War's toll on marriage: study proves war veterans have higher divorce rate, but Vietnam vets have lower rate than public perception

VFW Magazine, March, 2003 by Janie Blankenship

Note: Though "combat" is used in the study, it is not clear whether the individual merely served in the war zone.

It's no secret that Vietnam veterans are more likely to get divorced than their non-veteran counterparts. And it's also no secret that if you believe this to be true, you've bought into the age-old media bias against Vietnam vets.

In fact, a recent study published in. Armed Forces & Society--"Warfare and Welfare: Military Service, Combat and Marital Dissolution"--proves the divorce rate among Vietnam veterans serving during 1968 and later is equal to non-veterans. Furthermore, pre-1968 Vietnam veterans are more likely to have remained married than non-veterans.

Conducted by professors William Ruger and Sven Wilson, as well as Navy veteran Shawn Waddoups, this study also found Korean War vets to have the most unstable track record with marriage--twice the dissolution rate of WWII vets. In comparison to non-veterans of their generation, vets of Korea were 26% more likely to get divorced. To gather such information, researchers analyzed data from the National Survey of Families and Household.

Researchers attributed this to such factors as a sense of inferiority compared to WWII vets. The homecoming vets of the "forgotten war" received paled in comparison, leaving many feeling isolated. The study found it probable that such "social stresses" could lead to divorce. Of course, these are all just theories.

The Real Truth

The most telling piece of this study--which surveyed 442 vets of WWII, 217 of Korea and 471 of Vietnam--is its candor in dealing with the truth about Vietnam War vets.

"The cultural tale that Vietnam veterans came home a messed-up lot, unable to form successful marriages, simply is not supported by the data," wrote the researchers.

One strain of the study does tie all three wars together: a correlation between vets who saw combat and those who did not. Little was revealed to determine why combat is detrimental to marriages. Commonsense, though, shows that dealing with life-threatening situations is tremendously emotionally disturbing. However, researchers agree: "The effect of combat is the nature of military service that matters, not necessarily its length."

The bottom line: the marriages of the men studied who actually served in combat were 62% more likely to end in divorce or separation, according to the study.

This "combat stress hypothesis" suggests that combat established psychological and emotional problems in some that would increase the risk of divorce.

Another reasoning used was the "hasty marriage hypothesis," where a couple would wed due to a draft notice or a call to sign up to go to war. This might have something to do with the increase in divorce among those veterans who were married before entering the service. The divorce rate among Americans jumped from 1.9 per 1,000 in 1939 to 4.6 in 1946.

This study, which The Associated Press calls "the largest and most comprehensive of its time," was written to prompt policymakers to cushion a combat veteran's return home.