Advice that’s on base

AFTER unveiling his plan for a troop increase in Iraq this month, President Bush spoke of the burden borne by America’s military families -- of “the quiet sacrifices of lonely holidays and empty chairs at the dinner table.”

The spare, elegant phrase evoked a stoic longing worthy of an Edward Hopper painting. But real life tends to be messier than rhetoric.

Indeed, here, on the sprawling, utilitarian home of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, there is a more intimate catalog of those burdens -- a running account of the cheating hearts, bedroom dramas, exasperated parents and emotionally wounded soldiers that has flourished with repeat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is an advice column, “Dear Ms. Vicki,” published in the base newspaper, the Fort Campbell Courier. Thanks to the candor of its letter writers, it has become an unexpected hit -- a sort of Ann Landers for the warrior set, and the kin left behind.

“Hello Ms. Vicki ... I found out that my husband started cheating on me while overseas,” wrote Wife Seeking Peace of Mind. “I do not know what to do, and I love him so much....”

“My son chose to marry a stripper before he deployed,” wrote A Mother with Morals. “This woman has torn our family apart and has ruined his finances....”

“Ever since my wife returned from Iraq, she’s been having nightmares, waking up with sweats, even screaming and yelling,” wrote Worried Husband. “She won’t eat, and she is losing weight....”

Answering them is Vicki Johnson, 45, an on-base clinical social worker. She is also a proud military spouse of two decades -- a patriot who is quick to note that heroic sacrifices are made not only on the battlefield but also around the dinette set.

She acknowledges, however, that even heroes can make a mess of their personal lives.

“The people in the military are equipped with this skill set that sets them apart,” she said. “But we’re also real people, with real problems -- the military just happens to be our career.”

The strain of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts on relationships is well documented: In fiscal 2001, about 5,500 Army marriages ended in divorce. Three years later, when the total number of married soldiers was about the same, the number of divorces nearly doubled, to 10,500. A 2004 study in the New England Journal of Medicine screened soldiers before and after deployment, and found that a “significantly higher” percentage met the criteria for major depression, post-traumatic stress syndrome and alcohol misuse after their return.

Other problems are harder to quantify -- though no less vexing. “I am a divorced mother with three children,” one letter to Ms. Vicki stated. “My elderly parents took care of my children while I was in Iraq.... I came back to three overweight children. All my parents did was feed my children to death, instead of keeping them active and healthy. If you can’t trust your parents, who can you trust?”

Vicki replied with a typical mix of compassion and candor:

“I truly thank you for your sacrifice to your country,” she wrote. “However, I think you are being too hard on your elderly parents. They were trying to help you continue with a military career by taking care of your 3 children ... hello!”

VICKI and her family moved to Ft. Campbell in July 2004 from Washington, D.C., where her husband, Lt. Col. Nathaniel “Skip” Johnson, a career military man, had served for two years as an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney. Now his orders were to join the 101st and lead a combat battalion in Iraq.

The Johnsons and their three sons had spent most of the last two decades hopping around the country from base to base as Skip ascended the chain of command. Though they had never lived at Ft. Campbell, the landscape was familiar: on base, modest one- and two-story houses lined tidy streets named for famous battles -- a government-issue replica of suburbia. Waiting beyond the gates: a six-lane strip of car lots and honky-tonks.

What was new was the acute sense of anxiety. The 101st Airborne Division -- more than 20,000 troops -- was gearing up to spend a year in Iraq. The soldiers had been there before, in 2003. But then, the war was new, the prospects were exciting and some thought it might be over quickly.

This time, families who had been through it before knew what to expect, but many were still weary from the previous yearlong deployment.

The Johnsons, by contrast, were out of practice. Skip hadn’t been on an extended deployment since his seven-month stint in Operation Desert Storm.

“We all knew that this was a different war,” Vicki said. “We’re already hearing about the casualties. It was very heated, and escalating. I knew he wasn’t going on vacation.”

At the time, the Johnsons’ three boys were 17, 19 and 21. People told Vicki the deployment would be easier for her because her children were older. But that wasn’t the case. Christian, her middle son, had just started at the University of Kentucky, where he had been recruited to play football. He was angry that his father wasn’t around for the transition to college. All three boys began to question whether the war was worth it -- and why their father had to fight in it.

Vicki had been working as a social worker in and around military bases for more than a decade, and she began seeing clients at Ft. Campbell. In her role as a wife, she attended pre-deployment meetings, asking questions, and also answering them. She wanted to show the families of her husband’s soldiers that she would suffer, too. It wasn’t difficult. She shed a lot of tears in those meetings.

Some of the other wives had begun to call her privately for advice: How do I deal with a sleepless infant on my own? My husband and I have been arguing -- do you think we should divorce before he leaves? The calls came from the homes of high-ranking officers as well as grunts.

Vicki and a few other social workers considered setting up an “ask a therapist” day at the PX, or post exchange. She called the base newspaper to ask if they would help publicize it. Instead, Editor Kelli Bland suggested the column.

The column debuted July 2005 in the Courier, in the middle of the B section. Vicki initially asked her clients if she could write up some of their dilemmas. The first letter was attributed to a woman new to Ft. Campbell, 23 years old and depressed about the deployment.

Get involved with the YMCA, Ms. Vicki urged the woman, take advantage of a free child care program, and meet with your Family Readiness Group, the official support organization for a company or battalion.

Then the soldiers shipped out. Traffic drained from the strip, the newspaper shrank in size and restaurants emptied.

