So I published this article on Salon last week and it got some attention. I got a lot of comments on the piece itself and some blogs picked it up too. It was a bizarre trip into online publishing. One thing I discovered is that if you publish online there are people who have never met you who will address you by your first name and curse you in the most vile possible way. A lot of readers keyed on the lead – which was quite obviously ironic – nothing important is ever simple, especially not the break-up of a marriage.
Jezebel linked to it and their commenters raised interesting things about the behavior of soldiers on deployment I had never thought about. Several military spouse blogs like LeftFace linked to it, and I’m still surfing an intense, profane, hate-filled anger from many (though not all) of those readers. I also heard directly from many current and ex-military who thanked me for telling my story. My family including my ex-soldier and my friends read it and understood it – but they already knew me.
What I wanted to shed a light on was how two decades of military involvement overseas has been disproportionately hard on American service members and their families – including mine. What I hadn’t planned on was that the word “marxist” would be so incendiary, nor that a woman’s wanting to define her sexuality on her own terms would be considered selfish. Salon picked the title. I wanted to call it “On Leaving a Soldier.”