Article on married soldiers sharing living quarters

[sholio]

As well as just being interesting in general, I thought this article on how the U.S. military handles deployed married couples might be of interest to fic writers who pair off military character on Atlantis:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080331/ap_on_re_us/combat_marriages

Living arrangements and public displays of affection are discussed. Apparently it's only in the last two years that married couples sharing living quarters in the field has even been an option, and there still are not nearly as many private accommodations as there are couples requesting them.

(Obviously, too, this is yet another area where gay couples get screwed -- or not screwed, as the case may be.)

Comments

[roga.livejournal.com]

That was really interesting, thanks for linking to it! For us, it's a non-issue, since soldiers either go home every day, week, two weeks, or in rare cases maybe a month - but they're mostly too young to get married anyway... As for public displays of affection, much like in other disciplinary aspects of the military, we're a lot less strict.

BTW, a small suggestion for the gen ficathon, if you don't mind: as you post, you can tag the fics - by prompt, by main characters, etc. That way when the ficathon's over it won't die down, but remain as a searchable archive.

[sholio]

Oh man, I'm SO glad you mentioned the tagging, because that is something I'd thought about doing 'way back when I was setting up the comm, but in the last-minute rush of getting the stories prepared, I completely forgot about it. Thank you!

That's interesting -- yet another difference between the two militaries! I guess it's really only an issue for U.S. soldiers that are deployed to combat zones -- at bases in friendly nations, and at home, married soldiers take their families with them and either live in single-family housing on base, or buy a house nearby like any couple. But the whole integrated-military thing is so new to us, especially combined with a career military like we tend to have, where people stay in it for a significant part of their adult lives -- we're only starting to adjust to the social ramifications of having both spouses in the military at the same time, combined with long overseas deployment.

[marf-the-river.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's interesting!

I've been doing research this year on WWI and WWII, and I came across a man's diary of WWII in which he related having received a letter that said something like "it has come to our attention that you are living with your wife. This must stop at once." Once women entered the armed services, it became a big problem, what to do with the women who had joined to follow their husbands, in Canada, and England, and I would suppose the US as well. Or, well, what to do with women in general became a problem, not just those with husbands. :)

It was really a complex issue - one that seems to be getting resolved sloooooooowly.

Thanks for posting the link!

[sholio]

"it has come to our attention that you are living with your wife. This must stop at once."

Ha! Oh my. That's just wrong!

Yeah -- I think the problems mostly stem from the fact that men and women have been effectively segregated to different areas of life for so long that we really have trouble dealing with a gender-shared space -- in a lot of areas of life, not just in the military, but perhaps it comes out a lot stronger in the military because it's *so* regimented and there are so many things about the whole mindset that have to change when you add women into the mix. Silly, arbitrary things for the most part, but it's hard to get people to do things differently.

As an example of a somewhat different mindset on the whole thing, the ancient Greeks believed that men fought best when they were fighting side-by-side with their lover; the elite Theban army was entirely made up of same-sex couples, and apparently kicked ass all over Greece.