Public Employee Press

Book Review
Collateral damage: Citizen-soldiers and their families

While the economic crisis has pushed Iraq into the background for most Americans, a new book focuses our attention on the reservists whose lives are on the line and the families they have left behind.

Stacy Bannerman’s “When the War Came Home,” a chronicle from inside the circle of military families who are bearing the nation’s burdens, is available in the library in Room 211 at DC 37.

Their stories will be familiar to the many DC 37 reservists who have fought in Iraq, and to the union families who have wept as their loved ones departed for the war.

Bannerman’s husband, Lorin, 43, is a sergeant 1st class in the Army National Guard’s 81st Armored Brigade. From her first chapter, “He Got the Call Today,” to the last, “I Got the Call Today,” tension runs high: Will he make it home?

The author documents the loss of income and benefits as husbands and wives are sent off to war and describes the damage as President George W. Bush makes reservists serve multiple tours of duty. With moving prose, she portrays the isolation that surrounds families with loved ones at war for a country that seems inured to their suffering.

Stacy and Lorin Bannerman’s questions about the war sharpen as their knowledge increases, and the book brings us inside the grassroots groups within the military that have organized around their opposition to the war — veterans, retired brass and soldiers’ families.

This took shape much earlier in this war than during Vietnam. By the 2004 election, at least a third of military spouses felt things were going badly in Iraq and 27 percent disapproved of Bush’s performance as commander in chief, according to the National Annenberg Election Poll of military members and their families.

As Election Day on Nov. 4 and Veterans Day on Nov. 11 loomed, voters pondered the astronomical dollar count, the bodies buried in the Arlington National Cemetery, the amputees and brain-damaged heroes in veterans’ hospitals and the reservists’ families on line at food banks, unable to feed their children while their spouses serve in a distant, dubious war.

— Jane LaTour