Since Iraq war, army divorces are up 80%

From Making Light:
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. 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. They all knew about “Jody,” the opportunist of Army lore who moved in on a soldier’s girl while the soldier was off fighting a war. They had sung hundreds of cadences in basic training deriding the name. But it had always seemed like a joke, something that happened to other guys.

Ain’t no use in goin’ home
Jody got your girl and gone
Ain’t no use in feelin’ blue
Jody took your auto too.
Lost your car in a poker game
Left your gal for another dame
Now she’s down in New Orleans
Sells her ass to earn her beans.

And so on. Endlessly on, for miles of marching.

A joke? Happens to other guys? Well, actually, no. It’s so common that marching cadences in general are called “Jodies.” Before the long (six page) article is over, we learn that since Mr. Bush’s war began, Army divorces have risen 80%.

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. [SGT] Cox’s wife was five months pregnant when she announced she was leaving him and going back home to Lawton, Okla.

There’s even a verb: to be Dear Johnned. That’s the “Dear John” letter, which apparently got its name during WWII.

A big part of the problem, I think, is that the Army isn’t used to long deployments. The Army wives used to complain about two-week field exercises. The Navy wives would just look at them like “get a grip.” The Navy had six- to nine-month deployments every year. You coped, or knew very soon that you couldn’t.

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 Ft. 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.”

Another thing we’d see a lot of were marriages just before we sailed, and the same guys getting divorced as soon as they got back. I expect the Army is seeing the same thing—get married before you deploy, even it it’s rushing things. In wartime, that isn’t totally unreasonable: If you get your head blown off there are benefits for Army widows. There aren’t any benefits for girlfriends.

Peacetime, I used to tell my troops, “Listen, don’t get married. If it’s real it’ll still be real when you get back. If it isn’t real, it still won’t be real when you get back but there’ll be a lot less paperwork.” I remember the movie Fatal Attraction, where the Michael Douglas character can’t handle having his wife away over the weekend and so picks up with a book editor. I saw that with a bunch of my brother officers. Many of us hadn’t seen our wives in a year or so. We just laughed at him.

Any time you got back from cruise, the first week would be real tough for everyone. It’s like, “Who are you?” You develop coping mechanisms for this, but if you’ve never done it before, and it’s not anything anyone you know has done before, you’re trying to make it up as you go along—not the best way to get an optimum solution.

The Navy has the opposite problem than the Army does in this story. Our divorce rate shoots up after the guy retires or gets permanent shore duty and he’s hanging around all the time. I think that the underlying problem isn’t deployment, or lack of deployment; it’s change in routine.

A different article now:
“Dear John,” the letter began. “I have found someone else whom I think the world of. I think the only way out is for us to get a divorce,” it said. They usually began like that, those letters that told of infidelity on the part of the wives of servicemen… The men called them “Dear Johns”. (Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, August, 1945)

There’s been a fair amount of speculation on the origin of the term: Several subscribers have mentioned a song on the theme of receiving a “Dear John” letter, suggesting it was the origin of the phrase. However, online sources say it appeared only in 1953, several years after the phrase had become established. A more plausible source was suggested by Dick Kovar, in a pre-World War Two radio programme called Dear John, starring Irene Rich, which was presented as a letter by a gossipy female character to her never-identified romantic interest and which opened with these words. Proving a link is likely to be impossible, but it’s conceivable this played a part in the genesis of the term.

Where shall we go from here? How about the classic “Dear John Letter” legend:
The soldier serving overseas, far from home was annoyed and upset when his girl wrote breaking off their engagement and asking for her photograph back.

He went out and collected from his friends all the unwanted photographs of women that he could find, bundled them all together and sent them back with a note saying … “Regret cannot remember which one is you—please keep your photo and return the others.”

All you deployed guys, take a word of advice from a fellow who’s been deployed more times than he can count: Don’t ask your sweetie questions if you don’t want to know the answers.

And you REMFs? Do me a favor. If you’re banging a soldier’s spouse, please put one of those yellow “Support Our Troops” magnetic ribbons on your SUV. Just so everyone will know you’re doing your part.

FOR THOSE of us who're not fighting in Iraq, here's the war as a new drama series on the TV Channel FX, as reviewed in the NY Times:

Timing is the questionable element in "Over There," Steven Bochco's 13-episode series about soldiers fighting in Iraq. It is not only the first television drama about the conflict, but also the first American television series that has tried to process a war as entertainment while it was still being fought.

