Believe that, if you want. It's also possible she got bored and did it for kicks.

My guess is that you really have no idea why she did it. And she's not telling you, either. But your goal is to find a narrative that gives you hope that the past can be restored. If you really want to understand her, you have to be open to the truth, whatever it is.

Deployment is incredibly hard on marriage. I can understand a military spouse getting so lonely that comfort is sought outside of the marriage. Especially when there were already some problems with the marriage before deployment. That, to me, is not a reason to end a marriage. I think infidelity (whether emotional or physical) can be forgiven and put in the past. That's if both parties really want to put the infidelity in the past. I think you're wise to be willing to do that.

But I'm not seeing where she values her marriage. You sound willing to be very understanding of how ways you may have neglected or frustrated her contributed to the marital collapse. You want to change that any way you can. I'm suggesting that this, possibly, may not be all about how her legitimate needs were not getting met in the marriage. This may be about her being a quite troubled/disturbed young woman who has an approach to life that is sort of doomed. She may be more emotionally damaged than you have ever considered. You're wanting to repair any dysfunction isn't going to go very far, if she has decided that she wants to behave dysfunctionally. You might scratch your head and think, "Why would anyone want to be like that?"

Some people are like that. She sounds like a person with serious emotional problems. You are looking for truthfulness. My impression is that she has already run a million miles away from truth. She may have adopted the mindset that "truth" is for suckers. There are people who get cynical and adopt that mentality. They go from one devious charade to another. They think they have to finesse other people, if they aren't going to come out the loser. They are incapable of dealing honestly with others because they really believe it's smarter to be sneaky and double-dealing.

There's probably a sad story behind how someone gets that way. It's most likely not totally the person's fault. Think about the home your wife cane from . . . about how her parents dealt with each other and dealt with her. Something may have gone seriously wrong way back before you ever met this woman. If that's true, then you trying to improve yourself may not fix anything.

I suspect your wife may have some serious psychological problems that have nothing to do with you. But she is looking for a scape goat for her unhappiness. So she'll blame you, the military, deployment, etc. This is all a bunch of smoke to avoid looking honestly at herself. Of course she doesn't want individual therapy or couple's counseling. A good counselor/therapist might try to hold her accountable for her own role in her own life. She's absolutely not going to allow that. Every single conversation with her that you describe is her wiggling out of making any earnest attempt to discuss anything. She is the woman wronged, and that's that. Finito! You may find you are at a dead end.

Ultimately, I think it's going to take an enormous amount of compassion on your part to accept that you may have married a very damaged person who may be truly incapable of being in a normal marriage, or any kind of a marriage that you could stay in without losing your mind.