thedrifter
07-15-05, 06:42 AM
Courtesy of Mark aka The Fontman
Shrapnel From Home
By Faye Fiore Times Staff Writer
Ain't no use in callin' home,
Jody's got your telephone.
Ain't no use in goin' home,
Jody's got your girl and gone.
Sound off! (One, two.)
Sound off! (Three, four.)
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.
After all, Sgt. Brent 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 Ft. Hood, Texas, 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 the chaos of 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 their units suffered few fatalities say they can name dozens who returned to empty houses, squandered bank accounts, divorce papers and restraining orders.
The Army divorce rate has jumped more than 80% since the fighting began overseas in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The courts around Ft. Hood, the Army's largest post, may have to add another judge to handle the caseload. Divorce lawyers hire extra staff 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 Ft. 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 Internet trailer less often after he checked the phone messages on his home answering machine one day and heard another man tell his wife he loved her.
Garcia stopped hearing from his girlfriend and started tracking his bank account. He said thousands of dollars of his saved pay was gone and she had found somebody else.
Jody.
All three men said they were devastated. Hall and Garcia were demoted after they were caught with black-market booze, a violation of Army regulations.
Cox a personable and popular noncommissioned officer whose men compared him to actor Rick Moranis with a crew cut grew snappish and withdrawn.
"He was not himself at all when his wife told him she didn't want to be with him no more," recalled Spc. Lance Fernandez, 23. "He was short with us sometimes, and you could see that he was down and he was depressed."
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."
Marriages and divorces in Bell County, home to Ft. Hood, are the highest per capita in Texas and as predictable as the tides. Before a division leaves for duty, Killeen's two justices of the peace get busy. When the division returns, Michael White, a leading family law attorney, stocks up on divorce intake forms.
Cox, Hall, Garcia and the rest of the 17,000-member 1st Cavalry, the Army's largest division, returned in March. In April, the district clerk's office recorded 335 divorces. The monthly average is 200.
"The divorce rate is so high here, we are just in the beginning stages of approving a fifth district court in Bell County. And there are suggestions that we really need a sixth," said White, whose waiting rooms are regularly filled with clients, mostly military.
The increase in the divorce rate is similarly steep Army-wide, with the number of ended marriages rising 86% from 2000 to 2004. That figure includes widows and some breakups counted twice, when soldiers divorce other soldiers. Even so, Army chaplains said the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq had taken a severe toll on military marriages.
"The extended deployments, a second one right on the back of the first we have placed a large number of families under stress," said Col. Glen Bloomstrom, a chaplain and the Army's director of ministry initiatives.
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, when the pay is tax-free. Hazardous-duty and family-separation supplements can amount to several hundred dollars a month.
Soldiers tend to enlist young and marry young: 1% of civilians under 20 is married, compared with about 14% of military members in the same age group, said Shelley M. 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," White said. "It's not unique anymore." Indeed, the Army recently instituted a program for single soldiers titled "How Not to Marry a Jerk."
Krystal Owen, 21, is the mother of two girls: Ashlynn, 4, and Avrie, 3. She grew up without a father in Academy, just outside Ft. Hood, and has left Texas once, to visit her brother in a Louisiana federal penitentiary. Determined to graduate from high school, she received her diploma while pregnant.
Married at 18 to a young private and divorced at 20, Owen earns $7 an hour as a secretary in the quaint old house that White converted into a law office. More than half of the $231.58 she clears each week goes to child care, another $85 toward rent. Money is a constant worry. Her mother tries to lend a hand, but she has financial problems of her own.
Owen has straight, dark hair and a face like actress Lindsay Lohan's. She frequents the nightclubs around Ft. Hood, where soldiers take advantage of women and women take advantage of soldiers. She has experienced both sides of that.
When her husband took up with a female soldier in Iraq, he restricted his bank account, leaving Owen to support the girls on her own. He later admitted in court that the money he withheld was spent on "strip clubs and partying," said White, who acted as her lawyer.
To girls who grow up around Killeen, or who land here courtesy of the Army, a soldier is considered an excellent catch steady paycheck, health benefits, guaranteed housing.
continued...........
