FORT HOOD, Texas – Jesse “Jay” Collins didn’t expect to be home for Christmas this year. He thought he would spend the holidays in Iraq, far from his wife and kids.
By Joel Salcido, for USA TODAY
Nevada Collins says she “really had some coping problems to begin with. I didn’t know how to handle a lot of things. I was crying all the time.” Now, she says, she’s become more independent and says she’s “grown up.”
Nevada Collins says she “really had some coping problems to begin with. I didn’t know how to handle a lot of things. I was crying all the time.” Now, she says, she’s become more independent and says she’s “grown up.”
He and his wife know it won’t be quite the same. His family is forever changed.
Now that the war is over, Collins and thousands of other soldiers are home, with visions of holidays and reunited families — and no new deployments looming on the horizon. Whether they make it to “happily ever after” depends in large part on how well they reconnect with family in the short-term as well as the long haul.
“There’s always this honeymoon period,” says Joyce Raezer, executive director of the National Military Family Association in Alexandria, Va. “Dad or Mom is back home, and then the normal family routine sets in, and they have to re-establish those boundaries. It takes time.”
Experts know this re-entry is full of hidden hazards, which they’ve seen played out over and over again in the nearly nine years U.S. troops have been deployed in Iraq.
Despite major efforts by the military to assist in reintegration from wartime to home life, including many programs and services aimed at soldiers and spouses, new Pentagon data released last week show the toll on family life deployment has taken. The military divorce rate hit 3.7% in fiscal 2011, its highest level since 1999, as nearly 30,000 marriages ended.
More than 3 million Americans have had a spouse or parent deploy in the decade since 9/11 — many multiple times, says Paul Rieckhoff, founder and executive director of the advocacy group Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
“There are tremendous stresses and challenges” that create a “profound disconnect that’s really difficult to reconcile. It’s almost like you’re on two different planets,” he says.
At this military installation of more than 46,500 soldiers and more than 100,000 family members, for the first time in more than eight years, approximately 60% of its soldiers will be home by the end of the year.
Among them is Collins, 41, who enlisted in the Army after being laid off from a welding job in 2008. His life — and his family’s — changed drastically when he was deployed.
“We’ve been married 16 years, and we’ve never been apart like that,” wife Nevada Collins says.
The Collinses have dealt with a lot of change in a short time. They moved to Fort Hood in 2010, renting out their house in Mt. Airy, N.C. The deployment began this year on Valentine’s Day. “All of us had to grow up in our own ways,” Jay Collins says. “We each took on a different responsibility from what we had when we were all home together.”
Isabella, 11, “worried that he wouldn’t be the same dad” when he came back. Jesse, 14, says he knew having his dad back would feel different at first. “It kind of did feel like it was a stranger in the house,” he says.
“I’ve been used to doing everything on my own,” says Nevada Collins, 38, a photo lab specialist. “He’s back, and it’s like I don’t want him to think I’m not including him, but I’ve not had to include him for so long. I’m just like, ‘OK, kids, let’s go.’ And I have to stop and say, ‘Oh, do you want to go with us?’ ”
On the positive side, she says she and her children “really bonded while he was gone.”
Billy Floyd, a behavioral health specialist at the Family Advocacy Program at Fort Hood, works with soldiers as they adjust to what’s changed at home — from hairdos or weight gain to rules and responsibilities — and helps families adjust to how being deployed has changed the service member.
“It takes a period of time to move from a constant, hyper-vigilant state to where you relax,” Floyd says. “Even though we say the words, that just won’t happen in a split second.”
Reintegration training
One of every 10 active-duty soldiers in the Army is assigned to Fort Hood. Since 2003, about one-third of the post’s soldiers have been deployed.
At Fort Hood and other sites, returning service members are required to attend reintegration training, which includes sessions on topics such as suicide, substance abuse, sexual harassment, vehicle safety and post-deployment resiliency. Relationship issues are woven into many of these workshops. Marriage retreats and family programs also are offered to smooth the transition.
In addition to the military’s assistance, non-profit groups such as Rieckhoff’s have developed programs to help families bridge the emotional distance created during deployment.
