Army Wives and Forgotten Families

'Army Wives': I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV
Zap2it.com - USA

Roland Burton is an excellent doctor. We know this because they told us so throughout the entire first season of Army Wives. This is a man who has received national acclaim for his work counseling patients through post-traumatic stress disorder. He's a man who, as soon as he decided at the end of the first season to look for a job elsewhere, was instantly offered a new job at Northwestern and presumably could have had his pick of places to go. In short, this is a guy who knows what he's doing.

So what exactly does it say when one of Roland's best friends is suddenly dealing with some post-traumatic stress, but abjectly refuses to seek counsel from him? Strange, right? But that's exactly the case we've got on our hands. Claudia Joy is hurting, badly, but rather than seek help from a respected and trained professional who also happens to be a great friend, Claudia Joy would apparently rather seek support from a mysterious stranger.

As it happens, Roland isn't even the only medical professional here whose professional expertise is falling by the wayside as somebody else assumes that role instead. Denise is a registered nurse, but you wouldn't know it from her behavior in this episode, in which flirting rather than nursing seems to be her priority. In the meantime, Roxy ends up acting like more of a nurse than Denise does. Roxy takes care of Betty, dishes out medical advice on Betty's fight with cancer, and ends up bedside looking after Betty as she prepares for chemotherapy. So to recap, in this series there's both a doctor and a nurse, but others are taking over the roles of doctor and nurse instead.

The case of Claudia Joy refusing to turn to Roland for support is especially interesting. Is she operating under the presumption that everybody on post is sure to gossip about her, and so even though she should theoretically trust Roland she still worries that if she talks to him, people will undoubtedly in turn begin to talk about her? Or is it simply a matter of pride, in that Claudia Joy still believes that she should present an invincible face to the rest of the post community, that she should be strong because that's what everybody else needs?
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This is a great piece on a show I really like. If you missed Army Wives last summer, turn on Lifetime next Sunday night and watch a good show. You can catch a repeat of yesterday's show on Saturday.

The point of posting this is that TV is being played out all across the nation on a daily basis. The suicide bomber is not on a base here, but is in Iraq and Afghanistan. The family torn apart is not just on TV but right here in our own neighborhood. They do not all live on bases with other military families to turn to for understanding. They are surrounded by people without the slightest clue what they're going through. These families are National Guards and Reservists families living right in our own communities. As bad as it is for regular military families, it's worse for the "part timers" who are expected to just be like the rest of us, act like the rest of us and deal with the same problems the rest of us do. But they are not like us.

Think of what the families of National Guards and Reservists go through. They face the same problems the regular military does, except they did not expect their husbands and wives to be sent to Iraq and Afghanistan over and over again. They did not expect to have to do without the kind of income they based their budgets on. They may have expect their spouse to have to respond to national security problems here on US soil, respond to natural disasters, but to be sent over and over again away from home is not what they planned on.

When members of the "part time" weekend warriors come home, they are expected to just go back to work, if they can, picking up where they left off. Their families are expected to just go on with life between deployment and homecoming. We expect much of them but no one is really talking about what they expect from us.

When they sacrifice their incomes to live on military pay, who makes up the difference? They do. When they have to leave their own businesses, who pays their bills? They are expected to. When they come home wounded and need to be taken care of, they are on their own until their claim is finally approved to deal with the injury as well as the loss of income. But there is a catch to that too. When they have a job making a certain income, that is what they base their budget on paying for mortgages, car payments and other issues in the lifestyle they planned on. The money in compensation, is not determined on what they make in their private lives. Most of them make a lot more money working than they can ever hope to receive as a disabled veteran. Who pays the difference?

We ask a lot of our military and their families but we expect even more sacrifice out of the National Guardsmen and Reservists. We've all heard "they knew they could be sent" when they signed up, comments along that line, but when you really understand what these families expected, being totally disregarded in the process was not part of the deal.

As great as Army Wives is, there should be a program on the National Guards and Reservist families because these people are our neighbors and we've let them all down expecting them to just deal with it all. The local communities do not understand what they are going through and have been reluctant to step up to help them. Local pastors are ambivalent when it comes to the stresses and strains on families and hardly none of them want to even hear the term PTSD, yet they are supposed to be their for their congregations. They need help to heal that wound and their families need help to cope with the changes. The spiritual needs are not being filled either.

When it comes to these citizen soldiers, we have a lot to catch up on and make up for but we won't unless the media sticks their stories in our face on a daily basis and humiliates us into paying attention. They have the same problems the regular military familes do but they also have the same problems the rest of us do. The military has bases and gain support from other families but who do the citizen soldiers have? Us and we are not there for them.





Senior Chaplain Kathie Costos
Namguardianangel@aol.com
www.Namguardianangel.org
www.Woundedtimes.blogspot.com"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation." - George Washington