Troops' struggles in Iraq include failing marriages
By Faye Fiore
Los Angeles Times
KILLEEN, Texas — Most of the men in 4th Squad, Charlie Battery, fought two wars while they were in Iraq. There was the war against the insurgents that had them patrolling for roadside bombs and raiding houses at all hours. Then there was the war back home, which had them struggling, over phone lines from 7,000 miles away, to keep their marriages and their bank accounts intact.
They say they eventually got used to the bombs. The crazy possibility of dying any minute didn't haunt them so much. But that other war, that was the one that tore them up in the downtime spent in Sgt. Brent Cox's trailer at Camp Victory. It would get quiet, and then one or another of them would ask: "So, how are things going at home?" And they would begin to brood.
Cox, 36, and his wife, Kristina, were expecting their first child after 12 years of marriage.
Pvt. Ray Hall, 21, was married to his high-school sweetheart, an airman first class stationed in San Antonio.
Spc. Jason Garcia, 23, believed that his on-again, off-again relationship with the mother of his then-2-year-old son was on again; he had given her his ATM card as a gesture of commitment.
But on the long-awaited day in February when the three soldiers returned here to Fort Hood, turned in their rifles and stood on the parade field, only Hall had a sweetheart there to meet him. And he found himself wishing she hadn't come at all.
After surviving Iraq, thousands of soldiers have become casualties of a fight they were poorly trained for: keeping control of their family lives during the separation of war. Men and women who feel lucky that their units suffered few fatalities say they can name dozens who returned home to empty houses, squandered bank accounts, divorce papers and restraining orders.
Divorces by fiscal year
2000: 19,223
2001: 18,774
2002: 21,629
2003: 23,080
2004: 26,784
The Army divorce rate has jumped more than 80 percent since the fighting began overseas in response to Sept. 11. The courts around Fort Hood, the Army's largest post, may have to add another judge just to handle the caseload. Divorce lawyers hire extra staffers whenever a division prepares to come home.
To a soldier in battle, the threat of a family falling apart can be a dangerous distraction. "That's probably the worst part about being over there," said Hall, now back at Fort Hood and facing a marriage so damaged it may not survive. "Your wife's cheating on you, you know she's been spending all your money the entire time, and there's nothing you can do about it. You think about that more than you do a bomb on the side of the road."
For some in the 4th Squad, the tensions played out nightly in Camp Victory's "Internet cafe" — the Army trailer with rows of computers where soldiers flocked to contact their families. Some found more pain there than comfort. Cox's wife was five months pregnant when she announced she was leaving him and going back home to Lawton, Okla.
Hall visited the trailer less often after he checked the phone messages on his home answering machine and heard another man tell his wife he loved her.
Garcia stopped hearing from his girlfriend and started tracking his bank account. He says thousands of dollars of his saved pay was gone and she had found somebody else.
There are six men in the squad, and five of them saw their marriages or relationships come under severe pressure. One relationship survived and three didn't; the fate of the fifth is unresolved. Concentrating on the mission became hard. Sitting in a Humvee, waiting for orders to roll out, the men would think about how life at home was falling apart, and they could do little about it.
"When we go outside that gate and into Baghdad, you've got to have your head straight," said Cox, who now lives alone in an apartment at Fort Hood. "You're trying to stay alive, but your mind goes to back home. Whatever problem you had before you left escalates because you're not there. ... I just wish she would have talked to me."
Whether by accident or design, the Army encourages its soldiers to marry. The best housing goes to families, leaving single soldiers to share the barracks. Wages are higher for active-duty soldiers with dependents, and higher still for those sent overseas, where the pay is tax-free. Hazardous-duty and family-separation supplements can amount to several hundred dollars a month.
Soldiers tend to enlist and marry young: Just 1 percent of the civilian population under 20 is married, compared with nearly 14 percent of military members in the same age group, said Shelley MacDermid, co-director of the Military Family Research Institute at Purdue University.
"These early, young marriages are not a great recipe for marital longevity," MacDermid said. "Research on divorce shows that. Add to that the anxiety associated with a dangerous job, and it doesn't bode well."
The deadline for going to war is among the most powerful incentives to rush a wedding. This time around, those unions are being tested by the longest and most recurrent deployments in the history of the volunteer military.
Married or not, soldiers are encouraged to assign powers of attorney to people they trust to monitor their finances while they are overseas. Some hand over their ATM cards and sign blank checks to people they hardly know.
"They come back, and their accounts are gone. It's not unique anymore," said Michael White, a leading family-law attorney. Indeed, the Army recently instituted a program for single soldiers titled "How Not to Marry a Jerk."
Kristina Cox lasted two months in Killeen after her husband deployed. She packed up and went back to her mother in Oklahoma to have her baby. She declined to be interviewed, but her divorce attorney, Arthur South, described the 12-year marriage as another casualty of the war.
"She's finding out that she doesn't need him. That's what happens," said South, who has handled his share of military divorces. "The gals get married, they are kind of young, and all of a sudden the husband is gone for months. They find out they can write checks, mow the lawn.
"This is a real tragedy of war."
Deployment strengthens the strong marriages and breaks the weak, Army brass often say. But 4th Squad member Spc. Lance Fernandez and his wife, Emily, say it damages the strong ones too.
In Iraq, watching his baby daughter grow up via Webcam, he bounced between doubt and faith, listening to his friends' despair and his wife's reassurances.
"This whole deployment really messed up a whole lot of marriages," said Fernandez, 23. "I can see six or eight months — it has to be done. But anything longer than that takes too much out of the marriage. My little girl is still getting to know me."
Fernandez's marriage survived. Cox's is over.
As for Hall, the stranger's voice on the phone that day still hurts. He's talking divorce; his wife, Airman 1st Class Melissa Hall, 22, is struggling to hold them together.
They married right out of Central High in Duluth, Minn. She says she tried to write or e-mail every day while he was in Iraq. But when the Air Force moved her to Randolph, near San Antonio, she had no friends, and he seemed very far away.
"I did kind of meet someone, but it was just friends. I needed emotional support," she said in a telephone interview.
The day the men of the 4th Squad came home and the buses deposited them on the parade field at Fort Hood, families filled the bleachers while the soldiers assembled in their desert camouflage dress. Once dismissed, each side broke free in a tearful, joyous search. Fathers met their babies for the first time. Husbands nearly squeezed the breath out of their wives. Fernandez held onto Emily as he never had before.
In the euphoric chaos, Brent Cox was pretty sure Kristina wouldn't be there, but he searched anyway. Garcia knew no one would meet him.
Melissa Hall had driven down from San Antonio and searched for her husband in the crowd. He didn't hug her. They spent the weekend fighting.
Off-duty and back in the Killeen countryside one warm night, Ray Hall stood outside a bull-riding ring watching one of his buddies get bucked to the ground for $5 a try. He took another beer and thought back to the day he heard the voice on the phone.
"I had to go out on patrol with Garcia and my sergeant. I was like, 'You can't think about this right now. That's when people get blown up.' "
Back then, he found a way to put it aside. Now, he can't.
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