For those left behind, a struggle to cope

[SoCalDem]

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2003/12/18/for_those_left_behind_a_struggle_to_cope



For those left behind, a struggle to cope
Deployments transform life at German base
By Aliza Marcus, Globe Correspondent, 12/18/2003

BAUMHOLDER, Germany -- At the US Army post here, where nearly 90 percent of the soldiers are deployed to Iraq, messages of love and worry decorate a large sheet of red-trimmed paper hanging over the entrance to the high school."Please come home," wrote one teen. "May God be with you," wrote another. A third simply scrawled, "Stay Safe." One floor up, an airy conference room has been transformed into a weekly drop-in center for students struggling with the pressure of having one or even two parents on duty in Iraq."Cumulative stress, that's what we're seeing," said Shirley M. Lips, the school's guidance counselor.

"There's more truancy and more illness. . . . I see more of an increase of kids being upset, going off on each other, shorter fuses all around. And the tears, they come quicker. These big guys just started last week," Lips said.These are hard times for families left behind by troops serving extra-long tours of duty in Iraq. Despite the welcome news over the weekend that deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had been captured, US military officials' sobering assessment is that the insurgents' attacks on US troops will continue.

Children have to deal with the ugly reality that a parent might not return.Spouses have to struggle month after month as single parents, raising and comforting children while trying to keep their own fears in check."I don't watch the news, and if I hear or walk by something on Iraq, I don't look at it. It freaks me out," said Kerstin Madden, whose husband, Charles, is deployed in Iraq with the 21st Theater Support Command, 200th Materiel Management Center."I can't show my emotions in front of the children; I have to wait until they go to bed to let myself go," said Madden, 32, as she laid out dinner for her two children in the family's apartment on the Sembach Annex base.

If there is opposition to the US operation in Iraq, it is not easy to find on the nearly two dozen Army and Air Force bases known as K-Town, or the Kaiserslautern Military Community, located in southwestern Germany.

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