INTERVIEW WITH JANE DOE-E

In accordance with her request for anonymity, this interviewee is referred to as Jane Doe-E. Her best friend and partner, Bob, is an Intelligence Officer with the Army in a division currently located in Baghdad. Jane met Bob about a year and a half ago when he was taking counter-terrorism courses.

Jane: When I last visited Bob in Texas before he left for Iraq, the guys were laughing and saying, "You wouldn't believe all the money spent, I mean millions, on equipment and training and then it always ends up as a bunch of guys in humvees with guns."

Bob has been in the military for seven years and has been having second thoughts about making it a career choice. He feels trapped. The retirement is great and it� only 13 years away. Additionally, he is far beyond entry level in the military and fears that in the outside job market he would be stuck in a cubicle back at the beginning.

I try to remind him that he's had lots of different jobs in the military, an education and he has a great resume for the outside world. 

Being in the military is a very honorable profession for him and military life is not only a safe secure job, normally, but provides a great network of friends and activities. However, a possible deal breaker is having to belong to an organization that does things one doesn� necessarily agree with and the pressure to conform are great. I suggested this may be an opportunity to change things from within. He liked that idea and it seemed to give him some peace. He's tormented about having to go to Iraq. 

The up side of it is that he and his friends make more money. Guys are coming back from Iraq able to buy new toys, BMWs, motor cycles, and boats but the downside reality is that they had to go to War in Iraq to do it. In email correspondence, Bob tells me that Iraqis are so much like us and the next moment he says they�e so different he can� understand them at all.

He has never really been able to tell me beyond the basics of what he actually does for a living. When he� home, in Texas, it� a job like any other. He gets up goes to work, has a lunch break, and comes home. He has lots of meetings, does PowerPoint presentations, and sends emails. I know Bob did a lot of background reading, all popular books about Islam and the culture. He may even have learned some Arabic.

My concern about Iraq is that I don� understand why we are there. It seems like sheer greed and gluttony. It was presented as being about terrorism, democracy, and liberty but our president wasn� democratically elected. He� also trying to change our civil liberties �for example, with gay marriage -- and it seems that if you�e not Caucasian, wealthy, Christian, and heterosexuals you don� count. As for terrorism, Saddam Hussein is not Osama bin Laden, and there are no Weapons of Mass Destruction, no real link to Al-Queda.

It makes me very angry like our service men and women are an expendable commodity available for our president� ego and pocketbook.  

I used to watch TV news avidly but when the body count started to go up I decided to be more cautious about what I watch. It� just too frightening and often twisted. It� amazing that, everyday, someone is dying: two soldiers here, six soldiers there. 

I try to find support groups and have been somewhat successful although people online tend to be really young. They�e the young spouses and girl friends of soldiers who are really into what the men are doing, not that they�e sold on it politically but that they�e trained to do this job and now they have the opportunity to do it; it� exciting for them. Bob and I are in our early thirties and we�e looking at the bigger picture. Younger people are focused on the thrilling moment and they�e not seeing the bigger picture.

Military spouses also tend to be clique-ish and uninterested in women who are not already military spouses.