Military, Civilian Values Clash in Marine Flap

Sgt. David Wikler, a 25-year-old Marine stationed at Southern California’s Camp Pendleton, has survived three grueling months of boot camp and lengthy deployments in most of the world’s hot spots. And his four-year marriage to his high school sweetheart, Debra, has survived as well.

But four of the five Marine buddies who rose through the ranks with him have not been so lucky, Wikler said. Married early--often to young women they hardly knew and who poorly understood the rigors of a Marine’s life--all but one of his comrades are divorced.

“For many of them, it’s like when you buy a car that’s a lemon,” said Wikler, not intending to minimize the emotional impact that divorce can have on an 18-year-old. “It can distract them from the mission; it can mean time away from work. And the person just doesn’t have his head in what he’s doing.”

In the world of the Marines, it means that a man could get himself--and his buddies--killed while he ponders his marital missteps. And since his unit’s survival--and that of the Corps--may depend on his attention to duty, it means that he probably never should have been permitted to be both married and a Marine, right?

Wrong, the Administration said last week after Marine Corps Commandant Carl E. Mundy Jr. directed his recruiters to bar married people from enlisting after 1995 and ordered Marines preparing to take the marital plunge to get “counseling” from their commanders.

President Clinton promptly declared himself “astonished” by both the intrusiveness of the order and the fact that Mundy issued it without so much as a tip of his cap to the Pentagon’s civilian leaders.

While Pentagon officials said they recognize the usefulness of further counseling programs, they quickly reversed the prohibition against married Marine recruits and set up a panel to study the issue.

The episode was yet another skirmish between the White House and the armed forces over social issues ranging from roles for women to access to abortion to homosexual rights. More broadly, experts said, it represents yet another collision of two distinct worlds--the civilian and the military--whose central values are strikingly different.

Whether the subject is married Marines or open homosexuality, the conflict is the same: Civilian society, and the Administration in particular, hold the notion that the rights of the individual supersede those of the larger group. The military, and the tradition-bound Marine Corps in particular, take the view that the needs of the group overwhelm all but the most basic rights of the individual.

And marriage, Mundy appeared to say last week, is not one of those basic rights.

But times, it would seem, are changing.

Through the Cold War and 12 years of military-minded Republican administrations, the armed forces’ definitions of those basic rights have gone unchallenged, said Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), who chairs the House Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on personnel policy.

“Now it’s a different day, and it’s a hard adjustment for them to make,” Schroeder said. “They seem to have a nostalgia for the days when the Marines were just a group of guys and their only focus was the Corps: the few, the proud, the family-less. But that’s not going to work.”

The tempest also illustrates how insulated the military is from the strains and ferment of American society outside its bases. Even among the military’s most senior leaders, several politicians said, there is a surprising lack of awareness of the political values that reign over Washington.

“The Marines especially have a kind of tin ear--they’re just not politically very sensitive,” one senior defense official said. “In fact, all the armed services have kind of a tin ear, but the Marines have a particularly bad case. It never occurred to them there could be any problem. It’s an interesting commentary on the fact they just don’t understand.”

But while the social strains of the outside world may be a distant reality to many service members, the unique strains of their own world are only too real to them.

American military forces are being stretched thinner by budget cuts. Troops are being returned to U.S. bases in record numbers in the aftermath of the Cold War, while nationalism surges in once-mighty U.S. military outposts, such as the Philippines. Yet the demands for American military action appear not to have abated.

As a result, troops from all services are likely to spend longer and longer periods on lengthy assignments far from their families. They will be paid a salary that starts at little more than $11,000 a year. And perhaps most important, they will still be 18- and 19-year-olds away from home for the first time in a confusing and dangerous world.

“A majority of these kids are struggling with their own independence for the first time, and combine that with a young wife who’s been taken away from her own family,” said retired Marine Capt. Mike Sawyer, who until January commanded a company of young Marines at Camp Pendleton. “A lot of these kids have never had a checkbook, and you have to teach them how to use one. It just gets very difficult.

