Dear Dora,
My husband is away serving his third tour in Iraq. I knew when we got married that, as a career soldier, he would be away from home from time to time, but I don't think either of us bargained for being separated so often and for so long at a time.
There are numerous support groups for the spouses of soldiers serving in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. These groups are not formally recognized by the Defense Department, but the Army (and other services) does encourage and facilitate them so as to minimize the emotional and financial damage to the families of the troops.
For example, the groups locally are composed of spouses thrown together by the Unit Family Assistance Office. The UFAO, as it is known, tries to assign the spouses of any given unit to different support groups, partly to keep down panic and grousing about the soldiers' orders (i.e. so all of the families in one support group aren't hit with the same deployment orders at once, etc.), and partly to ensure that the support groups don't collapse when a given unit rotates back into CONUS.
The days of these support groups being made up of all women are long past, of course. In our support group of twenty-one, there are six Army wives, eight Air Force wives, two Navy wives, and five Army husbands. We meet every week in a facility provided by the UFAO at the rec. center on the local Air Force Base, and at first we talked through all the difficult issues of staying afloat emotionally and financially in the absence of our spouses. We provided each other with sympathetic shoulders to cry on, babysitting help, advice proven from experience, and lots of black coffee.
We have a calling list with everyone's home phone and cell phone numbers so we can call our support group members with news and rumors, or get help individually if we need it.
As you might imagine, with a couple dozen young people of both sexes thrown together in emotional circumstances, relationships develop from time to time. The other members of the group try to overlook these things, but one of the functions of the group is supposed to be friendly help in avoiding just this type of damaging diversion while the spouse is away.
Unfortunately, our group meets in a room housed in a "portable" facility – a temporary trailer moved onto the base to accommodate the increased activity level during the war. This space is also used as a staging barracks, where soldiers stay overnight while waiting for transportation to their overseas assignments. The trailer is therefore equipped like an apartment with a kitchenette, multiple bathrooms, and, of course ... beds.
Early last year, at the end of my husband's previous tour of duty in the zone, I was one of the members of the support group who discovered that Jennifer and Todd, two of the other members of our group, were meeting romantically, and secretly, after our regular meetings. I and two other women stumbled on them when we returned to look for one of the other ladies' purse after a meeting. Todd and Jennifer had stayed behind, and after we were all gone (or so they thought), they were at each other like a pair of newly-weds on their honeymoon on one of the cots in our meeting room.
The couple had locked the door, but we easily saw them through the windows in the doors while we were peering in to locate my friend's purse. I was shocked, but the other two women were less so. The woman who lost her purse said that she already knew something was going on between those two. The other woman, an officer's wife named Marilyn, expressed the opinion that these groups were known for that sort of behavior, and she just wished she could get in on it herself.
We were able to find an unlocked door around the back of the trailer, and we entered, turning on the lights from the back hall to warn the trysting couple of our presence. When we entered the large room where we had our meetings and where all the bunks were, the two of them were straightening their clothes at opposite ends of the room. "Just straightening up," the man said. The woman, Jennifer, who was in fact the wife of another soldier in my husband's unit, scurried to leave, red with embarrassment. As Todd also made for the door, Marilyn took his elbow and escorted him out, saying "We need to talk."
I assumed that Marilyn was going to give him a piece of her mind, but we came to find out that she actually gave him a piece of something else. Gerry, the gal who had lost her purse, told me later that Todd and Marilyn had ended up at Marilyn's house that night, and that it was a replay of everything that Todd had done with Jennifer.
