| | “For a while a lot of soldiers coming back were not being seen because there was such an overload of patients and so few mental health providers on base,” said Carl Settles, a psychologist and retired Army colonel who runs a practice near Fort Hood, Tex.
The military recently called him to ask how many of several hundred patients he could take on, Dr. Settles said.
Corporal Callahan, who is on the brink of divorce, said his marriage, his second, had been troubled before his deployment but became unsalvageable once he shipped out. His deployment also forced him to transfer guardianship of his children temporarily to their grandparents because of problems at home, he said.
His injury, which has left him unable to walk, has now complicated his chances of remaining in the Army. “I felt like I had hit bottom,” he said. “I had so much bitterness in me. I have been so angry. So many nights I have cried and tried to figure out what I can do and what I can’t do.”
Capt. Lance Oliver, Corporal Callahan’s commander in Iraq, said he kept close track of Corporal Callahan’s personal situation, and while disintegrating marriages are not uncommon, Captain Oliver said, Corporal Callahan’s was the most dramatic.
“I can’t think of one that is more heartwrenching,” he said.
Spouses’ Secrets
Extramarital affairs, hardly rare in other wars, are also a fixture now.
David Hernandez, who is in the Army and is based in Fort Hood, said his relationship with his wife of 10 years crumbled between his second and third deployments. She was frazzled and lonely, he said, with two children to care for; he came back moodier, quieter and more distant. Now his wife is living with another man, Mr. Hernandez said in e-mail messages from Iraq. He, in turn, has started a relationship with a female soldier, despite his hope for reconciliation.
“It was very stressful for her doing everything and worrying about me,” he said, adding, “I spent so much time away; it drove us apart to seek other relationships.”
“Now I’m back out here,” he said. “I feel helpless. What can I do? It makes it a little easier being with someone out here. Temptation was the hardest, and I gave in.”
Dr. Settles sees about 40 soldiers a week in private practice and says a majority of soldiers cope well. But those with problems feel them deeply.
“Infidelity and financial issues are major issues,” Dr. Settles said, adding that there are abundant cases of wives who clear out their husband’s bank accounts or soldiers who come home and go binge shopping. “Even a good mule needs a few oats once in a while,” he said. “ Some of these guys, they are kind of at their limit.”
Some therapists say they are bracing for this year’s divorces. Mary Coe, a marriage and family therapist working near Fort Campbell, an Army base on the border of Kentucky and Tennessee, said she was seeing “many, many divorces” right now. The 101st Airborne Division recently returned from its second deployment with an astonishing level of rage, she said. “Now we are seeing 15- to 20-year marriages not making it, and these are families that survived 20 years of deployments,” Dr. Coe said.
Lei Steivers, whose husband is a senior noncommissioned officer at Fort Campbell, has been a military wife for 25 years. But it took her husband’s second yearlong deployment to Iraq to cripple their marriage. They are now in counseling. A family leader on the base, Ms. Steivers, 46, also has two sons in the military. She said a number of men she knows came home last year for rest and relaxation and demanded a divorce.
Many spouses, she said, blame the presence of women alongside combat units. The blame may be misplaced, but the anxiety is not.
“They are side-by-side fixing an engine, the girls live upstairs, the guys live downstairs,” Ms. Steivers said. “We are just more and more in awe, saying, What is going on?”
Some wives have uncovered their husband’s pornographic pictures on Web sites like MySpace, she said, adding, “I’ve seen them because the wives show them to me.”
Dr. Coe said she had been surprised by the number of soldiers who had come home and sought counseling for sexual addictions fueled by DVD’s and Internet pornography.
While pornography is blocked by the United States military in Iraq, service members gain access to it with laptops through their own Internet service providers, Corporal Callahan said.
At the same time, spouses back home sometimes hook up with men on the Internet. When the relationship surfaces, it sometimes leads to violence, said Robert Weiss, who co-wrote “Untangling the Web,” a book about Internet pornography, and who has been hired as a consultant by military family groups looking for guidance.
Family Trumps All Else
For some spouses, concerns about infidelity take a back seat to the demands of a household. Lillian Connolly’s husband of 21 years, a staff sergeant in the Army Reserve in Massachusetts who now works at a Lowe’s Home Improvement, was sent to Iraq twice. The first deployment, in 2003, lasted 11 months. The second one, for which he volunteered, was much harder on the family. Even before his father’s second deployment, the couple’s 12-year-old started having tantrums. When his father left their home in 2005, the boy started to misbehave at school, Ms. Connolly said. He and his sister were the only children with a deployed parent, and the school, she said, was mostly unsympathetic. If anything, Ms. Connolly said, she got the blame.
“He really worried about his dad every day,” Ms. Connolly said of her son. “They couldn’t understand he had an anger problem because his dad was gone.
“That was more stressful and harder to deal with than my husband being gone.”
Mary Keller, the executive director of the Military Child Education Coalition, a private nonprofit group that helps children and schools cope, said two million children had experienced deployments. Worst hit are those in schools that are isolated from military culture.
“It is highly likely that the teacher doesn’t have a personal experience with the military,” Dr. Keller said.
At home, spouses say, they try to keep their young children connected to their deployed parents. Ms. Jorgenson lets her three children pull Skittles out of a bowl to mark the passage of time. She buys them surprise gifts from their father, like boxes of Fruity Pebbles or camouflage sheets. Meanwhile, she thinks, “Will I ever get through bath time and get them to bed without screaming and losing my patience?”
Parents of young soldiers often appear the most tormented, counselors say, especially if opposed to the enlistment. There are also few resources for them.
“Mothers are in worse shape than wives,” said Jaine Darwin, a psychoanalyst and co-director of Strategic Outreach to Families of All Reservists, a volunteer group that offers counseling to military families in many states. “Mom is not allowed to cry. And that is certainly a problem.”
Esther Gallagher, 50, who works in a counseling office at a high school in Goodrich, Minn., has two sons in Iraq. She worries about both but frets most about her youngest, Justin, 22, a gunner who has seen a lot of violence in Falluja. He joined the Minnesota Army National Guard and has spent most of the past three years on deployment; the last tour was recently extended, which angered his mother and disheartened the soldiers in his unit.
When Sergeant Gallagher came home for two weeks last year, he walked out of the room any time anyone talked about Iraq.
“Every day, they are in harm’s way,” Ms. Gallagher said, her voice quavering. “I mean, that’s your baby — to have him out there in harm’s way, and not knowing. Your life has been to protect these kids.”
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