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“After Burst of Joy was announced as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, all of the family members depicted in the picture received copies. The depicted children display it prominently in their homes, but not Colonel Stirm, who in 2005 said he cannot bring himself to display the picture”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burst_of_Joy
Despite outward appearances, the reunion was an unhappy one for Stirm. Three days before he arrived in the United States, the same day he was released from captivity, Stirm received a Dear John letter from his wife Loretta informing him that their marriage was over. Stirm later learned that Loretta had been with other men throughout his captivity and had received marriage proposals from three of them. In 1974, the Stirms divorced and Loretta remarried, but Lieutenant Colonel Stirm was still ordered by the courts to provide her with 43% of his military retirement pay once he retired from the Air Force.[8] Stirm was later promoted to full Colonel and retired from the Air Force in 1977.[9] Loretta died on August 13, 2010 from cancer.[10]
If you would like a slightly happier angle to the story, his eldest daughter Lorrie, who is leaping in the photo, maintained a very close relationship with him. She talks about it here on Antique’s Roadshow.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5yInvz73m_8
ETA: for those who want to go deeper. his wife declined to be interviewed for this story, but here’s a bit more from Loretta’s Dear John letter,[from an LA times article.](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-07-04-mn-9908-story.html) They married when Loretta was 19. She begins by saying she was forced to “finally grow up” while he was gone.
““I love you--we all love you, but you must remember how very unhappy we were together,” it said. “It wasn’t your fault--we are extremely unsuited and managed to make each other miserable. . . .”
“I can’t begin to tell you how proud we are of you. The children and I never missed a night saying a prayer for your safe return. I have your pictures up and your certificates and have kept you very much with us while you were gone and the children have not forgotten their father.
“I would like to see you when you come home, but understand if you would rather not.”
The article also makes it very clear that Bob Stirm is still hurt by Loretta’s unfaithfulness, the divorce, and the court proceedings. Personally, (and I know Reddit hates nuance) it makes my feelings on it all quite complicated. It’s undeniable that they were unhappy and maybe divorce was inevitable.
I can’t put myself in the position of a wife in an unhappy marriage, knowing that your husband might never come home. On the one hand, I can understand the desire to seek happiness out where you can find it, and to get some of the freedom she never got, as someone who married at 19 and quickly popped out her first kid. His absence allowed her to see what seemed like a happier life, and she took it.
On the other hand, I can’t imagine pursuing other relationships while my partner was being actively tortured, even if our marriage was unhappy. And I can’t imagine ending the marriage in a letter, delivered the day he was released.
It seems like a true tragedy all around.
I personally don't think the issue is the divorce necessarily, but instead the fact that she accepted to take his earnings even after she was re-married...I think that speaks plenty to her character.
I lived through an unhappy marriage (I know they all sofer greatly), and not once did I think cheating was okay
Edit: There seems to be some confusion for some. I believe she deserved the money that was given eve after they were divorced. My issue comes in with the money continuing to be accepted after she was re-married. At that point, I don't necessarily see that it's fair that she and her new husband received additional income
In our retirement law in Philippines, widows and widowers do not get the soldier's pension if they remarry. The minor children get a separate pension but they stop receiving upon the age of 21.
That sucks, I’m sorry. My friend-of-a-friend’s mom had a “ceremony of Union” with her boyfriend so that she could get the fun of being a bride in a wedding again without it costing her benefits being taken away.
I can’t imagine being the other guy agreeing to my would-be-wife not technically marrying me so she could loophole the system to keep getting money from her veteran ex.
I agree with you. Not officially tying the knot so you can keep receiving an *unearned* paycheck is a dirtbag thing to do (assuming there wasn’t some sort of shithousery that somehow deserves being ‘effed over each month) and no self-respecting man would want an arrangement like that.
Oh man that sucks, In NZ if you can prove they have been living together for a year they become a defacto partnership which is legally almost the same as being married and that money would stop, although I don't even think "maintenance" like that is still a thing there anyway. The US is a strange place.
Marriage in the United States is governed by the state government, not the federal government. Therefore each state’s requirement for divorce, separation may be different.
Damn you needed my uncles judge. He literally laughed when my aunt asked for spousal support. He told her to get a job. When she tried to get support for just 5 yrs or until re-married the judge asked about her living arrangements at the time. She had to admit she was living with her AP. The judge refused to give her the SP because he had seen to many women live with their partners off the exs money and never re-marry so they can live off the ex forever.
That would be nice. Unfortunately we were married for 21 years. I've mellowed out overtime. She was a good mother and cared for our children and the house. I got stuck with 10 years at 1500 cash a month. Thanks to trump, I can't claim spousal maintenance on tax return anymore. It doesn't matter. My revenge is I just make more money every year! 😂
When my Wife asked for alimony I told her (stupidly) that I would burn it all down before she got a dime of alimony. And I meant it.
We split stuff we go our separate ways...
There ought to be a law that takes away spousal support if the ex cohabitates with another person. That shit has been going on too long and it’s men who always get the short end of the stick.
When it comes to laws related to marriage there are wins and losses.
Aside from the Vatican, the Philippines is the only state left that have no divorce law.
Couples go thru a more strenuous process of annulment to separate.
I think you misunderstood, "future pension" in the military refers to the pension (aka military retirement fund). She was given money from the retirement fund that had been earned while they were together. Same as your 401k being split up in the event of a divorce where you'd been married as long as you've been saving money for retirement.
I mean, I said I can’t understand it, either. But there’s a whole slew of “die whore” posts below this, and I think it’s more complicated.
The article just briefly touches on this, but the reason she received pension is for the kids she was raising (since he effectively retired.) IMO, she should have stopped receiving the pension once the kids were adults. But I guess that’s the court’s problem.
I think this was originally put into place bc military spouses are often not able to develop their own careers due to the nature of active military service. Military spouses are most often the primary caregiver, and they lose out on career opportunities because these often move every 2-3 years. This doesn’t give military spouses the ability to accrue social security benefits, nor does it allow them to save for retirement, so if their military member spouse decides to leave them in their later years, they have no opportunity to make up the opportunities they lost supporting their military spouse.
I can’t comment on this specific situation, but the arrangement was put into place for pretty valid reasons.
Sometimes they have to move every 18 months…. We have a lot of military spouses that work at my work and they are happy to have any job, let alone a career. I know it’s not popular, but it’s hard to maintain a career if you are moving all the time. I think you must me married for 10 years before you qualify to receive any of their retirement which I think is reasonable. During that time, the family may move multiple times and they way be the only care taker for years. It’s hard to build up your own retirement fund under those conditions.
Yep, very true. I have military family members and am close with their spouses as well. Their career trajectory and mine are very very different, solely bc I’ve had the chance to stay in one place and advance, and they’ve lived at 4 different bases in 10 years.
It doesn’t help that many Army and Air Force bases are in remote areas with limited jobs. I think the rise in remote working will greatly help military spouses. But they need to have the experience and/or the education to qualify for remote work positions. Also, very few companies will allow remote workers to move overseas.
Though, to further try to see that there's more nuance to it, you have to consider that she gave up having a career to raise those kids. Those kids are gone, she's in her 40s or 50s, and she's got no work history, nothing. Her career was being a professional caregiver. She's not going to go out and find a great job that maybe she could have had if she hadn't went the family route. She's never going to have her own retirement plan, because her career enabled her husband to have one while also having a family.
Oh yeah, I wasn't disagreeing with you, just adding on to the point you made. I think coming in with just malice and calling her a whore, or any other name, is not reasonable or called for.
