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

[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.