Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
Chicago Tribune
May 5, 2008 Longer deployments taking toll on soldiers as combat stress, suicides, depression and family pressures soar
By Kirsten Scharnberg, Tribune correspondent
FT. RILEY, Kan.— On this historic Army post where more than 7,000 soldiers have been deployed to Iraq on extended tours of duty, virtually everyone has a story about how the long absences have affected those back home.
The young wives who decide the lifestyle is too hard and pen "Dear John" letters before packing up.
The families that begin to unravel when a soldier comes home mentally or physically damaged from more than a year in combat.
The chaplains who work round-the-clock to staff new family intervention programs: for war-strained marriages, for suicide prevention, for kids missing their parents.
"The human psyche can only take so much," said Capt. Jeff Van Ness, a chaplain who returned from duty in Iraq just two weeks ago. "And a 15-month deployment seems to be where we really began to see some breaking points."
Just over a year ago, the Defense Department announced that the Army would shift from 12-month tours to 15-month tours to support a surge of forces into Iraq. Since then, there has been constant debate about how well that gambit worked militarily and politically.
But it is on Army installations like Ft. Riley, a sprawling base in the heart of Kansas, where officials are taking stock of the human toll these extended tours have taken on tens of thousands of Army families nationwide.
Suicide rates are up, with the Pentagon reporting that some 20 percent more troops committed suicide in 2007 than in 2006. Divorce rates, which have been escalating since 2003, remain at about 3.3 percent, up from 2.9 percent before the start of the war. Incidences of combat stress are soaring, with a new independent study finding that as many as 1 in 5 service members are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, a reality that deeply affects their families. And numerous posts, including Ft. Riley, are beginning to study whether there are correlations between deployments and domestic assaults, sexual assaults and alcohol offenses.
'A very big deal'
Although President George Bush announced recently that the policy of 15-month tours will be abandoned as of Aug. 1, those currently in the midst of extended deployments—such as Ft. Riley's soldiers—will finish out their tours.
And those who work closest with these soldiers and their families say that in many cases the damage from the long combat rotations already has been done.
"I know that a lot of people may hear 15 months versus 12 months and think, 'Well, what's the difference?' " said Lt. Col. Steve Quigg, a Ft. Riley chaplain. "But the difference is pretty simple: The longer you are in a combat zone, the harder it is to disengage when you come home. That causes a lot of stress when the family is reunited. And, on the other end, imagine being the family back home that is missing your soldier for not just one Christmas but two, not just one anniversary but two. Psychologically, that year mark has proven to be a very big deal."
The Army has been forthright about the strain placed on families. In fact, the Army, the only branch of the armed forces to have standard tours that exceed seven months, has acknowledged that if it cannot make the families of soldiers happier during this time of war, it will begin to lose personnel in droves.
As a first step, this year the Army has begun to implement provisions of a new Army Family Covenant that has the service budgeting nearly twice as much—$1.4 billion, compared to about $700 million previously—on family-focused programs.
"These protracted, multiple deployments are bound to take a heavy toll unless we have something good in place for the families when their soldiers deploy," said Ft. Riley's senior commander, Maj. Gen. Robert Durbin.
At Ft. Riley, pilot programs are being tried. One is Strong Bonds, a marriage retreat program intended to address the stress of deployments.
The hope is that such programs can make inroads on lowering the divorce rate, particularly among the officer corps, which has traditionally had very low rates, as well as among female soldiers, who now make up the largest demographic of divorces in the military, with 9 percent of them divorced.
Van Ness, who counseled many soldiers struggling with dissolving marriages during his 15 months in Iraq, spoke of how heartbreaking it was to see soldiers get news of a spouse's affair back home or of a divorce request.
He remembered one unit that had grown so accustomed to divorce in the ranks that it was turned into a morbid joke. The soldiers were part of an EOD unit, an acronym for Explosive Ordnance Disposal, but they joked that the letters actually stood for "Everyone's Divorced."
Van Ness made the education of suicide prevention one of his primary missions during deployment. As his soldiers return home, where the difficulties of post-traumatic stress and depression often settle in, he hopes he taught them well enough to come to him with concerns before there is a tragedy.
Quigg, the chaplain who ministers to the families back home, also worries about the impact of long and repeated deployments on soldiers' marriages and mental health. He said he sometimes gets word of a wife about to inform her deployed husband she wants a divorce; often the best he can do is to counsel her "to at least wait until his tour is up to deliver the news."
Offering support
Over the last couple of weeks, as some 3,500 Ft. Riley soldiers returned home from 15-month tours, Quigg began offering daily "marriage reunion briefings." In these sessions, the chaplain candidly talks to couples about the hurdles of reuniting: how men may want sex while women simply want to catch up and talk, how soldiers will have a hard time transitioning from an authoritative command role to a partner-in-the-home role.
"They are leaving a combat zone where they've been for 15 months and they need to be sure not to turn their home into a new combat zone," Quigg said.
Despite all the grim statistics, it would be wrong to say that many families on Ft. Riley are not thriving. Dana Van Ness said that during her husband's Iraq tour she found strength in several other women struggling through the same long deployments. Their families ate dinner together at least once a week and had "trash TV nights" on which they watched the reality show "Survivor." When an ice storm knocked out power to the base, the women fired up gas grills and heated soup.
"I guess my attitude always was that I was proud every day of what my husband was doing over there and I wanted him to come home and be proud of how I've run things here," Dana Van Ness said.
Jeff Van Ness smiled as his wife spoke. He'd been home only two weeks, he said, but he was doing everything he could to show her how much he appreciated what she'd done while he was gone. So far he's brought her coffee in bed every day since he stepped off that plane.
