Disrespecting the home fires? (Long Post)

3 March 2005 | Racehorse

[Racehorse]

The next time a liberal friend insists there is no contradiction between supporting the troops and opposing the war, before speaking, consider whether Stacy Bannerman and Karen Houppert are prime examples of why your friend may be wrong.

Bannerman opposes the war in Iraq. She is a pacifist. She is married to a Washington Army National Guard soldier now deployed to Iraq.

Bannerman's idea of supporting the troops: “The best way to support our troops is to bring them home from this reckless, ill-conceived war based on lies. Help President Bush to honor his pledge to end world tyranny: get the United States out of Iraq.” To catch the full flavor of Bannerman’s support, read her email on behalf of Military Families Speak Out sent to Congressman Adam Smith.

Last night, Bannerman appeared with Karen Houppert on Hardball with Chris Matthews.  (Later this afternoon the transcript may be online.)

Karen Houppert writes for a variety of magazines, including, no surprise, The Nation and Salon, and for ten years she worked as a staff writer at The Village Voice.  Most recently, she has written a book focusing on military families.  While you most likely will join me in not buying the book, I think you may be interested in seeing an example of what Random House/Ballantine Books publishes as social science, womens's studies, and military history.

Below is the publisher's book description, a favorable review from Elle, and a unfavorable review by military.com.  As reviewer Tom Miller writes, The New York Times is going to love this book.

From the publisher, Random House:

As taps echoes across the cookie-cutter housing areas of upstate New York’s Fort Drum, the wives turn on the evening news, both hoping for and dreading word of their husbands overseas. It’s a ritual played out on military bases across the nation as the waiting wives of Karen Houppert’s extraordinary new book endure a long, lonely, and difficult year with their husbands far from home. Houppert, a prize winning journalist, spent a year among these women, joining them as they had babies, raised families, ran Cub Scout troops, coached soccer–and went to funerals.

The waiting wives include Lauren, twenty-six, whose Navy SEAL husband was killed in Afghanistan; Heidi, peace activist and Army wife whose life is a daily struggle with her conscience; Crystal, a nineteen-year-old raising two babies on a shoestring while her husband fights in the Middle East; Tabitha, who becomes the alleged victim of murderous domestic violence at the hands of her Special Operations boyfriend; and Danette, once an Army brat and now a devoted Air Force wife, who teaches, raises two teens, and fills her days with endless volunteer work.

Houppert shows that these women make some of the same sacrifices of their personal liberties as their husbands do and yet garner none of the respect accorded their spouses. Today, these military wives find themselves torn between an entrenched tradition that would keep them in a Leave It to Beaver family ideal and a modern social climate suggesting that women are entitled to more–a career of their own, self-determination, and a true parenting partner.

Meanwhile, the military concocts family-friendly policies and spends millions on new programs designed to appease military wives–and to maintain them as staunch supporters who will encourage their husbands’ reenlistment. The Army likes to say that it “recruits soldiers, but retains families.” And indeed, the future of the all-volunteer force hinges on the success of this mission. Though Army brass speak glowingly of the “Army Family Team,” this team is often deeply divided over strategy–and even goals.

A gritty, behind-the-scenes look at the tour of duty from the domestic front, Home Fires Burning provides a fascinating, fresh look at an enormous American institution and the families that live in its shadow.

A favorable [Must Read] review by Elle:

Give them the news, then get the hell out of Dodge,” says a U.S. Army post's Chief of Casualty and Mortuary Affairs, a man with a euphemism for a title whose job is to deliver a life-fracturing message to the wives of fallen soldiers—and then leave before he's attacked by them.

That's typical of the gulf in the military between standard operating procedure and messy human reality, which is marvelously detailed in Karen Houppert's closely reported, deeply empathetic study, Home Fires Burning: Married to the Military—For Better or Worse (Ballantine), a look at a year in the life of military wives during wartime. Houppert, a former staff writer for The Village Voice and a military brat, spent time at Fort Drum in upstate New York and found women uneasily married to a quasi-socialist system of identical subdivisions, dizzying jargon, and forced patriotism. She profiles “human dimension challenges” such as Crystal, a tongue-pierced 19-year-old Kentuckian with no job, a toddler with an eye disease, another baby on the way, and an immature soldier-husband who refuses to travel long distances in the same car as she (he takes his own) because he doesn't want to be cooped up with their child.

The military's attempts to integrate the role of wife into the system have evolved from the view that her job is “to strengthen her husband's morale” to today's holistic approach of the Total Army Family. But bases are still patriarchal strongholds where a wife must learn the same lingo as her husband but handholding is discouraged “lest he need to salute a passing superior.”

