Infidelity and War

In 2007 I was on a conference call with a group of people organizing a one day symposium focusing on sexual health issues for American service members.  I'm Canadian, and come from a long line of pacifists, so while I know people who have friends and family in the military, my direct experience and knowledge was limited.  One of the people on the call was a minister who was also a veteran of the Vietnam War.  Near the end of the call he said something simple and clear.  He said that once you kill someone you're never the same.

He wasn't saying this to discourage us from the work we were trying to do, which was ostensibly to improve the sexual options and opportunities for returning service members who had been in combat as well as their partners.  He was just saying it to either remind us, or in my case, educate us.  I listened and never forgot it.

In 2008 Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) organized an event which gave service members an opportunity to speak as plainly and clearly about their experiences, called Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan.  Listening to that testimony (which I recommend providing you have the support and resources to process afterwards) I was reminded of the conference call and the comment from the vet.

And I remembered it again today, reading about a paper that is being presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.  The paper is titled "Veteran Status, Marital Infidelity, and Divorce" and it draws on data from a 1992 survey which found that 32 percent of veterans who were ever married reported extramarital sex.  The paper contrasts this with the 16.8 percent of non-veterans who reported infidelity.  The point being that we need to PAY attention to all the ways that military service impacts individuals and families.

I agree with the point.  And just as I was glad to be participating in the symposium, I'm glad that these researchers are thinking about these groups of people and topics, like infidelity, which are not ones that everyone wants to talk about or study.  But at the same time I kind of flinch at the act of comparison.

Imagine you take a family and pull them away from their existing communities and support networks, and surround them with other families to live near each other for an intense but always limited time, and then you take one member of the family away.  And imagine they are going somewhere where they are quite likely to be hurt or die, and even more likely to see friends die and kill people they don't know.  And imagine the family members who are left behind know this.  And imagine the person is in harms way for a year or more.  And as soon as they come back, they may be planning to leave again soon.   These are experiences that can't, and I would argue shouldn't, be compared or pathologized in comparison to families without these experiences. After all, they have multiple and far reaching effects on individuals and relationships, including their sexual relationships.

Infidelity in the context of military service is not the same thing as infidelity in the context of a "regular" life.  I'm not saying that life for people who haven't served in the military is necessarily any better or easier or less traumatic. What I am saying is that the act of comparison isn't without risks.  Number crunching, when the numbers represent people, can lead to people crunching.  And I'm against all non-consensual people crunching.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about it.  And to the extent that this research is trying to unpack what's happening in families I'm glad for it.  But I worry about the ways that this kind of research erase the differences when they make comparisons between veterans and non-veterans as if they were comparing smokers and non-smokers.

Read more: Sexual Health Issues for Post-Combat Soldiers

Read more: About.com's Guide for Military Families

Related: All About Infidelity