Military divorce can be a whole new battleground

When military and matrimony don't mix
By Kristi Tousignant
The (Baltimore, Md.) Daily Record/AP
Published: August 30, 2014

A move is underway to standardize custody rules for military families. The Uniform Law Commission approved language for a model Deployed Parents Custody and Visitation Act in July 2012. Under the model act, past deployment and "possible future" deployment cannot be used against a parent in a custody proceeding, although imminent deployment can be considered.

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — For those in the armed forces, divorce can be a whole new battleground.

"It's ironic because these are trained fighters and they can find themselves in a battle they are not prepared for," said attorney Cynthia Hawkins Clark.

Although military family law cases go through civilian courts, they often present a unique set of challenges with deployments, military pensions and child custody, said Clark and Paula J. Peters, who practice at the Law Offices of Paula J. Peters P.A. in Annapolis.

And with Fort Detrick, Fort Meade, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Andrews Air Force Base, the Naval Academy and other bases in Maryland, there are many military members locally who need legal assistance, Clark and Peters said.

"I can't think of anything more satisfying," Clark said. "It's very hard not be invested in them. They are very good people."

The challenges of representing service members vary depending on whether they are on active duty or retired, attorneys said.

For active service members, the key issues often involve the couple's children. Long deployments mean long absences from that child's life, which can make it hard to get joint or shared custody.
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Armor of God Military Ministry

1st. LT Ryan Presnal talks about going to war and coming back but the danger of combat is not over when they come home. He is stationed at Fort Hood. Members of his unit got divorced and some committed suicide.

The story of how one family dealt with the deployment and return of their son and the issues they dealt with and how the Armor of God Military Ministry was formed to offer hope and healing to our troops and their families. Armor of God Military Ministry is an outreach ministry of the WoodsEdge Community Church of The Woodlands, Texas.

Divorce veteran

Divorce veteran
by
Chaplain Kathie

A conversation I had last night with a young wife ended with thoughts of how many Vietnam veterans ended up with multiple marriages. Just as with today's young veterans, being married into the world of combat, has not been easy, it was especially hard on the Vietnam generation of veterans. While PTSD has not changed, the ability to communicate and find support has. Now we are able to reach out to other people going through the same difficulties and hardships all over the country. We are able to connect to people around the world if we can't find someone else right here. We can find information and inspiration but perhaps the most important gift is the knowledge we are not alone.

The Vietnam War brought about 2 million combat veterans home. Perhaps the most shocking piece of news is that we've reached almost as many serving in Iraq and Afghanistan as we did with all those years in Vietnam. This means that there were just as many families adopted by combat and living with the results of it. We've already seen the increased rates of suicides and attempted suicides just as we've seen the increase rates of divorces. Many families are facing year of regrets because they do not know what to do to help their veteran heal or even know the right questions to want to have answered.

Information is available all over the web for them to learn if they want to. What about the veteran's spouse from the Vietnam generation with marriages that ended long ago? Divorce under any circumstances is hard. It's heartbreaking to see a marriage end and being left with an unknown future when you thought you had it all planned. They fell in love with one person only to discover all too often they were really married to a stranger.

For the spouse of a combat veteran with a marriage that ended long ago, the fact remains that you were married into the results of combat, but you just didn't know it. You simple assumed that you were married to someone who changed, or wasn't what you thought they were and you're still living with the pain of a shocking situation. Don't blame yourself. You didn't know what the newer generation of spouses know today. No one told you that it all came back with them. The support wasn't there. Knowledge was not available to you or to your well meaning friends giving you advice to end the marriage. Your kids didn't know why their parent acted the way they did and most blamed themselves just as you blame yourself. The veteran blames himself/herself just as much because they didn't know any better.

There are jobs for all of you to do and that is to first understand what happened by know why it happened. Learn what PTSD is and what it does to survivors of combat and what makes them so unique. You didn't have a common marriage with just the usual problems everyone else faces, but you had a combat marriage with all the other problems that came with it. Once you have a great understanding, first forgive yourself for not knowing and for making mistakes because you didn't know. You did the best you could with what you knew at the time, so forgive yourself. Explain it to the kids because they have to forgive their parent too. It was not the fault of the veteran because while they knew there was something wrong, they didn't know what it was or what they could do to stop feeling pain so deeply. It was not that they didn't love you enough, it was more that they couldn't stop feeling pain enough to feel the blessings that come with love.

Many veterans ended up homeless because you had no support to be able to live together.  Some committed suicide because they had no hope of being happy again.  Remember, you did the best you could for them at the time.  You just didn't know what else to do.  You cannot change your past but you can learn why it all happened and this will give you some peace.

