The home front

I haven't been particularly impressed with Don Martin's reporting from Afghanistan so far but this article is an insightful one, and deals with an issue that deserves more attention:

Living in one of the world's harshest environments in sweltering and dangerous southern Afghanistan can be a snap compared to reconnecting with a family that has adapted to the soldier of the house not being around.

Finding all the traditional tasks reserved for the man of the house now being done with relative ease by the spouse and children can be tough on the alpha-male ego. Ditto for the female soldier who finds her spouse has taken over motherhood and child-rearing responsibilities.

Statistics are hard to come by, but one study of U.S. soldiers in 2005 put the returning infantry divorce rate at almost 20 per cent.

"I see it all the time," says Sgt.-Maj. Wayne O'Toole, a 30-year military veteran. "It can start right at the airport. He goes to hop into his truck and she takes the wheel because that's what she's done for the last six months. She thinks she's doing him a favour by driving him home, but he really, really wants to drive his truck again. Then the fighting starts."

While the CF has gotten much better at dealing with "soft" issues like PTSD and home-work balance since I was in, it still has an awfully long way to go:

About once a week, David would quietly leave his office, drive a half-hour away and change out of his uniform before sitting down with a doctor for a regular appointment.

For months, the young soldier ventured far from his military base in Edmonton to seek help for a problem that had robbed him of his sense of humour and left him haunted by memories of comrades’ bodies being loaded into helicopters in the deserts of Afghanistan.

It was a hassle, but it was the only way he felt he could get the treatment he needed without facing repercussions from a military he and others say is failing soldiers traumatized by the rigours of war.

"They’ve made it impossible," David, who insisted on using a pseudonym, said in an interview from his Edmonton home.

"I had to drop my treatment because I couldn’t get the time off from work and I was embarrassed to tell the people I work with. Once you start going to see someone to help you out, they treat you like you can’t do your job no more.

"You come home and you almost feel like the army’s turning its back on you."

This soldier's experience may be atypical, but I know of too many who have slipped through the system's cracks in other ways to be entirely convinced of that.

Pitter, patter, folks.