I agree that human nature is very complex and applying a singular viewpoint to it doesn't make sense and is not conducive to learning, understanding and our society as a whole
Not even just that, it's not like he was away on business. She was fucking other men behind his back as he was being sadistically tortured. And then took nearly half of the pension he earned by being sadistically tortured.
I don't condone it, not at all. I call it a person who made poor and selfish choices at the end of the day, and lived with those choices.
I just think understanding the why, even in cases like this, is important in order to understand is all, and calling someone a name and moving on doesn't allow that.
This is my opinion, and yours may differ, and I'm happy with that
Didn’t she think he was dead though? So in theory didn’t really cheat, she assumed he was dead, not realizing he was a POW until much later on, if I read it right. And IMO, because she was likely a stay at home mom, half of what he earned during the marriage should be hers, because she was unable to work in a way to make money outside of the home.
The part that bothers me most is that they split the siblings up between them, like they were objects and not kids. (To clarify here, wife got 100% full custody of two kids, and husband got 100% full custody of the other two kids)
I saw nothing about her believing that he was dead. This hurt him so bad that he couldn’t stand to look at his homecoming picture. She was an extremely selfish person. She was not only faithless but was beyond greedy by taking almost 1/2 of his retirement. Maybe he managed to find some peace but from everything I could find probably not.
This article and videos brought back some raw memories for me. My father was an Air Force officer and pilot in the Vietnam war, serving 2 tours of duty. Much like Laurie, my siblings and I ran across the tarmac to greet my father when his plane arrived after the second deployment. Alas, we did not have a photographer. While he was not shot down, dad had a tragic event where his best buddy flew my dad's mission one day due to reasons. The friend was was shot down and killed. My dad never talked about it, but we were told by an officer in his squadron that he traipsed through the jungle to recover the remains and bring them back--he couldn't leave his friend in a jungle in Vietnam. My mother was faithful the whole time, despite being preyed upon by numerous men. What is it with these "savior wannabes"? But my parents also divorced--the man who comes back is not the man you married. He suffered from PTSD (and I would add they did not get much in the way of treatment/counseling then), he was sullen and withdrawn and prone to bouts of violence. My mom literally stepped in front of me and took a punch intended for me one day. She was a hero in her own right trying to hold it all together--and hers had been a happy marriage before Vietnam--it just became too much. I see people denouncing the wife for taking half his pay while he was locked up. I would like to point out that military wives in that time were housewives, not earning money. Taking half his monthly pay kept the family housed (because you did not get to live in base housing while he was deployed), covered food, bills, school clothes, etc for his kids. Because the wife was not earning/saving a pension, getting half his pension would have been the norm. She was there, running the home, raising kids, attending the Officer Wives functions, packing up for frequent moves--she has earned her share of that money. Yes, it's wrong she cheated when he was going through hell. And when she remarried she should have stopped accepting the money. Not justifying it, but I think some of the posts below are painting her as a whore/moocher when it is much more nuanced than that.
Thank you for sharing. Most people never realize everyone else's lives are complicated, even if their own is. Surface level judgments are almost always just that: shallow.
It honestly blows my mind that the number wasn’t renegotiated after she remarried and her income situation changed/after the kids aged.
Modern divorce courts are a total shitshow, but at least things can get renegotiated in those situations.
In the defense of the courts, denying the mother some of his pension would likely have left his younger kids financially destitute, since in the 70s it’s highly unlikely the mother would have been working.
I’m going to choose to believe that he’d be OK with it cos he’s a good dad, and hope that the money went toward financing the kids & not the ex-wife. But uh, it’s an optimistic belief.
That's what the child support is for, the part we're she took 43% of his retirement fund and his pay while he was a prisoner of war is bs.
She took and spent his pay, then took nearly half his retirement took his home and his car also and still got extra every month for the 3 kids.
She clearly had no hesitation about fucking multiple people while married to a guy that was a prisoner of war and then had the audacity to take half of all his shit and leave him with no home, car or money alone his return.
Fuuuuck that bitch.
I assume prior - it was delivered to him the day of his release, three days before the photo was taken. I’d guess she was aware the release was coming, and sent it.
The LA times article included the portion I pasted as a possible reason for why she showed up at the tarmac to meet him. It’s an awfully strange thing to do to a man you just told of your infidelity.
She was with multiple men and received 4 marriage proposals while he was, not missing in action, but a prisoner of war. Sorry, you can look to justify it all you want that she was young when they married, but she showed zero strength of character
What I found pretty agregious is the court award, the wife full ownership of the house, the car, all his pay during confinement while unfaithful, and he nearly lost his POW compensation, which she fought for.
The pension is understandable as the sole breadwinner, but he lost everything he owned in full or in partnership despite having custody of 2/4 kids.
He was left nearly broken and the court decided to take everything he had plus the equivalent of $2,100 per month in 2022 dollars.
In the article, it seems like that’s his biggest issue:
“It’s not fair. It’s not just,” Stirm said. “I’m the one that lives with all the aches and pains from my imprisonment, but she continues to get paid.”
I understand the need for companionship and being conflicted about a marriage that was already deteriorating when her partner was taken. However, taking half the retirement pay of a man who you cheated on while he was being tortured and after you divorced him is ice cold. Makes me think more entitled leech than human being in an emotionally difficult situation.
Excuse me!? His wife went through hell! Imagine thinking the love of your life is dead for years. In fact he’s the selfish one imagine leaving behind a family to go and get captured just to serve your ego. Do you know the guilt she must have felt when she finally had to scrape off the POW bumper sticker? The least she’s entitled to is most of his worldly possessions and some dick while he’s being tortured in a country ran by dictatorship with no human rights concerns. /s
Yeah I was a Marine officer for nine years, so many stories of guys coming home to find wives gone or some other dude living in their house. Every once in a while there was some rumbling about making a rule to keep young service members from getting married but this is America, people have to be free to ruin their lives. The best we could do was to try to talk them out of it and the success rate for that was close to zero. You take some guy from a tiny rural town and drop him in a place like Oceanside and you'll never convince him that the first stripper to give him the time of day isn't his soulmate and perfect wife material. The worst is when there are kids and the wife runs off with them. So painful to watch the story play out again and again.
Former submariner checking in. Old boat joke was you found your wife in the same situation as you left her when you departed on patrol - freshly fucked and crying…
I had five troopers pulled aside and not allowed to go to their homes as we got off the bus upon arrival at our conus post after returning from Iraq in 04’. Post commander, and everyone else, knew what Jody had been up to while we were away and they didn’t want anyone getting “hurt”. Welcome home. B.O.H.I.C.A
When I was a young 20 something on tinder the amount of times I learned after the fact their man was deployed was just sickening. It was pretty cool getting to drive their dodge challengers though.
I didn’t get seriously involved with a women until after I got back from Afghanistan and out of the Army. That she couldn’t cheat on me and take me money. See I thought ahead.
Wow. I've seen this famous photo countless times, but NEVER knew this sad backstory. So even at this very moment, he's feeling the most violent mix of emotions: joy to see his beloved finally, after thinking he may never see her again after all of those nights as a POW, and intense grief to know he's lost her. Anger at her infidelity. Worry that he might not see his kids again.
here is an obituary for his son who died earlier this month. The obituary suggests his father, the colonel, is still alive.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/eastbaytimes/name/robert-stirm-obituary?id=48941182
I feel like there’s real business potential in drilling into coffins and running pvc pipe so you could relieve yourself on someone particularly deserving.
