Merry Christmas in July
Summer has been moving along...spent a weekend in VT. Went to Lake George. Just been chilling out, catching up with people, and being lazy. Wed Im going back up to VT to get Stef and Thurs morning we are leaving to go spend a few days up at the house in Maine like I do every year. It is gonna be a good time as always. She is not getting deployed so we are offical roomates this semester! We are even color coordinating our room like losers haha. I have been talking to Stephen alot, he is on a "vacation" right now, but it consists of going back to their first base they went to in Iraq. Sweet. but we get to talk online alot and do the whole web cam bit. I seriously cannot wait until he comes home, I miss him so much. we decided not to go to Hawaii just in case he dosnt get home in time and whatnot. Plus we are going to Belize and Italy next year so its just better off. I should get a job before hockey season so i can save up some cash for that. Well anyway, I am off to pack. <3
I need to rant about something. In this Sunday’s version of the Providence Journal, there is a story about the relationship problems between the soldier in Iraqand his wife/fiancée/girlfriend. Basically the journalist painted a picture that shows the wife running off with all the husbands’ money, buying needless things for the kids and herself. Then you have to throw in “the other man” or as the Army likes to call him “Jody.” Right from the start these guys learn cadences that talk about Jody taking his girl away while he is off doing his military stuff. The Army is to partly to blame here, because now these guys are worrying about what is going on at home even if they are not suspicious. The ProJo gave an example of a woman that found it funny that she had access to an ATM card of a soldier she knew for 2 weeks. She lived near the base, and it sounds like she just lives off these guys instead of going out to find a better job to support her child.
Now, I am not saying that every relationship is perfectly normal. There are cases where the wife/fiancée/girlfriend does run off with the money, buying lavishly expensive items for themselves or friends. There are the cases where the wife feels she did not marry into a deployment and decided this is not what she wants, so she doesn’t need to deal with it. There are cases of woman that cannot survive a year without being physically intimate with someone, so they just find a new partner. However, this is all another case of poor media coverage.
Instead of writing something useful, let’s write about the poor soldier whose wife went buck wild and cheated on him 300 times while he was in Iraq. Let’s make military relationships look like something that came out of section 8 trailer park (except there is much more money). Then say it takes away from the job of the men because they cannot concentrate when out on a mission because they are upset. This is ridiculous. As if they did not negate soldiers enough, now they are going to start digging into the personal life. The media has truly ruined the image of this war. It makes me so angry that they wrote about this stereotype, because all it does is make the situation worse. It’s reinforcement to the general public who does not have personal contact with a soldier, that indeed our military is just a bad thing.
For months I worked so hard to get over what other people said about me. Just because my boyfriend is in Iraq does not mean its open season for me. It does not mean that I go out and disregard his feelings. And it certainly does not mean that I will go and cheat on him with his best friend just because he took care of me. I had a group of adults get on my back about how they would never let their daughter hang out with other guys if she was in my shoes. They judged me without knowing me and they automatically assumed that I would cheat on Stephen while he was gone.
Why don’t they write an article on the number of breakups that happen when you go to college? Why don’t they pick apart the marriages of every day citizens that do the SAME exact thing as the military spouses? It’s time to get the media out of the war, and stop letting the liberals control the minds of the naïve. And it’s time to start being a little more supportive of our country.