Stryker Brigade News

Army Wife Distrusts Timetables

Oct-30-2006 » Filed Under: 172nd SBCT

The following is a short excerpt from another very long article from Newsweek profiling 172nd SBCT families during the brigade's extension.

By Karen Breslau, Newsweek

Oct. 30, 2006 - For the first year of her husband's deployment with the 172nd Stryker Brigade, Tamara Bell says she was a "good Army wife." She supported her husband's mission and trusted the military to bring him home safely—and on time. After all, Tamara, 32, grew up as a Navy brat, and she and Staff Sgt. Edward Bell have been married for 12 years, weathering several overseas deployments in South Korea, Bosnia and the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, when Edward was with one of the first units to enter Baghdad. Even during his second Iraq deployment, Tamara, waiting at home in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the couple's infant son, did everything she could to keep her spirits up. She and Edward counted the days remaining in full moons ("It seems a lot shorter that way") and communicated nonstop about their baby Nicholas, now 11 months old, whom Edward last saw at birth.

But last July, only days before Edward was to return home to Fairbanks following a year of combat duty in Mosul, Tamara learned that his infantry battalion, the 4-23, was being sent to Baghdad to quell violence in the Iraqi capital. The extension was to last four months. That was the moment she snapped, she says. "Everyone has a breaking point, and that was mine," says Bell. "He was exactly seven days away from coming home. With the extension, I said, 'Wow, I need to be a lot less trusting of what the military tells us.'" Her husband, she adds, feels his own country is using him. “They are no longer showing us any loyalty." [...]