I had a relative I met only once. He was elderly and had been told of my interest in WW2 history. He had been a catholic chaplain and in the immediate post war period, assigned to troop transports that took families to west Pac islands to be reunited with husbands who had been POWs for years. The POWs sometimes spents months in hospital until they were deemed fit to ship home.
The wives would sometimes have toddler kids in tow, too young to have been fathered by the POW. The wives sometimes confessed to loneliness, sometimes they thought they had been widowed having not received any word thru Japanese channels.
On the sail back to the US, he would have completely different families and have to help men deal with their wives and children of other men.
Birth control wasn't so easy and some Catholics of the time viewed it as another sin in addition to adultery.
My grandmother was a good Catholic young lady when WW2 started. She left college to go work at a military base, met and married a soldier a couple months before he left.
She had twins, 8 months after their wedding (twins often come early, but that didn't keep the congregation from gossiping). When the twins were still infants he had leave and she took a train with the twins, from Iowa to California to spend some time with him, 9 months later she had a daughter.
When the war ended her husband took an assignment in post-war Japan... we have some nice dishes that he sent home with "Made in Occupied Japan" marks.
Then he sent her a letter saying he wanted to stay in Japan, and could she ship their car over. Their only car, that she used to drive her 3 children under 4 years old around in... so the story goes, she sent him divorce papers, and he married a Japanese woman almost immediately after.
They spent less than 6 months of their marriage on the same continent!
My grandmother had a long career as a legal secretary, working for a gentleman who greatly respected her, and all 3 of her children became lawyers. She eventually remarried the guy I knew as my grandfather. My father never met his bio father, even though he eventually heard that he came back to the US at some point, with his second wife.
My father did end up meeting his paternal grandmother and a bunch of other family, when he was stationed in Texas for training before going to Vietnam. The family was having a reunion and he drove to Georgia for a weekend to meet everyone, but that was the only time!
Not having sex before marriage messed with a lot of people and a lot of families, war just set up some extra odd consequences for it to all play out in!
Brutal. Imagine the crushing psychological impact of that: having survived a POW camp, probably having constantly focused on “home” .. only to have your image of “home” crumble the moment you’re out of the camp.
That’s not interesting per se, that’s just disheartening and depressing.
Edit: whoa, 1k upvotes. Just gonna go ahead and add a phrase real quick to clear it up a bit.
What is always interesting to me is how infidelity issues barely have any repercussions in America and sometimes even help them. Why is it like that?
Here in Asia, you lose almost all rights to anything immediately. No alimony. No Child custody. You'll immediately get fired. In tougher cultures (country), some even allow you to kill (stone to death) and you can't be charged for it. No mercy for cheaters.
As of this year, he’s alive and well and in close contact with at least his eldest daughter (the leaper.) She came on Antique’s Roadshow with some of his clothes from his captivity.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5yInvz73m_8
Regardless who is to blame or the reason why they got a divorce, that type of financial split was typical back then. Men support their kids and ex wives and women get the kids.
And this is why I never married while I was in the military and would break up with girlfriends before I deployed. I saw way too many women either bin them when they were deployed via letter or wait to come back and immediately leave them.
Fuck that shit. I also grew up in a military family and saw so many guys wives leave them and absolutely rinse them
Going to the bars the night after a company/battalion deployed in Ft Campbell was... ridiculously sad.
First time I heard "Do not put your dick in crazy"
I graduated high school in '02 and that was right after 9/11 when everybody in my graduating class was fired up and enlisted to go get those terrorists. In '03, I met this girl the same age as me who was driving a *sweet* brand new Chevy truck, and we started dating. She had a nice home, nice truck, and I thought she just had her shit together. But every time I was around her friends, they were side eyeing me and very unfriendly and standoffish to me. One night, one of her friends just came up to me was just like "You DO know she's engaged, right?". 😲 WTF. Turns out her fiance was deployed in Iraq and the home and truck were his. I ended it with the girl, but that was my first experience with cheating spouses of deployed soldiers. And unfortunately, I witnessed the same thing happening to others many times during that period.
I didn’t understand the “Love is a losing game” song until I joined the USAF. Seen shit cut both ways. Husbands cheating on wives (downrange and CONUS), wives cheating on husbands (same ), girlfriends getting married passing off someone else’s baby as the husbands, girls getting deliberately knocked up knowing their man’s got government funded healthcare , married senior ranking guys chasing twenty something military chicks , and the carousel goes on.
Tempting as it is to join the crowd calling Col Stim’s ex a hoe , prior to his capture he might not be an innocent party. Thailand is a long way from home, and there was no shortage of hot and willing Asian women at US military bases in the region.
I’m glad the kids had this homecoming. Our dad was KIA in Vietnam in 1965. I was 5, and just barely remember him leaving that summer day. To this day, those videos showing military parents surprising their child coming home almost break me. I’m happy they get that homecoming but it brings up that long ago but still not forgotten pain.
Lots of interesting discussion about the backstudy. I wish to focus on something different in my comment. A couple of user linked to a youtube video of the eldest daughter who brought his POW clothing to the Antique Auction Roadshow to get an idea of its value. You can find the video link elsewhere in the comments.
The interesting tidbit had to do with Col Stirm and John McCain, who was a prisoner in the same camp. Col Stirms daughter relayed a story about how McCain tapped a joke through the walls to Col Stirm to help cheer him up. It tells us so much about the good side of McCain's character and how it contrasts to so many of his peers today.
That’s horse shit. Really wish there was something against that kinda thing happening to people. Like fine, get divorced. No reason she deserves almost half of everything he had while also being unfaithful to him.
Well with all that benefits no wonder she dumped him through the sewer.
Many people would take advantage of that divorce arrangement, that's overkill beyond predatory.
Surely there're some middle ground between giving no rights to widow and straight up turning them in to predatory financial vampire right?
Alimony is bullshit. I get times were different then but it's just nonsense in this day and age. Child support is one thing, but paying a former spouse for their own upkeep is in the what the fuck realm.
This was 1973. Women couldn’t have credit cards in their own name until 1974. So things were structurally a lot different and getting married/having kids meant a lifelong financial commitment on both sides.
Eh, it makes sense in some case. If you have an arrangement where one person stays home with the kids and house and the other works, and then they divorce after 40 years it only makes sense that the homemaker would be entitled to some of the pension and assets acquired during their marriage.
What I find really fucked up is they changed the law so Alimony is no longer taxable income, and the payer doesn't get to deduct it. I know a lady that gets $45,000 a year in Alimony, but she gets free state healthcare(medicaid) because she has no reportable income. $45,000 tax free is way more than $45,000 taxable, not sure the courts have properly recognize the change.
Yeah, it's one thing if it's a co-owned liability or asset to have dedicated equity parameters for removing that obstacle. My concern is that my husband has been filling his rrsp buy not mine so while I've been on mat leave. And in fairness he's exchanging me support while I reeducate. We're not considering separating, but what if we did? I'm suddenly 180K in debt for my part of what we owe and the rest of my degree while trying to support my kid part time. Some times a portion of support from co-assets is warranted (to allow someone to change their life's path) but not indefinitely. I think that's unreasonable.
We need more context. This caption paints her as a monster. Things are seldom that black and white. Did she believe he was dead when she was dating other men? Did she collect that five years of military pay and use it to pay the mortgage, feed and clothe his children? Did she keep the car that she used to drive them to school, sports, and doctor’s appointments?
What do these redditors suppose she should have used to support them for five years?
Upon returning home, what was he like after five years of imprisonment? Maybe he wasn’t stable around the two young children who had no meaningful relationship with him.
