Divorces inflict home front damage on US troops

Divorces inflict home front damage on US troops
David Smith (The Guardian)

2 June 2008



In an army base in Baghdad, in functional wooden booths in a white-walled room, a row of young men in uniform stare at computer screens. Many are emailing, instant messaging or playing online card games with their wives and girlfriends seven or more time zones away.


There is a background hum from others talking on a bank of phones. One soldier can be heard protesting: 'You have no idea what I'm going through out here.'

With the Iraq war in its sixth year, some of these American soldiers are on their third or fourth combat tour - 15 months away from home with just 18 days' leave. The strain is showing on their relationships and many will return home, exhausted, to find a disenchanted wife has walked out. Divorce rates among the US military are soaring.

Corporal Leonard Allen, 33, is missing his son's first year of life. A member of the 2-4 Infantry 'Warrior' Battalion, 10th Mountain Division, Allen served a nine-month stint in Afghanistan in 2006. Normally he could then have expected at least a year at home. But eight months later he and his comrades were training in Kuwait, then deploying for a long tour in Baghdad.

'There were a lot of deployment babies after Afghanistan,' Allen joked. His son Colton is eight months old. 'I've seen two and a half months of his life. My wife Andrea gives me daily progress reports - he's learning to crawl - but it's a shame when a father has to miss being there. Six or nine months here wouldn't be so bad, but these 15- month tours are killing everybody.'

Allen, a former bill collector now regularly on patrol in the streets of Baghdad, married two years ago in Las Vegas. 'We knew there was a chance I'd be sent to Iraq. She was pretty down for a while, quite sad, and she worries about me here. She knows why I'm here and she's glad, but she wants me to come home.'
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