Marriage Missing in Action

For 10 often anxious, often lonely months, this has been Mr. and Mrs. Brewer’s war, and they don’t know when it will be over.

By herself, Jennifer Brewer has found and rented a mobile home for her family on the edge of this small Georgia town. She assembled a dining room set and a crib, jump-started her Chevrolet Cavalier and is puzzling over how to fix its leaky brakes.

To feel close to her absent husband, the 20-year-old Army wife wears his old gray T-shirts and shorts to bed. Operation Iraqi Freedom and its run-up have made her a single mother, and alone she has witnessed 13-month-old Austin’s first steps, his first tooth, his first birthday and his first attempt at speech.

“His first word was ‘Dada,’ ” Jennifer Brewer remembered, her hazel eyes bright with the irony of it. “I don’t know where he got it from.”

Outside Fallouja, about 30 miles west of Baghdad, Specialist Scott M. Brewer, who saw his wife and son for the last time in September, shares a room in a low, flat concrete building with a half-dozen other American soldiers. All the windows have been broken and there is a makeshift door. An air conditioner in one window frame groans and stirs the air, providing slight relief from the 120-degree temperatures.

The tall, slender scout with Echo Troop, 9th Cavalry Regiment, attached to the 2nd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized), received the Army Achievement Medal last week, basically recognizing that he has served in the Iraq war, and with distinction. But on a hazy evening, as other soldiers lounged around, smoking cigarettes, his thoughts were on his wife.

What does he miss about her? “Everything,” replied the 21-year-old with close-cropped brown hair and a narrow, sunburned face.

For tens of thousands of American families, the war against Saddam Hussein and subsequent occupation of Iraq have become the dominant facts of their lives, a rupture and ordeal people not in the military may have a tough time comprehending.

“Imagine all the uncertainty you have in a marriage in normal times,” said Walter Meeks III, director of the museum at Ft. Stewart, Brewer’s home post as part of the 3rd Infantry. “Now we multiply that by the fact that the spouse is not only away on deployment but in potential harm’s way.”

After the first war in the Persian Gulf, the Army realized that to keep its soldiers happy and get more of them to reenlist, it had to do a more effective job taking care of families during their absence. It began an array of social programs, including family team-building, family readiness groups and reinforcement of unit detachments left in the rear, so it could answer questions from spouses and dependents and assist in solving their problems.

“The Army has come a long way,” said Susan W. Wilder, an official with Army Community Services at Ft. Stewart. “Since Desert Storm, the Army has put enormous time, money and effort into making sure families can stand on their own two feet.”

Not everything can be planned for, however. Some families prove much more adaptable to the shifting realities of life in the military. There are also the vagaries of war and the disruptions and heartbreak caused by last-minute changes in orders.

The soldiers of Echo Troop, 9th Cavalry, were told a couple of weeks after their brigade took Baghdad on April 9 that they would begin going home in the second week of May, Scott Brewer said. He telephoned his wife, he said, and she was thrilled. The very next day, he said, things changed, and the brigade was told to stay put pending further orders.

“She was really disappointed,” Scott said. “She was counting on me coming home.” They had been planning to go on a cruise to the Bahamas and take a vacation in Florida.

About two weeks later, the brigade was ordered to Fallouja, a hotbed of resistance to the U.S. military occupation. By the time Scott could phone home, Jennifer had already learned about his new whereabouts from local TV.

“The news called it a real hot spot with a lot of problems, so she really got worried,” Scott said. “My mom really freaked out -- she was terrified.”

This month, there would be another roller-coaster ride of hope and dismay for the Brewers and many Army couples like them. The 2nd Brigade was informed that it would be home sometime in August. Scott phoned with the news, and Jennifer was ecstatic. Then last week, the soldiers were told they would be remaining in Iraq indefinitely. (On Saturday, the commander of ground forces in Iraq said he hoped to have the division home by the end of September.)

Morale plummeted, Scott said, and some soldiers became extremely angry -- though they continued to focus on their duties.

“Our guys were told the quickest way home was through Baghdad,” Jennifer said. “They got to Baghdad, and they sent them to Fallouja. Now we don’t know what’s next.”

In Iraq, a few concerned senior noncommissioned officers were moved to issue a statement, noting the 3rd Infantry Division had spearheaded the assault on Baghdad, and detailing what the unexpectedly long deployment was doing to their families and their careers. “The war fighters in the major campaign have been told ... they would be going back to their loved ones and newly born children twice, while that time came and went,” the NCOs said.

“There are soldiers who stand guard in Iraq and do the right thing, have a good attitude no matter what happens, even though they have seen their 3-year-old sons and daughters for as little as six months of their lifetimes,” their statement said. “Many have not seen their new children ... even though they received bad information and reality crushed them and their families more than once.”

