When Jody Calls. Oh, Yellow Elephants...

Yeah. The old "Jody" call. The story of Jody and Dear John are as old as the military. Deployments were tough enough in peacetime. The number of my friends and squadronmates who got divorced over being gone kept me from getting married. Out of my last squadron (15 officers) only four are still married to the same women. Pretty sad. Now in Iraq, it's getting worse.

Most of the men in 4th Squad, Charlie Battery, fought two wars while they were in Iraq. There was the war against the insurgents that had them patrolling for roadside bombs and raiding houses at all hours. Then there was the war back home, which had them struggling, over phone lines from 7,000 miles away, to keep their marriages and their bank accounts intact.
...
They all knew about "Jody," the opportunist of Army lore who moved in on a soldier's girl while the soldier was off fighting a war. They had sung hundreds of cadences in basic training deriding the name. But it had always seemed like a joke, something that happened to other guys.
...
After surviving the chaos of Iraq, thousands of soldiers have become casualties of a fight they were poorly trained for: keeping control of their family lives during the separation of war. Men and women who feel lucky their units suffered few fatalities say they can name dozens who returned to empty houses, squandered bank accounts, divorce papers and restraining orders.

The Army divorce rate has jumped more than 80% since the fighting began overseas in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The courts around Ft. Hood, the Army's largest post, may have to add another judge to handle the caseload. Divorce lawyers hire extra staff whenever a division prepares to come home.

This has to be one of the saddest stories coming out of Iraq yet. I always cringed when I saw those marriages of young enlisted guys to their HS sweethearts, standing there in their class "A" uniforms beaming with pride, their new bride on their arm. I wondered how long that was going to last, no relatonship other than wham-bam-thank'ya ma'am and a trip to the local justice of the peace.

The young men wanted to know that they were going to be coming home to a faithful, patient, loving wife, perhaps even a new child; the idea of a trimmed lawn and a white picket fence guarding their family as they guarded their perimeter from bad things, squarely in their thoughts as they boarded the transport to Baghdad. No sacrifice was too great to come home to that. But separation, anxiety and lonliness make for a powerful antidote to those dreams. Young wives forced to live in near poverty on a junior enlisted salary soon begin to wonder what it's all about; far from home and their family that separation begins to cause changes metastisize into a cancer that has no cure save their excision from the marriage.

Another thing that was interesting about the article, two of the enlisted men named were reduced in rank for buying and consuming black-market alcohol. How sad is that? Are they not allowed to drink? Is there no EM club they can go to blow off steam? I see the makings of another epidemic of "zero tolerance" substance abuse bullshit coming, and an entire generation of servicemen left high and dry, so to speak because it's cheaper to kick them out than treat them for the legitimate psychological stress that drove them to become involved with substance abuse to begin with. General Discharges and Other-than-Honorable discharges get little to no VA support, and are harder to get "upgraded" by the Board for Correction of Military Records. Maybe that's the 1600 Crew plan to defund the VA...

crossposted to Democratic Veteran