The Price of Duty, Honor & Country
By Trudy Chun
May/June 2001 Family Voice

As an Army wife for 20 years, Evelyn Rundenza experienced the best military life has to offer. Her family had the opportunity to explore the world as they lived in two foreign countries and three states, and her husband, Nick, had a career he loved. But the military brought many stresses.

• The wait for base housing caused added financial strain and, in one case, substandard living conditions.
• Deployments left her caring alone for her three children, while her husband served in Asia for 12 to 18 months.
• The need to supplement family finances conflicted with her desire to be an at-home mom. While her husband wanted her to work, “I had to be mom and dad to my kids when he was [deployed],” Evelyn says.

Separations and job stress formed a widening gulf between Evelyn and Nick, and he became abusive. They divorced. She acknowledges the military isn’t totally at fault for the end of her marriage. But the realities of life for military families were prime contributors.

“We have paid a price,” she says.

The United States invites young men and women to be among the “few and the proud” or to become “an army of one.” We would expect our nation to ensure their families’ needs are sufficiently met.

But the United States, the nation known around the world as the “land of plenty,” has left many military personnel and their families—especially those of lower ranks—struggling financially. That’s on top of the typical pressures of military life: frequent moves, long deployments and poor housing.

But hope may be on the horizon. President George W. Bush has noted the enlisted soldier’s plight, and he has taken steps to rectify it. This will result in a stronger military.

The Defense Commissary Agency reported in 2000 alone, the commissaries at Ft. Belvoir, Ft. Meyer, Andrews Air Force Base, Quantico, and Patuxent River Naval Air Station (all located in the Washington, D.C., area ) collected more than $800,000 worth of food stamps and vouchers for WIC (Women, Infants and Children) food program. The Pentagon revealed that last year all military commissaries received more than $21 million in WIC vouchers.

“It’s a sad indictment of society when someone who is willing to give his life for his country is paid less than minimum wage,” Thomas Loughlin, who heads the Marine Corps Community Service at Quantico, commented in The Washington Post.

Shawn Akard, an Army wife of 14 years who now lives in Ankara, Turkey, said the problem of low pay does not stop with the lower enlisted ranks. She spoke of an Army sergeant with 15 years of service who left the military because his wife found him a job with better pay and benefits: driving a bread truck. “The Army lost a bright, motivated person whom everyone loved,” she said. And it was not because he did not love his work, but because his family needed financial security.

Money pressures also affected Evelyn’s marriage. Her husband’s job in military intelligence required him to work 12 to 14 hours a day, leaving no time for a second job. And, Evelyn noted, the military gives no overtime pay. Nick wanted Evelyn to work outside the home, but she hesitated. “My career was being a full-time mom,” she explains.

Finances became especially tight when Nick was deployed to Korea, because he needed half of his paycheck to cover his living expenses. “While he was paying [added expenses], his family suffered,” Evelyn says. To help out, she took a part-time job at her children’s school.

To improve pay and benefits for military servicemen and their families, President Bush has proposed increasing spending by $5.7 billion—$1.4 billion to improve pay, $3.8 billion for healthcare, and $400 million for housing. Bush proposes increasing a scheduled raise from 3.9 percent in the coming year to 4.6 percent.

What could this mean for military families? David Lewis, a financial advisor at Camp Pendleton, believes it could make all the difference in the world. “If you’re married with two children and you’re a lance corporal, you’re well below the poverty line,” he told USA Today. “The pay raise could make the difference between eating beans and rice or peanut butter and jelly. It could mean they could pay all their bills.”

Evelyn found base housing to range from excellent to, in her word, “ghettofied.” (The worst housing she lived in was recently replaced.) The greater problem for her family was the wait for on-base housing.

In Germany, her family could afford only an off-base apartment with no hot water and only a portable electric heater. As a young military wife, Evelyn struggled to care for her baby and toddler in this situation. One year later, the commander heard of the family’s plight and moved them to temporary quarters until base housing became available.

In California, they had to pay for expensive housing for one year, on top of an already tight income, while they waited for military housing. “We lived month to month,” Evelyn says. Then, when they moved on base, her children needed to adjust to a new school.

