By Michael Matza

FORT BRAGG, N.C. - In a place where a popular joke has it that "if the Army wants you to have a family, they issued you one," nearly everyone knows the story of a soldier who stood on the tarmac amid a joyous homecoming ceremony only to be told that his wife wanted a divorce.

Or of a wife five months pregnant, with a husband who was in the Persian Gulf for seven months.

Or of a soldier who returned to a bank account drained by a girlfriend using his power of attorney.

Or of a soldier who wears the hero's mantle uneasily.

Most Desert Storm veterans are not reliving nightmare firefights. Nor are they suffering the homecoming rejections experienced by veterans of Vietnam. Amid a frenzy of popular patriotism, most are basking in the glow of glory. For a significant minority, however, Desert Storm has produced a storm of desertions. Having lived apart from spouses or live-in lovers for up to nine months, hundreds of soldiers just back from the Persian Gulf are finding it hard in some cases impossible to return to those relationships.

Although the Army expects domestic friction after a long deployment, lawyers and others here say they have never seen such an explosion of marital discord not after Panama, not after Grenada. They attributed the difference this time to the intensity of the war, the prolonged bombing and the "extra stresses," including images of captured pilots paraded on Iraqi television. And although statistics are not yet available, the problems at Fort Bragg probably are not limited to one base or one branch of the military, a spokesman for the local Vet Center said.

Here in Cumberland County _ home to 270,000 people, 97,000 of them soldiers and their dependents _ more than the usual number of military families are splitting up. Before the gulf deployment, Renee Rorhrock, a lawyer in nearby Fayetteville who specializes in family law, averaged 50 separation cases a month involving GIs. Since the soldiers began returning two months ago, she has handled 300 such cases. Marriage counselors and social-service workers report similar increases.

Geron Gambill, director of Contact, a 24-hour civilian crisis hotline, said Fort Bragg chaplains he had worked with were bracing for "double the normal rate of divorce" through the end of the year. Because 50 percent of the GIs involved in the Persian Gulf war were married, compared with 20 percent from the Vietnam era, proportionately more will encounter marital problems,, social workers said. Retired Army Chaplain Jim Johnson, minister of counseling at Fay-etteville's Snyder Memorial Baptist Church, said the vast majority of Fort Bragg's 18,000 marriages were rock solid. But he estimated that the war had seriously destabilized at least 500.

"From a mental health standpoint, that's a significant number," said Mr. Johnson, who predicted "the bulk is yet to come" because returnees and their families would have the added stress of reassignments soon.

Soldiers and wives interviewed said untested marriages, and those involving younger couples without family or church support, were especially at risk.

“You've got a 17-year-old private's wife sitting back here getting her husband's check while he's deployed," said Sgt. Keith Thrasher of the Airborne Military Police, "and chances are she didn't want to be here in the first place."

Carolyn Malkinski, a public affairs assistant with the 18th Airborne CoJUS, said chaplains "are feeling a little burnt out at this point." None agreed to be interviewed for this article.

In March, the county's Family Violence Care Center, which operates a 14-bed shelter for battered women, registered a slight increase in admissions from military couples after the GIs returned, which director Maria Constas attributed to readjustment stress.

"We've been saying that marriage is one of the casualties of Desert Storm," said lawyer Debra Radtke. While attending court two weeks ago, Radtke said, she watched as six solders sought custody of their kids. Alegal question Dfeach case, the soldier alleged that his wife was an unfit parent because she was sexually unfaithful during the months he was away. One case involved a GI who returned to find his wife living with another man.

Rothrock tells of a soldier's wife who was carrying another man's child. She was due to deliver before her husband came home. She wanted to know whether she could give the child up for adoption without her husband's finding out. The legal answer was no. In one case, a member of a triangle was killed. Less than 24 hours after returning from the Gulf, Airman First Class William R. May Jr., 20, was shot to death and dumped on a Fort Bragg tank trail. Police arrested and charged a man who was living with May’s girlfriend at the soldier's trailer home.