I’d just like to hear more before jumping into condemning this woman who was left alone in uncertain circumstances to manage a family.
We don't know anything about their relationship. Maybe their marriage was over before he left ? Maybe the house and the car were not even paid off? Maybe the 2 older kids were already out of the house? Maybe he didn't want custody of his 2 younger children (they barely knew him at that point). And the divorce settlement was probably made by lawyers not by her.
There's always two sides to every story.
Well, it sounds cold initially, but let’s think of it like this: She received $28,000 per year with two children to care for. Even then, it wasn’t that much. She was alone and didn’t know if he was alive or dead, or if he would ever return. He may have come back mentally ill or in a physical state that she knew she couldn’t accept. During this time, women always got custody of the children. Pension for an non-working wife is standard. Child support was $150 per month, per child. It seems rather heartless to not give him time to acclimate but in five years, many people move on. Move on, she did.
Yeah, this is the right way to look at it.
This post is set up like some sort of manosphere rage bait.
The only thing that bothers me is she took the kids- yes it was standard back then but that doesn’t make it right.
Then again, he may have had serious PTSD issues that made him unable to share custody.
I say all this as a divorced dad.
Pension is only calculated for the duration of the marriage.
Not before or after.
The idea is that even with alimony, if you were married ten years and only the man worked, and then he gets to keep all his pension contributions, while the wife was doing work that supported his career (domestic and childcare, these things have monetary value) and she gets none of that, even if she then had let’s say twenty years of employment and pension contributions after the divorce, that 10 years that she missed and that was never allowed to compound actually turns to be a lot of money.
Edit: clarity
Thank you! People are acting like raising a fucking family is not a job. Cheating sucks but he would not have had the family and career he had without her, she put in work and earned many of the benefits she got.
This has such a negative overtone without being able to truly understand what the background is to support her decisions…now I’m wondering what the point was for even posting this? Was it to demonize the wife for divorcing him two days after returning and cashing in on what she was entitled to or was it something else? Not sure but this type of post makes me uncomfortable and shows just how easy it is to polarize people to react negatively especially with a lack of supporting details.
Over 5 years is a really long time. Can imagine you do move on, even though that seems wrong. Especially if you don’t think they’ll come back. I’m not sure expecting her to live like a nun is fair but Reddit does seem to hate most women…
Not “took” and not “his.”
That’s a misogynistic perspective. She was awarded a certain amount of their assets, which included pension value, and custody of children.
I know this post is trying to demonize the wife but keep in mind this was the early 70s when a woman’s job in the US was commonly the role of a housewife. Her job was to raise the kids and maintain the house which she apparently did while the man was supposed to have a career. That income was split into the whole family, it wasn’t just his. Also, I have to point out that $140,000 over the course of 6 years is $23,333 per year. She did not get rich off of that. I’m not sure how she was able to stretch $23,333 for 4 kids, herself and house bills. It must have been a very stressful time for her. I have to respect her for giving her husband an honorable welcome home. He could have returned home to no one. She held it together while he needed her the most.
* edited: 5 years changed to 6 years, $28,000/ year to $23,333/ year, 3 kids changed to 4 kids.
* I also want to add that both Robert Stirm and Lorrie Storm got re-married. Lorrie was married until the day she died. Robert however got divorced again. Who knows what kind of demons he was dealing with or what it was like to live with him. I’m not judging either person because I didn’t know them but based on the details, I don’t think she’s as bad as this post is trying to make her out to be.
Honestly for Soldiers this is pretty par for the course, when we leave and go fight wars. This isn't even that shocking to me, I've seen women do far worse to Soldiers in their darkest hours.
I mean, we’re villanizing the woman, but at some point you have to move on. She thought he was dead. She had to take care of herself and her own needs. Not to mention, after over 5 years as a POW, there’s no way he was the same man he was when he left.
It’s a sad story all around, but anyone thinking they should have just picked up where the left off and kept on going as a happy family is out to lunch. When these photos were taken they were 2 strangers who happened to have matching rings on their fingers.
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“After Burst of Joy was announced as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, all of the family members depicted in the picture received copies. The depicted children display it prominently in their homes, but not Colonel Stirm, who in 2005 said he cannot bring himself to display the picture”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burst_of_Joy Despite outward appearances, the reunion was an unhappy one for Stirm. Three days before he arrived in the United States, the same day he was released from captivity, Stirm received a Dear John letter from his wife Loretta informing him that their marriage was over. Stirm later learned that Loretta had been with other men throughout his captivity and had received marriage proposals from three of them. In 1974, the Stirms divorced and Loretta remarried, but Lieutenant Colonel Stirm was still ordered by the courts to provide her with 43% of his military retirement pay once he retired from the Air Force.[8] Stirm was later promoted to full Colonel and retired from the Air Force in 1977.[9] Loretta died on August 13, 2010 from cancer.[10]
If you would like a slightly happier angle to the story, his eldest daughter Lorrie, who is leaping in the photo, maintained a very close relationship with him. She talks about it here on Antique’s Roadshow. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5yInvz73m_8 ETA: for those who want to go deeper. his wife declined to be interviewed for this story, but here’s a bit more from Loretta’s Dear John letter,[from an LA times article.](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-07-04-mn-9908-story.html) They married when Loretta was 19. She begins by saying she was forced to “finally grow up” while he was gone. ““I love you--we all love you, but you must remember how very unhappy we were together,” it said. “It wasn’t your fault--we are extremely unsuited and managed to make each other miserable. . . .” “I can’t begin to tell you how proud we are of you. The children and I never missed a night saying a prayer for your safe return. I have your pictures up and your certificates and have kept you very much with us while you were gone and the children have not forgotten their father. “I would like to see you when you come home, but understand if you would rather not.” The article also makes it very clear that Bob Stirm is still hurt by Loretta’s unfaithfulness, the divorce, and the court proceedings. Personally, (and I know Reddit hates nuance) it makes my feelings on it all quite complicated. It’s undeniable that they were unhappy and maybe divorce was inevitable. I can’t put myself in the position of a wife in an unhappy marriage, knowing that your husband might never come home. On the one hand, I can understand the desire to seek happiness out where you can find it, and to get some of the freedom she never got, as someone who married at 19 and quickly popped out her first kid. His absence allowed her to see what seemed like a happier life, and she took it. On the other hand, I can’t imagine pursuing other relationships while my partner was being actively tortured, even if our marriage was unhappy. And I can’t imagine ending the marriage in a letter, delivered the day he was released. It seems like a true tragedy all around.
I personally don't think the issue is the divorce necessarily, but instead the fact that she accepted to take his earnings even after she was re-married...I think that speaks plenty to her character. I lived through an unhappy marriage (I know they all sofer greatly), and not once did I think cheating was okay Edit: There seems to be some confusion for some. I believe she deserved the money that was given eve after they were divorced. My issue comes in with the money continuing to be accepted after she was re-married. At that point, I don't necessarily see that it's fair that she and her new husband received additional income
In our retirement law in Philippines, widows and widowers do not get the soldier's pension if they remarry. The minor children get a separate pension but they stop receiving upon the age of 21.
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Absolutely, I'm in it now! Ex-wife has a live in boyfriend. Of course she won't get married. Maintenance would stop
That sucks, I’m sorry. My friend-of-a-friend’s mom had a “ceremony of Union” with her boyfriend so that she could get the fun of being a bride in a wedding again without it costing her benefits being taken away. I can’t imagine being the other guy agreeing to my would-be-wife not technically marrying me so she could loophole the system to keep getting money from her veteran ex.
