At many bases I visited, people often invoked Mayberry, the mythical small town in the Andy Griffith Show, to describe base life. Beyond the comfortable living arrangements and the numerous amenities, they meant the comparison to capture feelings of security, community, and connection on base. George Reeves, a civilian working at Naval Station Guantánamo Bay told me that living on base was like being in “any small town in America.” “You know everyone or you know of those you don’t know,” he said.
George and his wife, Mary Reeves, who also worked on base, were living with their three teenaged children in a three-bedroom house with a large backyard in one of Gitmo’s suburban-style housing developments. “It’s like America. An American city,” George explained. But it’s “a city without crime. You don’t worry about your kids,” he said. “They can jump on the shuttle [which provides a free way to get around base], and you don’t worry about them.”
The schools on base are good, George told me, with small class sizes and teachers who really care about their students. For single parents, there’s pretty cheap child care, with reduced rates for people at lower ranks. “You have a lot of support,” George said, adding that people are always looking out for you. “It’s like you have a family.” As a blogger at MilitaryBases.com, one of many websites dedicated to base life, puts it, “There is a thread of oneness and camaraderie that connects everyone.”1
People on base also tend to be extraordinarily polite: one quickly learns to always say “Thank you, sir” and “Thank you, ma’am.” Income inequality is shockingly low for the United States: the highest-ranking general makes only around ten times the pay of the lowest-ranking private. (The average S&P 500 CEO, on the other hand, makes 354 times the average worker’s salary.)2 And unlike lily-white Mayberry and most of the United States, the bases are unusually diverse and ethnically integrated, in keeping with the overall diversity of the military.
On the other hand, some ethnic segregation endures: Euro-Americans are overrepresented among military officers, and a form of class segregation is strictly enforced in on-base housing. Rank and pay grade determine the size and quality of one’s quarters, and officers are usually housed in different neighborhoods or residential complexes from the enlisted troops. Officers also often have their own clubs, dining halls, and even gym changing rooms.3
On many bases, an even lower class of segregated housing exists for people termed “third country nationals.” These are the citizens of countries other than United States and the host nation of the base, who frequently cook, clean, and keep the physical infrastructure of bases running every day. Most often, they are Filipinos. At Gitmo, the Filipinos live in dormitories that usually have four bunk beds to a room; Jamaicans have slightly better housing, formerly occupied by U.S. troops. At bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, many of the contractors have been from Nepal, Bangladesh, and as far away as Fiji. The journalist Sarah Stillman described them as “the Pentagon’s invisible army: more than seventy thousand cooks, cleaners, construction workers, fast-food clerks, electricians, and beauticians from the world’s poorest countries who service U.S. military logistics … Filipinos launder soldiers’ uniforms, Kenyans truck frozen steaks and inflatable tents, Bosnians repair electrical grids, and Indians provide iced mocha lattes.”4
While the nationalities of the people who make up this invisible army tend to change from country to country (aside from the widespread presence of Filipinos), the amenities and services they provide and the facilities they maintain are remarkably similar at most bases. The comforts provided for the benefit of families help ensure that bases look and function like small American towns, making the adjustment to life overseas and from base to base as easy as possible.
Despite the benefits, however, family members make significant sacrifices to their lives when a spouse or parent is posted abroad. Even in an era when women join the military in large numbers—they account for about 15 percent of the force—most of these sacrifices are borne by women: around 95 percent of military spouses are female.5 Even though war can feel surprisingly distant on U.S. bases, amid the yoga classes and intramural basketball games, these women can usually attest more than anyone else how the proximity of death hangs over base life.
“A REALLY FAIR SYSTEM”
Today there are around 233,000 spouses, children, and adult family members of military personnel living on and around bases and other facilities outside the United States. Family members, in fact, outnumber the total number of troops overseas by more than 55,000.6 When the first wives arrived on bases abroad in the late 1940s, their living conditions were nothing like today’s. Women had to make do with surplus food and makeshift commissaries. Many military men were hardly enthusiastic about their presence. An Army report from 1946 sarcastically contrasted the days of wartime combat with the postwar period: “Then the emphasis was placed on ammunition, clothing and food for fighting men, while today such interesting items as cleaning materials for household use, clothing and feeding of our civilian employees who are natives of the occupied countries and the problem of fresh milk for dependents’ children occupy our attention.”7
Soon, many of those same military men began realizing the importance of caring for the growing population of family members as part of building Little Americas around the globe. Thus began the construction of family housing, schools, hospitals, commissaries and shopping centers, recreational facilities, and much more support infrastructure. After the Vietnam War, during which conditions and morale deteriorated across the military, leaders placed renewed emphasis on improving the lives of families. In an era without conscription, troops were, on average, older and more likely to have a wife and children. The Pentagon realized that a major reason personnel were leaving the military before retirement was the poor quality of life for families. Unhappy families mean unhappy troops, and unhappy troops mean not enough troops to fight.8 Family support thus became a significant labor issue for the military.