Despite the stresses, most families will “find a way to reconnect and settle back in,” says psychologist David Riggs, executive director of the Center for Deployment Psychology at the Uniformed Services University School of Medicine in Bethesda, Md.
“We don’t want to jump to the conclusion that everything has gone bad because it’s taking awhile to get things back together on an even keel,” he says.
Even so, many families do have real trouble reconnecting.
A Pew Research Center study of 1,853 veterans released this month finds that 44% of the 712 who served post-9/11 say re-entry to civilian life was difficult. Being married reduced the chances of an easy re-entry from 63% to 48%. The veterans who were married and served after the terrorist attacks in 2001 were asked about the impact deployments had on their marriage; nearly half (48%) said the impact was negative.
Soldiers, spouses and experts agree that e-mail, texting and webcams help. But just because there’s communication doesn’t mean it’s all good.
Staff Sgt. Duane Duke, 28, of Nashville, and his wife, Angie, 30, tried to talk daily on Skype, but they acknowledge that spousal communication in the past year during his fourth deployment wasn’t optimal.
“We didn’t really discuss the things that were really going on at home … you don’t want them worrying about it because they can’t be here to help,” Angie Duke says. “On the other hand, you don’t want to tell him, ‘We did this and this,’ and then they feel like they’re missing out on everything.”
The couple have been married 3½ years; their son, Alex, is 2½.
When Duke was home last Christmas, he knew he would return to Iraq.
“It feels a lot different this time,” he says. “There’s one less deployment that my family has to take on. I feel like I can pick up where I left off. I don’t feel like I’m going to disappoint (Alex) by leaving next year. That made it so much easier to pick up the Daddy role.”
Unrealized expectations
Riggs says service members who know they won’t have to separate for awhile may feel like recapturing “what it used to be like.” That could be a problem, he says.
“They may be putting more pressure on themselves to put it back together again. In the past, they may have maintained a certain amount of distance because they knew they were going to leave again,” Riggs says.
Duke says that even though his wife “held it down tremendously while I was gone,” it’s difficult not to have expectations that don’t materialize. “With my son, I figured he’d be on his way to maybe being potty-trained. And then I come home and he’s working on it, but not potty-trained. And I’m thinking, why not? You had a year,” he says.
Alex still uses a pacifier, another sore spot. “We’re arguing about some of these things,” she says.
Disagreements over parenting are nothing new for couples, but they may be magnified with deployment, says psychiatrist Stephen Cozza of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress, also at the Uniformed Services medical school in Bethesda.
“We always tell parents to take it slowly and re-enter parenting activities more cautiously. To take on parenting and disciplinary responsibilities can be a jolt to the children and spouse who have been managing without them,” Cozza says.
Children may have complicated feelings mixed with their happiness at the parent’s return. “Sometimes children will become angry because they feel as though a parent didn’t have to do this, and put themselves in that situation. They can direct the sadness and frustration of having to deal with the separation to the parent, as if it was their fault,” Cozza says.
Nevada Collins says she thinks the deployment was particularly difficult for son Jesse, whose older stepbrother had also moved away. “He had no males in the house. Even our dogs are females. He didn’t feel like he had anybody he could turn to. If it was hard on anybody, I’d say it was hard on him.”
“It was pretty bad not having a dad around,” Jesse says.
Jay Collins, who works in satellite communication, and his fellow soldiers in the 4th Sustainment Brigade weren’t in direct combat. But many returning combat vets also are dealing with physical injuries, substance abuse or post-traumatic stress disorder. The Department of Veterans Affairs says more than 200,000 combat veterans (16% of the 1.3 million who fought) have been treated for PTSD since the Iraq and Afghanistan wars began.
The RAND Corp. has studied military families, and its current research is taking a more detailed look at reintegration, including health and well-being, marital and parent-child relationships, finances and career, says Anita Chandra, a RAND public health researcher in Arlington, Va..
The study of 2,100 households began in the spring and will survey each nine times through 2014. All are married, some without children, some with young children and some with 11- to 17-year-olds, Chandra says.
Floyd says service members having more time at home in the new year will make a big difference.
“It will allow for more time with the family and with the spouse to re-establish and to build on and enrich the relationship,” she says. “We’re not asking them to start over. They already have a relationship.”
