~ Spouses say the armory had little contact with them; the Guard says the best help comes from private groups.

@Summary Statement:By TJ GREANEY

While her husband was serving in Iraq, Paula Grass called the armory in Cape Girardeau with one simple question: She wanted to know where she could find a doctor.

Unfortunately, she said, the question happened to be one no one there could answer.

"I called because my daughter's pediatrician did not take Tricare, the health care offered to National Guard families. I just wanted to get a list of pediatricians in the area who do accept the insurance. Nobody could tell me."

Grass said she was transferred from person to person at the armory with no one able to provide the correct information. Finally she was encouraged to get a phonebook and call around to doctors' offices herself.

"Family assistance was nonexistent for us. There was no family assistance," Grass said of the help she received from the National Guard during her husband's deployment.

Grass is not alone. Of four National Guard spouses of the recently returned 35th Engineering Brigade Infantry Division interviewed, all reported scant or no contact with the local offices during their husbands' active duty. One reported going as long as 14 months without a courtesy phone call from the office. All said in order to get information on paychecks, benefits or even the status of their husbands, they were forced to rely on an informal network of other spouses and the Internet.

Seven soldiers from Cape Girardeau County and seven others from Dexter, Poplar Bluff and other towns returned home Friday.

"I basically felt like I was in the dark," said Susan Skelton of Jackson, wife of Maj. Steven Skelton.

Even more surprising to the spouses: This is how the system is meant to work. No one at the Cape Girardeau armory specializes in family assistance.

"This change was a decision made to better support our families. We're going back to the family readiness groups," said Capt. Tamara Spicer of the Guard's public affairs office in Jefferson City. "These are self-created groups of spouses and even children of Guardsmen and women. This is really the best support system there is."

In January, the Missouri National Guard chose to eliminate the Family Assistance Center at the Cape Girardeau armory. The center had previously been operated by a full-time civilian contract employee whose only job was to answer questions and provide support to family members.

As of Friday, about 1,300 Missouri Guardsmen were on active duty.

Prior to the restructuring there had been six family assistance centers around the state. The move reduced the number to the one in Jefferson City. Missouri is now one of three states nationwide to have a single family resource center serving the entire state. Illinois, by contrast, has seven.

The decision to eliminate these contract employees will save the state approximately $200,000 annually, Spicer said.

Guard officials insist there has been no dropoff in service.

"The effort was meant to better serve families by allowing them to go to their hometown armories instead of these six centers around the state," Spicer said. "We've had no complaints from a family member or a member of a unit about the change."

Capt. Scott Ratcliff, administrative officer for the 1140th Engineer Battalion, said he also thinks the system works.

"All I can say is they didn't pick up the phone and call anybody or if they did they just didn't talk to the right people. We would have had that information on hand or if not we could have called up to Jefferson City and gotten it for them," he said.

But David Grass, who returned Friday to Cape Girardeau from a 14-month tour in Baghdad, said he is disappointed at the quality of family services in the Guard.

"I think they know there are problems there," said Grass, a 23-year veteran who works as a construction engineer for the city of Cape Girardeau. "Our spouses do not get enough credit for all the things they do back at home, and I think they know with the family resource center there are just a lot of things they are lacking."

'We didn't have a choice'

The spouses of 35th Engineering Brigade ID troops said they did not launch official complaints but met twice monthly to lean on each other and swap snatches of information about their husbands and things they had found online concerning benefits.

"We didn't have a choice, so we became problem-solvers and worked things out ourselves," Skelton said.

But, said some, a helping hand would have been nice.

"It would have been nice to get a packet of information or something from them with the general whos, whats, whens and wheres we needed to know, but there wasn't really anything like that, so we took it on ourselves to figure things out," said Michelle Irvy of Jackson, wife of Maj. Bill Irvy.

The "disconnect" was so large, Irvy said, that if not for an e-mail from her husband she would have had no idea he was coming home or where to meet him.

Grass agreed. "Their job is to inform us, but I've never received one phone call," she said. "We were told 'Oh, your family resource center is going to be wonderful and they're going to keep you informed,' but what I found is there really was nothing there."

Those that did receive calls said the contact from the armory was so unexpected that it caused them to fear the worst. Michelle Doughten of Jackson, wife of Sgt. Richard Doughten, said she got a strangely formal call asking her questions about her husband without an introduction.

"I said, 'Please, if you call me, tell me who you are at first. Introduce yourself and tell me why you're calling. I'm driving down the road here and my heart about stopped,'" she said.

"So I've really had no interaction with them. We have our own support system," she said.

tgreaney@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 245