With thousands of troops now preparing to return, a new crisis may open on the domestic front. Military wife Stacy Bannerman (click here) on the husbands she’s seen transformed into domestic abusers.
"If you don't hear from me in the next 24 hours, call the police," she whispered, then hung up. My phone read 2:12 am; it was the third call in as many minutes. I tried calling back—no answer. I went back to sleep, angry at Kristi for calling in the middle of the night and scaring me with a single sentence.
The next morning I fired off an email: "I cannot, for the love of God, imagine what you were thinking when you called last night. Please tell me." Kristi and I had become battle buddies at home while our husbands were serving in Iraq in 2004-05. We had cried each time a military family member called with word of a soldier's death or suicide; we grieved at funerals and gravesites, marches and memorials. We wept with and for each another when she or I learned that our husband had been mobilized for another deployment, and again when they finally came home...
The United States of America has spent billions on the very fact we want to stop this nightmare. There was a reason and there continues to be a reason to invest in the well being of our veterans. They are not the average American and there is a lie most Americans live with that soldiers can go into battle and come home to pick up their civilian lives where they left off. That is not the case. There are real insults to the very person and personality of the American soldier. The sooner Americans get their minds wrapped around that the sooner they'll realize war is not casual and simply a reality. War has casualties. Very real casualties and some of them come home.
April 7, 2014
By Stacey Bannerman
There have been days (click here) when there are more military family members killed by their veteran on the home front than troops killed in action on the war front. March 23, 2012, was one of them. Kristy Huddleston wasn't a soldier who had already served multiple tours, or a combat veteran traumatized by war, but her husband was. That put her at a higher risk of experiencing potentially lethal domestic violence than virtually any other demographic in the nation. As Kristy lay on the kitchen floor, bleeding from a gunshot wound to the head, her 10-year-old son called 911. The murder trial of Bourne Huddleston, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, is on the docket for April 7 in Jackson County, Oregon.
Combat veterans are responsible for almost 21 percent of domestic violence nationwide, linked to the development of post traumatic stress disorder. This is comparable to the fact that veterans alone account for 20 percent of U.S. suicides. We call the problem of veteran suicide an "epidemic," funding research, convening conferences, and creating new programs, hotlines and therapies aimed at prevention, intervention and reducing the stigma of seeking mental health care. But we don't talk about veteran intimate partner violence at all, effectively ensuring that the catastrophic consequences remain largely unacknowledged and unaddressed....
"If you don't hear from me in the next 24 hours, call the police," she whispered, then hung up. My phone read 2:12 am; it was the third call in as many minutes. I tried calling back—no answer. I went back to sleep, angry at Kristi for calling in the middle of the night and scaring me with a single sentence.
The next morning I fired off an email: "I cannot, for the love of God, imagine what you were thinking when you called last night. Please tell me." Kristi and I had become battle buddies at home while our husbands were serving in Iraq in 2004-05. We had cried each time a military family member called with word of a soldier's death or suicide; we grieved at funerals and gravesites, marches and memorials. We wept with and for each another when she or I learned that our husband had been mobilized for another deployment, and again when they finally came home...
The United States of America has spent billions on the very fact we want to stop this nightmare. There was a reason and there continues to be a reason to invest in the well being of our veterans. They are not the average American and there is a lie most Americans live with that soldiers can go into battle and come home to pick up their civilian lives where they left off. That is not the case. There are real insults to the very person and personality of the American soldier. The sooner Americans get their minds wrapped around that the sooner they'll realize war is not casual and simply a reality. War has casualties. Very real casualties and some of them come home.
April 7, 2014
By Stacey Bannerman
There have been days (click here) when there are more military family members killed by their veteran on the home front than troops killed in action on the war front. March 23, 2012, was one of them. Kristy Huddleston wasn't a soldier who had already served multiple tours, or a combat veteran traumatized by war, but her husband was. That put her at a higher risk of experiencing potentially lethal domestic violence than virtually any other demographic in the nation. As Kristy lay on the kitchen floor, bleeding from a gunshot wound to the head, her 10-year-old son called 911. The murder trial of Bourne Huddleston, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, is on the docket for April 7 in Jackson County, Oregon.
Combat veterans are responsible for almost 21 percent of domestic violence nationwide, linked to the development of post traumatic stress disorder. This is comparable to the fact that veterans alone account for 20 percent of U.S. suicides. We call the problem of veteran suicide an "epidemic," funding research, convening conferences, and creating new programs, hotlines and therapies aimed at prevention, intervention and reducing the stigma of seeking mental health care. But we don't talk about veteran intimate partner violence at all, effectively ensuring that the catastrophic consequences remain largely unacknowledged and unaddressed....