Life overseas had, for example, long been boring for women. One medical officer in the 1950s reported getting a large number of “neurotic complaints from women who had nothing to do all day but visit the clubs.” Women in Okinawa often spent much of their days drinking and losing money in the slot machines that were ubiquitous in clubs on overseas bases.9 Reacting to the rise of the feminist movement of the 1970s, the Pentagon created programs to address domestic violence, to allow women to collect child support and alimony, and to provide on-base child care. A 1985 hiring preference law giving spouses preferential access to on-base jobs helped address the problem of wives having to give up jobs and careers to follow their husbands overseas. (Many women married to military personnel teach in the Pentagon’s overseas school system, and since there are schools at most large bases worldwide, this makes following a partner’s military transfers somewhat easier.) By 1988, the military was investing $8 billion a year in family programs around the globe.10
As a result, base life is now generally very good for families, particularly on bases abroad. Most domestic bases tend to be comfortable, too, but because of the challenges that overseas postings create for families, bases abroad usually offer even greater comforts and family supports. Children usually have an extensive array of extracurricular opportunities, including competitive sports, music and dance, clubs, and spelling bees that often offer opportunities for additional travel. Football teams in Okinawa, for example, fly to play against teams at bases in South Korea, Guam, and on Japan’s other islands. Tennis and soccer teams in Italy cross the Alps to play teams at bases in Germany. Research shows that on the whole, children appear to benefit, rather than suffer, from their nomadic lifestyle and separations from one or more of their parents.11
For families as a whole, living overseas is also financially advantageous. In addition to the regular salary earned by a member of the military, personnel generally receive an overseas cost-of-living adjustment. (The adjustment is also given in Hawaii and Alaska.) The average adjustment is about $300 per month; worldwide, the adjustments total around $2 billion annually.12 The military also pays for troops’ housing. Some live on base, but in most countries, the majority of troops and their families live off base. Overseas housing allowances are usually generous, so families often live in homes far larger than they could afford in the United States. Because military personnel lose any money from their housing allowances that they don’t use, most rent the largest and most expensive home their allowance will buy. (The generosity of the Pentagon’s rental payments tends to drive up area rents, to the frustration of many local renters, if not the owners. In places like Guam, nineteen- and twenty-year-olds will sometimes pool their money to live in luxurious beachside homes that are out of reach for most locals.)
On top of it all, there’s the military’s single-payer health care system, providing universal coverage to families. There are extensive education opportunities, both online and off. There’s the adventure of living overseas, complete with opportunities for tourism, cross-cultural interaction, language learning, and vacations at military resorts. For “military children,” as the Pentagon calls them, there are generally high-quality, well-funded Pentagon-run public schools. Depending on how one calculates expenses, annual per-pupil spending is almost twice the national public school average of $12,608 and may be more than $20,000 higher.13 And that’s just the start of the inventory of amenities and benefits.
“It’s the purest application of socialism there is,” Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general, has said with a sense of irony. “It’s a really fair system, and a lot of thought has been put into it, and people respond to it really well.”14
SACRIFICE
During my first visit to Gitmo, there was a telling moment during the playing of morning reveille. As the tinny recording sounded over loudspeakers around the base, the wife of a sailor wondered aloud if she had to stop and salute the flag like her husband.
Technically, the answer to her question is no. But the fact that the question occurred to her at all highlights the ambiguous role that spouses and other family members have on base. Although they are not formally part of the military, living on base still shapes their time, their behavior, even their thoughts and feelings. And the unacknowledged costs can be remarkably high.
In one of my classes, a self-identified “Army brat” (a term most embrace) described how, despite the advantages of the globe-trotting lifestyle, the life can be a “very insular” one. Until recently, for instance, she didn’t know what a grocery store was, having always gone to the commissary. “Military children are impacted by the constant change of schools,” she wrote. “It is hard to constantly be the new kid, to constantly be catching up, to constantly just be different.” During a class presentation, she admitted that the feeling of being different, of being a constant outsider had persisted into her college years. “Sometimes, I have days when I go into my dorm room and cry.”
For spouses, too, frequent moves from base to base tend to interrupt their lives. Living in foreign countries where spouses typically can’t work in the local economy, many struggle to maintain careers outside the home despite spousal hiring preferences that help some. In 2012, the unemployment rate for spouses of active duty troops was 25 percent. When they do find work, military spouses tend to earn around 60 percent less than peers married to civilians.15
As for childrearing and housekeeping, the twenty-four-hour-a-day nature of military life likewise places heavy burdens on spouses—who are, again, 95 percent women. While military spouses usually have excellent access to around-the-clock child care compared to most parents in the United States, they also must be ready to assume 100 percent of the parenting and other household duties with next to no notice if their partner is deployed.