Real letters began pouring in.

Dear Ms. Vicki: “I’ve got a big problem,” a woman from Alabama wrote. “My brother married a woman just a few days before he went to Iraq. He didn’t even know the girl. But you know these guys. Well, this girl has destroyed our family.... [She] is a drunk. She’s mentally crazy. She calls him in Iraq telling him lies all the time about us.”

Dear Ms. Vicki: “Ever since I have known her (when she was only 3), my stepdaughter has had a problem with habitually telling lies.... Since her father deployed this fall, the problem seems to be escalating.”

Dear Ms. Vicki: “I hate to be nosey and in other people’s business, but my neighbor is doing her husband wrong. My husband is good friends with her husband. But since her husband deployed, she has been letting other men come to her house.... Do you think I should tell my husband what’s going on so he can tell her husband?”

Ms. Vicki told the Alabama sister-in-law there wasn’t much she could do about her brother’s wife. The lying stepdaughter was referred to counseling. And the neighbor was advised to keep her peace: “Think about what this would do to a man to hear that his wife is entertaining other men in his house while he is away fighting in a war.”

Readers wrote in to praise her, or to vent: “You make me sick, so much that I will never read the Courier as long as they have you giving advice,” an October 2005 letter said.

Before Ms. Vicki, the Courier, an official Army publication with a circulation of 23,000, had never received many letters to the editor. “There were weeks where we’d think, ‘Did we even put out a paper?’ ” Bland said.

After a few months, Bland moved the column to the front of the B section, above the fold, with a color photo of Vicki smiling like a trusted friend. She was receiving at least a dozen letters a week and writing the column, then as now, on a volunteer basis. Most submissions were e-mails, but some were written in longhand, left surreptitiously in her home mailbox. Some people stopped her at the PX, sharing their problems over their shopping cart. Some hoped to see their words in print, but others sought confidential advice.

Extended family wrote her from other states after stumbling across her column on the Internet. Soldiers e-mailed their grievances from the front lines:

“I am writing to you from Iraq about my wife -- she refuses to stop going to the clubs. I met her at a club about three years ago and married her shortly after that.... My wife is really attractive and it bothers me because I know that other guys are hitting on her and they could be doing God knows what.... “

Ms. Vicki replied: “From your report, you married a party girl who’s still a party girl. Did you expect her to be a stay at home mother and housewife?”

If some readers thrilled at the salacious peek into other lives, Vicki did not share their enthusiasm. She had seen enough marriages break up over peacetime stress.

“When it happened, I would always think, ‘Gosh -- while we were playing cards or Scrabble I wish I would have known that their marriage was in trouble,’ ” she said. “I wish I could have done something.”

For her published responses, Vicki stuck with the principles that she relied on in her social work sessions. Chief among them was that military spouses should not give in to melodrama and think of their situations as unique, lest they wallow in victimhood. She likes to point out that people in other professions -- police, firefighters, coal miners -- also risk their lives daily.

That belief was tested on the nights she longed for her husband’s conversation and for his touch. It was tested in February, when she watched the chaos unfold in Samarra, where he was stationed, after insurgents blew up the Golden Mosque. It was tested when doctors found a lump in her throat and told her it might be cancerous.

Skip was due back for two weeks of R&R; in May. They had planned to while the days away lazily in each other’s arms. Instead, Vicki told him on his second night back. They had rented a room at the Opryland Hotel, down in Nashville. Her husband bawled like a baby.

“I hated to tell him,” she said. “But I had to practice what I preach. I’m always telling people, ‘You can do it; you can get through this.’ So I had to.”

The surgery was scheduled after Skip’s departure, but he fought to have it moved up. He couldn’t go back to Iraq without knowing she was OK. It was performed, successfully, on the day of her youngest son’s high school graduation. They removed her thyroid gland -- it was, in fact, malignant -- and then Skip went back. Vicki returned to her column.

“When I heard that a brigade from Alaska was extended by four months, my heart panicked with fear,” a reader wrote in August, signing as Deployment Blues. “What if it happened to my husband’s brigade? I think I would ‘crack,’ literally.”

“Dear Blues,” Ms. Vicki wrote. “Time seems to have slowed down, we are all worn from the stressors of deployment, and now we are hearing the departure dates are changing for some.

“It’s been tough -- I know first hand.”

THE 101st returned to Ft. Campbell between August and November. One hundred and four soldiers did not come home.

The living returned to flags; brass bands; and husbands, wives, boyfriends and girlfriends. The Courier dedicated countless pages to pictures of couples kissing. Skip returned Sept. 12. He and Vicki had the house to themselves -- their youngest son was now also playing football at Kentucky.

In Samarra, Skip had missed simple things: drinking a glass of water from his kitchen tap, feeling cold. He missed his wife.

The strip was full of traffic again, its greasy spoons packed with bodies in desert camouflage. Young soldiers blew their combat pay on fast cars and motorcycles. People smiled at the squeal of their tires.

The letters kept rolling in.

Dear Ms. Vicki: “The romance between me and my husband is just not the same. He has been home for five months.... I’m too young for this, I don’t even feel sexy or alive anymore.”

Dear Ms. Vicki: “I’ve noticed that most wives try to do extra special things to impress their husbands when they return.... My wife gained more than 55 pounds!”

Dear Ms. Vicki: “I don’t mean to be too nosey about you, but are you married to a Soldier who’s deployed? I say no, because you seem to be handling everything too well.”

richard.fausset@latimes.com