FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. – After unveiling his plan for a troop increase in Iraq this month, President Bush spoke of the burden borne by Americas military families – of the quiet sacrifices of lonely holidays, and empty chairs at the dinner table.
The spare, elegant phrase evoked a stoic longing worthy of an Edward Hopper painting. But real life tends to be messier.
Indeed, here, at the sprawling, utilitarian home of the U.S. Armys 101st Airborne Division, there is a more intimate catalog of those burdens – a running account of the cheating hearts, bedroom dramas, exasperated parents and emotionally wounded soldiers.
It is an advice column, Dear Ms. Vicki, published in the base newspaper, the Fort Campbell Courier. Thanks to the candor of its letter writers, it has become an unexpected hit – a sort of Ann Landers for the warrior set and the kin left behind.
Hello Ms. Vicki I found out that my husband started cheating on me while overseas, wrote Wife Seeking Peace of Mind. I do not know what to do, and I love him so much .
My son chose to marry a stripper before he deployed, wrote A Mother with Morals. This woman has torn our family apart and has ruined his finances .
Ever since my wife returned from Iraq, shes been having nightmares, waking up with sweats, even screaming and yelling, wrote Worried Husband. She wont eat, and she is losing weight .
Answering them is Vicki Johnson, 45, an on-base clinical social worker. She is also a military spouse of two decades, and she acknowledges that even heroes can make a mess of their personal lives.
The people in the military are equipped with this skill set that sets them apart, she said. But were also real people, with real problems – the military just happens to be our career.
The strain of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on relationships has been well documented: In fiscal 2001, about 5,500 Army marriages ended in divorce. Three years later, when the total number of married soldiers was about the same, the number of divorces rose to 10,500.
A 2004 study in the New England Journal of Medicine screened soldiers before and after deployment, and found that a significantly higher percentage of troops after their return met the criteria for major depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and alcohol misuse.
Other problems are harder to quantify – although no less vexing. I am a divorced mother with three children, one letter to Ms. Vicki stated. My elderly parents took care of my children while I was in Iraq . I came back to three overweight children. All my parents did was feed my children to death, instead of keeping them active and healthy. If you cant trust your parents, who can you trust?
Vicki replied with a typical mix of compassion and candor:
I truly thank you for your sacrifice to your country, she wrote. However, I think you are being too hard on your elderly parents. They were trying to help you continue with a military career by taking care of your 3 children hello!
The making of Ms. Vicki
Vicki and her family moved to Fort Campbell in July 2004 from Washington, D.C., where her husband, Lt. Col. Nathaniel Skip Johnson, a career military man, had served for two years as an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney. His new orders were to join the 101st and lead a combat battalion in Iraq.
The Johnsons and their three sons had spent years hopping from base to base as Skip ascended the chain of command. Although they had never lived at Fort Campbell, the landscape was familiar: on base, modest one- and two-story houses lined tidy streets named for famous battles – a government-issue replica of suburbia.
What was new was the acute sense of anxiety. The 101st Airborne Division – more than 20,000 troops – was gearing up to spend a year in Iraq. The 101st had been there before, in 2003 – back when the war was new, the prospects exciting, and some thought it might be over quickly.
This time, families knew what to expect, and many were weary from the previous yearlong deployment.
The Johnsons, however, were out of practice. Skip hadnt been on an extended deployment since his seven-month stint in Operation Desert Storm, during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
We all knew that this was a different war, Vicki said.
At the time, the Johnsons three boys were 17, 19 and 21. People told Vicki the deployment would be easier for her, because her children were older. But that wasnt the case.
Christian, her middle son, had just started at the University of Kentucky, where he had been recruited to play football. He was angry that his father wasnt around for the transition to college. All three boys began to question whether the war was worth it – and why their father had to fight in it.
Vicki had been working as a social worker in and around military bases for more than a decade, and she began taking clients at Fort Campbell. In her role as a wife, she attended pre-deployment meetings, asking questions and also answering them. She shed a lot of tears in those meetings.
Some of the other wives began calling her privately for advice: How do I deal with a sleepless infant on my own? My husband and I have been arguing – do you think we should divorce before he leaves? The calls came from the homes of high-ranking officers as well as the rank and file.
Vicki and a few other social workers considered setting up an ask a therapist day at the Post Exchange, or PX, the base retail store. She called the base newspaper to publicize it. Instead, editor Kelli Bland suggested the column.
The column debuted July 2005. Vicki initially asked clients if she could write up some of their situations. The first letter was attributed to a woman new to Fort Campbell, 23 years old, and depressed about the deployment.
