Jon Marshall

The major couldn't stop crying.

He was haunted by the memory of writing a letter to the parents of an 18-year-old under his command in Iraq who had died in combat. When the major returned to his suburban Chicago home in November, depression colored his days and his relationship with his wife soured.

John Moore of Wrigleyville keeps hearing stories like this one. Through the online class about relationships he teaches for American Military University, U.S. troops tell him about family troubles and emotional wounds that have festered while serving in Iraq, Afghanistan and other danger zones.

The soldiers share stories about snipers, land mines and car bombs. They also tell Moore how they're afraid their spouses are cheating on them, or how they're riddled with guilt because of their own infidelity. They tell him about wanting to come out of the closet, or about their pregnant girlfriend, or about not knowing their own children after being gone for up to fifteen months. They tell him about the anger, jealousy and uncertainty they feel.

Once the approximately 170,00 soldiers deployed in and around Iraq and Afghanistan finally head home, Moore worries, they won't be ready for the emotional reality of their homecoming and America won't be equipped to support them.

"If they don't have a safe conduit to talk about it, it's like a time bomb," Moore, 34, says.

Moore tries to defuse that emotional time bomb through his class, "Interpersonal Communications," better known at American Military University as "Love 101." Each month a new group of fifteen-to-twenty soldiers and military spouses signs up for the eight-week class, which he launched in 2002. The class lets soldiers trying to prove how tough they are in combat reveal vulnerabilities they would never share with their own units.

"The whole culture of the military is that you don't talk about feelings or emotions," says Moore, the author of "Confusing Love with Obsession" (iUniverse, 2003) and a counselor at Chicago House, a North Side agency for people living with HIV/AIDS. "For people who feel alone, this is a conduit for them to communicate intimate things. By the second or third week, students start to share their feelings. By the end it's a crescendo of emotion."

With a crew cut jutting across his forehead, piercing dark eyes and the wiry yet muscular build of a man who works out regularly, Moore looks ready to go into combat himself. From his office, he sifts through emails, assignments and discussion board postings from students based in Iraq, Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates, Korea, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Germany and the United States.

"Trying to remain faithful to my wife has been very difficult," writes Rob (names of soldiers in this story have been changed to protect their privacy), a 24-year-old Army private from Kentucky who was shipped to Iraq for a year one month after getting married. "About four months after being deployed, I found myself having an affair with a woman who was recently divorced. I feel so much guilt about cheating on my wife, but a man has needs and it is not easy being alone for all this time."

Marital strains such as Rob's only add to the danger of military life. A 2002 Defense Department survey found that military personnel with high levels of stress are twice as likely to get sick or injured. "You can't fight an enemy effectively if you're worried your wife is sleeping with someone or if your kid is sick," Moore says.

For instance, Greg, an Army private from Chicago, was driving a truck in July of 2003 near Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit when a roadside bomb exploded, destroying his right arm. Greg wasn't thinking about safety before the bomb exploded, he told Moore. Instead, his mind was in turmoil: his wife had just told him she was unhappy with their relationship, and he had just learned his time in Iraq was being extended sixty days.

This kind of emotional burden becomes even heavier when soldiers can't talk about their relationships, Moore says. Once every couple of months, one or two students divulge to the class that they are gay but are afraid to tell anyone in their units because they risk getting discharged.

"Being gay in the Navy is extremely hard," David, a 24-year-old sailor from Florida, wrote for Moore's class. "Combine that with having a partner for four years who you can't contact while on deployment and you have a recipe for severe depression. I can't even talk to the chaplain about the problem because I fear he will turn me in and I will get kicked out of the service."

Whether gay or straight, troops in the class talk the most about their distance from loved ones, Moore says. "If they're used to hearing from their wife every other day, but now it's once a month, it sends them out of their minds," he says. "The marines will tell me that it hurts more being away from their wife and kids than being shot at."

The length of the Iraq deployments, which the Pentagon says average about a year, makes staying in touch with children especially difficult. About half the students in Moore's classes are parents, and they're upset that they've missed their children's birthdays, holidays and other milestones. "When your father comes home after one-and-a-half years, it's like a stranger walking into the house for young kids," Moore says.

Moore knows all about the disruptions military life can bring. His father was in the Navy and served in Vietnam, and he had uncles in the Navy and Marines. Moore says his parents' marriage collapsed as they bounced from Chicago to Texas to Florida. After they divorced, his mother moved to Chicago Heights and the family went on welfare. "I know what it's like to stand in a soup line for food and get my Christmas gifts from the Salvation Army," he says.

Although all wars disrupt the lives of military families, the anxiety level during the Iraq war has increased as it drags on and deployments are repeatedly extended, says Shelley MacDermid, co-director of the Military Family Research Institute at Purdue University. "Desert Storm was quite a bit different because it was shorter and more of an air war," she says. "From this war we have people coming back who have been on the ground in very ambiguous and risky situations for a long time."

Every week Moore hears about this risk and bloodshed. "I get private emails from students who say their assignments are going to be late because they just shot someone," Moore says. "If you've just killed people or lost a limb, it's impossible not to bring that into your relationships."

The result can be severe mental health problems. A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded that up to 17 percent of 1,709 soldiers surveyed returning from Iraq suffer from major depression, generalized anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder.

Many of these mental-health problems pop up six months to a year after troops return, says Mary Graham, a senior policy adviser with the National Mental Health Association. Families and friends don't notice problems right away, but the returning soldiers often start to self-medicate with alcohol and drugs, she says. "It's only going to get worse as more people get back," she says.

In extreme cases, the depression and post-traumatic stress lead to domestic violence. A 2000 study in the journal Military Medicine found that long deployments raise the likelihood of severe aggression against spouses. The danger of this aggression became tragically clear two summers ago when four soldiers--three of them just back from Afghanistan--allegedly killed their wives at the army base in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Although such severe cases are rare, many of the hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops who are based abroad will need social services or psychiatric help, Moore and Graham agree. But a report last year by a Veterans' Affairs task force found that the availability of quality care for suicidal or depressed veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan is "haphazard and spotty."

If counseling is available, there's no guarantee that troops will take advantage of it. "It's a small community and everyone knows when you're accessing mental health services," Graham says. "There's a stigma around it. Or they're afraid their commanding officer will find out."

That's why some soldiers turn to Moore's class to share their stress. They tell him that as they prepare to return home, they often grow nervous about the changes they might face. If their marriages were troubled when they left, their apprehension increases. When they do finally walk in the door, some returning soldiers feel they can't match the images that others have created of them. "You have to live up to expectations that your spouse has built you up to be--a hero--but in reality you're tired and angry and possibly depressed," Moore says.

A burst of sexual activity when couples reunite can relieve some of that tension, but after the initial excitement, depression often starts to sap their love lives, Moore says. "Students say it's difficult being home," he says. "The adjustment is harder than they thought, because they're no longer on a sense of mission."

Even when the relationships last, the partners sometimes are as drained emotionally as the soldiers. "It's almost more difficult for the spouse because they've had to live through constant anxiety and fear about the deployed person," Shelly MacDermid of the Military Family Research Institute says. "But if your relationship was strong when you left, you have a good basis to be strong when you get back."

Moore hopes his class helps keep these relationships strong. "The good thing is that love is no longer a four-letter word for these soldiers," he says. "They can talk about it now."

And Moore hopes the rest of the country will be ready to welcome his students and help heal their emotional wounds. "They are heroes for having to put up with this. Not just for getting shot at and risking their lives, but also for leaving their families," he says. "They want to come home. They just want to come home."

(2005-05-10)

Also by Jon Marshall

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment