Armed Forces: The Living Room War

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Jeromy Willis, an Air Force enlisted man and ex-Army marksman, had been trained to kill the enemy. But when the cold war ended and his base faced closure and his career began looking less secure and his marriage came under strain, the enemy started looking a lot like his wife Marie. First he tried to kill her with a flaming propane torch. Weeks later he tried to strangle her. She fled to her mother's home in Rhode Island, and the Air Force confined Jeromy to his base in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. But when Marie returned there to press charges against her husband, he had somehow learned of her supposedly secret appointment. Outraged that she was ruining his career, Jeromy confronted Marie inside the waiting room of the base legal office early last year. He fired a pawnshop pistol into her chest. As horrified witnesses watched her yellow dress turn crimson, she screamed, "Jeromy, no!" And then he fired a second round into her brain.

Marie Willis became another victim of an alarming increase in domestic violence on America's military bases. The rise in abuse of spouses and children, researchers and the Pentagon believe, may be connected to the painful reduction in U.S. fighting forces following the end of the cold war. In 1986 there were 27,783 reported cases of violence in military families; last year there were 46,287. Now, a confidential -- and unprecedented -- Army survey obtained by TIME suggests that spousal abuse is occurring in one of every three Army families each year -- double the civilian rate. Each week someone dies at the hands of a relative in uniform, and nearly 1,000 formal complaints of injury are lodged against family members in the service. Untold thousands may suffer in silence.

Over the past year there has been gory evidence of the home-front carnage. A soldier in Washington state killed his wife, packed her body into a suitcase and threw it off a bridge. In Southern California a Marine who was a hero in the Persian Gulf War shot and killed his newly divorced wife and their five- year-old daughter. In North Carolina an airman hacked his wife to pieces, wrapped her remains in plastic garbage bags and stored them in the refrigerator. In Hawaii a sailor killed his baby daughter, stuffing her into a duffel bag and tossing her into Pearl Harbor. A soldier in Germany, angered at his wayward spouse, decapitated her G.I. lover and placed the severed head atop his wife's nightstand.

The new Army survey offers an unvarnished and quantifiable look at the problem. "The rates of marital aggression are considerably higher than anticipated," declared the researchers, who have questioned more than 55,000 soldiers at 47 bases since 1989, and continue to do so. The growing number of victims seeking help "is soon likely to exceed treatment resources." And the problem isn't restricted to low-level or poorly performing soldiers. "Often those in the most responsible and stressful positions," the report says referring to noncommissioned officers, "appear to be more likely to be involved in abusive episodes." The violence ranges from kicking, biting and punching to attacks with knives and guns.