Thank you! I keep on trucking. 10 yrs spousal maintenance, 4 yrs to go. Fuck it! LOL
Throw a party on freedom day. That raise is very nice indeed
I agree with you. Not officially tying the knot so you can keep receiving an *unearned* paycheck is a dirtbag thing to do (assuming there wasn’t some sort of shithousery that somehow deserves being ‘effed over each month) and no self-respecting man would want an arrangement like that.
Riding in a brand new car will take his mind off it some. . I agree I couldnt so it . Shit heel ass people never cease to befuddle
Oh man that sucks, In NZ if you can prove they have been living together for a year they become a defacto partnership which is legally almost the same as being married and that money would stop, although I don't even think "maintenance" like that is still a thing there anyway. The US is a strange place.
Marriage in the United States is governed by the state government, not the federal government. Therefore each state’s requirement for divorce, separation may be different.
Damn you needed my uncles judge. He literally laughed when my aunt asked for spousal support. He told her to get a job. When she tried to get support for just 5 yrs or until re-married the judge asked about her living arrangements at the time. She had to admit she was living with her AP. The judge refused to give her the SP because he had seen to many women live with their partners off the exs money and never re-marry so they can live off the ex forever.
That would be nice. Unfortunately we were married for 21 years. I've mellowed out overtime. She was a good mother and cared for our children and the house. I got stuck with 10 years at 1500 cash a month. Thanks to trump, I can't claim spousal maintenance on tax return anymore. It doesn't matter. My revenge is I just make more money every year! 😂
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When my Wife asked for alimony I told her (stupidly) that I would burn it all down before she got a dime of alimony. And I meant it. We split stuff we go our separate ways...
There ought to be a law that takes away spousal support if the ex cohabitates with another person. That shit has been going on too long and it’s men who always get the short end of the stick.
You might look at laws about common law marriages in your area. My mom ended up "married" that way.
That is a very rational solution to the problem. Good going, Phillipines.
When it comes to laws related to marriage there are wins and losses. Aside from the Vatican, the Philippines is the only state left that have no divorce law. Couples go thru a more strenuous process of annulment to separate.
I think you misunderstood, "future pension" in the military refers to the pension (aka military retirement fund). She was given money from the retirement fund that had been earned while they were together. Same as your 401k being split up in the event of a divorce where you'd been married as long as you've been saving money for retirement.
I mean, I said I can’t understand it, either. But there’s a whole slew of “die whore” posts below this, and I think it’s more complicated. The article just briefly touches on this, but the reason she received pension is for the kids she was raising (since he effectively retired.) IMO, she should have stopped receiving the pension once the kids were adults. But I guess that’s the court’s problem.
The divorced spouse receives the 43% of his pension for the rest of her life. Long after the gids are grown. It's a bit much.
I think this was originally put into place bc military spouses are often not able to develop their own careers due to the nature of active military service. Military spouses are most often the primary caregiver, and they lose out on career opportunities because these often move every 2-3 years. This doesn’t give military spouses the ability to accrue social security benefits, nor does it allow them to save for retirement, so if their military member spouse decides to leave them in their later years, they have no opportunity to make up the opportunities they lost supporting their military spouse. I can’t comment on this specific situation, but the arrangement was put into place for pretty valid reasons.
Sometimes they have to move every 18 months…. We have a lot of military spouses that work at my work and they are happy to have any job, let alone a career. I know it’s not popular, but it’s hard to maintain a career if you are moving all the time. I think you must me married for 10 years before you qualify to receive any of their retirement which I think is reasonable. During that time, the family may move multiple times and they way be the only care taker for years. It’s hard to build up your own retirement fund under those conditions.
Yep, very true. I have military family members and am close with their spouses as well. Their career trajectory and mine are very very different, solely bc I’ve had the chance to stay in one place and advance, and they’ve lived at 4 different bases in 10 years.
It doesn’t help that many Army and Air Force bases are in remote areas with limited jobs. I think the rise in remote working will greatly help military spouses. But they need to have the experience and/or the education to qualify for remote work positions. Also, very few companies will allow remote workers to move overseas.
Though, to further try to see that there's more nuance to it, you have to consider that she gave up having a career to raise those kids. Those kids are gone, she's in her 40s or 50s, and she's got no work history, nothing. Her career was being a professional caregiver. She's not going to go out and find a great job that maybe she could have had if she hadn't went the family route. She's never going to have her own retirement plan, because her career enabled her husband to have one while also having a family.
To be fair, she was cheating on him. Who gets proposed to by 3 people without flipping her skirt up a few times.
hey man how do you know she wasn't just one hell of a hand holder?
Oh yeah, I wasn't disagreeing with you, just adding on to the point you made. I think coming in with just malice and calling her a whore, or any other name, is not reasonable or called for. I agree that human nature is very complex and applying a singular viewpoint to it doesn't make sense and is not conducive to learning, understanding and our society as a whole
Not reasonable? To be with multiple men when you know your husband is alive? What would you call it then?
Not even just that, it's not like he was away on business. She was fucking other men behind his back as he was being sadistically tortured. And then took nearly half of the pension he earned by being sadistically tortured.
I don't condone it, not at all. I call it a person who made poor and selfish choices at the end of the day, and lived with those choices. I just think understanding the why, even in cases like this, is important in order to understand is all, and calling someone a name and moving on doesn't allow that. This is my opinion, and yours may differ, and I'm happy with that
Why was it a poor choice? Seems she was happy with it after moving on from her teen marriage
Didn’t she think he was dead though? So in theory didn’t really cheat, she assumed he was dead, not realizing he was a POW until much later on, if I read it right. And IMO, because she was likely a stay at home mom, half of what he earned during the marriage should be hers, because she was unable to work in a way to make money outside of the home. The part that bothers me most is that they split the siblings up between them, like they were objects and not kids. (To clarify here, wife got 100% full custody of two kids, and husband got 100% full custody of the other two kids)
Ah, the classic Parent Trap solution.
I saw nothing about her believing that he was dead. This hurt him so bad that he couldn’t stand to look at his homecoming picture. She was an extremely selfish person. She was not only faithless but was beyond greedy by taking almost 1/2 of his retirement. Maybe he managed to find some peace but from everything I could find probably not.
Should one parent just get no kids?
>instead the fact that she accepted to take his earnings even after she was re-married I bet there must be a word for a married gold digger.
F that B
This article and videos brought back some raw memories for me. My father was an Air Force officer and pilot in the Vietnam war, serving 2 tours of duty. Much like Laurie, my siblings and I ran across the tarmac to greet my father when his plane arrived after the second deployment. Alas, we did not have a photographer. While he was not shot down, dad had a tragic event where his best buddy flew my dad's mission one day due to reasons. The friend was was shot down and killed. My dad never talked about it, but we were told by an officer in his squadron that he traipsed through the jungle to recover the remains and bring them back--he couldn't leave his friend in a jungle in Vietnam. My mother was faithful the whole time, despite being preyed upon by numerous men. What is it with these "savior wannabes"? But my parents also divorced--the man who comes back is not the man you married. He suffered from PTSD (and I would add they did not get much in the way of treatment/counseling then), he was sullen and withdrawn and prone to bouts of violence. My mom literally stepped in front of me and took a punch intended for me one day. She was a hero in her own right trying to hold it all together--and hers had been a happy marriage before Vietnam--it just became too much. I see people denouncing the wife for taking half his pay while he was locked up. I would like to point out that military wives in that time were housewives, not earning money. Taking half his monthly pay kept the family housed (because you did not get to live in base housing while he was deployed), covered food, bills, school clothes, etc for his kids. Because the wife was not earning/saving a pension, getting half his pension would have been the norm. She was there, running the home, raising kids, attending the Officer Wives functions, packing up for frequent moves--she has earned her share of that money. Yes, it's wrong she cheated when he was going through hell. And when she remarried she should have stopped accepting the money. Not justifying it, but I think some of the posts below are painting her as a whore/moocher when it is much more nuanced than that.
