BALANCING

Headlines versus heartlines.

Against a backdrop of media reports about escalating attacks that seem to be “ongoing, nonstop” as Jennifer Rossin puts it, being an Information Age military spouse brings a knot of colliding, sometimes contradictory, information and emotions.

“As much as it worries me, I still watch [the news],” Jennifer Rossin said, adding that CNN is “one of the few channels we get” at her Wiesbaden housing unit.

But she and others talk about disconnects between media reports and what they’re hearing directly from their soldiers in Iraq. Soldiers, they say, talk or write about being bored, homesick, exhilarated by the adventure or exhausted by the heat. But rarely do they directly mention attacks...

Asked whether she believes the media or her husband on the ground, she answers without pausing: “I believe what my husband tells me.”