CAR, perhaps your friend’s anguish of her Marine spouse leaving AGAIN for a war-zone is rubbing off on her young kids. She and all her eligible family members can use Tricare and/or Tricare Prime for low cost counseling, each with their own psychologist. Some practitioners will even counsel the parent and child(ren) together. She needs to get involved in the network of help available to her.
My ex-spouse joined in 1974, during the end of the Vietnam war. He was assigned to several ships which toured the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf frequently and visited foreign war zones on the ground for humanitarian purposes, where disease was rampant, such as Mogadishu in Somalia. No, we did not have the back-to-back conficts like today (Afghanistan and Iraq) but nevertheless, he was deployed without access to e-mail, video or a pay phone. GONE IS GONE. It took 3 wks. to 3 mos. to get a letter from him and a Morse Code message to the ship was answered by the command within a week, ONLY if important. These messages had to be sent from an office in downtown SD (meter pkg.) and the sender had to prepare it first and be present to send it by first waiting in a long line.
Yes, CAR, you are correct that housing prices were 50% lower 15 years ago, but interest rates were higher and I stand by my assertion that military families today in SD receive THREE TIMES the housing allowance we did, for the same rank. We have truly come a long way in the care of military families and IMO, they are very well provided for.
