UNWILLINGLY WED TO THE WAR

O'Fallon, Ill.

In the six years I've been a military wife and a Nation reader (introduced to it by my Army officer husband), I've seen my viewpoints reflected in your pages but not my life. Karen Houppert's excellent "Against the War but Married to It" [Nov. 10] remedied that. My husband deployed for six months following 9/11, leaving me alone with our two small children, scrambling to explain to them, and myself, why he was gone. If I squinted hard, skipped past Alexander Cockburn's columns and deleted my ZNet e-mail before reading it, I could almost see the justification for the invasion of Afghanistan. It wasn't how I thought Bush should have responded to 9/11, but the fact that the invasion had support even on the left made it a little easier to convince myself that it served a greater good. I've told my husband it's a good thing he has not (yet) been deployed to Iraq, since I can't see managing to perform the same hat trick on myself this time around.

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