Modern War Heroes

Here’s a heartwarming image to send you off into the new year. What a beautiful moment.

As this war drags on, more and more problems on the home front seem to be surfacing. The main problem? Our soldiers are being repeatedly sent back to the field, instead of serving one tour and coming home – like in the past. In addition to the added time in the field aggravating the problem of PTSD, all this distance and separation is beginning to have a heavy toll on the relationships and/or marriages of our men and women in service. With all the time spent apart, couples are adjusting more and more to being alone.This mentality isn’t healthy for a marriage and doesn’t promote a couple to act as a team.

This article posted on USA Today discusses the problem in detail:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — If military families are quietly “coming apart at the seams,” as the wife of the Army’s top soldier told Congress in June, the evidence is here in the dining room of Army Capt. Mark Flitton and his wife, Lynn.

Their oldest child, Scott, 15, stormed into this room early this year after an argument with his father, asking why his mother ever married “that man.” It was here in March where the couple first discussed divorce.

In July, Mark and Lynn explained at the dining room table how they live together now only on a superficial level, driven apart by back-to-back combat deployments and marking days until he goes back to war in Iraq next year.

“I haven’t come home yet,” admits Mark, 46, who during the past 10 years has spent a cumulative 36 months away in three separate tours. “I’m still in the war mode, and I don’t know that I’m going to come out of it until I know I don’t have any more war rotations to go back on.”

“We’ve just become so comfortable in living separate lives,” says Lynn, 49.