Often, the hardest part of war for those left behind isn`t being separated from their loved ones, it`s having them come home.
That`s what two University of South Carolina psychologists expected when they studied the Persian Gulf war soldiers.
What they learned surprised them.
”The bottom line is that we expected there to be problems of people fitting back in,” says Dr. Fred Medway, who specializes in the effects of separation and reunion. ”We saw very few.”
One reason, they say, is the positive way troops were welcomed home. Another is that mental-health professionals overseas and stateside had prepared families and soldiers better than they had during Vietnam.
The South Carolina survey was limited to South Carolina reservists and their spouses. But Medway and his colleague, Dr. Thomas Cafferty, chose the group intentionally. Career soldiers, they say, returned to a military setting and had a chance to decompress. But reservists returned to a civilian lifestyle.
The three-part study included a written survey sent to 2,000 reservists and their families and returned by 400. It contains questions about expectations and reality, marital satisfaction before and after the conflict, problems that have developed.
”True,” Cafferty says, ”we found the stay-at-home spouses became more independent, more self-sufficient. With Vietnam, husbands didn`t like that. They`d had the dominant role in the family and wanted to take it back over. The women said: `No way. We`re going to share this.`
”What we saw (this time) was that men came back and said, `Gee, I really respect my wife`s new-found self-sufficiency.` That appears in a lot of responses.”
Away from the survey, the news isn`t always so positive.
For example, John D. Parker, an Army reservist with the 94th Medical Unit, based in Mesquite, Texas, says his unit has experienced its share of marital problems.
”When a family has done without the reservist or the reservist without the family, it takes a while to readjust,” says Parker, 41, who is single.
Gwen Brooks didn`t anticipate problems when her husband, an Army reservist with the Dallas-based 279th Maintenance Unit, came home after serving in the conflict. But Mrs. Brooks says they had a ”power struggle”
when he returned. Before he left, he handled the money and kept up with car maintenance. When he returned in May, his wife was taking care of that-quite nicely, she says.
Brooks, 42, says he wanted to start handling the money immediately after his return.
”It was kind of hard because I was usually the one who wrote the checks out,” he says. ”She said, `You could at least let me finish doing it.` It took a couple of months to get back into the finances. But she did a wonderful job while I was gone, and I raise my hat to her.”
Medway and Cafferty, though, say they wonder what the divorce rates don`t show.
”It wasn`t that soldiers came back with problems,” Medway says. ”Those behaviors which were shown when they came back were the same shown before they left. But the kicker is, their spouses have now changed. They won`t put up with that stuff.”
The bottom line, he says, is that marriages that were strong maintained their strength. Those ”less than strong” got better.
The psychologists say that what they learned could help therapists work with clients who, through jobs, are separated periodically.
”What makes some people survive these circumstances and go on with their lives successfully versus others who aren`t able to do it?” Cafferty asks.
Although he doesn`t have the answer yet, he says he does know this:
”Travel and separation aren`t right for everybody.”
