This time last summer Sharon, who asked that her last name not be used, was the typical wife of an Army pilot deployed to Iraq. She was expending a lot of energy on just surviving. But like most military spouses, she supported her husband in what he had chosen to do, and for what he believed in.

Her husband’s deployment meant she was wearing two hats, both mother and father to two children, 6 and 10. She mowed the lawn, kept the house, paid the bills, and laid awake at night worrying about her husband’s safety.

But she didn’t mind the extra work.

“It was all doable because there was relief in the friendships with other women who were experiencing the same in their day-to-day lives,” she said. “We vented to each other and took care of each other. We weren’t isolated because we were there for each other.”

Sharon, 36, is once again struggling to survive, but this summer for very different reasons. She is separated from a husband she says “came back from Iraq a changed man.”

As she sits in my living room, looking anxious and worn, Sharon tries to explain what went wrong in her marriage.

“I struggle to understand what happened and make sense of it,” she says. “All I know is that once he came home he was there physically, but emotionally he was absent.”

Shortly after returning from Iraq, her husband took up with another woman. It was a relationship, he told Sharon, that didn’t demand that he deal with parenting and a wife who wanted him to share wartime experiences.

The reunion of couples after long deployments and the post-deployment processes are complex and poorly understood. So complex that many military marriages are not surviving the transition.

In a military mental health survey done in Iraq in 2006, 20 percent of soldiers interviewed (both men and women) said they or their spouses were planning a divorce; that is up 5 percent from a year earlier.

Things tend to deteriorate even more once soldiers return home, but there aren’t any statistics on this because the Army doesn’t follow up. In many cases, the wife wants to talk about what happened, to try to understand, and the husband is reluctant to discuss it.

The Army appears to be aware that there are problems with military marriages.

Kathy Matties, a Mobilization Deployment Specialist at the Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, says there are services that assist spouses during their husbands’ deployments. There is the Spouse Battle Mind Class, and services offered by the Family Advocacy Center and the Family Readiness Center.

There is also the Strong Bonds program offered by Army Chaplains in which couples go on weekend retreats designed to strengthen relationships, inspire hope, rekindle marriages, and heal relationships.

When I ask Sharon if she and her husband had taken advantage of such programs, she said she had never heard of them.

“The Army doesn’t send out literature about support services to spouses,” she says. “And if our husbands are told about them, they are hesitant to take part because of the stigma.

“If my husband went to his commander and admitted to problems in our marriage, he would end up with a strike against him, because to not be able to handle your wife and personal life is frowned upon by the Army.”

So the Army’s efforts seem to be falling short.

Sharon’s marriage had, at least partly become a victim of the military experience. And programs that are in place to help support military marriages aren’t working.

While soldiers may get counseling pre-deployment, when I asked Kathy Matties about programs to assist soldiers in combat zones process their emotions, she had no response.

In the combat zone, the focus is on getting the job done, not on the psychological effects of the job, nor on how it will affect his marriage and family. But even while a soldier is a warrior, he is also a son, husband, or father back home.

Battlefield programs could support soldiers in the field. Such programs might strengthen military marriages instead of turning them into broken marriages.

It is a common stereotype that while the soldier is eating rations and being shot at, the soldier’s wife is at home foolishly spending his money, having affairs and demanding a divorce. From my own experience as a military spouse, and what I have seen around me, nothing could be further from the truth.

The majority of military spouses are their husband’s most steadfast supporters. They make as many sacrifices as their husbands do, but don’t earn the same respect. The left-behind military spouse runs the show while the Army holds out to the world that it is an “Army Family Unit.”

Turn around re-deployment is especially stressful to military marriages. But the Army has yet to recognize and understand how important marital support is.

It is time to turn a spotlight on military marriages, and the damage caused by repeated deployments. In some cases, it is impossible for the soldier to transition back to an active role in his marriage.

Until the Army implements programs that deal with psychological issues during deployment, military spouses may be greeted at the door by a stranger. Even the strongest marriage is in danger of collapse under such stress.

Just ask Sharon, whose 12-year marriage is dead, because of a soldier’s military experiences. She considers her marriage an uncounted casualty of war.