The Families They Left Behind

For six months U.S. career servicemen in Europe have been getting madder and madder at President Kennedy's order cutting off Government-paid transportation and housing for wives and children who want to be with their G.I.s overseas. Complained a European field commander in a recent message to his Pentagon superiors: "Without the stabilizing effect of a wife and children, we may be creating more social problems than we are solving on the economic front."

Last week, staring into a Scotch and soda in a Frankfurt bar, an Army captain brooded: "This isn't Korea or Viet Nam, and it takes more than an effort of will to remain pure here for two years. And I wonder the same about my wife back home. You worry about home, her old boyfriend, the kids." Said an Air Force chaplain in England: "Morale is at rock bottom. We had an incident of a rendezvous in London between an officer and another man's wife. I thought somebody was going to get shot."

Both Mother & Father. Beyond the loneliness and temptations that plague both the G.I. and his faraway wife, both worry about the effect of separation on their children. At Fort McPherson in Atlanta, Mrs. Maurice Miller, wife of an Army colonel who will soon be sent to France, said: "I love the Army about as much as anyone. But I'm all for his resigning if we cannot go with him. I don't think anyone should have to be both a mother and father to five little ones." In Columbia, S.C., Mrs. Tex Gardner, whose U.S. Army sergeant husband is now in Mannheim, Germany, said of their two sons, 14 and 12: "A mother can't handle it alone. They need love that I alone cannot give them. They are interested in football and scouting. I cannot satisfy them." Said Captain James Stamper, a paratrooper now in Italy: "The bad thing is not how my wife or I feel about it, but how it will affect our three children."

Such prolonged separation is a bigger service problem than it once was, since about 85% of all officers and 40% of enlisted men now are married. Instead of the carefree, hard-living G.I.s of old, whose greatest peacetime conquests often occurred in bars and bordellos, today's settled-down servicemen average 2.8 dependents each. When the travel ban was ordered, 320,000 dependents were already in Europe, and thus were not affected; they still receive Government housing or allowances. Since the order, 56,000 servicemen sent abroad have been separated from their families; another 19,000 somehow found the money to take their families with them at their own expense (it costs about $500 to get a wife and one child to Paris) and to rent quarters for them without benefit of the usual Government allowance (in France, this is about $100 a month). Obviously, many cannot afford this on their military pay--yet neither can they afford the expense of maintaining a home in the U.S. and meeting their own living costs abroad.

"It's Chickernfeed." When President Eisenhower ordered a similar travel ban in 1960 on the theory that it was needed to reduce the U.S. gold outflow, the wives left at home became known as "gold-dollar widows." Ike's order was lifted by President Kennedy in February 1961--but the new ban went into effect last October. The Defense Department did not explain the latest order, although newsmen were told variously that it was because the troop buildup required all travel space or that the Berlin crisis was so hot that dependents should not be in Europe. Last February, Kennedy told a news conference that the gold problem was the main reason for continuing the ban.

Almost to a man, servicemen overseas find the gold explanation unfair. "Why did they pick the military to correct the gold drain?" asks a colonel in Stuttgart.

"Because they can simply give the order and we slobs have to take it? What about tourists, businessmen and others? Brother, I have had it." "It's chickenfeed," says a general. "The petty savings aren't worth the bother." The Pentagon claims that the dependents who did not go to Europe would have spent some $125 million there.

But in 1961 U.S. business directly invested about $1.5 billion in Western Europe, U.S.

tourists spent $609 million there, and other U.S. employees had their dependents with them.

Counting the Days. The overseas servicemen are understandably enraged by some insensitive statements from back home, such as Virginia Senator Willis Robertson's claim that dependents want to go overseas just so they "can live high on the hog, have servants, PX privileges, and buy liquor at $2.50 a bottle." But the servicemen are burned even more by frequent "news leaks" from the Pentagon that the ban is about to be lifted--without anything ever seeming to happen. "I get so sick of listening to the damn radio each morning to hear 'key Pentagon officials' quoted as saying the ban 'may be lifted soon,' " complains a lieutenant colonel in Heidelberg. "What kind of stupidity is that? My wife and kids are coming over here in 55 days--yes, I'm counting the days--and I have to spend $1,200 for their fare." Says a Seventh Army colonel: "I have been in the Army 18 years and have been separated from my wife slightly less than eight years. Now we have been told to take this, and nobody has even had the consideration to tell us why." Last week another "high Army official" said the ban may be lifted "within the next two weeks."

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