On the Homefront: War Takes Its Toll on Overburdened Military Families
    By Emily Yellin
    The San Jose Mercury News

    Sunday 28 May 2006

    The idea that war is men's work has been around for as long as war itself. Women, tradition has it, were the supporting players - dutiful, uncomplaining and sheltered from any real action. One of the most time-honored such images was the wife or mother "left behind." She sent her soldier off. She welcomed him home. And in between, she was not to be seen or heard from much but presumably pined away in patriotic martyrdom.

    Iraq is far from the first war in which the roles assigned to women do not match up with what they actually do or who they are. But it is the first war that has included women, for better or worse, playing major parts in the main story line. Think Condoleezza Rice, Cindy Sheehan, Jessica Lynch, Lynndie England and Jill Carroll.

    Now, two new books about the Iraq War have given a 21st-century recasting to the war wife. Stacy Bannerman's "When the War Came Home" and Kristin Henderson's "While They're at War" provide vivid descriptions and heart-wrenching details of the way war reaches into every aspect of the lives of soldiers' spouses. The books also make clear that the government's wavering support for the needs of military families in this particular war has made their survival here at home seem as tumultuous and uncertain as that of their soldiers in Iraq.

    Bannerman is a career peace and human rights activist, whose husband, Lorin, a sergeant in the National Guard, was called up to serve in Iraq. She uses the challenges the couple face in reconciling his war work with her peace work as a focal point of "When the War Came Home." And she makes important points, such as showing that the most passionate activism against this war is not on college campuses but in the households of those with the most at stake, the primarily blue-collar military families. Yet Bannerman is strongest when she sticks to her own feelings of anger, frustration and heartache at her husband's absence.

    The e-mails between the couple are especially touching. After an appearance by Bannerman on MSNBC's "Hardball" aired at her husband's base in Iraq, Lorin e-mails that some of his colleagues applauded her, others didn't. Bannerman replies, "If they want military wives to shut up, tell them to recognize us as the unpaid resource we are." In another e-mail, Lorin assures her, "I thank you for having the courage to speak out.... I support you my wife and I know you will do the right thing." And she ends one e-mail by thanking him for "being the answer to every prayer I have ever prayed for love."

    Bannerman also effectively conveys the isolation and lack of government support particular to National Guard families who operate on the military's second tier. However, she occasionally veers off into breathless, unsubstantiated or distracting tangents - about war policy, peace activism and even a transsexual friend - that detract from the more profound story of love during this war that is the worthwhile core of her book.

    Henderson's eye-opening work, on the other hand, skillfully carries the reader through her vast subject, bringing up appropriate, well-sourced details at the right time. Henderson is a journalist whose husband, a longtime Navy chaplain, served with the Marines in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

    "While They're at War" provides a wide-ranging portrait of this war's effects on the day-to-day lives of military wives and a few husbands (honorary members of their sisterhood) in and around Fort Bragg, N.C. Their stories illustrate common problems such as inadequate child care, lapses in insurance and bouts of debilitating depression. Henderson also chronicles the resentment and burnout among spouses who serve the military as unpaid but desperately needed family outreach workers. And she describes wives facing monstrous effects of their husbands' combat stress long after the homecoming, including domestic violence and even murder.

    Henderson closely follows a woman named Beth Pratt, whose husband finally returns from Iraq and wants to get her a gun so she can protect herself when he is sent away again. Beth objects, explaining that if she had had a gun the last time he was in Iraq, she surely would have used it to kill herself. Suicidal depression is just one of her worries. Her husband's combat pay is so inadequate that she will qualify for welfare if she decides to stay home with the baby that she is expecting.

    For these family members, terrible news can come anytime. In one of many poignant scenes, Henderson describes an Army wife named Teresa Metzdorf home alone watching "American Idol" when her husband calls from a military hospital in Iraq. He tells her his leg was blown off that morning in a roadside explosion that killed three of his fellow soldiers and blasted the face off another. Teresa then spends seven long months at Walter Reed Army Medical Center with her husband in rehabilitation, among countless unheralded amputees and paraplegics. Their story will jolt readers out of obliviousness - reality-television-induced or not - as surely as that phone call did Teresa.

    What comes through loud and clear in both books is the enormous, and underreported, toll this war has taken on military families at home. Unlike most other civilians, they must live through its impact every day. Near the end of Henderson's book, a seasoned Army wife who has survived her husband's many deployments tries to comfort a group of angry younger wives. She says there would be something wrong with them if they weren't mad at the uncertainty pervading every minute of their lives. Rejecting the traditional stoicism of military wives, she declares, "This 'suck it up and don't complain' is for the birds."

    As both these books demonstrate, so is our longstanding tendency to ignore the pressures under which these overburdened military families fight our wars.