A horrible army wife's post

There are some things you read that just anger you, even if they don't personally affect you.  I'm a big supporter of our men and women in uniform, and I have the honour of being proud of two countries' militaries and the sacrifice they make.  I also happen to know a few spouses of military folk, and they should also be honoured for what they have to endure.  It can't be easy being essentially a single parent while your spouse is off to war.  Even if you don't have kids, your loved one is still thousands of miles away, constantly in danger of losing his/her life.  Our soldiers are heroes, but their spouses and family are too.  For enduring this kind of hardship, I salute you all.

So what's got me so pissed off?  Cassy Fiano brings it to the forefront.  In a blog post entitled "How to Destroy a Soldier's Life," she responds to, and totally destroys, an article written by Courtney Cook on Salon.com.  (I'm not going to link to it, but you can find the link in Cassy's response).  In her article, Cook basically recommends that military wives leave their husbands via the "Dear John" letter, also getting the soldier to explain it to the kids in a letter!  She doesn't mention husbands of soldiers, so I'm not sure what her feelings are on that.


Here's the beginning of her article:

"You'd be surprised how easy it is to leave a soldier on deployment. You can do it with a letter. (He can't argue with you. He doesn't have a phone.) If you lay the groundwork early, saying to the soldier before he leaves, "This will be the end of us, we might as well admit it," it's that much easier. The letter won't even come as a shock.

And if you have children with that soldier? You can handle all that with a letter, too. He'll write it -- because he cares about the kids, because he wants to work with you to do what's best for them even though you're leaving him -- and you'll give it to them. Here again, you will avoid a nasty confrontation. Who will they cry to? You? You're just the teary-eyed bearer of the letter. Him? The one who's sweating it out in the desert?

There will be no moving truck, no boxes, no house torn asunder. The soldier is peeing in a bucket as you pack. He doesn't care who gets the couch."

Can you believe this shit?  She not only didn't have the courage to confront her own husband with her inability to deal with being an army wife, but she's recommending that others take the same cowardly actions that she did!  I understand that dealing with the stress and hardships of being an military wife are hard, and it's no crime to say "I can't do this anymore."  But to do this to a soldier who's currently out in the field, whose lifeline is that connection to home that soldiers can get nowadays, through online chat, Skype, etc, is just cruel and cowardly on the wife's part.

Cassy, who is the wife of a Marine, does an excellent job eviscerating Cook:

"It isn’t enough for her to be this callous, shallow, superficial, and selfish. She’s recommending other women do the same thing, too. One of the worst parts about this is that she feels like it was a good thing to tell him while he’s away at war that she’s leaving him. She presumably doesn’t care about the effect this has on soldiers while they’re deployed. They’re over there fighting for their lives, and she thinks it’s a smart move to saddle them with this while they’re in the middle of that? You’ve got to be a pretty damn low person to not care about the extra stress you’re putting on someone that’s fighting a war and risking their life, all because you don’t want to deal with telling them face-to-face that your marriage is over. Soldiers fighting a war don’t need the added stress of knowing that the person who they think is waiting for them has abandoned them. She abandoned him for a Marxist, and then abandoned her son when he didn’t conform to the life she wanted. Her husband sounded consistent in his morals and values throughout the duration of their marriage. She, on the other hand, seemed to grow to hate the military to the point where she couldn’t even support her own son because he decided to join."

Oh yeah, I forgot that part.  Not only did Cook go on to marry a Marxist anti-war protester, but she couldn't bear to be there when her son went into the Army.  His dad was the only parent there.  That's just sickening.

I encourage you to go read Cassy's whole post.  It's long, but it's worth it.

And to you military spouses out there, both women and men, I salute you again.  Unless you're like this woman.  Then I don't even have the time of day for you.