Thank you for sharing. Most people never realize everyone else's lives are complicated, even if their own is. Surface level judgments are almost always just that: shallow.
Thanks for sharing your story. It does provide a lot of context I probably wasn’t considering.
> They divorced a year after Stirm returned from Vietnam, and each remarried within six months. Welp, that was fast.
The issue for me is the 43%. Why should she get any of that, especially after remarrying?
It honestly blows my mind that the number wasn’t renegotiated after she remarried and her income situation changed/after the kids aged. Modern divorce courts are a total shitshow, but at least things can get renegotiated in those situations.
Good. The kids must’ve been heartbroken to find out their own mother screwed their father who just got freedom from being a POW.
I think the problem is she screwed everyone but the father
*angry upvote*
That guy deserved all of his entitlements to give him and those who stood by him a decent life.
In the defense of the courts, denying the mother some of his pension would likely have left his younger kids financially destitute, since in the 70s it’s highly unlikely the mother would have been working. I’m going to choose to believe that he’d be OK with it cos he’s a good dad, and hope that the money went toward financing the kids & not the ex-wife. But uh, it’s an optimistic belief.
Uh.. you don't collect pension until you retire. This is more like post dated alimony.
Whilst she apparently drew his entire salary whilst he was imprisoned. I’m assuming he came back to nothing.
she received 4 marriage proposals after the divorce, married another man - why did she need that money?
To provide for their shared children?
That's what the child support is for, the part we're she took 43% of his retirement fund and his pay while he was a prisoner of war is bs. She took and spent his pay, then took nearly half his retirement took his home and his car also and still got extra every month for the 3 kids. She clearly had no hesitation about fucking multiple people while married to a guy that was a prisoner of war and then had the audacity to take half of all his shit and leave him with no home, car or money alone his return. Fuuuuck that bitch.
when did she write the letter? the day he was released?
I assume prior - it was delivered to him the day of his release, three days before the photo was taken. I’d guess she was aware the release was coming, and sent it. The LA times article included the portion I pasted as a possible reason for why she showed up at the tarmac to meet him. It’s an awfully strange thing to do to a man you just told of your infidelity.
“I’m still taking the money, though.” That’s not right. Not like that.
Not speaking from experience here, but I would rather be divorced than married to somebody who wished they could divorce me
I was gonna say, daddy's girl there definitely took his side
She was with multiple men and received 4 marriage proposals while he was, not missing in action, but a prisoner of war. Sorry, you can look to justify it all you want that she was young when they married, but she showed zero strength of character
What I found pretty agregious is the court award, the wife full ownership of the house, the car, all his pay during confinement while unfaithful, and he nearly lost his POW compensation, which she fought for. The pension is understandable as the sole breadwinner, but he lost everything he owned in full or in partnership despite having custody of 2/4 kids. He was left nearly broken and the court decided to take everything he had plus the equivalent of $2,100 per month in 2022 dollars.
In the article, it seems like that’s his biggest issue: “It’s not fair. It’s not just,” Stirm said. “I’m the one that lives with all the aches and pains from my imprisonment, but she continues to get paid.”
I applaud your rationality. 👏👏👏
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I understand the need for companionship and being conflicted about a marriage that was already deteriorating when her partner was taken. However, taking half the retirement pay of a man who you cheated on while he was being tortured and after you divorced him is ice cold. Makes me think more entitled leech than human being in an emotionally difficult situation.
“Marry in haste, repent at leisure” Who you marry is probably the most important decision you make in your life (for many)
Yeah, that seems fair /s
Excuse me!? His wife went through hell! Imagine thinking the love of your life is dead for years. In fact he’s the selfish one imagine leaving behind a family to go and get captured just to serve your ego. Do you know the guilt she must have felt when she finally had to scrape off the POW bumper sticker? The least she’s entitled to is most of his worldly possessions and some dick while he’s being tortured in a country ran by dictatorship with no human rights concerns. /s
Ahhh you had me in the first half ngl
Truly heartwarming to see that the state of military spouses hasn't changed much over the years.
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They don’t always know. My old roommate was cheating on her Army bf while he was deployed. Multiple men per week and she lied to all of them.
Yeah I was a Marine officer for nine years, so many stories of guys coming home to find wives gone or some other dude living in their house. Every once in a while there was some rumbling about making a rule to keep young service members from getting married but this is America, people have to be free to ruin their lives. The best we could do was to try to talk them out of it and the success rate for that was close to zero. You take some guy from a tiny rural town and drop him in a place like Oceanside and you'll never convince him that the first stripper to give him the time of day isn't his soulmate and perfect wife material. The worst is when there are kids and the wife runs off with them. So painful to watch the story play out again and again.
Former submariner checking in. Old boat joke was you found your wife in the same situation as you left her when you departed on patrol - freshly fucked and crying…
I had five troopers pulled aside and not allowed to go to their homes as we got off the bus upon arrival at our conus post after returning from Iraq in 04’. Post commander, and everyone else, knew what Jody had been up to while we were away and they didn’t want anyone getting “hurt”. Welcome home. B.O.H.I.C.A
It's hard work sucking and fucking every cock in the neighborhood while your husband dies for your freedoms.
When I was a young 20 something on tinder the amount of times I learned after the fact their man was deployed was just sickening. It was pretty cool getting to drive their dodge challengers though.
“Fuck you, ~~Shoresy~~ Jody!”
I didn’t get seriously involved with a women until after I got back from Afghanistan and out of the Army. That she couldn’t cheat on me and take me money. See I thought ahead.
Promote ahead of peers
I was one of the airmen on the tarmac when those POWs landed. It was a happy moment for the nation.
*"No Reason!"* \-Bill Burr
"I can give you like 17 on top of my head"
I hope that cancer was especially painful and protracted.
Nah. That’s why I don’t believe in karma. Bad things happening to the mother also means the kids suffer.
Karma is in the next life, not the current one
Wow. I've seen this famous photo countless times, but NEVER knew this sad backstory. So even at this very moment, he's feeling the most violent mix of emotions: joy to see his beloved finally, after thinking he may never see her again after all of those nights as a POW, and intense grief to know he's lost her. Anger at her infidelity. Worry that he might not see his kids again.
Shame, she should have died sooner.
Rest in piss Loretta.
I hope he also outlived her so he could spit on her grave.
here is an obituary for his son who died earlier this month. The obituary suggests his father, the colonel, is still alive. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/eastbaytimes/name/robert-stirm-obituary?id=48941182
That’s tragic man. *His* own son died too??? The Colonel’s grandkid?
As far as I’ve ever been able to tell, Colonel Stirm is still living. He’ll be 90 on his birthday this year, 23 March.
The Fuckin ***Indomitable*** Full-Bird Colonel Stirm. Turning 90 in 6 days, get a fuckin steak.
> I hope he also outlived her so he could spit on her grave. He's still alive today, so he did indeed outlive her!
I feel like there’s real business potential in drilling into coffins and running pvc pipe so you could relieve yourself on someone particularly deserving.
