The ramifications of our occupation of Iraq keep hitting closer to home. Now we've got the military issuing thinly veiled threats to military wives who voice their concerns a little too loudly.
Susan Peacock thought that the 400th Military Police Battalion Family Readiness Group was there to provide solace and support for spouses of soldiers shipped to Iraq.But when she read her e-mail July 15, she was appalled at what she saw. Group leaders were playing what one later called "hardball" with the Columbia mother of two and other 400th family members.
"OK this has gone far enough!" they wrote. The message said that "certain people are getting their soldiers in trouble" and that the unit's e-mail list had been sent to the Pentagon "for possible security violations and will be closely monitored."
A few days earlier, Peacock had heard a news report about an explosion outside Baghdad, near where the 400th, her husband's unit, was based. Since he'd left this spring, she'd grown skeptical of the military's unfailingly rosy accounts of the 400th's status.
Desperately worried, she tried to get information about the blast from family support staff and Army officials at Fort Meade, where the 400th is based. But after three days of inquiries, Peacock said she still knew nothing.
That's when she decided the other wives of the 400th might want to know about the incident. She sent an e-mail telling everyone what she'd heard.
"Evidently everything is not fine," she said she wrote....
Lisa Torey, the family program coordinator for the 220th Military Police Brigade, which oversees the 400th, said in an interview that there were no injuries in the blast Peacock was asking about. Peacock's e-mail, she said, was distressing to many families who don't watch the news and don't want bits of information dripping in from unofficial sources. They have a right, she said, not to be disturbed with troubling news.
She added that there had been several other "violations" regarding use of the e-mail chain. Torey, a civilian volunteer whose husband is deployed in Iraq, wouldn't specify what those were, but she said she had to put a stop to them.
"We have 150,000 troops over there," she said. "Someone could say something, and that information could get to the wrong person. And then ultimately you could have the worst-case scenario, and we have a dead soldier on our hands."
In a follow-up e-mail to the family members of the 400th on Tuesday, Torey backed off, writing that "no one is in trouble with the Pentagon or Higher Headquarters." She wrote that she "had to play hardball and get you to stop immediately because that fine line regarding breach of security was almost crossed."
Finally, she added: "You also have to remember that your loved ones volunteered to do this, they may have done it with the impression that they would never go anywhere because they are 'Reservists,' but they knew that was a possibility when they signed that dotted line."
The 400th is not the only unit whose families have recently received e-mails encouraging them to put a lid on their complaints. Anita Blount, wife of Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, wrote that she shared their frustration about the length of the division's deployment to Iraq....
She said that "when the Iraqis see media coverage of disgruntled Americans, publicly campaigning for the return of our soldiers from Iraq, they are encouraged and believe their strategy is working. They believe that their continued attacks on American soldiers are having the desired affect and are diminishing the resolve of the American people to complete the task in Iraq."
Question: How could Iraqis 'see media coverage of disgruntled Americans' when most people don't have electricity?
Watch for some of the fallout from this to be reflected in retention numbers. Servicepeople generally don'lt like their wives spoken to like this. Arrogance on behalf of a command by wives will come up, and folks will vote with their feet.
