The Homefront Club

• A practical guide by `The Voice of the Military Family’ •Addresses the nuts and bolts of military life •Author’s column is read by 200,000 every week On the American homefront during the ongoing war on terror, no one is feeling the pressure more than military families. Operating tempo is expected to increase. Projected deployments are going to be longer. The United States’presence in Iraq alone is projected to be at least five years. This news means that military families who have been pressed to the limit since 9/11 are wondering just how they are going to keep the marriage together, raise a family, and maintain some semblance of normality. For the past six years, Jacey Eckhart has written a popular column, `The Homefront’, running twice weekly in the Norfolk Virginian Pilot. Through her work, she is asked frequently to speak to deploying commands, training sessions, church groups, reservists and retirees. They call her `The Voice of the Military Family’. `It is a job I love,’ she says, `but it doesn’t do enough. Every week I get requests for past columns about moving, infidelity, in-laws, kids, deployment and “that one about geographic bachelors”.’ Current books written for military families don’t cover these topics. They admirably address the nuts and bolts of military life. They tell the least initiated spouse what to call the chief and when to get in touch with Navy Relief and how to sign up for dental insurance. But they don’t offer any kind of philosophy about how to live well within the military community. Eckhart’s book addresses this need, a need that has grown all the more glaring post-9/11. Jacey Eckhart knows about what she writes in her column, which is seen by 200,000 readers twice a week; she herself is a military spouse, having been married to a navy officer for sixteen years. They have three children, have completed five and a half deployments, and have moved twelve times. She grew up in an air-force family. Highly regarded as an authority on military-family issues, she has appeared on Washington Week in Review and the Today show. Her wise and witty column is frequently reprinted in The Early Bird, a publication for senior military officials.