Little Things Can Be Wearing to Wives Who Wait at Home

Even without the worries of holding a family together on a shrinking budget, Pamela Banks and Francine Wright know the pain and strain of having a husband stationed in Saudi Arabia.

Little things have this way of taxing them--a flat tire last week, the trash piling up outside. Suddenly the bills are hers to pay. All those chores he used to take care of going undone.

“Some days you just need to close up the doors and windows and sit in the dark and cry,” said Banks, 24, whose husband of five months, Staff Sgt. Lawrence Banks, shipped out six weeks ago. “There’s nothing else you can do.”

These and other wives gathered last week at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station’s Family Service Center to talk about the personal impact of Operation Desert Shield, the largest American military deployment since the Vietnam War. Each has different strategies for coping.

Wright spends a lot of nights shopping. “That’s what I do when I get depressed.” When the malls close? “Then I go home and look at the bill,” she said laughing, “and scream, ‘Oh my God, what have I done!’ ”

She also cries, watches television, cries some more. “By that time, its time for me to go to bed.”

The night Banks’ husband, an ordnance officer, left for the Mideast, she “pigged out” alone on “ice cream, chocolate, doughnuts, beer.”

Now she takes one day at a time, keeping busy at work and with doctor appointments. She is leader of an Family Action Contact team, one of several wife support groups that formed at the base after President Bush ordered troops to the Persian Gulf to prevent an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia.

While supporting other wives is part of her role, Banks admits that most of the time coping for her means not sharing with others but isolating herself. She has sat in her darkened house alone, crying, on many nights. It’s better, she said, than having people “be nice to you. That just breaks me up.”

“You take it one day at a time,” she said. “Most of the time I just don’t think about what if. It’s only when I get really depressed or drunk that I think, maybe he won’t come home. It’s that little what-if voice that really screws with you.”