IN 1997, MY WIFE, LOLA, AND I, ALONG WITH OUR TEENAGE daughter, Jennifer, our toddler, Wolfgang, and our newborn, Konrad, were living in base housing near the shores of Virginia. The house was built in the ’50s and only a small sand dune separated the beach from the backyard. It was actually our second time in Virginia; we’d been there three years before, when Lola and I were engaged but not yet married.
During our first go-round in Virginia, in 1991, we had been giving our relationship a one-year engagement period. When the wedding date was set, the boys on the team ensured that the occasion would be memorable by preparing an elaborate pulley system in the ocean surf zone using truck wenches and line attached to old pier pilings. My hands were tied behind my back and I was provided with a lifejacket and a pair of goggles and then attached to the line. The boys then positioned themselves on the beach with MP5 submachine guns loaded with paint rounds, while the wench operator proceeded to make me a floating “rubber duck” shooting arcade. They must have spent hours setting up the system. I am guessing they did not see the memo on the navy’s hazing policy but I was glad to help them improve their shooting. Nonetheless, I survived and Lola and I were married on August 8, 1992. Mind you, we were both being extremely cautious. Both of us had been married before, and Lola was a widow whose husband had died. So Lola was bringing up Jennifer as a single mother, and doing a really good job of it.
The point is that we wanted to be methodical about making sure we could forge a strong relationship. We were going to face stresses Ozzie-and-Harriet-type families don’t. Lola knew what my priorities were going to have to be, regardless of how I felt about my loved ones. She knew that in military families, every time the kids get sick, or a dog gets run over, or a house gets broken into, it’s the non-military spouse who has to deal with whatever needs to be dealt with.
SEAL team marriages have an even greater set of stresses because of the nature of the mission and the people it takes to do it. We are not just guys who signed on for tours of duty; we are also all Type-A personalities. “Take charge” and “Never quit” are in the basic job description. And I have to confess, we also were used to enduring a whopping amount of physical and emotional abuse, especially during training. In those times, it’s a SEAL wife who often plays a big role in either nursing her husband’s wounded ego when things go wrong or reining it in when it gets out of hand. Keep in mind that when our egos take a beating it isn’t like a traditional bad day at the office. You fail at some task and you come away questioning your very self-worth, asking whether you deserve the job, the respect of your comrades, or even the love of the woman you’re with. It’s a far-reaching, deep-reaching doubt.
Apart from those challenges, SEALs spend a lot of time away from home on missions or training. Sometimes, they leave with no notice. You walk in the door, grab a go-bag, kiss your wife, and—with your brain already on the mission—walk back out the door. If you remember to say good-bye, that’s a plus. Because the majority of operations are classified, wives of team members often don’t know where their husbands are or what they’re doing. And there’s one set of stress that comes from wondering if their husbands are going to be late coming home from work and quite another that comes from wondering if they’re in a hotspot somewhere, and whether they’ll ever see their husbands again.
Lola and I once figured out that for a time I was spending two hundred nights out of the year away from her and the kids. It takes someone special to be a SEAL; it takes someone even more special to be a SEAL’s wife.
So you have SEAL team husbands coming back after being away for a while, and they’re returning to households where the wives have had to step into household mother and father roles … plus celibacy, which presents its own nasty issues. Sometimes you come back from war and there are kids running around, sometimes there are teenagers being teenagers, and all of a sudden this knucklehead shows up saying that he’s the man of the house, and the wives who have been dealing with the usual family drama say, “Wait a second! The crown is not yet yours!” There’s definitely an adjustment period.
When you’re in a leadership position, there’s another consideration. Even when you’re home, your mind may be elsewhere. You’re thinking about past missions and training—what went right, what could have gone better. You’re planning for future training and missions—your own, and especially the men under you. You’re considering your team’s shortcomings and how to shore them up. You’re thinking about the complexity of the mission and the cost of failure to your men and their families. You are responsible to make sure everyone comes home. Try reading Dr. Seuss to your kid with that on your mind. And more often than not these considerations aren’t things you can share with your wife, so she can’t do much but be supportive in a general way.
What’s even worse for a SEAL wife is that they’re not supposed to know about the missions their husbands are on, but if you suddenly start growing a beard or tanning, they can get a pretty good sense of what you’re going to be doing. Quite frankly, however, the spouse’s intel network is oftentimes better than the team members’. When your suitcase is already packed when you get home, they know. And sometimes they’ll turn on the TV and see reports about specific military operations, and even though there’s no specific mention of SEALs they’ll know SEALs were involved … and if you happen—happen—to steal a moment to call, they can’t ask any questions. They have to know without being able to comment on it. There’s a lot that can’t be shared between spouses.
It takes a pretty special person to realize this is the sort of life they’re going to be in for, and then to be able to make it work. And I’ll be frank here: a lot of SEAL team marriages fail. It’s ironic when you think of all the time and money that goes into turning man to superman, yet the hidden cost is structural damage to the human parts of us. I truly do not believe it is possible to avoid that. The way you live with it is through the strength of your partner. Our marriage has been one of the strong ones, and Lola has been well more than half of the reason why.
If anything, we put our engagement through more tests than most. As I mentioned, the first time I was stationed in Virginia, Lola and I weren’t married. We were engaged, we knew we were really good together, but we hadn’t formally taken our vows. We didn’t know it when we first moved there, but the fact that we weren’t married was going to make life more difficult for her than it otherwise would have been. Fiancées were not considered a “fully vested” part of the command. They could go to Christmas parties and picnics and other social functions, but without the title and the marriage certificate they weren’t really taken into the heart of the community. They did not have access to naval facilities or command services.
