'In Army, we're family'

FORT CARSON, Colo. -- The military's rhetoric about being a big family resonates among a preponderance of today's Army spouses.

"We may not be blood-related, but in the Army, we're family," said Maj. Sue Sliman, a reserve officer whose husband is a staff officer who was posted to Baghdad in the first half of 2003. That sentiment - - echoed often by other spouses -- reflects the Army's increased efforts to look after soldiers' families.

About 75 percent of military spouses who sought assistance said they found the Army helpful, according to a poll conducted by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University.

That marks a major change from the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when the number of families who needed help took the service by surprise. "My 19-year-old wife never got a single phone call" from a military support network during that deployment, recalled Capt. Bren K. Workman, who was an enlisted soldier then. But when he was posted to western Iraq with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment last year, he said, "She got called week after week."

Spurred by the family disasters it had back then -- suddenly- single parents struggling with needs ranging from child care to transportation to domestic advice -- the Army has built an elaborate support network that provides the families of deployed soldiers not just information but also social services, such as counseling.

Army Community Service centers, with paid staff augmented by volunteers, ease relocations and deployments with a variety of aids ranging from teaching financial management skills to lending toys to children who have just moved. The centers also maintain revolving funds for emergency loans for food, rent and essential travel, as well as programs to identify and help victims of child and spouse abuse. They even offer classes on how to live in the United States for the benefit of foreign women who have married troops serving overseas.

Family Assistance Centers provide more specialized help on legal and medical matters.

Here at Fort Carson, a Family University teaches couples communication skills and other ways of coping with stress -- without giving them the stigma of looking as though they need counseling, an important consideration in a tight-knit, watchful community. Army Family Team Building teaches new spouses the ABC's of military life, from rank structure to how to read a pay stub.

A day-care center built of stones and bricks in 1998 takes care of about 300 children most weekdays, for a fee of about $80 per child for five 10-hour days -- the cost is subsidized by the Army. More than half the children had fathers deployed this year. At some bases, wives of deployed soldiers are also eligible for free "respite day care."

Other Army facilities have also found ways to provide greater support to deployed soldiers and their families. At some base hospitals, maternity nurses bring cell phones into delivery rooms so soldiers in Iraq can hear their babies being born.

The Army also seeks to identify soldiers considered at risk for difficult homecomings -- because of trauma in Iraq or special needs at home -- before they even return to the United States, with commanders there compiling data and sending them back to the post here. Even soldiers who are not seen as vulnerable are required, when they get home, to take classes on "reintegrating" with their families.

Tying it all together is the Family Readiness Group, or FRG. Every unit has a robust structure of volunteer groups whose job is "detection and direction" -- that is, finding the troubled spouse or family and pointing the way toward help. The groups tend to meet weekly, and the Army often provides free child care for participants. Between sessions, a stream of e-mails and telephone calls provides information on events in Iraq and on help available here.

"If it wasn't for the FRG, a lot of women probably wouldn't have made it," said Amy Greene, the wife of a medic in the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, while holding on her hip her 8-month-old daughter, born while her husband was in Iraq.

That conclusion is widely seconded, even at off-post shelters for abused women, which tend to see the ugliest side of military life.

"I'm just amazed at what the Army has put in place. I think there will be much less violence and neglect of children because of all the supports put in place," said Trudy Strewler, executive director of the Court Appointed Special Advocates, a nonprofit organization in Colorado Springs that monitors the situations of abused and neglected children and makes recommendations to the court. "I just think the military's support network is 100 times stronger than it was 10 years ago."

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