The Soldier's Wife

In today's Stars and Stripes:

Iraq mission not essential

I have spent two of the last three years without my husband. He is serving his second tour in Iraq. I am not a complainer, but I am absolutely fed up with the Army. Everyone seems quick to point out that soldiers “signed up” for this. When my husband joined the Army, deployments were few and far between and even when they did occur, six months was the absolute worst-case scenario. No one ever dreamed of yearlong deployments, time after time.

It is nearly impossible for a marriage to survive under these conditions. I am an independent woman, but I got married so that I could share my life with my husband. The only sharing we are able to do is by short phone calls or e-mails.

Iraq is totally different from any other deployment. The Navy goes out and floats around in the ocean for six months. Big deal. The Army is “boots on the ground” in a war zone. It’s bad enough that my husband is taken away for a whole year, but the stress of worrying about him is nearly incapacitating at times. No one is safe in Iraq.

The consequences and fallout from Iraq will be seen for decades to come. The children left without fathers or mothers, the maimed and crippled soldiers whose lives have been forever changed, the breakup of homes and families, and the resulting psychological problems will haunt America for years to come.

There is nothing in Iraq worth the life of one American soldier. There are so many problems at home in the United States that should be fixed before we worry about what is going on half a world away. Imagine the good that those billions of dollars could do at home.

Bottom line: My husband signed up to protect and defend the United States of America. America was not attacked by Iraq or Saddam Hussein. Following is a quote from George H.W. Bush’s 1998 book “A World Transformed”: “I firmly believed that we should not march into Baghdad. … To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant into a latter day Arab hero … assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerrilla war.” No truer words were ever spoken.

Debbie Ray
Fort Sill, Okla.