Radtke said lawyers "probably get a harped perspective because we only see people who have problems." She emphasized that the cases also have included "girls who waited patiently only to find that hubby was having sex in Saudi and doesn't want his wife anymore."

Day-care director Debra Miles, whose Kiddie Kastle Preschool serves 90 Fort Bragg families, said one symptom of infidelity had surfaced when children started talking about "uncles" they had never mentioned before. "A lot of 'uncles' showed up and I don't mean kin," Miles recalled. Some mothers were desperate to find weekend baby sitters and arrived some mornings looking as if they had just returned from a date. "I got irked by it," said Miles. "After a while, I just couldn't find more sitters. I wasn't going to participate."

Ordinarily, just two or three of Miles' military families separate in a year's time. In the two months since GIs began returning, Miles has heard of eight separations involving Kiddie Kastle's military families. "One," she said, "was not a shocker. They were in trouble before Daddy left." She attributed the others to the war.

Fayetteville psychologist Ann Clark, whose clients include married soldiers, said partners had tended to idealize each other while apart. After "homecoming honeymoons," old problems surfaced fast. Some, said Clark, came to a stark realization: "I enjoyed missing you more than I enjoy having you around." Others grew apart after spouses forced to become self-reliant learned to like the independence. "You've got a man who was head of a household. He comes back after six months, and suddenly his wife is taking a leading role," said a soldier who asked not to be identified.

For some, the label "hero," and the outpouring of a grateful nation, has proved a bit unnerving. Suddenly soldiers are public property, just when their families need them most. Clark has two sons who served in the gulf, a 30-year-old on active duty and a 28-year-old reservist. The younger man was still wearing desert camouflage when he changed planes in Atlanta. "This little old lady came up to him and said: 'Can I hug you? I'm so grateful to you,'" Clark recalled. "Meanwhile, he was thinking, 'Is this someone I helped across the street once?'"

For soldiers who performed bravely but unheroically, there is pressure "to come up with war stories," Clark said. "One of my boys said, 'Should I have gotten shot?' Like that would validate it. I thought that was kind of sad."

The waiting room of the Raintree Clinic, a family counseling center on Bragg Boulevard, is decorated with yellow ribbons, a map of the gulf and a stencil proclaiming, "We Support Operation Desert Storm." Clinic director John Vaughn, a psychologist and Vietnam veteran, has noted several traits in common among Desert Storm soldiers he has counseled. Whether they fired a shot in anger, all lived with the knife-edge stress of a possible Scud or gas attack. After months in "high-gear" readiness, some returnees are extremely impatient. Others have withdrawn from family "so as not to go off on anybody," in the vernacular of soldiers. Still others returned to adolescent children who "broke bad" while their father was away.

For some soldiers, there are searing memories as well. Second Lt. Darren Klemens, 23, served with the 37th Engineer Battalion of the Combat Airborne. He said the men in his battalion were "insulated from trauma and butchery." But they did come upon dead Iraqi soldiers, especially near the Euphrates River, an area that took a heavy pounding from U.S. planes. In war-game exercises, Klemens said, troops wearing sophisticated electronic gear play "million-dollar laser tag." When a soldier is "killed," his beeper goes off. "In Iraq," said Klemens, "the bodies don't beep."

Kathleen McKee, director of Lumbee River Legal Services, helped coordinate "Operation Legal Storm," a joint effort by Army and civilian lawyers to assist returnees with credit problems, overdue rents and utility shut-offs. McKee recalled that in the weeks before the ground attack, soldiers were ordered to ship all personal effects home. So wives and girlfriends and husbands and boyfriends back in Fayetteville began receiving boxes filled with cards and letters, electronics equipment, framed pictures of the kids. "Your immediate reaction is, 'This is what happens when a person dies,' " McKee said. "What we are seeing is that spouses had a hard tour of duty, too."

—The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 19, 1991