Deployment Tough On Marriages–More Spouse Support Needed

Michelle Koidin Jaffee: Deployments testing marriages

Editor’s note: Michelle Koidin Jaffee’s “Double Duty” column chronicles her experiences raising twin infants while her husband is deployed in Iraq.

NAPLES, Fla. — The warning came by e-mail.

“You may be clueless,” wrote a retired chief petty officer, “as to the hurricane you have now entered.”

Over the course of repeated deployments, he went on to say, his wife became a heavy drinker and his marriage, which produced two sons, fell apart. He was responding to my column about finding a silver lining to my husband’s deployment. He scoffed at my tone, implying that I did not take seriously the threat it posed to a marriage.

Certainly, marriages can unravel for a variety of reasons. And it sounded like this man’s wife was not very stable to begin with. Nevertheless, I took his words to heart.

It’s common knowledge that, in addition to deaths and lost limbs, cases of social ills such as post-traumatic stress disorder are left in war’s wake. And now, amid the nearly four-year-long war in Iraq and its repeated, year-plus deployments, there is fresh concern in the military community about divorce.

Defense Department statistics show divorces among Army personnel have risen about 25 percent since 2001, when deployments began ramping up after the 9-11 terrorist attacks, though the rate among other service members is essentially flat.

Nonetheless, retired Col. Michael Wagner fears the rates will only continue to climb. As director of the Medical Family Assistance Center at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., he works with returning soldiers. “Marriages are being torn apart by multiple deployments,” says Wagner, who also directs the nonprofit Military, Veterans and Family Assistance Foundation, which provides retreats for veterans and their spouses to help them reintegrate into marriage and community.

Read the rest here.

~ by Anthony on January 10, 2007.