Beth Pratt hunched on a chair in the anonymous, fluorescent-lit exam room of a health clinic on Fort Bragg, N.C. It was a wintry day in early March, she remembers, and her dancer's body drooped with sadness. She picked at the skin around her fingernails.
The nurse practitioner rustled through the door. "So, what brings you in to us today?"
Beth Pratt with dog Danny.
(Sarah Ross Wauters)
|
|
"Oh," said Beth and stopped. Her voice was thin and scratchy. She started again. "I'm having a really hard time with my husband gone." Her husband was deployed to Iraq five months before. "I think I'm really depressed." She started to cry. "I cry like this all the time. And I just want it to stop."
Beth remembers that the nurse practitioner nodded. She was older, with the calm, comforting air of a woman who has raised a whole brood of children and seen it all. She nudged Beth with the usual questions: Are you feeling any sense of hopelessness or helplessness? Have your sleeping habits changed? Have your eating habits changed? Have you lost weight? How about a change in sexual desire? Yes, Beth said to each question, struggling to get the word out, yes, yes, yes, and yes, adding to the last, "Actually I don't know, since my husband's not here." And her face crumpled again.
"Honey, have you had any suicidal thoughts?"
Beth didn't say anything. She just nodded.
"Do you have a plan? What are you thinking about?"
"I've been thinking," Beth said softly, "that if I had a gun, I'd shoot myself."
AROUND THE SAME TIME, on a back road on Fort Bragg, just a few miles from the health clinic, a gold hand-me-down sedan was doing 70 in a 55-mph zone when the blue and red lights came on behind it, forcing the driver, Marissa Bootes, to stop. It was midnight. The military policeman asked, "Do you know what speed you were going?"
"I have to get to the hospital," Marissa recalls saying. "My daughter woke up screaming that her head hurt. She has a temperature of almost 104; she's burning up. I'm afraid she might have that viral infection that's been going around, that kids have been dying of."
The MP flicked his flashlight over 5-year-old Lexie slumped in her seat. Her hair was wet with sweat, her cheeks flaming, the rest of her skin clammy and pale. The MP frowned, unconvinced. "I hope you're not lying to me."
"Look at me!" said Marissa. "I'm wearing sweats and I've got a sick kid in the back seat. Where else would I be going at 70 miles an hour in the middle of the night?"
He let her go -- he just asked her to do him a favor and slow down. Her husband was riding convoys in Iraq. Now their kid was sick. She wasn't slowing down for anybody. She hit the accelerator and sped the rest of the way to the Army hospital.
Five hours later, Lexie's temperature was headed back down, and they were dragging home. Before Marissa fell into bed, she says, she faxed the doctor's excuse to her supervisor at the law firm where she worked as a paralegal. She'd landed this job just before her husband was deployed four months earlier, and it was her dream job. But if she tried to drive to those 8 a.m. foreclosure hearings, she might just wrap the company car around a tree. The firm could get someone else to cover the hearings.
At 9, her supervisor was on the phone with one clear message: If those hearings happened without her, she was fired.
BOTH MARISSA BOOTES AND BETH PRATT ARE MARRIED to lower-level enlisted men in the 82nd Airborne Division. Beth's husband, Pvt. E-2 Luigi Pratt, drove Army trucks on convoys through Iraq's Sunni Triangle. On other convoys along those same roads, Marissa's husband, Spec. Charlie Bootes, manned a Mark-19 fully automatic grenade launcher.
Marissa and Beth have never met. Marissa, 24, grew up in foster homes, has a two-year college degree and is married to her high school sweetheart. On the subject of the war, she had no patience for Americans protesting in the streets; it killed morale, she said, made life harder for soldiers and their families. Beth, 34, had a happy childhood, holds multiple post-graduate degrees and is newly married for the second time, no children. As for the war, she believed it was wrong from the start. The U.N. weapons inspectors, it seemed to her, had been doing just fine. Beth and Marissa didn't have much in common except for this: In the fall of 2003, they both faced the frightening challenge of their husbands' first deployments.