Unlike other television war series, "Over There," the Steven Bochco show about soldiers in Iraq, doesn't shy away from scenes of graphic violence. In "Over There," the soldiers are immediately plunged into combat.

School shootings, presidential scandals and even abuse of Iraqi prisoners are now routinely sifted into "Law & Order" subplots; viewers have become just as inured to the fictionalization of real life on so-called reality television. But even in our hyperaccelerated media culture, "Over There" is fast work. And that is both troubling and comforting. "Over There," which begins tonight on FX, is a slick, compelling and very violent distillation of the latest news reports and old war movies and television shows. That alone could make it seem like a show business atrocity, a commercial abuse of a raw and unresolved national calamity.

Except that exploitation is not necessarily a bad thing. "Over There" dramatizes wartime slaughter and suffering that all too often go unnoticed. For all the lives lost and billions spent, the Iraq conflict has raged on with surprisingly little impact on most Americans. Gas is not rationed, neighbors do not plant victory gardens, and there are no gold stars in the windows of grieving mothers.

Except perhaps in the cartoon strip "Doonesbury," reminders of war in the media are fleeting. Live battle scenes and Pentagon briefings flicker across television newscasts as fast as weather bulletins and weight-loss features; even live events become dulled by repetition on cable news programs and radio. Fiction, however, has a way of slowing time and putting a frame on a shifting, fragmented reality.

Mr. Bochco and Chris Gerolmo, a co-creator and executive producer of the series who is also the principal writer, have been careful to vein their drama with a message that is cautiously bold: hate war, love the troops. The first episode begins with the main characters at home bidding farewell, from Bo, 19, a former high school quarterback who has sex with his wife in every room of their house to "make memories," to Mrs. B, an 18-year-old who confides her premonitions of death from a telephone booth. "I've seen those faces on 'Nightline,' " she says. "Every one of them's me."

Their unit is plunged into desert battle almost immediately, pinned down in a ditch, exchanging fire with Iraqi insurgents who are supposed to surrender peacefully under a negotiated agreement but who try to break out instead. The violence is startlingly vivid, including the image of an Iraqi fighter whose torso is cut clean off by a grenade and whose legs take one last step before collapsing. The explicit combat scenes - artistic renderings of Pentagon battle reports - set "Over There" apart. During World War II, many war movies were made long before its outcome was known: "Mrs. Miniver," "Casablanca" and "In Which We Serve" were released in 1942. Back then, wartime films focused on survivors and civilians struggling on the home front; neither Hollywood nor the War Department wanted to demoralize audiences with too graphic a depiction of what their servicemen were likely to endure.

A drama set in today's Iraq cannot afford to take any narrative risks. The second episode chillingly evokes a soldier's panic as an unidentified car looms ahead at a checkpoint, but the story line avoids moral ambiguity; no Italian journalist is shot at by mistake; murderous insurgents really are hiding in the trunk of the slain civilian's car. Prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib is glancingly mentioned, but not explored. When a covert operations team takes hold of an Iraqi suspect, the heroes worry about what is going on behind closed doors. One of them mutters, "Guys at Abu Ghraib got court-martialed." On "Over There," however, the battle-zone interrogation is aboveboard and even saves lives: the suspect cracks and tells the Americans where his comrades have hidden 20 Stinger missiles.

Mr. Bochco is known for creating unusual, memorable characters, but in this tinderbox setting he sticks to recognizable archetypes: the gung-ho Texas football player, the oversensitive college boy, the tough but tender sergeant. Women and members of minorities are carefully paired to avoid negative stereotypes: Smoke, a captious, careless black soldier who picks on Tariq, an Arab-American soldier, is balanced by Angel, a conscientious black soldier and former choir singer. Mrs. B, well on her way to becoming a war-zone sadist, grinds the hand of a dead Iraqi fighter with her heel just as Doublewide, the other female transport driver, prays silently over an Iraqi she might have killed.

Cartoons, let alone cop shows and hospital dramas, are repulsively and graphically violent, so it would be unrealistic to expect Mr. Bochco, whose credits includes "Murder One" and "NYPD Blue," to make a nonviolent war drama. "Over There" is smart and engrossing. But its expertly filmed battle scenes - firefights, checkpoint shootings, limbs torn off by exploding mines - at times overshadow the soldiers themselves. The danger is that some viewers could end up loving the war as much as they love the troops.