Home-Front Connection: A Blessing or a Burden?

[unhappycamper]

Cpl. Jose Gonzales with the 1st Battalion, 12th Marines chats on the phone at Camp Fallujah. The 21-year old is from Grand Prairie, Texas.


Home-Front Connection: A Blessing or a Burden?
Stars and Stripes | Allison Batdorff | October 09, 2007


FALLUJAH, Iraq — Staff Sgt. Shannon Garstka blames the Internet for helping to disconnect his marriage while he was in Iraq.

It started when an old female friend turned up on his MySpace page — Garstka’s online social networking system of choice during his current deployment — and his wife didn’t like that she was there.

Misunderstanding turned into jealousy, and it went downhill from there, Garstka said.

~snip~

Warner helped author a 2005 study published in last month’s issue of Military Medicine that said issues like family, financial and legal problems outrank actual combat exposure when it comes to what’s worrying most soldiers in Iraq.

Task Force Baghdad also had five suicides during the deployment, most of them junior-enlisted Caucasian men under the age of 30 suffering from home-front and marital stresses during their first deployment.

Home-front issues accounted for 35 percent of the 22,000 contacts that combat-stress specialists had with Baghdad soldiers in 2005. This was compared with 22 percent for combat exposure and 15 percent for peer/unit issues.


Rest of article at: http://www.military.com/features/0,15240,152064,00.html