Fort Carson – Army Sgt. Bruce Wilson had been awake for more than 24 hours, but he still knew Tuesday was Valentine’s Day.
“That’s why I stopped to get a bottle of champagne,” said Wilson, 26, a native of Gainesville, Fla.
Wilson had just come from a year-long tour in Iraq, so he had more than one reason to pick up the bottle of Dom Perignon during a two-hour layover in Ireland. Feb. 14 is also the day he met his wife, Iesha, 25.
Wilson was among 280 soldiers from the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment who were welcomed home Tuesday at Fort Carson by a raucous red-white-and-blue crowd, many of whom brought bouquets of roses, boxes of chocolates and heart-shaped balloons.
While love was in the air, Army officials know that the stress of war often weighs heavily on the troops. Soldiers and their partners rated the loss of a relationship as their top deployment concern – above death or injury – in an informal survey last year.
The Army’s beefed-up family-support programs are intended to address that issue.
Tuesday’s V-Day returnees will take today and Thursday off and then return to Fort Carson for a series of briefings before taking month-long vacations.
During the briefings, they will fill out mental-health questionnaires, hear experts talk about rejoining their families and learn about support programs, including offerings titled “Building Strong and Ready Families” and “How to Not Marry a Jerk.”
The Army and the Army National Guard will spend $7.2 million this year on the family program, which helps strengthen marriage and ends with an all-expenses-paid – including child care – weekend retreat in resorts such as Breckenridge and Vail.
The Army has trained 50,000 people in the program since 1999. It was beefed up after the U.S. deployed troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, as an effort to help lower divorce rates.
In 2004, 3,325 Army officers divorced, but that number dropped to 1,292 in 2005. Divorces also were down slightly among enlisted members, from 7,152 in 2004 to 7,075 last year.
“It’s a marriage-education workshop,” said Martha Rudd, an Army spokeswoman. “They are taught how to communicate more effectively and deal with stress. There is a health-care component with it, and they go over all the different resources that are available to them, so if they’re having some kind of problem, there’s help out there for them.”
After the long flight back to Colorado on Tuesday, most soldiers only wanted to go home, take a hot shower and chill out.
“I want to go home and relax,” said Capt. Clay Duncan, 28.
Before he did that, however, he pulled a wrinkled red envelope from a cargo pocket in the pants of his desert camouflage uniform and handed it to his wife, Nadia, 25.
“This is too good to be true,” Duncan said as she clutched the Valentine.
Staff writer Erin Emery can be reached at 719-522-1360 or eemery@denverpost.com.
