I’d like to say that once I finished boot camp, got married, and settled into my first duty station things got better.
I’d love to be able to tell you that it was a piece of cake balancing military careers with family time.
It would be wonderful if I could explain how easy it is to line up two military careers using the instructions set forth by the military for cases like ours.
However, this is real life and real life is not so easy.
I learned that there is a big gap in the military when it comes to resources for dual military couples. Not only are there giant loopholes in instructions that allow dual military couples to be stationed halfway across the world from each other, there are also ones that allow commands to dictate what financial allowances their service members can and cannot receive.
You see, there is an instruction for BAH that deals solely with dual military couples. It outlines which member is considered a member with dependents should the couple have children and which one is considered a single member. It outlines that both members are allotted single BAH if there are no children involved. It outlines that members are entitled to BAH even if they are not geographically located together. It even outlines the exact number of miles apart a couple can be in order to be considered stationed in the same area (90 miles for those who are curious.)
But this wonderful instruction means very little because of the fine print that states a members command can regulate all of these things outside of what the main instruction says. Want to know what that translates to?
My husband and I were stationed 502 miles apart for over 3 years and he never once received BAH.
In fact, when my command stepped up and got involved to try and help us out, his command told us I shouldn’t be getting BAH either!
That’s not the only instruction that is out there that sometimes gets pushed to the back burner in order to achieve the needs of the military over the needs of military families. In the Navy, dual-military couples are set up on a rotation that is supposed to ensure only one member is on sea duty at a time. This is supposed to ensure that couples with children won’t be deployed at the same time. Yet that instruction is set to the side when needs of the Navy come calling and all of the sudden both parents are deployed and children are being shuffled to extended family until the overlap is no longer an issue.
