WASHINGTON, 28 July — With yesterday’s breaking news that four US Army wives have been killed in the past six weeks at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, allegedly by their husbands, the US Army has announced it will reevaluate the base’s family-counseling program.
But these deaths could have been avoided, says an expert familiar with the program.
In less than two months, two Fort Bragg soldiers killed their wives in murder-suicides, and two others were charged with murdering their wives. Three of the soldiers were from the army’s special operations and had just returned from Afghanistan; the fourth was from an airborne unit and had not yet been sent into action.
Having acknowledged a problem of domestic violence, an experimental program was started three years ago to manage stress and violence among army soldiers. The result, a military expert tells Arab News, is that the Army could have prevented these killings at Fort Bragg, but that senior decision makers prevented the program from being implemented Army-wide, saying the program cost too much and was unnecessary.
“It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the solider came home from Afghanistan and found out his wife was sleeping with his buddy, and that another buddy told him,” the expert told Arab News yesterday, on the condition of anonymity.
“They’re just kids, and when people get that angry it usually is because of sex, drugs or money.
“The broader issue that is not being said in these newspaper stories today is that soldiers are trained, all day long, to be aggressive and to kill,” said the expert. “And they are not being trained to stop being aggressive when they get home to their families.”
“They may be counseled, but not adequately,” the expert said, acknowledging there is a counseling program available in the field for special operations troops, and that soldiers are counseled before they leave on assignment and before they return home.
“The second issue is that military families are themselves under tremendous stresses, which include having spouses that are separated for long periods of time, unexpected training cycles that disrupt family plans, financial stresses because of the relative low wages of soldiers, and the added stress that there is a culture in the military that doesn’t encourage female spouses of soldiers to work. This, coupled with the poor job market around military bases, means that wives are often required to stay at home, where they are inactive and become bored,” said the military expert.
“The army has recognized that there are problems – which has contributed to a higher than average divorce rate; increased instances of family violence, including murder; and instances of soldier going AWOL (absences without leave); and a decline in re-enlistments.”
The expert told Arab News that the army has, on an experimental basis, implemented a counseling program to help army families deal with stress and resolve personal conflicts, both within the family and outside the home.
“The experiment — which has been quietly underway at a handful of US military bases, including Fort Bragg and at another military base that sent troops to Afghanistan, which is Fort Drum, New York, home of the 10th Mountain Division — offers volunteer participants, usually both the solider and spouse, several weeks of stress management and conflict resolution training.”
The results among the several hundred graduates of this program have been remarkable, said the expert, who is personally familiar with the program. “Incidents of domestic violence have declined significantly. Related issues, such as depression, alcohol and drug abuse — have declined and many spouses of soldiers have, as a result, shed unwanted pounds.”
He said some of the obese spouses have lost unwanted weight because “they are not a depressed as they used to be, and have stopped overeating.”
Sadly, senior leaders in the US Army are fully aware of the dangers that led to the Fort Bragg killings, the expert said.
In April of last year, during a “Army Family Action Plan” meeting at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, chaired by Army Vice Chief of Staff General William W. Crouch, US Army Specialist Daniella Rosario of Fort Richardson, Alaska, an official representative of the US Army Pacific Command complained that there was a critical shortage of professional marriage and family counselors to help soldiers deal with their murderous stresses.
“When families of soldiers are left behind upon deployment, they are left in a place they are not familiar with,” said Rosario. “They experience difficulties adjusting to overseas environments.”
Another attendee at this meeting, Chief of the US Army Chaplains Gaylord T. Gunhus, who is responsible for the Army’s family counseling program, defended the Army’s stalled family counseling program, telling Rosario that his office is planning to spend a paltry $42,000 to train 12 family-life chaplains who will eventually be assigned to Family Life Centers at Army bases throughout the world.
“US Army Europe has requested an additional 16 family-life chaplains to be sent there in this role,” Gunhus added, saying that these specially trained chaplains will not only perform family and marriage counseling, but also conduct training programs with the unit chaplains to give them additional skills.
Gunhus said the chaplains would likely to “be resourced to train more family-life chaplains.”
But the military expert believes foot-dragging on the part of the army leaders like Crouch, Gunhus and US Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki are directly to blame for the murders at Ft. Bragg.
“These deaths, at least a few of them, could have been prevented if the army had implemented a relatively cheap and vastly cost-effective program to better prepare soldiers and their families for the stresses of army life and the long separations of overseas deployments,” said the expert.
“It is only because of the failed leadership of Shinseki — who thinks it is essential to spend millions of dollars on black berets — that these people died so needlessly.”
