I don't mean to be a dick, but I didn't enlist when I came of age, and instead found a job close to home. It paid shit+tips until I made it into college. And if I hadn't taken that course, I still wouldn't have enlisted. Plenty of my family has, and it's because they see it as a reliable job with an early retirement and ~unbeatable benefits in the long run -- and they all know all about the fact that it often requires moving your family or being separated for months at a time.

"Vacation" or not, everyone involved knows what they're getting into, and signing up for a job that takes you away from your spouse for months-years is a choice.

If it's all up to personal choice, it's not that different from a vacation, philosophically. It's a job, and there are pros and cons to choosing one that takes you away from home for months at a time.

One of the cons is a severe strain on any relationships you might have due to your extended absence.

You could have chosen any one of a number of jobs closer to home. Instead, you chose to ~check out on your family and not see them for several months. A year. Years.

It's not right for these women to cheat, but I wouldn't deign to ask any of them to stay married to me if I left. "Sorry, hun. I've answered an ad for a job in South Africa. See you in 6 months."

People somehow think that's reasonable when they decide to join the military. But, from an objective standpoint, it's not.

I'd suggest dropping the "fighting for their freedom" bit, too. We haven't fought a defensive war since September of 1945. People talk about "keeping ISIS busy abroad," but it's painfully clear at this point that the Iraq war was not "defensive," and that instability in the M.E. has come largely as a result of American (and, to a lesser degree, European) meddling. In short, if we hadn't tried our hand at toppling governments, and funding bloody civil wars, insurgencies, and dictators, terrorist organizations probably wouldn't hate us nearly as much as they do.

And they're still not a threat to America. We've lost twice as many Americans abroad to "counter-terrorist" wars as we have to terrorism, itself. To put it differently: we tripled Americas' "casualties of terror" by taking them on abroad. Did we save American lives? Well, we ~galvanized the most powerful extreme Islamist group against us, and created a power vacuum for them to grow.

We made America less safe by putting our boys over there, in the way of IEDs, etc.

So don't call it "fighting for their freedom," please. We fought for Halliburton's profits, access to oil, and probably some other things. But we're not fighting for "America," or "freedom."

TL;DR if you choose a job that takes you away from home for multiple stints of months or years at a time, I don't think it's reasonable to expect fidelity from most SOs. If you don't want that, choose a different job.

/end rant