If you are a veteran, make peace with that part of your life. There was a lot of damage done to people you loved even though you didn't mean it. Learn what was behind the way you acted and then explain it to your ex-spouse and your kids. Even if nothing comes out of it, at least give them the chance to forgive because in the process you will give them the chance to stop thinking it was their fault. No one was to blame for what no one knew. Many veterans have had three, four or even five marriages. Each one the result of hoping to find happiness thru someone else but doomed to end because the pain lived stronger than hope. Making peace with your past has to involve them as well. This way, there is hope for a fresh start in your life and healing the life you had after combat just as much as it's about healing the life you lived during combat.

Find the knowledge you need on the web and in support groups. It's not too late for you so stop wishing you knew all of it long ago and begin to use what you learn today. To heal your future you must first heal your past and then even you can find happiness in a loving relationship. It is not uncommon for an aware veteran to restore relationships with their kids once they understand why things were the way they were. Give them a chance to heal the pain they carry. It was no one's fault but the pain was no less real to everyone involved. Life is hard enough just as a human but when you're a human with combat in your life, it makes it all the more harder to find peace in your life but it is not impossible. Learn and act on what you finally understand for the sake of people you loved.

Unhappy couples staying together as economy makes divorcing too costly

‘I just want to leave him, but I can’t afford it’
Unhappy couples staying together as economy makes divorcing too costly
By Alex Johnson
Reporter
msnbc.com
updated 7:42 p.m. ET, Sun., Nov. 23, 2008
what pastors, family therapists and matrimonial counselors have long struggled to accomplish: keeping troubled marriages together.

Marriage counselors and divorce lawyers nationwide say more distressed couples are putting off divorce because the cost of splitting up is prohibitive in a time of stagnant salaries, plummeting home values and rising unemployment.

While the stress of economic uncertainty often worsens already shaky unions, it also can make couples more financially dependent on each other, said Pamela Smock, a researcher at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27808110/

The VA Brush-Off for Spc. James Eggemeyer

James Eggemeyer in his trailer in Stuart, Fla.Darrell Jones photo

Politics
The VA Brush-Off
The Department of Veterans Affairs routinely delays disability claims by wounded soldiers for months and years, often shunting them into homelessness. But there’s a simple way for the government to get disabled veterans the help they deserve. It can trust them.
By: Aaron Glantz September 17, 2008

Twenty-five-year-old Spc. James Eggemeyer injured himself before he even set foot in Iraq, while jumping out of an AC-130 gunship during parachute training at Fort Bragg, N.C. As he leapt from the plane, his arm got tangled in one of the lines of his parachute. Instead of drifting gently through the air to the ground, he was dragged alongside the plane as if on a short leash. “My parachute was twisted up like a cigarette roll, and I hit real hard,” he says. “My ankle and my knee and my back and my shoulder (got hurt). I tore my rotator cuff. I feel like a 50-year-old man.”

Military doctors prescribed several drugs: the painkillers Vicodin and Percocet and the steroid hydrocortisone. Then, in April 2003, they ordered the heavily medicated soldier deployed to Iraq. For the next year, Eggemeyer drove a Humvee, running supply convoys all around the country. His convoys were attacked twice. His worst day occurred early on, when the military truck in front of his Humvee hit a civilian vehicle.

“One of the cars in the oncoming traffic hit another car that was coming toward us and caused that car to swerve across the intersection and slam into the truck in front of me. The truck in front of me hit it pretty good and killed everyone inside,” he says. He slammed on the brakes to avoid adding his Humvee to the pileup. Then he got out and loaded an entire family of dead Iraqis onto an American helicopter.

“A Black Hawk had come in when my first sergeant called the medics, and they flew, and the people got taken out,” he says. “But they were already dead, and so they just got transported: a little girl, two adult females and a guy.” After that, Eggemeyer’s condition worsened. The longer he stayed in Iraq, the worse his body felt. He also started to take more of the painkillers and the steroids the military had given him. The more he took them, the more he needed to dull the pain.
But violence wasn’t the only thing Eggemeyer had to deal with overseas. While he was in Iraq, he filed for divorce. Then Eggemeyer checked his bank account, and, he says, $7,000 had somehow gone missing. So, for the duration of his time in Iraq, Eggemeyer’s parents took custody of his son, Joseph, who had been born just two months before his deployment.

