The Proud, the Anxious Wives of the Marines

When Whitney Nash heard three American servicemen had been killed by an errant bomb, her stomach turned to ice.

With her husband somewhere in Afghanistan, she threw on a pair of overalls and rushed to the USO, where there are free doughnuts and free e-mail.

“My lovely little boo bug,” read the message from her husband, Marine Lance Cpl. Nick Nash. “I’m still here and I’m missing you like mad. Things are going better.”

“Thank God,” Nash whispered.

Jeanette Frick was munching on a chicken Caesar salad at the officers’ club when the news broke. As the colonel’s wife, Frick often gets information from her husband before it’s public.

“Don’t worry. They’re [Army] soldiers, not Marines,” Frick told a friend eating with her. Then she caught herself. “Wait. Now I feel bad saying that. Those men are probably somebody’s husbands. Isn’t it horrible?”

While the Marines of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit are tip-toeing around land mines and hunting down Taliban in southern Afghanistan, a shadow force of 1,000 spouses, mostly women, marches on at Camp Lejeune in eastern North Carolina, 7,200 miles away.

They are a proud but sometimes anxious group, ranging from sophisticated, professional women to newlyweds like Nash, who is broke, six months pregnant and 19 years old.

They share an ache for balance, of trying to stay connected to a war-bound husband and at the same time get on with their lives, whether that’s working, raising kids or just bumming around. It’s a way of coping familiar to military wives generation after generation.

But it’s not easy. War can find the weakest seam of a military marriage and tear it open. After the Persian Gulf War, divorce rates on certain Army bases shot up by as much as 50%, one Army study showed.

“I’ve seen deployment eat up marriages,” Frick said. “In some ways, it can be good because you don’t have time to get sick of each other. But it can also lead to loneliness and a lot of temptation.”

Many Marines Marry Fast and Young

Nash begins her day at the USO, a bright, white house in downtown Jacksonville about 10 minutes away from the heavily guarded gates of Camp Lejeune.

She’s usually greeted by Mr. Jay, a sweet old man who pushes a broom and says to visitors, “How ya doin’, hero?”

She stands 5-foot-3, fair, cute and enormously pregnant.

“I feel like I’m in the ‘40s or something,” she said as she squeezed behind a computer. “Waiting around for my husband to come back from the front. Doesn’t it sound corny?”

Nick sends her e-mail almost every day, though he’s never supposed to say where he is.

“It’s just normal stuff,” she said. “Sometimes it’s sweet and other times it’s crap. He once told me he wanted to wake up next to me until he didn’t wake up anymore. Kinda nice, huh?”

The two met at a bar near Camp Lejeune and fell in love over a basket of fries. “He told me, ‘How many people you going to meet in your life who don’t like ketchup?’-- because neither of us like it,” she remembered. “He was sooooo right.”

They married four months later, she in shorts, he in jeans. They spent all of 23 days together before he shipped out.

Nash is hardly the emblematic Marine Corps wife.

But there is a certain live-it-up-while-you-can spirit to life on a military base and her situation is typical of many fast, young marriages.

The Marine Corps is the youngest branch of the military--16% are teenagers. It’s also the most male--with just 6% women.

Of the 164,000 Marines, 40% are married and 40% of those couples get divorced, a little less than the national average.

“Becoming a Marine is like becoming a man,” Frick said. “And for a lot of these young guys, getting married and having a kid is like a rite of passage, whether they’re ready for it or not.”

A Different World for Officers’ Wives

Just like in the Marines, the families of officers and enlisted personnel are divided. Rank has its privileges. There are separate social clubs and housing for officers’ families. It’s almost like a caste system, with little fraternization. Even in a time of war.

While many enlisted wives are applying for public aid or wiping up tables at the Outback Steakhouse, officers’ wives can afford to be stay-at-home moms and go to Tupperware parties. Officer pay isn’t bad, $88,000 a year for a colonel, for example.

Frick, 38, who has a master’s degree in industrial psychology, isn’t working.

She helps out at her son’s school, where children make two sets of construction paper Christmas cards for their parents--one for Mom at home, the other for Daddy, wherever he is. She spends a lot of time with Patrick, 5, in their two-story farmhouse in the woods. As the colonel’s wife, she has the responsibility of leading the Key Volunteer Network, which looks out for the needs of families of deployed Marines.

On a recent afternoon, she drove to a “scrap-booking” session at her friend Kim’s house on Plow Point Lane. American cars were parked in every driveway. The American flag flew from every porch.

Kim, who wouldn’t reveal any more about her identity than her husband is a major in the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, and another woman sat at a table, cutting up pictures and plucking peanut M&Ms; from a big bowl. A TV flickered in a corner of the room, with nobody really watching, until a shot appeared of Marines digging foxholes near Kandahar.

“Have you cried yet?” Frick asked Kim.

“All the time,” she said.

“I haven’t,” Frick said.

“Maybe I should rent a sad movie or something.”

On Sept. 20, 2,200 Marines, commanded by Col. Andrew P. Frick steamed off from a port near Camp Lejeune to the Mediterranean and then the Arabian Sea. Along with the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unite from Camp Pendleton in Southern California, the Marines of the 26th MEU (referred to as “the two-six mew”) are now guarding airstrips in Kandahar, running reconnaissance missions and working with the anti-Taliban forces to stamp out the Al Qaeda terrorist network.

No Marines have died. Three were recently injured by a land mine, and so far five Army soldiers and one CIA agent have been killed.

Lt. Cmdr. Phillip DeGeorgio, head of counseling services at Camp Lejeune, home to 43,000 service personnel and their families, hasn’t seen a noticeable increase in anxiety or depression cases.

“But if the casualties start to climb, that will change,” he said. “Overnight.”

A few weeks ago Frick asked base officials what she should do if coffins started coming home. “They told me not to go there,” she said.

Making Ends Meet on $1,200 a Month

At night, Nash curls up on the floor in her one-bedroom, off-base apartment, under all the pictures of her and Nick and the framed copy of his lance corporal promotion.

“I can’t sleep in our bed all alone,” she said. “It feels wrong.”

She’s also having problems with money. Her husband earns $1,200 a month, but after making payments for their Neon car and wedding rings, she gets $560. That leaves her, after rent and bills, with about $3 a day for food. She has applied to the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society, a nonprofit aid organization that doles out limited food grants and no-interest loans. But Marine officials said she “tapped out” her benefits and racked up a $3,000 phone bill from overseas collect calls.

Nash’s father, a retired Army major, sent her a box of canned goods this month to help tide her over.

Seven years ago, the head of the Marine Corps tried unsuccessfully to bar married recruits, partly because salaries were so low. Salaries are set assuming the Marine will live in the barracks and eat in the chow hall, not support a family off base.

The one bright spot in Nash’s life is the baby.

“I heard the heartbeat for the first time the other day,” she wrote Nick. “It was the most perfect noise I’ve ever heard.”

Planning for Soldiers’ Return

Every nine months, Marines assigned to combat units set sail on a six-month mission. The day they get home is always a big day.

At the end of the lunch at the officers’ club, Frick and her friend Jo laughed about what they would do when their husbands’ Afghanistan tour ends, hopefully in March.

There are certain rituals wives must follow, they insisted.

“First, you start shaving your legs,” Frick giggled.

“Then you shed those 20 pounds you gained stuffing your face with chocolate while he was away,” Jo said.

“And then,” Frick added with a wink, “you get yourself some new lingerie.”

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Times researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this report.