An Army of Debt

Like many stories, this has several beginnings. Here is one: On a hot day in August, 1983, just before my senior year of high school, I walked into the Army recruitment office in Appleton, Wisc. The purpose of my visit was practical. I wanted to go to college.

The recruitment officer was a smoker. The fumes had stained the walls of his office, or maybe the plaster had actually been painted that color. The place was warm. I remember that I was dressed in a wool skirt my mom had made and that I should not have worn wool in August. The officer asked a few questions, talked a great deal, was respectful and told me I would be a "good recruit." I was susceptible to this praise.

I remember a few other things. One was that my incipient patriotism took a running leap as he described how I might serve my country. There was a familial component to this emotion. My father and his brother were both Air Force men. My cousin had made a career as a Navy SEAL, something all of us looked on with pride.

I was interviewing for the Army Reserves, and the recruiter described the money the government would give me, enough to pay for four years of university. In return, after I graduated, I would serve full time in the Army for two years. I would be an officer. It was the money, though, that made my blood rush. I wanted it. I wanted an education. And I wanted to get one without causing my family pain.

A few weeks later, school started up again, and I learned that none of my friends was considering military service. Peer pressure won. I didn't join up.

The recruiters hadn't finished with me, though. They called my house more than once during my senior year. Even after I entered college, they kept phoning. When I wasn't home on break, my parents took the calls. Together, we turned down the Army perhaps a dozen times, in both flush periods and on days when money for my education was hard to come by.

Over the years, I have come to see this decision, however arbitrary, as pivotal and defining -- one of those choices that determine a life.

Some of my college classmates were in ROTC. They ended up going to the Middle East for the first Gulf War. After we graduated, I heard about their experiences in the desert and on leave. Always, just as on the day when I first saw them in uniform, I heard a bell sound in my brain. I sometimes felt I was witnessing my other life -- the one I turned down.

I heard that bell sound again as I reported and wrote this article.

Across the country, in small towns and big cities, the families of our National Guard and military Reserves are having trouble paying the bills. Many are barely treading water. Some go under.

Many households of Reservists -- 30 percent, according to a 2002 Pentagon estimate -- lose income when activated. In 2002, the U.S. Department of Defense also surveyed the spouses of Reservists who had been activated. Out of the 30 percent who said they had lost household income, the Pentagon survey indicated, half had monthly decreases of between $500 and $2,000 per month. Another 23 percent forfeited in excess of $2,001 monthly.

Poor pay and economic strife are conditions the Reserves and National Guard share with others in the regular military. "Lower-ranking enlisted people qualify for food stamps. It's not how we're used to thinking about government employees, but there it is," says Kathleen Gilberd, co-chair of the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild. "Active duty pay has traditionally not been enough to help people get by." Extreme financial crises set in when service people are deployed because they then have no opportunity to get a second job to supplement their income.

But Reservists and National Guard members are especially hard hit. "The ones who do experience income loss, it's usually a significant income loss," says Shirley Calhoun, spokeswoman for the National Military Family Association. Many have good-paying jobs in the civilian world. But in the military ranks, the same people may not yet have made officer, "so they are at a lower pay level," says Calhoun.