Base housing has advantages. It places the soldier near his workplace and his family within a supportive community of people with common struggles. Moreover, those who can put up with the crumbling housing on post don’t have to pay rent and utilities.

Because base housing has a waiting list, many soldiers’ families must find housing in the city. At Ft. Hood, they receive a $542 stipend each month for rent, but the average three-bedroom apartment in nearby Killeen, Texas, runs about $600 plus another $150 for utilities.

“Housing plays a huge role in quality of life. It directly relates to retention,” Capt. John Strange, an infantry company commander, told USA Today.

“If a soldier is forced to live off post in a less than safe environment, then that affects the soldier’s morale and his willingness to deploy and leave his family behind.”

Kelli Kirwan, the wife of a Marine gunnery sergeant, recently testified at a military forum designed to let top brass know how they can improve life for military families.

“My children and I stand at a civilian airport and say goodbye to our husband and father for a year,” Kirwan said. “There is no flag waving. There is no fanfare. He’s going to do his job, and we’re going to stay back here … and do what we’re supposed to do. Being able to walk into a military hospital and have my children seen if they need care while he is gone is not something I should have to fight for.”

Kirwan said her family is like a cloth that is pulled apart and forced to adjust when her husband is gone. “We as a family have to tighten our threads to bring that fabric back together so we are able to do what we need to do. Not just to survive, but to thrive, to be productive, to continue to grow and develop,” Kirwan said. “When he comes home, there’s no room—we’ve pulled together to make it through. So it’s painful to pull that apart and make room for him to fit back into the family.”

The Navy is probably the hardest branch on family life, because it necessarily requires long deployments aboard ship. And many families have decided the toll of deployments is a price too high to pay.

One Navy wife told USA Today her 21-month-old daughter had so lost touch with her father that she actually pointed at a waiter in a restaurant and cried, “Daddy!”

“It is very painful when she calls strangers ‘Daddy,’” the woman said. “She looks all over the house for her father and can still pick him out of pictures. But it is hard for her to stay connected.”

Indeed, the Navy’s history has not been family-friendly. During Vietnam sailors were stuck at sea for 12 months or more at a time. Throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, a nine-month “float” was the norm. In the last decade, sailors were only supposed to be at sea six months at a time, but it was not unusual for those deployments to stretch to nine.

In the last three years, however, the Navy has stuck to its six-month limit.

“When we asked people why they were leaving the Navy, the big dissatisfier that kept coming up was, ‘It’s hard on the family,’” Capt. Joe Gradisher of the Navy Bureau of Personnel told USA Today.

To try to keep the best and brightest within the ranks, the military has stepped up efforts to make military life more family-friendly. The Army now publishes its drill schedules, has stopped its surprise night drills, and decreased the number of required working hours on weekends.

The Navy has made e-mail available for sailors to stay in touch while out to sea, and it has even provided video hookups so that new fathers can get a glimpse of their children born during deployment.

Shawn, who is a doctoral candidate in psychology, worked with the Navy when her husband was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. She said the Navy has formed family support units out of necessity. These units provide a liaison between the ship and family. They help work out communication issues that arise during deployments.

Shawn worked with the wives and the liaison to make sure both spouses were “on the same sheet of music” financially during the float. Many younger enlisted families had never learned how to communicate about finances before this experience. So programs in financial management and financial communication are invaluable to preserving good morale and developing healthier marriages.

“They do not want to get close, because it will hurt too much when it ends,” Akard said. “Many people do not want to say goodbye. … Instead they say, ‘We’ll see you at the next duty station,’ but that only rarely happens.” As a result women tend to avoid connecting with other wives.

“If this is true for the parents, how much more for children?” she asked.

The state of our military families directly reflects our nation’s values and priorities. Are we willing to take care of America’s soldiers? From low pay to poor housing, from long deployments to constant moves, if we want to preserve top-notch armed forces, America must be willing to make military families a top priority.

Trudy Chun is a writer and research specialist for CWA. She and her husband, a major in the U.S. Army, live in Ankara, Turkey. She has written on family-related issues for 10 years.

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