Shrapnel From Home
By Faye Fiore Times Staff Writer
Ain't no use in callin' home,
Jody's got your telephone.
Ain't no use in goin' home,
Jody's got your girl and gone.
Sound off! (One, two.)
Sound off! (Three, four.)
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.
After all, Sgt. Brent 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 Ft. Hood, Texas, 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 the chaos of 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 their units suffered few fatalities say they can name dozens who returned to empty houses, squandered bank accounts, divorce papers and restraining orders.
The Army divorce rate has jumped more than 80% since the fighting began overseas in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The courts around Ft. Hood, the Army's largest post, may have to add another judge to handle the caseload. Divorce lawyers hire extra staff 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 Ft. 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 Internet trailer less often after he checked the phone messages on his home answering machine one day and heard another man tell his wife he loved her.
Garcia stopped hearing from his girlfriend and started tracking his bank account. He said thousands of dollars of his saved pay was gone and she had found somebody else.
Jody.
All three men said they were devastated. Hall and Garcia were demoted after they were caught with black-market booze, a violation of Army regulations.
Cox a personable and popular noncommissioned officer whose men compared him to actor Rick Moranis with a crew cut grew snappish and withdrawn.
"He was not himself at all when his wife told him she didn't want to be with him no more," recalled Spc. Lance Fernandez, 23. "He was short with us sometimes, and you could see that he was down and he was depressed."
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."
Marriages and divorces in Bell County, home to Ft. Hood, are the highest per capita in Texas and as predictable as the tides. Before a division leaves for duty, Killeen's two justices of the peace get busy. When the division returns, Michael White, a leading family law attorney, stocks up on divorce intake forms.
Cox, Hall, Garcia and the rest of the 17,000-member 1st Cavalry, the Army's largest division, returned in March. In April, the district clerk's office recorded 335 divorces. The monthly average is 200.
"The divorce rate is so high here, we are just in the beginning stages of approving a fifth district court in Bell County. And there are suggestions that we really need a sixth," said White, whose waiting rooms are regularly filled with clients, mostly military.
The increase in the divorce rate is similarly steep Army-wide, with the number of ended marriages rising 86% from 2000 to 2004. That figure includes widows and some breakups counted twice, when soldiers divorce other soldiers. Even so, Army chaplains said the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq had taken a severe toll on military marriages.
"The extended deployments, a second one right on the back of the first we have placed a large number of families under stress," said Col. Glen Bloomstrom, a chaplain and the Army's director of ministry initiatives.
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, when the pay is tax-free. Hazardous-duty and family-separation supplements can amount to several hundred dollars a month.
Soldiers tend to enlist young and marry young: 1% of civilians under 20 is married, compared with about 14% of military members in the same age group, said Shelley M. 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," White said. "It's not unique anymore." Indeed, the Army recently instituted a program for single soldiers titled "How Not to Marry a Jerk."
Krystal Owen, 21, is the mother of two girls: Ashlynn, 4, and Avrie, 3. She grew up without a father in Academy, just outside Ft. Hood, and has left Texas once, to visit her brother in a Louisiana federal penitentiary. Determined to graduate from high school, she received her diploma while pregnant.
Married at 18 to a young private and divorced at 20, Owen earns $7 an hour as a secretary in the quaint old house that White converted into a law office. More than half of the $231.58 she clears each week goes to child care, another $85 toward rent. Money is a constant worry. Her mother tries to lend a hand, but she has financial problems of her own.
Owen has straight, dark hair and a face like actress Lindsay Lohan's. She frequents the nightclubs around Ft. Hood, where soldiers take advantage of women and women take advantage of soldiers. She has experienced both sides of that.
When her husband took up with a female soldier in Iraq, he restricted his bank account, leaving Owen to support the girls on her own. He later admitted in court that the money he withheld was spent on "strip clubs and partying," said White, who acted as her lawyer.
To girls who grow up around Killeen, or who land here courtesy of the Army, a soldier is considered an excellent catch steady paycheck, health benefits, guaranteed housing.
continued...........