May 5, 2008 Longer deployments taking toll on soldiers as combat stress, suicides, depression and family pressures soar
By Kirsten Scharnberg, Tribune correspondent
FT. RILEY, Kan.— On this historic Army post where more than 7,000 soldiers have been deployed to Iraq on extended tours of duty, virtually everyone has a story about how the long absences have affected those back home.
The young wives who decide the lifestyle is too hard and pen "Dear John" letters before packing up.
The families that begin to unravel when a soldier comes home mentally or physically damaged from more than a year in combat.
The chaplains who work round-the-clock to staff new family intervention programs: for war-strained marriages, for suicide prevention, for kids missing their parents.
"The human psyche can only take so much," said Capt. Jeff Van Ness, a chaplain who returned from duty in Iraq just two weeks ago. "And a 15-month deployment seems to be where we really began to see some breaking points."
Just over a year ago, the Defense Department announced that the Army would shift from 12-month tours to 15-month tours to support a surge of forces into Iraq. Since then, there has been constant debate about how well that gambit worked militarily and politically.
But it is on Army installations like Ft. Riley, a sprawling base in the heart of Kansas, where officials are taking stock of the human toll these extended tours have taken on tens of thousands of Army families nationwide.
Suicide rates are up, with the Pentagon reporting that some 20 percent more troops committed suicide in 2007 than in 2006. Divorce rates, which have been escalating since 2003, remain at about 3.3 percent, up from 2.9 percent before the start of the war. Incidences of combat stress are soaring, with a new independent study finding that as many as 1 in 5 service members are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, a reality that deeply affects their families. And numerous posts, including Ft. Riley, are beginning to study whether there are correlations between deployments and domestic assaults, sexual assaults and alcohol offenses.
'A very big deal'
Although President George Bush announced recently that the policy of 15-month tours will be abandoned as of Aug. 1, those currently in the midst of extended deployments—such as Ft. Riley's soldiers—will finish out their tours.
And those who work closest with these soldiers and their families say that in many cases the damage from the long combat rotations already has been done.
"I know that a lot of people may hear 15 months versus 12 months and think, 'Well, what's the difference?' " said Lt. Col. Steve Quigg, a Ft. Riley chaplain. "But the difference is pretty simple: The longer you are in a combat zone, the harder it is to disengage when you come home. That causes a lot of stress when the family is reunited. And, on the other end, imagine being the family back home that is missing your soldier for not just one Christmas but two, not just one anniversary but two. Psychologically, that year mark has proven to be a very big deal."
The Army has been forthright about the strain placed on families. In fact, the Army, the only branch of the armed forces to have standard tours that exceed seven months, has acknowledged that if it cannot make the families of soldiers happier during this time of war, it will begin to lose personnel in droves.
As a first step, this year the Army has begun to implement provisions of a new Army Family Covenant that has the service budgeting nearly twice as much—$1.4 billion, compared to about $700 million previously—on family-focused programs.
"These protracted, multiple deployments are bound to take a heavy toll unless we have something good in place for the families when their soldiers deploy," said Ft. Riley's senior commander, Maj. Gen. Robert Durbin.
At Ft. Riley, pilot programs are being tried. One is Strong Bonds, a marriage retreat program intended to address the stress of deployments.
The hope is that such programs can make inroads on lowering the divorce rate, particularly among the officer corps, which has traditionally had very low rates, as well as among female soldiers, who now make up the largest demographic of divorces in the military, with 9 percent of them divorced.
Van Ness, who counseled many soldiers struggling with dissolving marriages during his 15 months in Iraq, spoke of how heartbreaking it was to see soldiers get news of a spouse's affair back home or of a divorce request.
He remembered one unit that had grown so accustomed to divorce in the ranks that it was turned into a morbid joke. The soldiers were part of an EOD unit, an acronym for Explosive Ordnance Disposal, but they joked that the letters actually stood for "Everyone's Divorced."
Van Ness made the education of suicide prevention one of his primary missions during deployment. As his soldiers return home, where the difficulties of post-traumatic stress and depression often settle in, he hopes he taught them well enough to come to him with concerns before there is a tragedy.
Quigg, the chaplain who ministers to the families back home, also worries about the impact of long and repeated deployments on soldiers' marriages and mental health. He said he sometimes gets word of a wife about to inform her deployed husband she wants a divorce; often the best he can do is to counsel her "to at least wait until his tour is up to deliver the news."
Offering support
Over the last couple of weeks, as some 3,500 Ft. Riley soldiers returned home from 15-month tours, Quigg began offering daily "marriage reunion briefings." In these sessions, the chaplain candidly talks to couples about the hurdles of reuniting: how men may want sex while women simply want to catch up and talk, how soldiers will have a hard time transitioning from an authoritative command role to a partner-in-the-home role.
"They are leaving a combat zone where they've been for 15 months and they need to be sure not to turn their home into a new combat zone," Quigg said.
Despite all the grim statistics, it would be wrong to say that many families on Ft. Riley are not thriving. Dana Van Ness said that during her husband's Iraq tour she found strength in several other women struggling through the same long deployments. Their families ate dinner together at least once a week and had "trash TV nights" on which they watched the reality show "Survivor." When an ice storm knocked out power to the base, the women fired up gas grills and heated soup.
"I guess my attitude always was that I was proud every day of what my husband was doing over there and I wanted him to come home and be proud of how I've run things here," Dana Van Ness said.
Jeff Van Ness smiled as his wife spoke. He'd been home only two weeks, he said, but he was doing everything he could to show her how much he appreciated what she'd done while he was gone. So far he's brought her coffee in bed every day since he stepped off that plane.