In the summer of 1990, Army Spec. 4 Hollie Vallance of Ft. Benning, Ga., was on maternity leave when she learned she would have to report to Saudi Arabia for duty in the Persian Gulf. Two weeks later, wearing a combat helmet and fighting back tears, Vallance became an enduring symbol of today`s soldier mom as she said goodbye to 7-week-old Cheyenne, her first child, in a poignant photograph that appeared in newspapers and magazines all over the world.
Eight months later, Vallance came home to a throng of reporters and photographers, and a 10-month-old child who did not know her. In Vallance`s absence, her husband Anthony Kirk had been a single parent and Cheyenne had experienced lots of firsts without her mother. Even after the homecoming, Vallance, assigned to the barracks overnight during a training exercise, missed her baby`s first steps.
Now, with a year to go before she is due to re-enlist, Vallance, 23, says she is questioning whether she wants to stay in the Army.
The problems Vallance experienced in Operation Desert Storm are not unique. Nor are they limited to women. Lt. Col. William R. Mark, a Veterans Administration chaplain in Boston, said that in debriefings immediately following the war, 98 percent of the returning soldiers he counseled expected no changes in their lives.
But once the soldiers got home, initial reports of financial, marital and other readjustment problems began to surface.
Possibly to make up for the decline in divorces during the war, there was a significant jump in divorce filings after the soldiers came home, said Lt. Col. David Westhuis, of the Army`s community and family support center in Washington, D.C. He cited 700 divorce filings during April and May 1991, up from 495 in the same period last year, in the counties surrounding Ft. Hood in Killeen, Texas, the nation`s largest Army installation.
Reported cases of domestic violence also increased immediately following the war, say Army counselors.
”We wish that were not the case,” said Maj. Bill Broome, a chaplain and director of the Family Life Center at Ft. Stewart, an Army post in Hinesville, Ga. ”Some couples just are not adjusting well. They don`t have the life skills to cope, so their stress level builds. Many come from homes themselves where abuse was a factor, so they deal with their stress the way their parents did.”
What`s more, said V.A. chaplain Mark, a higher-than-normal number of soldiers, about 1 in 10, sought some form of counseling after the war. A fair number of those were women. Unlike many men-who, Mark said, typically ”have a `suck in your gut and take it like a man, you weenie` attitude”-the female soldiers have not hesitated to speak up about what bothers them.
This willingness to discuss their problems may stand the women of the Gulf war in good stead, he added.
”We don`t want to make too early an assumption,” Mark said, ”but we think that over time, because the women verbalized their feelings (about the war) earlier, they may come out of this experience better than the men.”
Women made up about 6 percent of the 541,000 troops who served in Desert Storm. And while this war was not the first conflict to include female soldiers, it was the first in which massive numbers of women who were already serving in the armed forces were called on for war duty and shipped out.
In the Middle East, they found the same problems men did, plus some of their own: for example, an almost complete lack of privacy and a culture that did not accept their role as soldiers. Many, such as Hollie Vallance, were new mothers and faced perhaps the biggest challenge of all.
When she went off to war, the initial separation from her baby was agonizing, Vallance said. ”I thought I was never going to be able to call home.” In fact, it was six weeks before she was allowed to.
While she faced physical danger, Vallance-a medic-ambulance driver who was one of the first women ever attached to a front-line unit during a war, and who was awarded the Combat Medics Badge-said being away from her child was the hardest part of war.
She found support among the ranks.
”There were six of us in my company alone who had just had babies, and we helped each other,” she said. ”We had professional people we could talk to, but we also talked among ourselves a lot.”
Meanwhile, her husband, a route driver for a soft drink company, was struggling to take care of Cheyenne by himself. After two months, he locked up the couple`s mobile home, put their furniture in storage and headed north to Galien, Mich., where both his and Vallance`s parents live. They helped him with the baby until Vallance came home.
After the war, stepping back into her daughter`s life was difficult, Vallance said.
