{"id":494,"date":"2004-02-19T00:21:06","date_gmt":"2004-02-19T07:21:06","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2004-02-19T00:21:06","modified_gmt":"2004-02-19T07:21:06","slug":"feeling-the-strain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2004\/02\/19\/feeling-the-strain\/","title":{"rendered":"Feeling the strain"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In order to maintain troop levels in Iraq, stop-loss and stop-movement orders are preventing those who would choose to leave the military from doing so, adding to the strain on families where both husband and wife are soldiers and facing separations of as long as two years. <\/p>\n<ul><i>Brian Stewmon returned late last month from an 11\u00bd-month tour in Iraq. He got home just in time to kiss his wife goodbye and send her off on her own yearlong deployment.  \u201cWe expected separation, but we never expected two years,\u201d Michelle Stewmon said last week, just after arriving in Kuwait. \u201cPeople don\u2019t know that it\u2019s going on. They\u2019re shocked this is happening.\u201d  The Stewmons are among a small number of dual-military families taking a double-barreled hit from the Army\u2019s supercharged operations tempo the past two years.<\/p>\n<p>Servicemembers who marry know it\u2019s possible that one or both could be deployed. Most Army families have endured a South Korean or Balkans tour. But Operation Iraqi Freedom, with its one-year tours and large personnel demands, has boosted the burden to something no pre-9\/11 soldier could have imagined.<\/i><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/stripes.com\/article.asp?section=104&#038;article=20513\">&#8230; read more<\/a><\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In order to maintain troop levels in Iraq, stop-loss and stop-movement orders are preventing those who would choose to leave the military from doing so, adding to the strain on families where both husband and wife are soldiers and facing separations of as long as two years. Brian Stewmon returned late last month from an [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}