Returning to Fort Bragg in April 2004, Eggemeyer was quickly discharged from the military. Already experiencing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, he started fighting with his captain and was given a “general discharge under honorable conditions,” which allows him to use the services of the Department of Veterans Affairs but denies him access to benefits of the GI Bill. Eventually, his PTSD and other injuries led him to become homeless, and he filed a disability claim with the VA. He continued to live literally on the street, sleeping in vehicles, for more than nine months as the VA bureaucracy sorted paper and asked for more, piling delay on delay.
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http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/676

Grim memories for Fort Carson soldier

Grim memories for Fort Carson soldier
Army Pfc. Spencer Offenbacker saw death in Iraq — lots of it, he says. When he returned home a changed man, his battle with the Army had only begun.
By Erin Emery
The Denver Post

The photos on Pfc. Spencer Offenbacker's laptop are gruesome: a severed Iraqi head; bugs crawling over a decaying body; a human skeleton in a pile of garbage.

Offenbacker, 25, a Fort Carson soldier, said he took the pictures to document how he and other Fort Carson soldiers picked up dead bodies near smoking piles of trash in the bombed- out streets of Baghdad.

An infantryman, Offenbacker said he kicked in doors during raids, had the most confirmed kills of any soldier in his unit and was exposed to at least eight improvised explosive devices.

The Army now disputes the amount of combat Offenbacker saw. But Offenbacker did receive an Army Commendation Medal for raiding an Iraqi home and rushing an al-Qaeda target. Offenbacker and another soldier subdued the man, who was reaching for an AK-47 rifle under his pillow.

When he returned to Fort Carson on Dec. 20, Offenbacker filled out a post-deployment checklist about his experiences in Iraq. He indicated that he had nightmares and had been exposed to IED blasts. It was five months later that he was evaluated for those issues by an Army doctor — and that was only after he sought help for drinking from Veterans Affairs doctors.

His troubles weren't all related to Iraq. Offenbacker had a disintegrating marriage. He began divorce proceedings a few days after he got home. Their daughter, Emma, now 4, was staying with Offenbacker's parents in Arkansas while he was deployed.

In mid-January, Offenbacker returned to his hometown for a 30-day leave. He was in bad shape when he arrived.

"He was shaking," said his father, also named Spencer Offenbacker. "He could not understand us. Sometimes, he would forget conversations we had with him only 10 minutes prior. He was very quiet and did not want to talk very much and was getting more agitated and depressed as the days went by. His alcohol abuse was prevalent."


His father took him to a VA clinic in Arkansas because he thought he was drinking
too much. Offenbacker told a VA doctor that he had been shot at numerous times, picked up bodies and saw six people get killed. Offenbacker said he had post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury due to "getting blown up a million times," medical records show.

Health records from Iraq show he was treated twice in theater for possible head injuries.

After returning to Colorado in late February, Offenbacker said he sought help at Fort Carson, but his superiors "blew him off" and marked him a problem soldier.

He was drinking up to "a handle of Jack Daniels" — a half-gallon — a day. He was too drunk to wake up in the morning and he missed several morning formations and physical training.

In April, unable to cope, Offenbacker went AWOL, back to Arkansas, where his parents noticed he was having suicidal thoughts. He checked into a VA clinic and enrolled in a rehabilitation program. Three weeks into the five-week program, Offenbacker was sent to jail.

A friend had a minor traffic accident and Offenbacker was a passenger in the car.

When police checked for warrants, the Army had issued one for Offenbacker being AWOL. The soldier came back to Colorado in handcuffs and shackles May 28. He was sent to the barracks, where a non-commissioned officer was to watch over him. He went AWOL again.

On July 3, Maj. Gen. Mark Graham, commander of Fort Carson, allowed Offenbacker to be discharged from the Army "under honorable conditions."

In an interview, Graham said that "after I stood back and looked at the whole thing, I thought that the discharge should be a different level of characterization. That's why I gave him a different level of discharge."
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http://www.denverpost.com/previous2/home/ci_10394676

Another PTSD soldier with "less than honorable" discharge

Ex-soldier fights for normal life
The Post-Standard - Syracuse.com - Syracuse,NY,USA
Sunday, August 31, 2008
DICK CASE
POST-STANDARD COLUMNIST

David Marr is coming out of a closet filled with demons.

He's talking about being messed up on drugs, being homeless, being divorced from his wife and losing custody of his children. He's also talking about his 20 years of experience in the military and how he turned his life around, finally.

David credits the Rescue Mission and the Department of Veterans Affairs with giving him the help he needed.

"My heart went out to him." Randy Crichlow explains. Randy manages the Mission's independent living program. "We watched him stay with us and stabilize. I'd say he had plenty of issues and a low level of trust when he came to us in November 2007. Now we're fast friends."

David and Randy have an ongoing pingpong tournament at the Mission, even though he checked out in May. David's ahead, 20 to 16 games.

David says he came to the Rescue Mission a broken man, unable to admit it. He'd been kicked out of the Army, after 20 years, because of a cocaine habit. His wife of 17 years, Laura, divorced him. She has custody of their three children - David III, 17, Valerie, 13, and Lauren, 10.