”I was overwhelmed at times. The first couple of weeks, my husband would leave the baby all in my care, like I had never been gone, and that bothered me, because I thought he was just kind of dumping her on me. But then I found out that he was thinking because I had been gone for so long I wouldn`t want him to help me.”
Vallance also learned that while she had been away, her husband and child had formed a bond she was not a part of.
”I noticed that whenever anything bad happened to Cheyenne, she would go to him. I felt kind of left out,” Vallance said.
”Even today, if he disciplines her, she gets mad and hits him or pouts, like babies do. But if I discipline her, she runs to him for comfort. That gets to me sometimes.”
In getting to know her child, Vallance has found that Cheyenne is sometimes distant, ”not real lovey, like some kids,” she said. But she does not necessarily blame her daughter`s independent streak on the separation.
”I think that`s her character,” she said. ”My mom said I was the same way.”
Such feelings of detachment are not uncommon among women soldiers who must leave infants behind, said Capt. Nancy Pilney, family support coordinator for the Iowa National Guard, based in Mason City. Pilney had a similar experience when she had to leave her 4-month-old baby to train for three weeks in Korea.
”When I came back, my daughter acted like she didn`t know me,” she said. ”I hit bottom. I just cried. It was three years ago, but the memory is as fresh as if it happened yesterday. It almost made me quit the National Guard.”
Many mothers came home from Desert Storm feeling guilty for having been away and confused about how to reassume their roles as mothers, she said.
”This is not to say the men didn`t have those feelings, too, because it`s really a unisex problem. But it seemed more pronounced in the women,”
said Pilney.
Rochelle Wheeler, family support coordinator with the 425th Transportation Brigade, an Army reserve command out of Ft. Sheridan, north of Chicago, found the same problem among returning service moms.
”We tried to prepare them before they came back for the possibility that their 2-year-old might turn away from them when they first got home. To those kids, they`ve become just a picture on a mantel.”
But, Pilney said, ”That`s one thing that women in the military just have to go through. You have to make the decision whether you want to stay in.”
In addition, many women are experiencing the same readjustment difficulties that have always plagued men, said Dr. Jessica Wolfe, associate director for the Boston site of the V.A.`s National Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Center, which is conducting a study of Desert Storm soldiers. These can include sleep disturbances, jitteriness, irritability and an inability to relate to people who have not experienced war, she said.
Capt. Jacqueline M. Sadle, 29, a single mother stationed at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, Ga., was deployed to the Middle East a year ago. At the same time, daughter Jessa, now 12, shipped out to her grandparents in Columbus, Neb.
In March, Sadle, a transportation officer, came home with a promotion, a Bronze Star for outstanding service and an optimistic outlook. Because mother and daughter had been separated numerous times before, Sadle had little trouble re-establishing her relationship with Jessa, who, she said, had
”gracefully made the step from childhood to teenage-hood” during the war.
But in the eight months since, Sadle has begun to see the war`s effects on her-something her father, a 22-year Navy veteran who served two tours of duty in Vietnam, already knew.
”It hurt to see her go because I knew that when she came back from that war she would never be the same,” Jack Sadle said.
Before Desert Storm, Sadle willingly worked long hours, but now she has retreated to a desk job that she says encompasses ”no field work, no alerts, nothing past 4 o`clock, Monday through Friday. I`ve learned to value different things.”
She has changed in subtler ways too. Once an easygoing pragmatist with a ready ear for others` troubles, she says she has closed herself off. While her life before the war was always filled with friends and extended family, these days Sadle is pensive, introspective and intensely private, preferring to spend her free time alone with her daughter.
”My relationships are more detached now,” she said. ”The one with Jessa is the only one that feels intact. My friends look like they`re different people, and I don`t relate to anyone the same way.”
For now, she is finding solace with her Gulf war tentmates. Every Sunday, the five women get together for brunch, even though, Sadle said, they have little in common except the war.
”We don`t have much to talk about now, but it`s wonderful to be together. We were there together in the middle of what was happening, taking our little part in that piece of history, and for some reason, that means a lot to me now.”
