Focus on the Family… PLEASE!

After spending the holidays in South Carolina with my family and friends, I decided to stop by Ft. Bragg, NC on the way back up I-95 to DC in order to see an old friend of mine from my freshman year of college (I’ll call her Kristin here). Although Facebook has made it a little easier to keep in touch over the past few years, it had literally been a full decade since I last saw Kristin. She was a senior when I was a freshman, and she soon graduated and married a great Army guy (aren’t we all?!). Ever since then, she’s been a dedicated Army wife, trying to balance graduate school and building her own career with the frequent relocations and now raising three small children. What a champion!

As good as it was to catch up and spend time with Kristin, I left Ft. Bragg simply heartbroken at what she very matter-of-factly told me about her life as an Army wife, the effect of multiple deployments on her husband and family, and the lack of seriousness with which the struggles they have to go through are taken.

I still very much love both DOD and the Army. Sure these institutions have their problems, and sure getting discharged under DADT myself was sort of traumatic, but despite these things I can still say that I truly love the military. That’s why I was just so saddened to see the military so miserably failing Kristen, her husband, her family, and so many others like them.

Kristen’s husband (I’ll call him Rob) is currently on his 4^th deployment to Iraq right now. She told me that the problems with PTSD began after his return from his first deployment, although after the second and third one she began learning the pattern of emotions that one goes through during and after deployment. I think learning and understanding more about PTSD has helped her cope with the stresses on her husband and her family a little more, although she certainly did have to learn everything she knows the hard way. She told me that so many young couples break up after the service member’s first deployment because the spouses simply don’t understand what’s going on, because PTSD isn’t taken seriously by many in the Army, because spouses get frustrated at pull-away during deployments and begin cheating, and so on. There’s just so much I learned or had reinforced that I can hardly get it all out.

Kristin said that when Rob is home, especially after his last deployment, he stays glued to the TV playing video games all night and sleeps all day on days he doesn’t have to work. Now he’s very distant towards their three young children (all under 10), he wants to develop friendships with other women, and he just has a sort of hopeless outlook about the future. Kristin has tried numerous things to try to help him, repair his relationship with her and the kids, and encourage Rob to go back to school or put in his warrant officer packet. Nothing seems to be working, and the Army doesn’t seem to give a damn.

In addition to all of this, I was surprised to hear about a number of other ways in DOD seems to be screwing over military families. For example, now that they’ve lucked up and moved out of the cramped and run down military housing and into a newer and nicer neighborhood on post (run by private contractors, of course), the Army now makes them pay for electricity. So I presume this means that if something happens and a military family can’t pay their electric bill this month, their power will get shut off in the dead of winter? What happened to the Army taking care of its soldiers and their families? Isn’t expense-free, on-post housing supposed to be a benefit of military service, especially for the families who don’t have a choice in a lot of this?

I could go on more, but I’ll stop here. Hearing about this, talking about this, and writing about this just makes me angry. The next time you hear someone say, “Thank you for your service,” hit them up for 50 bucks, then take it over to the first military family you can find and give it to them to put towards their electric bill at their on-post housing.