ABSTRACT
A nation deeply divided in peace will inevitably find it difficult to maintain a unified front in war. Predictably, then, a United States deeply fissured by family conflicts has found that those conflicts have compromised its unity in the war against terrorism. The loss of martial unity manifests itself in one way when individual soldiers lose their fighting spirit because their personal experiences in marriage and family have been bitter ones. The soldier who is fighting for a wife and children back home is almost certainly more highly motivated than the soldier who has rarely seen his ex-wife or their children since the divorce that broke up their family. Nor is it easy to conceptualize as an ideal soldier a woman who has enlisted only to alleviate the impoverishment into which divorce has plunged her. Unfortunately, in today’s army thousands of America’s soldiers are living precisely these post-family, post-wedlock scripts.
