Full Description
Distilled from nearly two hundred interviews, conducted from the 2003 invasion of Iraq on, Army Spouses marshals an incredible breadth of individual experiences, range of voices, insider access, and theoretical expertise to tell the story of US Army husbands and wives and their families during wartime in this century.
Morten Ender offers the first contemporary study of the emotional cycle of deployment and its impact on military families in the post-9/11 world. Military spouses, as he shows, operate both near and far from the front lines, serving on the home front to support combat service in the so-called Global War on Terror that has intimately bound together soldiers, families, the military institution, the state, and society. He paints a vivid picture of army spouses' range of responses to deployment separations that illuminates the deep sacrifices that soldiers, veterans, and their families have made over the past twenty years.
Contents
Dedication
Tables
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Abbreviations for U.S. Army Officer and Enlisted Ranks
Introduction: U.S. Army Spouses
1. "The Deployment Before the Deployment": Pre-Deployment
2. "The Temporary Widow": Deployment
3. "The Big Group Hug": Post-Deployment
4. "I Have No Idea about Service": (In)Formal Social Supports
5. "They Take the Brunt of the Deployments": Army Children and Adolescents
6. "He has a Laptop": Social Networking Between War and Home Front
7. "Wolf Blitzer Doesn't Talk to Me Anymore": War on Television
Conclusion
Appendix: Notes on Methods
Notes
Index