They’ve since loosened the rules in an attempt to accommodate the demanding lifestyle. But those changes came after the first time Lola and I were there, unmarried, and before our return, when we were already married. By that time she had already been around the base enough that they weren’t going to do the introductions for her. She sort of slipped between the cracks, and that wasn’t easy for her either time.
I liked living on-base near the beach. I was close to work, and during the second time we were there the kids were young enough that they could run around on the base without getting into anything that would compromise security too much. Jennifer was very happy with her high school friends, Konrad—who had recently been born—was still in Lola’s arms, and as for Wolfgang, well, a three-year-old’s curiosity is mostly limited to what he can get from the Navy Exchange in the way of toys or candy.
When the team was on standby and held hostage to staying within forty-five minutes of the command, the kids literally grew up on the compound. Since we lived on-base, nearly every time higher headquarters needed an answer or had an inquiry I was called and asked to go into the operations center and answer the mail. After all, “He lives so close.” As a result, I was always on the compound on the weekends and typically brought the kids in tow. Wolf and Konrad would play hide and seek in the locker room and between the equipment cages filled with gear. They knew how to shred paper and what not to touch. They knew where the boneyard was and what not to touch. Looking back on it, it was just nice to be a dad.
If there was a downside to living on the beach, it was that we were occasionally in the path of Atlantic storms. For the most part, this wasn’t too bad: base housing could stand up to a little wind and rain. The house was small but cozy, I could walk to work, and except for a few of my colleagues speeding through the neighborhood, I loved living there. It was like living in a 1950s community, right out of the pages of Leave it to Beaver.
It was there that we went through one of the more trying times in our family life. There was a tropical depression that pretty much overnight turned into a tropical storm, which then quickly turned into a hurricane—one heading right for the base, and our home.
But Lola and I talked about it, and we agreed that while the storm might crack a window or two, it wasn’t anything to worry about. I assured her that we were going to get through it together.
Turned out the command had other plans. The military was not going to risk its most valuable assets getting damaged if the destruction was avoidable. If a terrorist organization seized a ship at sea or took hostages on some foreign shore, a storm of this size might prevent the team from being able to respond immediately. We were the nation’s 911 force and could not be delayed should we be called. Word came down from the command that certain assets had to be moved and sheltered away from the storm’s path. Those assets included SEALs, but they did not include the SEAL families.
Boy, that really puts the question on its ear: What comes first—country or family—when the military could accommodate both but chooses not to for reasons they did not care to share with us? I was not comfortable with the idea of heading for safety and leaving my family in potential danger.
In this case, barring being brought up on charges of insubordination, I didn’t have a choice. The storm was upgraded in the morning. The team was ordered to move out in the afternoon, and on the evening before the storm was supposed to hit I moved out with them. Hurricane Bonnie was about to show the full force of nature at her toughest.
The command did what it could to make up for ordering the SEALs off-base. Seabees assigned to the command—members of the US Naval Construction Forces, or Construction Battalions—came in and sandbagged the houses, boarded up the windows, and otherwise did what they could for the SEAL families living on-base.
But at least a lot of them were together. I was now away from danger with the rest of the team in Florida, and Lola and the kids were in the house bracing to face the storm alone.
If you’ve ever been in a hurricane, you know that you don’t as much see them as you do hear them and feel them. If you’re in the middle of a hurricane, hopefully you’re in an inside room, one without windows. So you while you can’t see what’s going on, you can probably hear the wind and the rain. Sometimes, you can feel the house you’re in rattle, and there’s the occasional thump as something—a heavy tree branch, a garbage can someone has stupidly forgotten to secure—hits your house. And wind is loud too: there’s an overused cliché about wind howling, but when you’re in the middle of a hurricane or a tornado, you realize that howl or shriek are the right words. The weather becomes alive, and it’s not very happy. It eats things too. Like phone and electrical wires.
With a hurricane, there’s a double blow. If you’re directly in its path, when you’re hunkered down you’ll hear all the howling, and you’ll feel the thumps and shaking. Then there will be a period of calm, which is deceptive—sometimes deadly so. This isn’t the storm’s end; it’s the eye—a bit of calm in the center before the eye passes over you and the wind and rain starts up again.
The eye of the storm was predicted to hit landfall a few hundred miles away and the intensity of the hurricane at the base was predicted to be not much more than a storm. The predictions were wrong. The hurricane winds increased as the storm turned toward land. Hitting the roads was risky alone with children, so Lola stood fast and hunkered down with our three kids—including two who weren’t three yet. She was waiting out the storm, and when the calm came of course the kids got restless and she had to keep them waiting … and keep them from going nuts when the noise started again. The power and phones went out and the line between the ocean and house became blurred.
None of this I knew while it was happening. For all I knew, the house had collapsed with them in it.
Hurricane Bonnie made landfall on August 27, 1998, achieving wind gusts of up to 104 miles per hour. Close to 950,000 people were evacuated and total damage exceeded one billion dollars. Lola showed her grit and braced herself and the kids in the bathroom. The house flooded, the power went out, but the plywood that the Construction Battalion had screwed on the windows held. Nobody died, thankfully. But I can tell you that it hasn’t been easy to know I wasn’t with my family, especially since not being with them wasn’t my choice.
One thing I do know is that Lola is a trooper.