During deployments to war zones, and temporary or long-term postings to locations where families can’t join military personnel (such as Honduras, Qatar, and Thailand), spouses become single parents in most ways. Like civilian families facing separation, these periods can harm spouses, children, and service members alike, as well as entire family dynamics. That military personnel have demanding jobs typically involving a greater chance of death than most careers only adds to the impact of separations.
Dr. Suzanne Rogers, an Army child psychologist (who asked me to use a pseudonym), has witnessed the problems that children of soldiers face during deployments and other separations. Being aware of these challenges, she was surprised when her children had many of the same problems during their father’s deployment to Iraq. “They were still more stressed out than I’d imagined and about as much as what I was seeing in my office,” she told me during a posting in Ansbach, Germany. “I train people to help their kids through this! But still, using all the tools, you can’t make it not impact them.”
Even technologies like Skype and email that ease some of the challenges of separation can also backfire, Rogers found. “If you have an awful lot of Skyping, seeing Daddy over the television screen—and yet [a child says], ‘I can’t have him.’ ‘He’s not tucking me in.’ ‘I can’t put my arms around him.’ ‘You’re not watching my baseball game.’ That can really piss a kid off.”
“You take the father away,” Rogers said, “it’s gonna have an impact.”
Whether or not a service member is deployed, spouses bear much of the psychological and social burden of having a partner in an unusually stressful and all-consuming career. As the base expert Catherine Lutz explains, spouses, like the troops themselves, “are effectively on call to the military.”16
Military spouses are also on call to perform significant work outside the home. Mayberry-like feelings of community on bases don’t magically appear from nowhere. They develop in no small part because of the work spouses do to build community, especially at overseas locations. While there are no formal requirements for spouses to participate in base activities or directly support a service member’s job, subtle pressures suggest that not participating might affect their partner’s performance reviews.
In years past, the wives of high-ranking officers created “wives’ clubs” with a hierarchy paralleling their husbands’ ranks. The woman married to the highest-ranking officer was considered the “mother” to the women “under her,” just as her husband exercised patriarchal authority over his uniformed subordinates. The other officers’ wives, in turn, were unofficially expected to mentor the wives of lower-ranked personnel, creating an entire support network for families.17 Today, each of the armed services maintains official support organizations for units and connected family members. In the Army, family members are automatically enrolled in Family Readiness Groups that rely heavily on the volunteer labor of spouses to organize support activities and communication networks for families. Like wives’ clubs of old, each group’s leader is often the spouse of a unit’s highest ranking officer.
Other family support roles are now filled by paid “Morale, Welfare, and Readiness” staff, as well as psychologists and other civilian employees dedicated to supporting troops and families. But the wives of officers still face expectations to lead and mentor the families of lower-ranking officers and enlisted personnel. “To decline these responsibilities, many wives worry, might harm a husband’s career,” writes the historian and former military family member Anni Baker.18 Retired Army colonel Douglas Macgregor explains, “There’s the expectation that the commanding officer—whether he’s a captain, colonel or general—that his wife will set an example by doing things consistent with her husband’s responsibilities … Wives are under enormous pressure.”19 The wives of enlistees frequently face similar pressures to participate in base life and support other families in ways ranging from emergency child care to offering comfort and help during deployments and in the wake of a service member’s death.
TOTAL INSTITUTIONS
In part, the pressures spouses face stem from the fact that the military is what sociologists refer to as a “total institution.” Total institutions—like the military, boarding schools, prisons, and asylums—have power over virtually every part of a person’s life. They usually have the power to keep an individual under nearly constant surveillance. They have control over an individual’s body. They have the ability to compel a person to follow orders (and in the military, these orders could result in death).20 The U.S. military’s power as a total institution has been so far-reaching that soldiers once had to ask permission to marry. Even recently, some have felt compelled to ask permission to get pregnant.21
Until 2011, the military also exercised broad control over its members’ sex lives and sexuality, by prohibiting same-sex intercourse and identification as anything other than heterosexual. At some bases, MPs would cruise by the parking lots of gay bars to record the license plates of service members.22 Of course, plenty of service members did maintain surreptitious same-sex relationships, and sometimes they weren’t even all that surreptitious. The power of any total institution is not limitless. Still, the psychological, social, and other effects of forcing people to stay in the closet should not be underestimated.
Bases are the physical manifestation of the military as a total institution (as are naval vessels). After all, while bases are designed to keep enemies out, like prisons and asylums they can also control their inhabitants by keeping them in. Commanders always have the power to make a base literally like a prison by ordering subordinates to stay inside or by simply locking the gates.
