COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

The Los Angeles Times digs into the dark side of military family life.Yep, there's a few faithless skank ho' spouses and girlfriends in every unit. The vast majority of them are nothing like the scumsuckers portrayed here.

To girls who grow up around Killeen, or who land here courtesy of the Army, a soldier is considered an excellent catch — steady paycheck, health benefits, guaranteed housing.

Stability like that can be irresistible in a part of the country where earning $12 an hour is considered top dollar for a woman.

Still, when Owen met a young soldier two weeks before he left for Iraq in the spring, she declined his absurd marriage proposal — he was, after all, already married, and she'd had enough of that.

But when he asked her to handle his finances while he was off manning the gun on top of a tank, she agreed. He left her his ATM card, his pass code, a book of signed checks and instructions to spend some money on herself.

The thousands that accumulated in his account was irresistible, and she soon became the sort of woman she had seen so many others in Killeen become.

First, she went to Wal-Mart and bought her daughters a $400 motorized bicycle. That was followed by clothes for all three of them, a DVD player and a television set for the girls' room. She took one of the blank checks and paid her April rent. There were a few nights of $600 rounds of drinks for her friends at one of the local strip clubs. When the soldier's $10,000 reenlistment bonus came through, there was no stopping her.

"I got caught up on my bills and bought clothes for me and my girls," she said, laughing weakly. "It was nothing he didn't know about. He knew about most of it. He knew I was taking money out of his account. He just didn't know how much."

About $5,000 later, the soldier — who still is in Iraq and could not be reached for comment — caught on.

He called Owen at work to say he was cutting her off. She left the law office for lunch five minutes early, intending to withdraw all she could. When the machine spit the card back, she was furious.

"I was thinking to myself — and this is how these women think — I should have kept some in my own account so I'd have money," Owen said. "Because all of a sudden, that was it."

Having that money, she said, was like an addiction. To buy new quilts for the girls' beds, to drop steaks into the cart at the market, was glorious. Now back to living paycheck to paycheck, half of her brain tells her she did something terribly wrong, and the other half says to do it again if given the chance.

"I felt like if he was that stupid to have known me for two weeks and given me his ATM card, that's what he gets," she said, the tears in her eyes competing with the harsh words. "I tell myself I'm like a Good Samaritan, trying to get these soldiers to quit doing that. I know, it's monstrous."

This wench is one narcissistic, sociopathic woman! But at least she's struggling with it, a little bit. Or playing the part, anyway. Maybe she'll grow up in time.

One soldier's wife in my unit never wrote or contacted her husband in the entire year he was overseas. No letter, no email, nothing.

Another soldier received a video of his wife having sex with another man when he was away.

And then there's the bankruptcies, the illnesses, the nervous breakdowns - all of them had a significant effect on deployed soldiers, and took a lot of leadership's time and attention to help soldiers deal with it.

I don't hear about all of them. And I only know about a small fraction of the hundreds of small family dramas that played out privately in the lives of my soldiers while I was overseas. A lot of times the NCOs just sort of keep that to themselves.

That said, there are super spouses, moms, and girlfriends in every unit, too. And a lot of them were working overtime to be surrogate moms and big sisters to the younger women who were struggling with fidelity, money problems, depression, drug and alcohol addiction, problem children, and who knows what else.

And again, we soldiers don't know the half of that, either.