Now he's off drugs, although still taking medication, after a successful rehabilitation program at Canandaigua Veterans Hospital. He's got a place to live, with his girlfriend in Mattydale. His ex lives on the same street and he sees the kids often. His son, David, just started as a freshman at State University College at Oneonta.

And David's a college student himself, about to start the third semester of a program in emergency management at Onondaga Community Collge. He talks about working for the Federal Emergency Management Agency and running for office.

We sat under a tree in the front yard of the home where he lives on a quiet street off Malden Road. The tranquility is interrupted occasionally by a speeding car and the roar of a plane out of Hancock Field nearby.

I ask David if the aircraft noise brings back memories of his service in civil affairs (in the 403rd Civil Affairs unit) in Bosnia, North Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Divorce stalks Katrina survivors

Divorce stalks Katrina survivors
Story Highlights
Katrina survivor Ricky Murray is trying to save his marriage

Despite heart attack, he's still trying to repair his flood-damaged home

After three years in FEMA trailer, wife is talking about divorce

Pastor says he's busy counseling couples who are stressed out; many split up
By Sean Callebs
CNN

(CNN) -- Ricky Murray was having a miserable year long before a storm named Gustav started threatening the Gulf Coast area. Now he's afraid he will lose his family because of a previous hurricane.

It has been three years since Hurricane Katrina killed more than 1,800 people when it struck, scouring Mississippi beach towns down to bare sand and rupturing the protective levees around New Orleans, Louisiana.

Eight feet of floodwater left Murray's home in Slidell, Louisiana, uninhabitable. He's been working on the house, but he and his wife and three children have been living in a FEMA trailer.

Murray also lost his job. He recently suffered a heart attack -- brought on in part by stress, according to doctors. But what's really agonizing for him is that his wife of 16 years says she is considering a divorce. Watch their difficult living situation »
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http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/personal/08/29/broken.homes.katrina/index.html

PTSD:War turns life 'upside-down'

War turns life 'upside-down'

By JARED MILLER
Star-Tribune staff writer



[oas:casperstartribune.net/news/wyoming:Middle1]


RIVERTON -- Robert Niezwaag Jr., an Army commander with a laid-back leadership style, suddenly found himself yelling at his men.

The tiniest annoyance could send him into a rage, and he felt as if he hated "everything and everybody."

"I didn’t know if I was getting tired of getting shot at or what," said Niezwaag, 34, a native of Riverton. "I just knew it was happening."

Niezwaag would learn later that the anger was a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, an anxiety disorder that probably resulted from spending 13 months in the war zone in Iraq.

Military medics tried to ease the symptoms in the field with a prescription of the anti-depressant Prozac, but Niezwaag noticed no improvement and stopped taking the medication.

He found temporary relief when he left Iraq and retired from the Army in October 2004. During his final months of service in Fort Hood, Texas, he was on a "pink cloud."

"Things seemed fine," Niezwaag said.

But his anger -- a common symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, also known as PTSD -- followed him from the deserts of the Middle East to his home in central Wyoming, where he had hoped to start fresh after 14 years in the Army.

He quickly found that he was unable to communicate with his wife. Everything she did seemed wrong, and he sometimes got angry.

Why were the bills unpaid? Why hadn’t their son played Little League baseball last season?

Then the fight was on.

"War takes your life and flips it upside-down," said Niezwaag, who has been in therapy for two years for his PTSD symptoms. "You try to piece it back together, but it’s hard, especially if you are married. You start arguing and you start fighting, and pretty soon ..."

Divorce was the next step for Niezwaag and his wife.

"I’m going through a divorce because of Iraq, because I changed," Niezwaag said.

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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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http://www.khaleejtimes.com/darticlen.asp?xfile=data/theworld/2008/June/theworld_June46.xml&section=theworld&col=
linked from ICasualties.org

"People aren't designed to be exposed to the horrors of combat repeatedly"

Casey: Deployments strain Army recruiting, retention

By Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — The stress of repeated deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan is beginning to show in the declining quality of Army recruits, retention of midlevel officers, desertions and other factors such as suicide, the Army's top general said Tuesday.

Gen. George Casey, the Army chief of staff, said his primary concern is the loss of captains. The Army invests about 10 years to develop them. An effort in the fall of 2007 to entice 14,000 of them to extend their commitments fell short by about 1,300, he said.

"People aren't designed to be exposed to the horrors of combat repeatedly, and it wears on them," Casey said. "There's no question about that."

Casey commanded U.S. troops in Iraq from 2004 to 2007. Since taking the Army's top post, he has spoken about the stress of repeated deployments. He highlighted some trends that show deepening strains.
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http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2008-02-19-casey_N.htm