What this means for spouses and other family members is that they, too, are subject to much of the military’s power as a total institution. Though they are not in the military themselves, the military has the power to shape significant parts of their lives, especially if they live on base. The military shapes the food family members eat, the clothes they wear, the purchases they make, the education they receive, the ideas they’re exposed to, and the media they consume (from Fox News often playing on TVs around base to everyone from Rush Limbaugh to National Public Radio on the American Forces Network Radio). And on bases overseas, where family members are separated from their homes, communities, and larger social networks and living in societies where they often don’t speak the local language, the military’s power over them is particularly pronounced.
Just as troops are under near constant surveillance, so, too, spouses and other family members are subject to high levels of daily observation. Little on base is private, and not everything off base is, either. “On or off base, there is great pressure to conform to common standards of behavior, from home decorating styles to dress to recreational activities,” says Baker, who experienced these pressures as a family member overseas. “When a family problem arises, it is more than likely that those in the chain of command will get to know” about it.23 Commanding officers have long called “unruly spouses” into their offices24 or told GIs to “control” their wives. In recent years the orders have become subtler and less explicit, but they have not gone away.25
A KNOCK AT THE DOOR
During Dr. Matt Rogers’s fifteen-month deployment to Iraq, one of his duties was to identify troops in body bags and officially declare them deceased. Back at his base in Ansbach, Germany, he has been part of several death notification teams responsible for informing spouses of the death of a deployed service member. He and others describe it as one of the most difficult things they have to do. Usually, Rogers (also a pseudonym) told me, the spouse breaks down completely, and the highest-ranking officer can’t make it through the prescribed lines: “The Secretary of the Army has asked me to express his deep regret that…”
Throughout my visits to various bases, I repeatedly had to remind myself about the role they play in waging war—such is the distance one can feel from conflict in these manicured Little Americas, with all their comforts and conveniences. And while military personnel and their families surely have a harder time forgetting the connection between bases and bloodshed, many of them mention a similar distance. At Gitmo, people describe forgetting about the prison on the other side of the base, let alone the wars raging thousands of miles away. Even within war zones, military personnel testify that Internet access, Skype, and other amenities make it possible to forget you’re in the middle of a war. They make it possible to regard the “bloody snarl of combat,” as the former Army public affairs officer and novelist David Abrams put it, as if “through a telescope … at a safe, sanitized distance.”26
But the truth is inescapable. Usually, Rogers told me, the notification team pulls up to a family’s home in a dark SUV. They try to be inconspicuous, but the sight of a notification team turns heads in every direction on base. There are pretty much just two occasions when a soldier wears a “Class A” dress uniform: having official photographs taken and participating in a death notification team. So when a spouse or another family member sees a group of soldiers in Class A’s approaching, on base or off, it can mean only one thing.
Generally, wives already know that someone is going to get a visit. After a death, there’s a three-day blackout on Internet and phone contact with the unit that has lost a member. When that happens, everyone knows someone has died. The only question left is, “Which family is going to get the knock on the door?”27 Which leaves the wives at the windows of their homes, waiting. Until they know who, it’s as if time stops on base.
In the Army, Rogers explained, there are usually at least three people on a death notification team. Each must be an officer or a high-ranking enlisted soldier. A casualty notification officer delivers the news to a spouse, a parent, or other next of kin. A military chaplain is there to offer spiritual support. A casualty assistance officer will inform kin about Army benefits, assist with paperwork, and offer a phone with unlimited calling to the United States to help make necessary arrangements.
Rogers said the team usually also alerts a close friend, to have someone on hand immediately to provide support for the spouse. So far, he told me, he’s only had to notify women, and he’s glad. People say that after getting the news, widows will hurt themselves, while widowers will hurt others.
Rogers told me that he and other doctors are included in notification teams both because of their stature as officers and because they can prescribe medications. Sleep aids and antidepressants can be helpful if a woman can’t sleep or can’t function, especially when children are involved, he said. There’s been some talk on post about the doctors overmedicating wives, he added, but it’s no good having a mother unable to care for her kids.
After the notification team has visited the family, the affected unit will send out a “red line message” to families on base and off. The brief official script, listing the name of the deceased and the date of death, will make its way around the unit with the help of a phone tree that’s usually run by soldiers’ wives.
When they get the red line message, spouses likely feel a brief sensation of relief, because they know the officers in the Class A’s didn’t knock at their door. And then they feel the pain of knowing that another family has had that dark SUV pull up in front of their home. Putting aside their feelings as best they can, spouses usually spring into action, organizing memorial services on base, offering support for the families, bringing them food, sitting with them, listening to their grief. Some units have freezers prestocked with food, ready for the next family.
But until they get that message, until they know it’s someone else, spouses wait, looking out their windows, wondering if it’s their door the team in the Class A’s will be knocking on this time.
Soldiers walk past Filipina women known as “juicy girls” outside Camp Casey, South Korea.