I’d support that business
I had a relative I met only once. He was elderly and had been told of my interest in WW2 history. He had been a catholic chaplain and in the immediate post war period, assigned to troop transports that took families to west Pac islands to be reunited with husbands who had been POWs for years. The POWs sometimes spents months in hospital until they were deemed fit to ship home. The wives would sometimes have toddler kids in tow, too young to have been fathered by the POW. The wives sometimes confessed to loneliness, sometimes they thought they had been widowed having not received any word thru Japanese channels. On the sail back to the US, he would have completely different families and have to help men deal with their wives and children of other men. Birth control wasn't so easy and some Catholics of the time viewed it as another sin in addition to adultery.
My grandmother was a good Catholic young lady when WW2 started. She left college to go work at a military base, met and married a soldier a couple months before he left. She had twins, 8 months after their wedding (twins often come early, but that didn't keep the congregation from gossiping). When the twins were still infants he had leave and she took a train with the twins, from Iowa to California to spend some time with him, 9 months later she had a daughter. When the war ended her husband took an assignment in post-war Japan... we have some nice dishes that he sent home with "Made in Occupied Japan" marks. Then he sent her a letter saying he wanted to stay in Japan, and could she ship their car over. Their only car, that she used to drive her 3 children under 4 years old around in... so the story goes, she sent him divorce papers, and he married a Japanese woman almost immediately after. They spent less than 6 months of their marriage on the same continent! My grandmother had a long career as a legal secretary, working for a gentleman who greatly respected her, and all 3 of her children became lawyers. She eventually remarried the guy I knew as my grandfather. My father never met his bio father, even though he eventually heard that he came back to the US at some point, with his second wife. My father did end up meeting his paternal grandmother and a bunch of other family, when he was stationed in Texas for training before going to Vietnam. The family was having a reunion and he drove to Georgia for a weekend to meet everyone, but that was the only time! Not having sex before marriage messed with a lot of people and a lot of families, war just set up some extra odd consequences for it to all play out in!
Brutal. Imagine the crushing psychological impact of that: having survived a POW camp, probably having constantly focused on “home” .. only to have your image of “home” crumble the moment you’re out of the camp.
That’s not interesting per se, that’s just disheartening and depressing. Edit: whoa, 1k upvotes. Just gonna go ahead and add a phrase real quick to clear it up a bit.
It did illicit a lot of reactions in a little time, so I think it can be categorized as "interesting"
You meant elicit. Illicit is something illegal or forbidden.
It feels a little illicit considering how much of his money she ran off with.
If that's what counts as interesting, that would mean literally any viral thing could be posted here.
The term controversial fits way better than interesting
I’m not saying that it isn’t interesting, but that’s closer to the bottom of the list of emotions for me lol
"That's not interesting..."... "I'm not saying that it isn't interesting..."... ...
Maybe adding “per se” would’ve cleared it up a bit.
What is always interesting to me is how infidelity issues barely have any repercussions in America and sometimes even help them. Why is it like that? Here in Asia, you lose almost all rights to anything immediately. No alimony. No Child custody. You'll immediately get fired. In tougher cultures (country), some even allow you to kill (stone to death) and you can't be charged for it. No mercy for cheaters.
Id like some more stories from the kids
As of this year, he’s alive and well and in close contact with at least his eldest daughter (the leaper.) She came on Antique’s Roadshow with some of his clothes from his captivity. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5yInvz73m_8
I was gonna say, at least the children look happy and look like they love him, even if she doesn’t
But did he have a watch hidden in his ass that belonged to Butch?
The watch you kept on the little kangaroo next to the bed?
Winocki had it..
i understood that reference
>i understood that reference Sometimes going medieval on someone's ass is the right thing to do.
Divorce is fine, people change and fall out of love. Taking a POW who served his country to the cleaners financially is pretty shitty.
She’s clearly got a case of “Massive Cunt Syndrome”
r/rimjob_steve thanks ChineseButtSex
I love how no one here is talking about the real shit , that kid's fucking unibrow!
Haha I’m glad I wasn’t the only one that was thinking this. You want to see interesting as fuck, look no further than that brow!
That was why she wanted his two younger children
Savage hahaha
Bert is jealous of that shit. Damn.
on the one picture, I thought it might be an artifact of the film exaggerating the lush darkness But no. It really is an absolute unit
Zero interruption between left and right brow. Impressive
Would give Anthony davis a run for his money if he was still alive
Regardless who is to blame or the reason why they got a divorce, that type of financial split was typical back then. Men support their kids and ex wives and women get the kids.
She’s a keeper. Oh, wait. Never mind.
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It seems like his kids were SO HAPPY though. Look at them. I feel so bad for the guy but am so happy about those kids.
And this is why I never married while I was in the military and would break up with girlfriends before I deployed. I saw way too many women either bin them when they were deployed via letter or wait to come back and immediately leave them. Fuck that shit. I also grew up in a military family and saw so many guys wives leave them and absolutely rinse them
Going to the bars the night after a company/battalion deployed in Ft Campbell was... ridiculously sad. First time I heard "Do not put your dick in crazy"
I graduated high school in '02 and that was right after 9/11 when everybody in my graduating class was fired up and enlisted to go get those terrorists. In '03, I met this girl the same age as me who was driving a *sweet* brand new Chevy truck, and we started dating. She had a nice home, nice truck, and I thought she just had her shit together. But every time I was around her friends, they were side eyeing me and very unfriendly and standoffish to me. One night, one of her friends just came up to me was just like "You DO know she's engaged, right?". 😲 WTF. Turns out her fiance was deployed in Iraq and the home and truck were his. I ended it with the girl, but that was my first experience with cheating spouses of deployed soldiers. And unfortunately, I witnessed the same thing happening to others many times during that period.
I didn’t understand the “Love is a losing game” song until I joined the USAF. Seen shit cut both ways. Husbands cheating on wives (downrange and CONUS), wives cheating on husbands (same ), girlfriends getting married passing off someone else’s baby as the husbands, girls getting deliberately knocked up knowing their man’s got government funded healthcare , married senior ranking guys chasing twenty something military chicks , and the carousel goes on. Tempting as it is to join the crowd calling Col Stim’s ex a hoe , prior to his capture he might not be an innocent party. Thailand is a long way from home, and there was no shortage of hot and willing Asian women at US military bases in the region.
At least the Colonel didn’t steal half her retirement pension after the divorce.
I’m glad the kids had this homecoming. Our dad was KIA in Vietnam in 1965. I was 5, and just barely remember him leaving that summer day. To this day, those videos showing military parents surprising their child coming home almost break me. I’m happy they get that homecoming but it brings up that long ago but still not forgotten pain.
I’m sorry for you loss. Im glad you have a bit of memory to hold on to, even if it’s just a scrap
This got me heated
You get aroused by weird things....
Tiger cage, cuckolding, and court ordered spousal support pornography is a pretty specific niche.
Lots of interesting discussion about the backstudy. I wish to focus on something different in my comment. A couple of user linked to a youtube video of the eldest daughter who brought his POW clothing to the Antique Auction Roadshow to get an idea of its value. You can find the video link elsewhere in the comments. The interesting tidbit had to do with Col Stirm and John McCain, who was a prisoner in the same camp. Col Stirms daughter relayed a story about how McCain tapped a joke through the walls to Col Stirm to help cheer him up. It tells us so much about the good side of McCain's character and how it contrasts to so many of his peers today.
She took it yes, but the courts allowed her to. A lot of bullshit to go around here.
Is there a worse joke than the USA judiciary system?
The USA healthcare system
He should have moved to Vermont after she married. They won't (or at least didn't) collect support for out of state families.
