Love from the Battlefield

We found an excellent article by Jon Marshall of New City Chicago that all of our people in the military can relate with. The following is an excerpt of Jon’s article

John Moore helps soldiers in combat tend to their wounded hearts

The major couldn’t stop crying.

He was haunted by the memory of writing a letter to the parents of an 18-year-old under his command in Iraq who had died in combat. When the major returned to his suburban Chicago home in November, depression colored his days and his relationship with his wife soured.

John Moore of Wrigleyville keeps hearing stories like this one. Through the online class about relationships he teaches for American Military University, U.S. troops tell him about family troubles and emotional wounds that have festered while serving in Iraq, Afghanistan and other danger zones.

The soldiers share stories about snipers, land mines and car bombs. They also tell Moore how they’re afraid their spouses are cheating on them, or how they’re riddled with guilt because of their own infidelity. They tell him about wanting to come out of the closet, or about their pregnant girlfriend, or about not knowing their own children after being gone for up to fifteen months. They tell him about the anger, jealousy and uncertainty they feel.

Once the approximately 170,00 soldiers deployed in and around Iraq and Afghanistan finally head home, Moore worries, they won’t be ready for the emotional reality of their homecoming and America won’t be equipped to support them.

“If they don’t have a safe conduit to talk about it, it’s like a time bomb,” Moore, 34, says.

Moore tries to defuse that emotional time bomb through his class, “Interpersonal Communications,” better known at American Military University as “Love 101.” Each month a new group of fifteen-to-twenty soldiers and military spouses signs up for the eight-week class, which he launched in 2002. The class lets soldiers trying to prove how tough they are in combat reveal vulnerabilities they would never share with their own units.

“The whole culture of the military is that you don’t talk about feelings or emotions,” says Moore, the author of “Confusing Love with Obsession” (iUniverse, 2003) and a counselor at Chicago House, a North Side agency for people living with HIV/AIDS. “For people who feel alone, this is a conduit for them to communicate intimate things. By the second or third week, students start to share their feelings. By the end it’s a crescendo of emotion.”

With a crew cut jutting across his forehead, piercing dark eyes and the wiry yet muscular build of a man who works out regularly, Moore looks ready to go into combat himself. From his office, he sifts through emails, assignments and discussion board postings from students based in Iraq, Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates, Korea, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Germany and the United States.

“Trying to remain faithful to my wife has been very difficult,” writes Rob (names of soldiers in this story have been changed to protect their privacy), a 24-year-old Army private from Kentucky who was shipped to Iraq for a year one month after getting married. “About four months after being deployed, I found myself having an affair with a woman who was recently divorced. I feel so much guilt about cheating on my wife, but a man has needs and it is not easy being alone for all this time.”

Marital strains such as Rob’s only add to the danger of military life. A 2002 Defense Department survey found that military personnel with high levels of stress are twice as likely to get sick or injured. “You can’t fight an enemy effectively if you’re worried your wife is sleeping with someone or if your kid is sick,” Moore says.

For instance, Greg, an Army private from Chicago, was driving a truck in July of 2003 near Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit when a roadside bomb exploded, destroying his right arm. Greg wasn’t thinking about safety before the bomb exploded, he told Moore. Instead, his mind was in turmoil: his wife had just told him she was unhappy with their relationship, and he had just learned his time in Iraq was being extended sixty days.

This kind of emotional burden becomes even heavier when soldiers can’t talk about their relationships, Moore says.