Sitting across from her in their designer dresses, they insisted she wasn't doing enough to raise raffle money to pay for a military child's future education. Am I really responsible for sending another kid to college? That was her desperate question to me. Unable to keep a job, given her husband's multiple reassignments, she had struggled simply to save enough for the education of her own children. And mind you, she was already providing weekly free childcare to fellow spouses unable to locate affordable services in that town, while counseling some wives who had become suicidal during their husbands' long deployments.
I could, of course, multiply such examples, but you get the idea. In the war-on-terror-era military, eyes are always on you.
Married to the Military (or the Terror Within)
On paper, the American military strives to "recognize the support and sacrifice" of the 2.6 million spouses and children of active-duty troops. And there are indeed gestures in the right direction from partnerships with employers who have committed to hiring military spouses to short-term-crisis mental-health support.
Talk to just about any spouse and she'll and yes, we are talking about women here tell you that the most effective and reliable support comes from other wives who volunteer their unpaid time to run FRGs and similar activities. Unfortunately, in the post-9/11 era, as anthropologists Jean Scandlyn and Sarah Hautzinger have pointed out, ever more aspects of military family life, once thought of as "volunteer," have become "voluntold" as in, we're watching you and you're expected to do it. Otherwise, your husband's career won't advance.
Worse yet, all such voluntold activities tend to sweep you into a world of informal surveillance geared not just toward making sure you don't spill the beans on classified troop movements, but averting possible PR crises over looming military realities like family violence and the rising suicide rates among the troops. After the birth of our second child, a woman with zero mental-health training typically called me weekly to "check in." She wanted to make sure, she insisted, that I was caring properly for our baby. If I refused to talk with her and I found her oppressive indeed she threatened to call in child protective services. I was in graduate school studying to become a clinical social worker, I told her, and knew perfectly well that she had no basis to report me. I wondered, though, what spouses with fewer resources went through when they received such "surveillance" calls.
Believe me, national security has gained a new meaning in such an atmosphere. Once, for instance, my husband was confronted by another officer because I'd written a post on an anonymous blog about military life I was then authoring my identity had just been discovered describing the unhealthy diet that officers were forced to eat on his submarine. Even this was considered a threat to national security, because I was "undermining morale."
Sometimes, it seemed as if those tasked with waging this country's never-ending war on terror had a deep urge to create yet more problems of every sort, while validating the assumption that we all lived in a world of ever-present danger. Just a week after my husband and I moved to a new duty station with our toddler, for instance, he approached me one evening in our still empty house after a 16-hour shift on base. His face was pale when, with fists clenched, he said, "I have a favor I need to ask of you." His new commanding officer wanted me to come by one night so that he and a group of senior officers and their wives could discuss what was "appropriate behavior" in spouses' groups. Apparently, the spouse of an officer leaving the command had not gotten along with the other officers' wives. Because my husband's rank was the same as the departing officer's, I was to be preemptively warned based on nothing more than the rank of the man I'd chosen to marry.
"Yeah, I'll talk to him," I said. "But I have some things I'd like him to consider, too." If I was going to attend such a meeting, I had my own set of topics to discuss among them, that families shouldn't be expected to pay $50 a ticket to attend the annual ball and that new mothers shouldn't be called weekly by the command ombudsman and asked about their parenting skills.
The next day, my husband told me his commanding officer felt "like you're forcing his hand." His nerves frayed, he took a breath and then whispered (so our toddler couldn't hear him), "Look, he said if you don't just come to his house, anything could happen to our family. Anything."
I never did visit that captain's house, nor participate much during the two years we were at that base. And yet the captain's ambiguous threat to our family hung over our home the whole time. There were moments at night when I jumped at every noise outside our windows. At a moment when I was alone with our toddler and once again very pregnant, our house was indeed broken into and I even briefly wondered whether the captain was to blame (before quickly dismissing the thought). I started to feel as though the terror of that period was coming from within the military itself.
No one attacked my family, but it would prove to be a difficult two years. For example, one evening shortly after my husband returned from a grueling deployment in which his sub had collided with a civilian ship, he shared a text from the captain voicing disappointment that spouses like me had not chosen to go to more events, including the Navy ball. Thanks to families like ours, the captain insisted, command morale was paying a price. We were, he implied, being watched and not only was my husband's career at risk, but the recent life-threatening crash at sea from which we were all reeling had somehow been caused, at least in part, by lack of spousal participation back here at home. Despite my best feminist efforts to dismiss such a ludicrous suggestion, I felt watched, crushed by guilt, powerless to reverse what seemed like an endless string of negative events affecting our family. Most of all, I felt increasingly lonely.
And as it turns out, I was anything but alone in that sense of constant surveillance and my reaction to it. According to a 2021 independent survey conducted by fellow military spouse Jennifer Barnhill, more than a third of spouses felt direct pressure from commanders or indirect pressure of other sorts to participate in spousal group activities. And yet, a majority of spouses surveyed sensed that they had little influence over the way the military actually ran. In other words, spousal groups often provided not much more than a veneer of legitimacy for the claims of military leaders that they cared about families.
My Personal War on Terror
Terrorism can be anywhere. That's the message repeatedly conveyed to me by my military community since the war on terror began. In these years, a chilling, if unspoken, corollary to that thought developed: anyone whose lifestyle and viewpoint the military did not agree with or approve of was a danger.
Over the last decade, I've felt as if the tiny community of discontented, activist-minded spouses I've associated with and the mob-like structures of the military conformists who eternally try to rope us in or dismiss us seemed to recreate post-9/11 America in a microcosm. A deep and ever-present fear of whistleblowers and dissent was increasingly pervasive in our world. It was typical of those years that, in 2010, Army Private Chelsea Manning was convicted by a military judge of 17 charges, including violations of the Espionage Act, and sent to jail after she provided more than 700,000 classified military documents to Wikileaks. Among other things, they detailed evidence of American military leaders failing to investigate hundreds of cases of rape, torture, and abuse by the Iraqi police; a 2007 U.S. Army helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed two Reuters journalists; and secret counterterrorism operations in Yemen that, in my opinion, Americans should have been informed about.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
