FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kan.
ANGRY AND JOYLESS The Duntons are looking to reconnect.
IN a measured voice, Maj. Levi Dunton explained to the small circle of Army officers and their spouses what had gone wrong in his marriage since he returned home from Iraq in 2005. He had trouble being involved with his family, he said. He didn’t find joy in being a parent to his two boys, 3 and 5 months. Little things made him angry.
Major Dunton said he was not sure whether his year in Iraq, where he was an Apache pilot and commander of 150 soldiers, was responsible for his numb state. Others, he wanted to make clear, had it a lot worse. To the other soldiers, this was a familiar litany of guilt, emotional distance and marital discombobulation; they were silent or simply nodded their heads.
Like Major Dunton, they seemed uneasy with all this talk, all this sharing, all this connecting to the wife in front of strangers.
Even as he spoke, Major Dunton, who fidgeted and played with his wedding ring, rarely made eye contact with Heather, his wife of 10 years and a former helicopter pilot herself.
Ms. Dunton, however, seemed relieved, liberated even, to be given a chance to reach out to her husband. She put her hand around his knee and said she was convinced that the war had wormed its way into their marriage.
“He used to tell jokes and funny stories and now he doesn’t do that anymore,” she said later. “I could tell he was different right away, but I thought it would pass.”
Not long ago, the Army, too, might have waited for it to pass — particularly for someone as seemingly steady and committed to his wife as Major Dunton. But that was before this war, with its 15-month deployments, before 2004 when divorce rates spiked among the officer corps and before recruitment and retention became a military preoccupation.
These days the Army is fighting a problem as complex and unpredictable as any war: disintegrating marriages. And so, the Duntons, like 18 other couples, gathered for a weekend retreat in late March, part of an Army pilot program to address marital stress after soldiers return from long tours in Iraq. The retreat is part of a new front in the Army’s “Strong Bonds” programs, which are for families and couples and run by its chaplains. Many of the earlier programs dealt with fundamentals such as “how not to marry a jerk” and how to have open communication.
What was missing, said Col. Glen Bloomstrom, the command chaplain at Fort Leavenworth who championed the retreat, was a way to address the stress that war places on marriages — where stress often first manifests itself and where it can take the greatest toll.
Most couples at the retreat — in all but one, the men were the soldiers — had been married 10 years or more, which means they had tied the knot in peacetime. Back then, the worst thing that could happen, many wives explained, was a posting to South Korea, where spouses are not included. Now, these couples must handle the separation that comes not only from long periods away, but also from spouses trying to connect with their partners’ combat experiences — something the men do not easily know how to share. Or want to share.
To build the bridge from love to war and back, Chaplain Bloomstrom turned to Sue Johnson, director of the Ottawa Couple and Family Institute and a developer of Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, one of the few marriage therapies with empirical data showing that it helps. Ms. Johnson, the daughter of a British Navy commando, teaches couples to address the emotions that underpin their fights, which is usually the need for more love and reassurance of love.
In her new book, “Hold Me Tight” (Little, Brown), Ms. Johnson writes of the work Israeli researchers have done with soldiers who were prisoners of war and experienced torture and solitary confinement. Those fastest to recover were in secure, happy marriages. The men told of coping by writing letters in their minds to their partners about returning home.
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