A soldier whose family is struggling with deployment may have a hard time focusing on his or her job. In a combat zone, that's dangerous. Such soldiers may also suffer from low morale and may be less likely to reenlist. "You enlist soldiers," says retired Air Force Lt. Col. Lillie Cannon, who is married to a Fort Bragg Army colonel. "You retain families."
Marissa Bootes, second from left, gets together with fellow Hooah Wives for friendship and support. ( Sarah Ross Wauters)
|
The idea that families are crucial to military readiness is now official policy in an era when according to a 2002 study by the Military Family Resource Center, half of all service members are married. But families haven't always been a priority at the Pentagon. During Vietnam, when young, single draftees served for two years and got out, only 25 percent were married. If a soldier lived on post with his family, when that soldier went to war, his family had to go live somewhere else.
Outside Fort Bragg in the 1960s, Joanne Hunt lived with her young son in Fayetteville, N.C., in the Dreamland Trailer Court, while her husband served three tours in Vietnam with Army Special Forces. "The place was full of women without husbands," she remembers. "They were all in Vietnam."
Every day, she says, a staff car would come through Dreamland, and the women would watch out their windows to see if it stopped at the trailer of a friend. If it did, they hurried over to comfort her, because her husband wasn't coming home again. They were all the support they had. The loneliness, the sense of isolation from the wider world, could seem unbearable. When Hunt thinks back on the Special Forces wives she knew from that time, she can't remember a single marriage that survived Dreamland. Including her own.
Hunt quotes an old saying: "If the Army wanted you to have a wife, it would have issued you one. In my day, it was true. You had your ID card, you could shop the commissary and go to the hospital, but other than that, while your husband was deployed, the military had no more to do with you."
Military families owe the support they receive today in large part to women like Hunt. In the mid-'70s, as the Army shifted to an all-volunteer force, she participated in a family life symposium, an early effort to improve the Army's support for families. During the '80s, there was a family liaison office up at the Pentagon, and down at the unit level, commanders began organizing their soldiers' spouses into Family Readiness Groups.
The FRG volunteers pass information between the Army unit commander and the families and let families know where to find needed services. The other military services have similar programs, and they all rely on spouses who volunteer to help other spouses adjust to the military or a new duty station, prepare for deployment and then get through it.
For spouses, the initial couple of months of any first deployment are usually the toughest. Then, "families typically adjust and realize, I can take care of this, I can perform these roles," explains Lt. Col. Joseph Pecko, chief of the department of social work at Womack Army Medical Center on Fort Bragg. "A lot of the problems we will see after that is when there is no breather, no respite for the spouse. The family moved here away from loved ones, and they really become isolated."
That's a peacetime deployment. A deployment in wartime raises the stakes. As casualties mounted in Iraq, the chaplains of the 82nd Airborne began to notice a wave of symptoms sweeping through the division's spouses -- depression, insomnia, shortness of breath, crying jags -- the same symptoms that people often experience after the death of a loved one. It's a common reaction among spouses during a wartime deployment, and it has a name -- anticipatory grief.
Fort Bragg and neighboring Pope Air Force Base make up one of the world's biggest military complexes. It alone bustles with more than 45,000 soldiers in the airborne and Special Forces. Before September 11, 2001, on any given day, there were 4,000 or 5,000 soldiers deployed out of Fort Bragg around the world. Two years later, that number had topped 24,000.
Families say goodbye here all the time.
BETH PRATT REMEMBERS WATCHING LUIGI GET HIS GEAR TOGETHER -- rain poncho, canteens, gas mask. It was September and it was cold, just before dawn outside his unit's big, brick headquarters. She was seeping tears. He was sweating. Another soldier, passing by, asked Beth, "He's not sick, is he?"
