Army Husband

If Mom's a G.I., who baby-sits?

It was Purple Hearts and flowers from the start. He was in the Air Force; she was in the Army. They fell in love while they were studying broadcasting and journalism, respectively, at the Defense Information School in Indianapolis. And then they carried on a long-distance romance between New Mexico's Holloman Airbase, where he was assigned to a supply unit, and Fort Lee, Va., where she worked as an Army journalist. Personnel officers at both bases assured them that he would have no difficulty transferring to a supply unit in Fort Lee, so Private First Class Richard Venema, then 21, and Sergeant Elayne Chalifour, then 19, decided to join forces. In 1977 they got married.

Then the military began behaving according to tradition. Richard was told he could not transfer to Fort Lee after all; the supply units were incompatible. He was unable to get a job anywhere near Fort Lee, nor could Elayne transfer to New Mexico. Richard even tried to transfer to the Army--to no avail. Exasperated by months of snafus, Richard resigned from the Air Force and joined Elayne at Fort Lee. There he eventually found a job as a salesman in a department store. No sooner had he done so than the Army transferred her to West Berlin on an "unaccompanied tour," with no accommodation for a spouse. Richard went along anyway; this time he settled for work as a handyman. Soon there was a new complication on the domestic front. "The baby was planned," says Richard. "The situation after Stephen's birth was not."

The couple's tactical problem: Who would guard the home front, with Momma in the front lines? Obviously Poppa, since in these days of deflated dollars Yanks in Germany can no longer easily afford such amenities as full-time baby sitters. So Richard dutifully quit his job once more. In increasingly liberated America, househusbands are becoming an accepted part of life. But in the macho world of the military, Richard is an unassimilable anomaly: as far as his military neighbors were concerned, he might as well have bartered away Pentagon secrets. Explains Richard: "The husbands won't talk to me, because I do 'womanly' things and they work." And their wives are no more sympathetic, barely acknowledging his presence when he does the family wash in the basement laundry of the military apartment complex where the Venemas live. Nor is life any easier at the PX; every time Richard goes there he seems to have to explain to yet another puzzled clerk that his wife is the soldier, he the dependent. Grousing does not help: "Nobody listens to me because nobody has to listen to me."

Difficult as their plight may seem, the Venemas are soldiering on. But they may not do battle much longer. Elayne's tour of duty is up in 1980, and she will re-enlist only if the Army assigns her to a U.S. city, where Richard can pursue his dream of becoming a disc jockey. Meanwhile, he continues to care for their five-month-old son during the day and take business courses at night. Undaunted, the couple is considering a second child.

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