Army wifeTamara Bell:"Everyone has a breaking point, and that was mine,"

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Mon Oct-30-06 08:55 PM
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Army wifeTamara Bell:"Everyone has a breaking point, and that was mine,"

The Making of a Dissident
How one Army wife came to mistrust Pentagon 'timetables’ on Iraq.

Courtesy of Tamara Bell
Tamara and Nicholas: Missing Edward

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Karen Breslau
Newsweek
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15487960/site/newsweek/

Updated: 5:21 p.m. ET Oct 30, 2006

Oct. 30, 2006 - For the first year of her husband's deployment with the 172nd Stryker Brigade, Tamara Bell says she was a "good Army wife." She supported her husband's mission and trusted the military to bring him home safely—and on time. After all, Tamara, 32, grew up as a Navy brat, and she and Staff Sgt. Edward Bell have been married for 12 years, weathering several overseas deployments in South Korea, Bosnia and the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, when Edward was with one of the first units to enter Baghdad. Even during his second Iraq deployment, Tamara, waiting at home in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the couple's infant son, did everything she could to keep her spirits up. She and Edward counted the days remaining in full moons ("It seems a lot shorter that way") and communicated nonstop about their baby Nicholas, now 11 months old, whom Edward last saw at birth.

But last July, only days before Edward was to return home to Fairbanks following a year of combat duty in Mosul, Tamara learned that his infantry battalion, the 4-23, was being sent to Baghdad to quell violence in the Iraqi capital. The extension was to last four months. That was the moment she snapped, she says. "Everyone has a breaking point, and that was mine," says Bell. "He was exactly seven days away from coming home. With the extension, I said, 'Wow, I need to be a lot less trusting of what the military tells us.'" Her husband, she adds, feels his own country is using him. “They are no longer showing us any loyalty."

These days Tamara has become, by her own admission, something of an Army dissident. "If people don't speak up and say this treatment is wrong, it's going to keep happening," she says. From her home off-post in Fairbanks, Bell is more vocal than most military spouses about her unhappiness. She and a small group of likeminded family members have written to their lawmakers and to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld protesting the 4-23's last-minute extension and continued ambiguity about their return date. Others vent on a Web site http://www.bringhome172nd.org/ launched by an Air Force veteran of the First Gulf War, Travis Pittman, who says he is "appalled" by the way the military has treated the 172nd.

Such public grousing is frowned on by the Army, which stresses the importance of family support to "mission success." Soldiers with unruly spouses can expect adverse career consequences. There is also peer pressure: many wives in the 4-23, interviewed by NEWSWEEK—who say they and their children also miss their husbands terribly—say the dissidents attract an undue share of media attention and reflect poorly on the sacrifices all 4-23 soldiers and their families have made during an unbearably long deployment, now 15 months and counting. At Fort Richardson in Anchorage, where some 4-23 families are based, the Army offers free counseling and babysitting services to families who are having trouble coping. But the growing outspokenness of some family members, especially those of career soldiers such as Bell, could become a problem for the Bush administration: after all, keeping the trust and support of military families may be critical to the success of its Iraq strategy, which will require a drawn-out U.S. effort to stabilize Baghdad. George W. Bush himself, at a White House news conference on Oct. 25, obliquely referred to the 4-23's mission when the president said he was "taking new steps to help secure" Iraq's largest city.