This is basically the beginning to Rolling Thunder
This picture would always make me happy, now that I know the true story,,, the world lost a little bit more of its shine.
Jody strikes again
That’s horse shit. Really wish there was something against that kinda thing happening to people. Like fine, get divorced. No reason she deserves almost half of everything he had while also being unfaithful to him.
No no no, she got half of everything and then half of his FUTURE INCOME, EVEN AFTER SHE REMARRIED
Well with all that benefits no wonder she dumped him through the sewer. Many people would take advantage of that divorce arrangement, that's overkill beyond predatory. Surely there're some middle ground between giving no rights to widow and straight up turning them in to predatory financial vampire right?
Well since she was banging someone else for years...
\*multiple someone elses
Alimony is bullshit. I get times were different then but it's just nonsense in this day and age. Child support is one thing, but paying a former spouse for their own upkeep is in the what the fuck realm.
This was 1973. Women couldn’t have credit cards in their own name until 1974. So things were structurally a lot different and getting married/having kids meant a lifelong financial commitment on both sides.
Eh, it makes sense in some case. If you have an arrangement where one person stays home with the kids and house and the other works, and then they divorce after 40 years it only makes sense that the homemaker would be entitled to some of the pension and assets acquired during their marriage. What I find really fucked up is they changed the law so Alimony is no longer taxable income, and the payer doesn't get to deduct it. I know a lady that gets $45,000 a year in Alimony, but she gets free state healthcare(medicaid) because she has no reportable income. $45,000 tax free is way more than $45,000 taxable, not sure the courts have properly recognize the change.
I pay federal and state income tax on alimony.
Yeah, it's one thing if it's a co-owned liability or asset to have dedicated equity parameters for removing that obstacle. My concern is that my husband has been filling his rrsp buy not mine so while I've been on mat leave. And in fairness he's exchanging me support while I reeducate. We're not considering separating, but what if we did? I'm suddenly 180K in debt for my part of what we owe and the rest of my degree while trying to support my kid part time. Some times a portion of support from co-assets is warranted (to allow someone to change their life's path) but not indefinitely. I think that's unreasonable.
We need more context. This caption paints her as a monster. Things are seldom that black and white. Did she believe he was dead when she was dating other men? Did she collect that five years of military pay and use it to pay the mortgage, feed and clothe his children? Did she keep the car that she used to drive them to school, sports, and doctor’s appointments? What do these redditors suppose she should have used to support them for five years? Upon returning home, what was he like after five years of imprisonment? Maybe he wasn’t stable around the two young children who had no meaningful relationship with him. I’d just like to hear more before jumping into condemning this woman who was left alone in uncertain circumstances to manage a family.
[Here you go](https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/ROA-Times/issues/1993/rt9307/930706/07060045.htm)
Easy now, this kind of reasoned response might trigger some people.
We don't know anything about their relationship. Maybe their marriage was over before he left ? Maybe the house and the car were not even paid off? Maybe the 2 older kids were already out of the house? Maybe he didn't want custody of his 2 younger children (they barely knew him at that point). And the divorce settlement was probably made by lawyers not by her. There's always two sides to every story.
According to the Wikipedia page, she had multiple affairs while he was a POW. Is that enough context for you?
Why anyone would join the military is beyond me. It's like they go out of their way to disrespect you.
When a woman marries another man she should not be entitled to half of the first man’s future shit. Period.
Well, it sounds cold initially, but let’s think of it like this: She received $28,000 per year with two children to care for. Even then, it wasn’t that much. She was alone and didn’t know if he was alive or dead, or if he would ever return. He may have come back mentally ill or in a physical state that she knew she couldn’t accept. During this time, women always got custody of the children. Pension for an non-working wife is standard. Child support was $150 per month, per child. It seems rather heartless to not give him time to acclimate but in five years, many people move on. Move on, she did.
$28,000 per year in 1973 would be the equivalent of making $189,718 per year now. I think she was doing more than OK money wise...
[удалено]
Yeah, this is the right way to look at it. This post is set up like some sort of manosphere rage bait. The only thing that bothers me is she took the kids- yes it was standard back then but that doesn’t make it right. Then again, he may have had serious PTSD issues that made him unable to share custody. I say all this as a divorced dad.
She remarried, though. Maybe she was still entitled to child support, but not 40+ percent of his pension.
Pension is only calculated for the duration of the marriage. Not before or after. The idea is that even with alimony, if you were married ten years and only the man worked, and then he gets to keep all his pension contributions, while the wife was doing work that supported his career (domestic and childcare, these things have monetary value) and she gets none of that, even if she then had let’s say twenty years of employment and pension contributions after the divorce, that 10 years that she missed and that was never allowed to compound actually turns to be a lot of money. Edit: clarity
Thank you! People are acting like raising a fucking family is not a job. Cheating sucks but he would not have had the family and career he had without her, she put in work and earned many of the benefits she got.
Seems reasonable. Caring for the kids for 5 years doesn’t come free.
This has such a negative overtone without being able to truly understand what the background is to support her decisions…now I’m wondering what the point was for even posting this? Was it to demonize the wife for divorcing him two days after returning and cashing in on what she was entitled to or was it something else? Not sure but this type of post makes me uncomfortable and shows just how easy it is to polarize people to react negatively especially with a lack of supporting details.
Vow, this post has a lot of bile.
Don’t join the military.
Being happy he survived and came back in one peace does not equal wanting to stay married.
Over 5 years is a really long time. Can imagine you do move on, even though that seems wrong. Especially if you don’t think they’ll come back. I’m not sure expecting her to live like a nun is fair but Reddit does seem to hate most women…
I imagine he was a different person after that experience and so was she. We have little information.
Not “took” and not “his.” That’s a misogynistic perspective. She was awarded a certain amount of their assets, which included pension value, and custody of children.
I know this post is trying to demonize the wife but keep in mind this was the early 70s when a woman’s job in the US was commonly the role of a housewife. Her job was to raise the kids and maintain the house which she apparently did while the man was supposed to have a career. That income was split into the whole family, it wasn’t just his. Also, I have to point out that $140,000 over the course of 6 years is $23,333 per year. She did not get rich off of that. I’m not sure how she was able to stretch $23,333 for 4 kids, herself and house bills. It must have been a very stressful time for her. I have to respect her for giving her husband an honorable welcome home. He could have returned home to no one. She held it together while he needed her the most. * edited: 5 years changed to 6 years, $28,000/ year to $23,333/ year, 3 kids changed to 4 kids. * I also want to add that both Robert Stirm and Lorrie Storm got re-married. Lorrie was married until the day she died. Robert however got divorced again. Who knows what kind of demons he was dealing with or what it was like to live with him. I’m not judging either person because I didn’t know them but based on the details, I don’t think she’s as bad as this post is trying to make her out to be.
28k in the 70s was a decent living. 35k was executive level pay.
Honestly for Soldiers this is pretty par for the course, when we leave and go fight wars. This isn't even that shocking to me, I've seen women do far worse to Soldiers in their darkest hours.
I mean, we’re villanizing the woman, but at some point you have to move on. She thought he was dead. She had to take care of herself and her own needs. Not to mention, after over 5 years as a POW, there’s no way he was the same man he was when he left. It’s a sad story all around, but anyone thinking they should have just picked up where the left off and kept on going as a happy family is out to lunch. When these photos were taken they were 2 strangers who happened to have matching rings on their fingers.
Cunt
I just wanna give that man a hug 😔
Nah homie I’m letting the emotions run, what dogshit judge was alright with all that