While Houppert clearly is troubled by the Iraq war, she lets the facts speak for themselves. She finds that plenty of these wives don't back the war but quietly support their husbands and hope for the best. It's a life of patriotic mission and quiet desperation—and an important story about today's America.—Joe Hagan

An unfavorable review by Tom Miller at military.com:

Karen Houppert, a former staff writer for the Village Voice and the author of The Curse: Confronting the Last Unmentionable Taboo, Menstruation, has trained her sights on another neglected subject: Army wives. Houppert spent two years studying these unsung heroes, and along the way, she identified some important issues that impact wives and families and indirectly influence the Army's ability to retain soldiers. Unfortunately, she approaches the subject with an intellectual parochialism that skews her analysis and undermines her credibility.

An Air Force brat herself - another apparent curse - Houppert uses a group of military wives to tell her story of an Army out of step with dependents. She found most her subjects at Ft. Drum in upstate New York, the home of the 10th Mountain Division. Even before we meet the wives, we know they are victims from Houppert's description of the post and the area. "It's a brave, new outpost in a rural region with little to offer..." she informs us. Little, that is, besides an "unforgiving landscape" and an "inhospitable climate."

There's more, of course, and much of it is indisputable [ . . . ]

Of the half-dozen wives that Houppert selects to feature, most seem content to be cast as victims of the Army. Certainly the Army needs to do much more in order to be family-friendly, but these people do have free will. Moreover, many of them are the victims of bad choices that have nothing to do with the Army. Crystal Solloway, a young wife at Ft. Drum, became pregnant at sixteen and a mother, wife, and high school dropout at seventeen. Shortly thereafter, she became an Army wife when her husband enlisted. Two years later, at nineteen, she had a second child. At Ft. Drum, she steers clear of activities on post and spends most of her day watching TV. This person has problems that transcend the Army. The author, of course, never claims that her subjects are representative of anything, much less the universe of Army wives.

Houppert's account of the trials of military wives is informed by her feminism, which she acknowledges, and by an elitism that she would vigorously deny. But, too many of her remarks disparaging people, places, and things outside her milieu are gratuitous for any other explanation. Does she really need to point out that children in Alabama say "fer" when they mean "for"? And regardless of Houppert's memories to the contrary, children in Selma, Alabama, wore shoes to school in 1970. It also might come as a revelation to the author that some people actually prefer the bucolic charm of the North Country of upstate New York to the urban sophistication of Manhattan.

Moreover, her liberal bias is never too far away. President Bush is a "jackass," Fahrenheit 9/11 is a historical documentary, and the war in Iraq is a "mess." Her credibility would have benefited from an acknowledgement that the messiness in Iraq had been accompanied by freedom for 25,000,000 Iraqis. She also would have been better served if she had avoided wishful thinking out loud. "In fighting to win hearts and minds - here and in Iraq - " she writes, "the military is losing on two fronts." [ . . . ]

Houppert even manages to dishonor a genuine hero, Specialist Kris Atherton, an infantryman who lost an arm in Iraq. Invited to a ceremony in South Prairie, Washington, where the local park was being renamed in honor of Atherton, she can find nothing positive to say. [ . . . ]

Houppert raises some important and legitimate questions that deserve a thoughtful, balanced, and honest analysis - something you won't find in Home Fires Burning. And, that's too bad. Her lack of balance, transparent elitism, and parochialism will finally wear out too many readers. This is the sort of review that gives writers heartburn, but Houppert shouldn't be too concerned. The New York Times is going to love this book.

[Bahbah]

I saw these two on Hardball last night. The pacifist wife maintains that the National Guard is not supposed to go overseas; they are supposed to protect the country by staying right here. There was lots more utter stupidity from her like how "insensitive" the Army is to their "plight." It was all about her. I wanted to smack her, and I am not ordinarily of a violent bent.

[SuziQ]

Today, these military wives find themselves torn between an entrenched tradition that would keep them in a Leave It to Beaver family ideal and a modern social climate suggesting that women are entitled to more–a career of their own, self-determination, and a true parenting partner.

Maybe I missed it, but is there some military rule that spouses who do not deploy are not allowed to work outside the home? I think it has more to do with the socio-economic level of the spouses. If they are 20-24 and have a couple of kids already, it's likely they barely finished high school, never attended college, and never started a 'career' so why would it be supposed they'd up and get one when their husbands went off to war?

They're trying to paint military wives as some 'put-upon' group of women who are victims of the decisions of the Commander in Chief, and who don't know how to take care of themselves and their kids. Kind of a slap in the face, I think.