U.S. Military (Ret.): The other side: Ex-military spouse weighs in on benefits after divorce - Military Retirement - Navy Times

U.S. Military (Ret.): The other side: Ex-military spouse weighs in on benefits after divorce

The touchiest subject I’ve ever dealt with in this column is the Uniformed Services Former Spouses’ Protection Act, the law that lets state courts treat military retired pay as divisible community property in divorce cases.

Not unexpectedly, the perspective on this issue as reflected in this column comes largely from military retirees.

And because divorces often involve bitter emotions — which only intensify when significant money is also at stake — that perspective often tends to portray ex-spouses as vindictive gold-diggers.

But I recently received an e-mail from the “other side” — from the former spouse of a retired Navy chief petty officer — that I feel is worth sharing.

She said that when they wed, he was an E-4 assigned to an aircraft carrier. During their 20-year marriage, it was a “tough road” during his frequent and lengthy deployments, especially in the early years when they had two young children, and even more so when he went into the submarine service.

“I raised the children mostly by myself,” she said, adding that she didn’t work outside their home but volunteered in Navy family support efforts to “help keep morale up while the subs were out. … I loved the Navy life and I loved him.”

A year after he retired and was seeking a civilian job, “he decided he didn’t want to be married any longer and took off with a 19-year-old girl,” she said. “He was 38, I was 36. We had bought a house and he just left me with the mortgage payment. I had to go into foreclosure.”

She said she was awarded half his military retirement pay in the divorce, plus child support. She said she began receiving her share of his retirement pay, but never got any child support.

A year later, she said, he filed a disability claim with the Veterans Affairs Department — “because submarine service ‘messed him up,’ he said” — and eventually was awarded a 100 percent disability rating.

That slashed her share of his retirement pay, which was reduced by the amount of his disability compensation under previous rules that prohibited service members from getting both payments in full, known as “concurrent receipt.”

Her case was heard in a state that does not consider veterans disability compensation to be divisible in divorce cases. Now she receives “only half of the small amount of his remaining retirement pay … one-tenth of the money that I worked for right beside him for 20 years.”

“He has not worked since he retired,” she said. “I had to get a job to support my two children and myself.”

Obviously, we don’t have the Navy chief’s view here. Still, I think this former spouse’s e-mail is a useful reminder that in discussions about the USFSPA, all stories have two sides.

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Retired Command Master Chief Alex Keenan served 28 years in the Coast Guard. E-mail him at retired@militarytimes.com.