Self-supporting: Military spouses band together when needed

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- For Dawn Eckel of south Kansas City, little was quiet on the home front after her husband left for Iraq in 2004.

The refrigerator quit. The furnace stopped working -- in January. The lawnmower broke -- in April. At some point the roof started leaking. All this was before she suffered a heart attack in June.

How much of this did she tell her husband, Sgt. Robert Eckel of the Missouri Army National Guard?

All of it, Dawn said -- but only after each crisis was resolved or addressed.

"I knew that if he was worried about things here, how was he going to focus over there?" she said.

Such is the wartime lot of the military spouse, whose address usually is where the parades end and real life begins. One difference now, however, is that National Guard personnel like Eckel, as well as Reserve troops, have been shouldering a significant share of the burden.

Roughly half the troops in Iraq are National Guard or Reserve. For their families, overseas deployment often brings emotional stress and financial hardship. While such issues are not exclusive to National Guard or Reserve families, they can be more challenging to them, because those families often do not live close to a military base, with its array of support services.

But a growing network of support organizations or strategies has risen up to address such needs. Many National Guard units, for example, will name a family readiness volunteer to take calls from spouses trying to pay rent or repair their cars.

For the families of the 834th Division Aviation Support Battalion, based in Warrensburg, that person has been Dawn Eckel.

"It's an elected position, and nobody else ran," she said with a laugh. "But when you marry a soldier, you marry the military and make the best of it."

Her perspective for the past year has been both that of a family readiness volunteer and a military spouse struggling to get by. Two days before Thanksgiving, the holiday took on vivid meaning for her when Robert Eckel returned to Kansas City after a year's duty in Iraq.

Dawn Eckel still plans to continue her activities as a family readiness volunteer.

"Just because there are some members who are back doesn't mean they don't need help reintegrating," she said.

Maintaining morale can be challenging. Ask Pat Kerr, Missouri Veterans Commission ombudsman.

In 2003, Kerr's daughter, a U.S. Army Reserve officer, was called to active duty in Iraq. She left her 13-month son with Kerr, who already had her hands full. The previous year her husband, a Jefferson City Methodist pastor, had been injured in a car accident.

"It's been exhausting working through the legal system and the health-care system," Kerr said. "And my husband and I are professionally trained in coping skills. If we are exhausted, what can the spouses of deployed soldiers be facing?"

Kerr now works to meet the needs of Guard and Reserve families created by the deployment of spouses. Those who call Kerr learn to get used to the sound of one or more telephones ringing in the background. Since May 2003, Missouri National Guard family assistance personnel have logged more than 12,000 calls requesting assistance.

The most frequent request is help in understanding benefits.

Sometimes such organized assistance helps. And other times, Guard or Reserve spouses seek out friends.

For example, Eckel's roof was repaired in part through an online community of military spouses that Eckel found at a computer game site called Pogo.com. The site, which offers chat rooms, appeals to military spouses, Eckel said, because it allows subscribers to distract themselves playing computer games while sending messages back and forth.

"I happened to mention that I had put a bucket out because of the roof," Eckel said. "A friend who lives in Harrisonville said, 'Do you know my family installs roofs?'"

Eight people showed up on a Saturday morning to put on the new shingles. The volunteers installed the roof to honor her husband's service in Iraq, Eckel said.

"They said they did it because my husband was deployed and because they were too old to go," she said.