What Color Star Should a Military Spouse Get

The following was written by a woman of great courage and compassion. Her courage is evident in this heartbreaking article. Her compassion is known to me because she is a good friend. Carissa founded Military Spouses for Change and then later, renamed it to Military Spouses of America. I was on the board of directors and very proud of all the work Carissa did, and still does for military families.

Most of the time when a spouse talks, it is long after the service member has left the military. It is when they feel free to open up. In this case, Carissa is still living on Fort Hood with her children, opening herself up to more judgments and attacks because she lifts the curtain, letting the rest of us know how hard it is on military families. Too often forgotten when we report on the rates of PTSD, suicides and attempted suicides, we forget about the families they leave behind, just as we forget about the fact half of civilian marriages end in divorce without half the problems the military families have. I am also sure many military spouses will feel grateful she did this, said what they would not dare talk about.

The next time you read a story about how grateful Americans should be for those willing to serve this country, maybe, just maybe, you can also offer a prayer of thanks for the families standing where few will ever see.

What Color Star Should a Military Spouse Get?....
by Carissa S. Picard

"There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?" Robert Francis Kennedy
The U.S. Army, Fort Hood, and War in Iraq from the perspective of an activist Army Spouse


"The blood and tears shed in houses back home aren't tallied by the Department of Defense even though these losses are casualties of the same wars that were being ‘fought over there' so they wouldn't ‘be fought over here.' I think the...reasoning was fundamentally flawed. Both wars are being fought on two fronts, but America only recognizes one." Carissa S. Picard, Esq.
Ironically, it would be at the largest military installation in the United States that I would come to know loneliness and isolation better than the man who brought me there. This stranger who was rarely home was the very person who "defined" me as well as justified my presence at Fort Hood. Once I married Caynan, I was no longer Carissa, I was Caynan's wife.

My tasks, outside of raising our children, generally revolved around the navigation of the unspoken interstitial space of the Army wife-being neither here nor there, neither this nor that. Or, put more plainly, learning how to live your life when you are no longer a civilian, but you are not a soldier either.

I wasn't a photograph, I was its negative. I wasn't sure what I was anymore, but I always knew what I wasn't. I wasn't a practicing attorney. My license was in Maryland. I wasn't a voice for myself, my family, or other military families. Soldiers speak for their families. I wrote the occasional blog or op-ed, until my husband threatened to divorce me if the writing didn't stop. Advocacy from within was a career killer. Apparently, it was a marriage killer as well.

Every species has to adapt or die. In my muddled attempts to survive the last eight years, I learned to engage in covert warfare, practice collateral damage control, manipulate pain management, and master the rules of dis-engagement. Landmines abound and I am not without battle scars.

The blood and tears shed in houses back home aren't tallied by the Department of Defense even though these losses are casualties of the same wars that were being "fought over there" so they wouldn't "be fought over here." I think the Administration's reasoning was fundamentally flawed. Both wars are being fought on two fronts, but America only recognizes one.
read more here
http://www.veteranstoday.com/article9953.html