Reporting from Marydel, Del., and Los Angeles — It's easy to tell 1st Sgt. Patrick Olechny is away. The freezer is stocked with single-serving dinners. The TV is off and, at nearly 8 p.m., the living room is dark.
Olechny is at war in Afghanistan, on his fourth tour of combat duty. His wife, Veda, is waiting for his return — in time for Thanksgiving, she prays each night.
War sets the rhythm for military families like theirs: Home by 9, in case he beeps on Skype. Cellphone charged, in case he calls. No point buying pot roast; she can't finish it herself.
But for just about everyone else, the war is easy to ignore. In this turbulent election season — amid the talk of "tea parties" and the economy and President Obama's approval rating and the fight to control Congress and bailouts and deficits and fear and anger — there is little mention of Afghanistan or Iraq.
"I hate to say we've moved on, but politically and from an election standpoint there's nobody out there trying to prosecute this as an issue," said Evan Tracey, whose Campaign Media Analysis Group tracks political advertising nationwide. "There's no discussion in any detail in any campaign that I've seen at any level, state or federal."
Even here in the shadow of Dover Air Force Base, where the coffins come home, the political conversation is not about war but witchcraft — a youthful dalliance of Republican Senate hopeful Christine O'Donnell — and whether her Democratic rival, Chris Coons, was only joking when he described himself in a college essay as "a bearded Marxist."
Veda doesn't blame people for their inattention. They have troubles of their own. "People are busy with their lives because of the economy. It's understandable," she says. "A wife sitting at home waiting for a soldier to finish deployment, that's her focus every day. You want to tell people about it, then you realize they really aren't interested."
The United States is now in the ninth year of the longest conflict in its history, fought by 150,000 troops on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq at a cost of more than $1 trillion. That is considerably more than the ultimate price of the much-debated Troubled Asset Relief Program, which bailed out automakers, banks and a handful of insurers.
Yet neither party has much incentive to discuss the fighting half a world away.
Democrats are pleased with the winding down of U.S. involvement in Iraq, but divided over Obama's decision to escalate efforts in Afghanistan; they don't want to pile onto a president already in political trouble.
Republicans, unhappy with Obama's opposition to the Iraq war when he ran for president, tend to agree with his approach in Afghanistan; but they aren't about to praise the Democratic commander in chief in the middle of the midterm campaign.
But for the Olechnys, avoidance is not an option.
He's 57, she's 56. They live in a double-wide trailer on two acres they bought 37 years ago on the Maryland- Delaware border. They grew up on the Delaware side, where chickens outnumber people 300 to 1.
He used to chase her around the playground in grade school. At 16, she was engaged. At 17, he joined the Army and went to Vietnam. She wrote him every day. They married as soon as he returned, before she even graduated.
Veda figured her husband's combat days were over, and for 25 years they were. He trained in Vietnam to fix helicopters, which proved a valuable skill back home. He was hired by the Army National Guard as a civilian mechanic. He also joined the Guard, which meant a weekend a month of soldiering and two weeks in the summer. She was OK with that.
Then in 1996, at age 43, he volunteered to go to Bosnia. Who goes to war at 43? And where is Bosnia? Veda was confused. Nine weeks later he came home in one piece. "I told him if he ever did that again I would divorce him," she remembers, laughing.
Years passed. Then came Sept. 11, 2001, followed by the war in Iraq. In the summer of 2004, Olechny's unit was called. "I swear Veda, I did not volunteer," he told her. It didn't matter. He had a skill his country needed. At 51, he was headed back to war.
The way the military is structured, service members and their families can be inconspicuous. The active-duty force is tucked away on far-off installations — Ft. Hood on the plains of Texas, Ft. Benning in the piney woods of Georgia.
"They train in remote areas, then get on a plane and go," said Norbert R. Ryan Jr., a retired Navy vice admiral and president of the Virginia-based Military Officers Assn. of America. "Out of sight, out of mind."
For members of the National Guard and Reserves — civilians like Olechny called up for war — the isolation seems even more acute. They are sprinkled throughout 3,000 or so communities across the country, attached to no base, no military housing, no ready group of people like them.