Get involved with the YMCA, Ms. Vicki urged the woman, take advantage of a free child-care program, and meet with your Family Readiness Group, the official support organization for a company or battalion.
Then the soldiers shipped out. Traffic disappeared, the newspaper shrunk in size, restaurants emptied.
And then letters began pouring in.
Dear Ms. Vicki…
Dear Ms. Vicki: Ive got a big problem, a woman from Alabama wrote. My brother married a woman just a few days before he went to Iraq. He didnt even know the girl. But you know these guys. Well, this girl has destroyed our family . (She) is a drunk. Shes mentally crazy. She calls him in Iraq telling him lies all the time about us.
Dear Ms. Vicki: Ever since I have known her (when she was only 3), my stepdaughter has had a problem with habitually telling lies . Since her father deployed this fall, the problem seems to be escalating.
Dear Ms. Vicki: I hate to be nosy and in other peoples business, but my neighbor is doing her husband wrong. My husband is good friends with her husband. But since her husband deployed, she has been letting other men come to her house . Do you think I should tell my husband whats going on so he can tell her husband?
Ms. Vicki told the Alabama sister-in-law there wasnt much she could do about her brothers wife. The lying stepdaughter was referred to counseling. And the nosy neighbor was advised to keep her peace: Think about what this would do to a man to hear that his wife is entertaining other men in his house while he is away fighting in a war.
Readers wrote in to praise her, or to vent: You make me sick, so much that I will never read the Courier as long as they have you giving advice, an October 2005 letter said.
Before Ms. Vicki, the Courier, an official Army publication, had never received many letters to the editor. There were weeks where wed think, Did we even put out a paper? Bland said.
After a few months, Bland moved the column to a more prominent place in the paper and started running it with a color photo of Vicki smiling like a trusted friend. Vicki was receiving at least a dozen letters a week by then. Most were e-mails, but some were written in longhand, left surreptitiously in her home mailbox. Some people stopped her at the PX, sharing their problems over a shopping cart. Some hoped to see their words in print, but others sought confidential advice.
Soldiers extended family members wrote her from other states, after stumbling across her column on the Internet. Soldiers themselves e-mailed grievances from the front lines:
I am writing to you from Iraq about my wife – she refuses to stop going to the clubs. I met her at a club about three years ago and married her shortly after that. My wife is really attractive and it bothers me because I know that other guys are hitting on her and they could be doing God knows what .
Ms. Vicki replied: From your report, you married a party girl whos still a party girl. Did you expect her to be a stay-at-home mother and housewife?
Vickis share of stress
Vicki stuck with the principles she relied on in her social-work sessions. Chief among them was that military spouses should not give in to melodrama and think of their situations as unique, lest they wallow in victimhood. She likes to point out that people with other careers – police, firefighters, coal miners – also risk their lives daily.
That belief was tested on the nights she longed for her husbands conversation and touch. It was tested last February, when she watched chaos unfold in Samarra, where Skip was stationed in Iraq, after terrorists blew up the Al-Askari Shrine, a Shiite mosque. It was tested when doctors found a lump in her throat and told her it might be cancerous.
Skip was due back for two weeks of R&R in May. Vicki told him his second night back. They had rented a room at the Opryland Hotel, in Nashville, Tenn. Her husband bawled like a baby.
I hated to tell him, she said. But I had to practice what I preach. Im always telling people, You can do it; you can get through this. So I had to.
The surgery was scheduled for after Skips departure, but he fought to have it moved up. He couldnt go back to Iraq without knowing she was OK.
It was performed, successfully, on the day their youngest son graduated from high school. Doctors removed her thyroid gland – it was, in fact, malignant – and then Skip went back to Iraq. Vicki returned to her column.
When I heard that a brigade from Alaska was extended by four months, my heart panicked with fear, a reader wrote in August, signing as Deployment Blues. What if it happened to my husbands brigade? I think I would crack, literally.
Dear Blues, Ms. Vicki wrote. Time seems to have slowed down, we are all worn from the stressors of deployment, and now we are hearing the departure dates are changing for some.
Its been tough – I know firsthand.
The 101st, including Skip, returned to Fort Campbell between August and November.
Still, the letters kept rolling in.
Dear Ms. Vicki: The romance between me and my husband is just not the same. He has been home for five months . Im too young for this, I dont even feel sexy or alive anymore.
Dear Ms. Vicki: Ive noticed that most wives try to do extra special things to impress their husbands when they return. My wife gained more than 55 pounds!
Dear Ms. Vicki: I dont mean to be too nosy about you, but are you married to a soldier whos deployed? I say no, because you seem to be handling everything too well.
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