The President's Respect & Concern For Troops & Military Families Is A BIG FAT LIE!

The Home Fires Are Burning Out

President Bush is always making a big deal about how he and his administration appreciate the sacrifice our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines are making by being in harm's way in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. But my grandfather, a veteran himself, always told me actions speak louder than words.

Our troops are being sent over and having their tours of duty extended time after time, leaving military families without adequate social and economic support at home. Since there are an inordinate number of reserve and national guard troops involved in the Afghan and Iraq invasions, many of these families do not have on-base housing, direct access to medical care and the support that living on base can provide.

This is not the only time that President Bush's actions do not live up to his words.

HERE'S a message from the military home front: Our volunteers are tired and need hired help. While husbands (the United States military is 85 percent male) crisscross the ocean for second, third and even fourth tours in Iraq, military wives (the overwhelming majority of volunteers are wives) are burdened not only with running households, caring for children and holding down jobs, but also with assisting families of deployed soldiers.

Almost 30 percent of all Army wives volunteer in a formal capacity. We run quality-of-life programs and serve on boards that take hours of dedication. We are the liaison between the commander and the soldiers' families, we refer people to various resources like the Red Cross and military-sponsored programs, we raise money to support family programs and in our informal roles, we are on call 24 hours a day to help families deal with divorce, child abuse, suicide and bereavement. Our work is expected, underappreciated and often goes unnoticed.

We volunteers save the Department of Defense millions of dollars that would otherwise have to be spent on consultants, accountants, social workers, publicists, counselors, fundraisers, program managers, administrative assistants, advisers, class instructors and event coordinators.

To give you an example of the magnitude of volunteer service, for fiscal year 2005, volunteers with various family programs that the Army offers logged 632,897 hours of service. Our service to the Army is valued at more than $11 million.

But what happens when the most dedicated and experienced of military spouses say they are worn out?

A friend of mine, a fellow Army wife and the mother of two small children, is the leader of the family readiness group of her husband's company. There are 60 soldiers in his relatively small company, but 51 of them are married. She is responsible for sustaining morale, cohesion and communication for 50 wives and their children, one husband and a handful of soldiers' parents. She leads meetings, manages and recruits other volunteers, holds fundraisers, updates rosters and passes on information from the command to families. Her husband has been deployed once to Iraq and twice to Afghanistan, where he is serving for a year. She's exhausted. "I think that at times families forget that I am just a volunteer," she said.

Needless to say, in the Army, if your volunteers are overwhelmed, you've got a big problem. Military recruitment and retention levels are directly linked to spouses, who are often the deciding factor in whether a soldier re-enlists or keeps a commission. If families are cared for and content, soldiers focus on their mission and are more likely to continue serving.

Leaders know this. Since his appointment in November 2004, the Army secretary, Francis Harvey, has said his top priority is the well-being of soldiers and their families. He has reason to worry about it: in the 2005 fiscal year, the Army missed its recruitment goal for the first time in six years. The number of officers leaving the military is the highest it has been since Sept. 11, 2001. Last year, 8.6 percent of junior officers left the service; that's up from 6.3 percent in 2004. The attrition rate for majors rose to 7 percent in 2005 from 6.4 percent in 2004. And the rate of lieutenant colonels leaving the military is 13.7 percent — the highest it's been in more than a decade.