'Home Fires Burning': Left Behind

By LAURA SHAPIRO

It's hard to imagine a more thankless version of married life than the one undertaken by Danette Long, Crystal Solloway, Veoletta Hayward, Heather Atherton and all the other women in ''Home Fires Burning,'' Karen Houppert's thoughtful and absorbing study of military wives today. Everything most other women take for granted, including the expectation that their husbands will come home from work alive, is subject to uncertainty. Moreover, it's their husbands' employer who chooses where they'll live, designs their houses, dictates how short to cut the grass and pays so stingily that more than a third of military families make use of federal poverty programs. No wonder, as Houppert notes, only 36 percent of the military wives say they would encourage their husbands to re-enlist. No wonder, too, the evening she attended a meeting of a Family Readiness Group -- the military's lumbering vehicle for fostering the equivalent of school spirit -- just seven wives showed up. The leader called it a better turnout than usual.