“As a military leader, you’re an employer but you’re also a landlord, a surrogate parent, a confidant,” Sawyer said. “You show up as a brand-new second lieutenant and you have a platoon of 30 young Marines. The way the military works, you’re a marriage counselor almost from the first day on the job. You listen to a lot of problems.”

Glen Bryson, who directs the Armed Services Young Men’s Christian Assn. at Camp Pendleton, a social-service agency that helps take care of junior enlisted families, reinforces that view.

“We’re dealing with children having children, 17- and 18-year-old moms who may not have finished high school, who may not have many parenting skills, and there are no parents there to help out. And they’re on their own. Dad is on deployment, and the poor wife is left on her own.”

Sawyer, now a businessman in San Diego, said an increasing part of a military commander’s day is taken up with activities that look more like camp counseling than war-making. Young officers will spend as much as a fifth of their working hours on issues “that a business person wouldn’t touch, wouldn’t even think about getting near,” he said.

Indeed, the military is probably the nation’s most paternalistic employer--an organization that considers not only a service member’s hairstyle and dress code but also his or her family life and financial well-being very much its business.

At the same time, the military is widely considered one of the nation’s most family-friendly employers, extending full medical benefits to all service members’ dependents and maintaining a costly and elaborate network of child-care services, family counseling and morale-and-welfare programs. A service member’s housing allowance goes up when he or she marries and with the arrival of each new child.

But staying married, given a service member’s long and frequent absences, can be harder, especially for younger soldiers. In defending the thrust of its rescinded policy, the Marine Corps last week said divorce rates among its first-termers have climbed in the past decade, more than doubling since 1983.

According to a 1990 study conducted for the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., marital breakups in the military do not appear to occur at a higher rate than those in comparable age groups in civilian society. But many more 17- to 20-year-olds in the service--in fact, two to three times as many as in the same civilian age group--are married.

That means the military has more than its expected share of young divorces.

In the Marine Corps, the numbers remain small: Of 32,000 first-term Marines, 1,280 were divorced as of March, 1993. But given the military’s concern for such emotional disruptions and their potential consequences on a unit’s morale and effectiveness, the issue has set off alarm bells.

“When we take (the troops) from these shores, when we take them from home and deploy them forward and send them, whether it be to Somalia or . . . Okinawa or wherever we send them, we’d like for them to be as carefree with regard to difficulties back home as possible,” Mundy told reporters last week. “It’s in our best interests that those families be stable because that’s something that a sailor or Marine, forward-deployed, far from shore, doesn’t have to worry about while he or she is out there.”

As a result, military leaders frequently voice support for maintaining their family-services programs. Not only does the prospect of a secure family life draw more stable individuals into the service, they contend, but the programs help the armed forces keep the best and most experienced of their troops.

But military leaders say they also see the family services as a crucial factor in ensuring the combat effectiveness of their fighting forces, as Mundy made clear.

Nevertheless, in an era of shrinking budgets and growing demands, the bill for supporting some 2.5 million military dependents is high. Family and child-support programs alone cost $400 million in 1993, and that does not begin to reflect the cost of providing health care, housing and moving expenses for service members’ wives and children.

In the face of such costs and the rising claim that family issues have on commanders’ time, many military leaders look back with nostalgia to the days when recruits largely came without the expense and headaches of family commitments. In drafting their future plans, said Brookings Institution manpower analyst Martin Binkin, “they’ve all thought about it.”

But politicians and military analysts cautioned that Mundy’s policy, well-intentioned as it might have been, missed the point.

Banning married recruits and seeking to discourage marriages by enlisting commanders in the effort “is an approach that’s known as throwing the baby out with the bathwater, or in military terms, search and destroy,” said Prof. Mark Eitelberg, an expert on military manpower at the Naval Postgraduate School.

If divorce is really degrading their effectiveness, he added, the Marines and other services would be better advised to improve their programs for handling marital and family problems.

“The idea that you solve the problem by banning marriage struck folks around here as anachronistic and almost ludicrous,” one senior Defense Department official said. “And perhaps a bit nostalgic too,” the official added, for the days when Marines were told, only half in jest, “if we wanted you to have a wife, we’d have issued you one.”