Home alone: the stunted lives of military wives.

• Author: Bingham, Clara
• Position: Home Fires Burning: Married to the Military - For Better or Worse - Book Review

Home Fires Burning: Married to the Military--For Better or Worse

By Karen Houppert Ballantine Books, $24.95

It all starts with that uniform. "I have uniform syndrome," Heather Atherton says. "I'm not proud of it. I see a guy in uniform, though, and I think they look 10 times better. They're clean-cut and they always have a job." When Heather married 24-year-old Army Specialist Kris Atherton, only eight weeks after they first met (she was pregnant), she also instantly achieved a level of financial security that she had never known growing up in a small town in Kansas, where her single mother worked two jobs. Some of the perks of being married to the military include free medical care, free housing, free utilities, free marital counseling, free drug counseling, free alcohol counseling, free financial advice, subsidized childcare, food and other necessities sold at cost, tuition assistance, free gym membership, free pool membership, and free swimming lessons for the kids. Movie tickets at the base theater cost only $2.50. What could possibly be wrong with this picture?

Plenty, says Karen Houppert, a Village Voice writer who spent two years interviewing a group of wives living at cold, windswept Fort Drum army base in upstate New York, as well as wives at other bases around the country. Her reporting reaches from the last days of the war in Afghanistan into the first year of the invasion of Iraq and provides an essential and much overlooked view inside Planet Military.

"The big hidden cost for service members, of course, is that they may go to war and die," says Houppert. Or if they don't die, they could go to war and not come home for a year or two. Or they could come back maimed: Kris Atherton returned from Iraq with an amputated arm and a case of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

Houppert's account of life as a military wife strips the veneer off of headlines announcing American casualties in Iraq and exposes the toll war takes on families at home. But more than just a chronicle of war widows' grief, her book shows us how day by day these spouses earn the right to boast, as it says on a Fort Bragg minivan bumper sticker: "Army wife: the toughest job in the Army." Military spouses cope with childcare hassles, teenage moodiness, car pools, lawn care--all the same challenges parents face in the civilian world. Only they do it alone. For months at a time--all the while never knowing if their husbands will make it back safely.

The lives of families...