The document said the NCOs and their soldiers would continue to perform their duties with professionalism.

Back at Ft. Stewart, some angry spouses took their complaints over the Army’s actions to the media. Others kept their feelings mostly to themselves.

Jennifer admits to being “maybe just a hair angry,” and the last 10 months have taught her to try not to think about when Scott will walk though the door of the home she has prepared for him. “I’d rather not be disappointed any more, so what’s the bother?” she says.

Though she sometimes feels sad -- she wept this month when she was alone on her second wedding anniversary -- she has called upon parents, in-laws, friends like fellow Army wife and neighbor Whitney Harkins and her own considerable stock of independence, flexibility, good cheer and gumption to make the best of things.

“If we can get through this,” she says of herself and Scott, “we can get through anything.”

After Scott shipped out, Jennifer went home with her baby to live for seven months with her parents in Hanoverton, Ohio, south of Youngstown. In May, she returned to Hinesville when she received the first false notice of Echo Troop’s return.

She rented a 70-foot mobile home for $450 a month, and has been decorating it with curtains she stitched, wooden birdhouses she painted and a sound system she assembled. “Anything,” Jennifer said, “to keep busy.”

The Brewers’ rambunctious, active son, who she says resembles her husband in his ability to eat cake by the handful, also keeps her occupied for much of the day. “I still think about Scott, but it’s a lot easier having Mini-Me around,” she says.

Jennifer, wearing a black T-shirt with the emblem of Scott’s unit on it, talked as Austin somersaulted on the floor, knocked over a lamp, chewed his mother’s long brown hair and bit her right forefinger.

Jennifer has decided not to cut her son’s hair, which is starting to curl upward in blond tufts, until her husband’s return. “You’ve missed too much already,” she told Scott during a phone call last week. “You deserve at least that.”

The couple met 3 1/2 years ago, when he worked as a dishwasher and she bused tables at a Hanoverton tavern and inn. He was from Summitville, another Ohio hamlet five miles away. She was 16, he was a year older. “We just liked each other,” Jennifer remembers. “He had muscles.”

She wrote him a letter every day he was at Army basic training at Ft. Knox, Ky., mailing them in batches. In October 2000, Scott took a half-carat marquis-cut diamond ring out of his red Dodge pickup and proposed to her on his knees. The next month, he was transferred to Ft. Stewart. On July 6, 2001, they were wed in the same Ohio tavern where they met. She moved to Hinesville that August.

In Iraq, Scott’s unit went ahead of the main 3rd Infantry Division force, performing reconnaissance as the armored column rolled north from the Kuwaiti border to Baghdad. A Humvee driver, he was involved in a few firefights, he said, in which Iraqi fighters were killed by his fellow scouts and Bradleys obliterated the vehicles trying to rescue them. As of Thursday, he said he had fired one shot, into a door as he and other soldiers were clearing an area in southern Iraq.

Shortly after the brigade arrived in Fallouja, a platoon from Scott’s regiment was attacked with a rocket-propelled grenade. No one was hurt, and Scott was careful not to mention the incident to his wife. But Jennifer heard about it from another wife at Ft. Stewart, he said, and asked him about it. Scott assured her he hadn’t been on that patrol, and that none of his patrols had been attacked.

The young cavalryman’s four-year enlistment is up in June 2004, and both he and his wife have decided he’s getting out. “I like the military OK, but I’d rather be a fireman,” Scott says. He was a volunteer firefighter in Ohio before joining the Army and intends to train to join a municipal force.

“He had thought about reenlisting, but after this, he decided he didn’t want to be away from us,” Jennifer said. “I want him all to myself. I don’t want to share him with the Army.”

Because Scott was away for his 21st birthday and Christmas, she has wrapped and stockpiled presents to give him when he comes back. They were able to communicate frequently by e-mail when Echo Troop was in Kuwait, but that ended with the invasion of Iraq. At one point, he wasn’t able to telephone her for two months.

Scott misses his wife’s sense of humor -- and her common sense. “In our relationship,” he said, “she’s the sensible one, money-wise especially.” He says she keeps him up-to-date on their son, sending photographs and letters. She says he writes to her when he can.

On Thursday, Scott called, and they talked about a family wedding that has been postponed, the 50 pounds he has lost on deployment, the six dozen cookies his mother had just sent.

“I miss you and I love you and I can’t wait for you to come home,” Jennifer said.

In a low voice, from a flat landscape of sand and dirt, a few palm trees and scrub brush, her husband replied, “Yeah. I miss you too.... I love you too. Bye.”

Dahlburg reported from Hinesville, Zucchino from Fallouja.