[Clemenza]

Women, including spouses and mothers, have historically never understood what their sons/husbands truly do, ie the responsabilities involved in serving during wartime. I'm sure that this is not so much the case today (women being less "sheltered"), but they still see things from a certain perspective that we should be sensitive too. Allow their husbands/sons to communicate the stakes and responsabilities involved.

In other words, with all due respect Dr. Laura, please shut your trap when "confronting" these ladies. They have enough to worry about.

[Tall_Texan]

Maybe the message is that when the soldier phones home, the wife should refrain from complaining about how hard her life is. All that would do is give the soldier more stress to deal with that he can't do anything about.

[Petronski]

In other words, with all due respect Dr. Laura, please shut your trap when "confronting" these ladies.

I agree with the sentiment completely, although I would put it slightly differently:

In other words, with all due respect Dr. Laura, please shut your steaming snack pipe...

[GovernmentShrinker]

A big part of the problem is that a large percentage of servicemen are very young and have even younger wives, often poorly educated. If you’re 18 years old with a baby and your husband is off in Iraq, it’s normal to feel lonely and overwhelmed. A college friend of mine married a Naval Academy grad, and during the first Iraq war, found herself playing “mom” to lots of teenaged wives of sailors who’d been deployed. My friend (whose husband had also been deployed) was more than happy to help out, but as a fairly new military wife, she was pretty to startled to discover the helplessness of many of these young wives and mothers. The gulf between her (bachelor’s and master’s degrees in math) and them (mostly either high school diploma only or high school drop-outs) was huge — plenty of them didn’t even know how to balance a checkbook.

[spectre]

"In other words, with all due respect Dr. Laura, please shut your trap when "confronting" these ladies. They have enough to worry about."

With all due respect, Clemenza, you aren't doing these fighting men any favors by telling Dr. Laura to "shut up".

I was the daughter of a career Military Officer, who was rarely home. My Mother kept a lot of her problems from him, so he didn't have to worry..

Then, I married "one", and repeated the same pattern with my own husband and children.

When these men are off on a mission and/or fighting a war, they don't need a whining, bitchy wife who does nothing but complain. They have a job to do, which is tough enough.

I've seen way too many men whose wives forced them out of the military, or worse yet, divorced them because they couldn't "cope".

Laura is right. It takes a special woman to hold down the fort while their man is away. God Bless them all..

Rant off...sw