A Long-Delayed Homecoming

For some of the returning soldiers of the 172nd, those changes may be more than a marriage can bear. After 16 months at home alone with five children, Beth Denton is more weary and skeptical than filled with hope. She’s also been frantically cleaning, trying to get the family’s four-bedroom home on base as tidy as it was in August 2005 when Staff Sgt. Chad Denton left.

But a lot has changed since then. The couple’s youngest son, Noah, was an infant; now he’s a rambunctious toddler. The oldest is a teenager who has carried a huge load for her younger siblings, and Beth worries that the 8th grader has fallen in with the wrong crowd at school. Beth predicts Chad will be a much stricter disciplinarian. “I’ve got a lot of mixed feelings,” says Beth. “I’m feeling everything. Scared, nervous, excited, and ‘Am I going to know him anymore?’”

The deployment has taken a hard toll on the couple’s marriage. With five children ranging in age from 20 months to 13 years, Beth is exhausted, and often feels she is at the breaking point. The only break she had was in October, when her mother-in-law came to help and Beth went to the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage for a few days of “me time,” where she could sleep, shop and watch TV without interruption.

But things have gotten so tense that the couple have talked on the phone about whether their marriage will survive, says Beth. “We’ve had some conversations where we talk about whether we are going to have to start dating again to see if we still know each other,” she acknowledges.

At Fort Richardson in Anchorage and Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks, the Army Family Readiness Group (FRG) offers workshops for spouses on what to expect when their husbands return from the war zone. After an initial honeymoon period of a couple of weeks, marital stress is common. And post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a constant worry.

Shortly after the 4-23 was transferred to Baghdad, the unit suffered its first death, Cpl. Alexander Jordan. Chad Denton told his wife that he helped load his comrade’s body onto the plane. “It’s got to do damage to anybody’s mind to be over there that long,” says Beth Denton. “He’s in denial about the PTSD thing. I’m thinking he has it, by the way he goes on the phone from being really mean and I’m doing everything wrong to ‘I love you, honey.’ It this is the new him and he’s going to stay that way, we have to talk. If this is ‘I’m in Iraq, I need to come home, I need to see my kids,’ then I can understand.”