I’ve had similar experiences with friends, where the wives would be faithful or unfaithful with some of their spouses being either the victim or the one who was unfaithful to them. The fair way to actually compare this would be to look at long distance relationships and compare the fidelity aspect, while the additional stressors of being at war can not be duplicated, it might create some additional insight.

I once had a OIC (Officer-in-Charge) tell me before I got married “A deployment will make a strong marriage stronger and a weak marriage weaker”. I have seen this to be true.

There is a Gunny who is here with me who has been married through 4 deployments. This last was the easiest on him and his family yet they’re getting a divorce. If you ask him the military had very little in his decision. He had PTSD after his first deployment but the last few he saw less and less and thus it was easier to transition.

Plus Marines always have a higher divorce rate than the other services yet the military as a whole mimmicks society pretty closely. I wonder if the economy has something to add to it.

Additionally the part on military women makes me wonder about fidelity. It’s always been an issue in the military. I remember my first year in being told to stay away from base housing because the deployed spouses were playing “red-light/green-light” which was a green light in the front porch light meant the husband was deployed and it was “all clear”.

Military members deployed also have issues of infidelity. As the #’s of women in war zones have increase so have combat “hook-ups”. A close friend of mine (no longer a Marine) has a child from a combat hook-up with a then-married Air Force member.

I remember when the first Army unit came home in 2003 two soldiers killed people within days of coming home. In the media they blamed PTSD. In the insuing trials they learned these two soldiers walked in on their wives with their boyfriends. This could easily be a story from Toledo and no one would assume PTSD.

So my big takeaway from this is it’s probably a more complicated issue than the media believes.

Stories like this remind me of Jim Croce’s song “Operator” which he wrote while in the Army sitting next to a phone booth while soldiers called the women who had sent them Dear John letters.

Seriously though, I thought it was interesting in the differences in the divorce rates and I’m sure part of it has to be related to the length of the war and the deployment and re-deployment our troops and their families have to keep going through.