Newsweek: War Stories - 'It's Tearing Families Apart'

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15210279/site/newsweek/

'It's Tearing Families Apart'
With the 4-23's battalion's Baghdad tour dragging on, Capt. Brad Velotta and his wife, Jodi, are finding it harder to cope.

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By Catharine Skipp

Oct. 10, 2006 - The first year of the deployment was bearable, at least. Capt. Brad Velotta and his wife, Jodi, made it through by talking almost daily by phone and by e-mail. She shared photos of their fast-growing brood by email, and he kept his men alive in Iraq. But since August, when Brad's Blackhawk company and the rest of the 4-23 were redeployed to the heart of Baghdad, the couple has grown more distant, like two planets spinning farther away from each other. "This is just starting to get old for all of us. The phone calls are getting stale," Jodi said in an interview. "Everything is getting frustrating; you don't know if you are saying the right things."

While they still love each other deeply and believe their marriage is strong, she feels as if, month by month, they are losing sight of the thread that ties them together. Jodi says that Brad will still offer fatherly advice about their two small children, Sophia, 3 ½, and Hudson, 2, but increasingly she realizes that he no longer understands how they have developed into different kids. "He doesn't know them as growing children. He hasn't experienced what is going on here."

They find it harder to connect about the simplest things. Recently Jodi was telling Brad about Sophia's shenanigans at the beginning of preschool. "I just thought it was a funny story. At 12:30 after lunch all the children take naps. For the first week-and-a-half she cried and kept everyone awake. So we let her sit at a desk and color. Then one day she put her head on the table and fell asleep. Now she gets her blanket and folds it up on the desk. Yesterday she was out for 45 minutes. She's so much like Brad—Little Miss Manipulative. I tell him the story and his first reaction is, 'Yeah, that's my girl,' but then he starts saying that she needs to listen to her teachers and she needs to lie down with the other children. I thought it was funny and now he is turning it around on me. I give up. He can't come over and talk to the teachers." Jodi says things seem to be going that way a lot lately, straining their relationship. She says sometimes she'll get so mad she just has to get it off her chest with e-mail after e-mail. "The first one, I'll hate his guts, the next one I'll be mad and by the end I love him so much."

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:sarcasm:

And I'm sure this is not unusual among the troops and their families. They have been gone for so long.

It is so hard to reconnect with your family when you return. Your kids have grown up without you you, often during times in their lives when they really needed you. You grew up without them, definitely in a time in your life when you really, really needed them. It is a terrible tragedy. People return from war marked forever. In Rummy's playground, if you aren't messed up by the first or even the second tour, the third one is sure to trip you out.