The cream of the crop, son. Bragging rights and a year’s vacation from the grit and spit.
THE STORY OF an army wife can’t be told in a linear way; it has to be written in reverse, with moments of back and forth. A metaphor for how we live. Zigzagging, never in a straight line.
When we move away from Fort Drum, New York, and leave eight years at the 10th Mountain Division behind us to become students at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on a cold and rainy summer day in 2009, I can’t quite absorb that this will be for good. I refuse to glance in the rearview mirror as we drive away, telling myself, We will be back. Most soldiers don’t have the opportunity or desire to homestead for eight years, especially in a place where they’ve been stationed even before those eight years. Most soldiers aren’t nuts enough to want to stay in the isolated North Country so long. I spent a total of fourteen years in the North Country of Watertown, New York, give or take, over a twenty-two-year period. First with my parents when my father was stationed there, then again as a wife. The second time, we came back just two months before 9/11, before the game changed for everyone. Leaving now feels wrong, but our marriage is on a messy, poorly maintained autopilot, and Jack has convinced us that a year at the coveted war college will be great for our family. So off we go and I tell myself we will come home to the North Country next summer.
A year at the war college is a gift, a gift of a year to unwind and reflect and take a look inward and also gain a perspective of the entire military system. Even more, it provides lifetime, hard-core bragging rights. Making or not making the war college cut is a big deal in our culture, and smugly working into conversation the phrase war college in a low and drawn-out voice is highly valued. Only one out of ten is selected to go, with a long alternate list of the folks almost but not quite selected to attend. The folks on the alternate list spend the entire year before the summer of war college waiting for an email or a phone call telling them they will have a spot. Some only find this out weeks before they need to report to Carlisle. So in addition to just having the simple bragging rights of war college, we have the added cachet of being selected first round and knowing a year in advance where we are headed. What’s really sad in our little world is that we all know who is on whichever list, and who is not. Nothing is a secret. Not the successes or the misses.
I try very hard to talk myself into being happy about leaving Watertown, even if it is for the big-deal U.S. Army War College. Until now, the army has given us just about everything we’ve asked for. It’s easy to take success for granted, and it could be swept away in a flash. Until now, we’ve always landed on our feet. Or at least given the appearance of it.
Fort Drum and surrounding Watertown are the only home our kids have known or remembered, so I reassure them with my hope that we will be back. A little trick I brought with me from my army brat childhood. I become as connected to places as I do people, maybe even more so. Saying good-bye and moving on to the next place never come naturally to me, it’s always an agonizing process, and this is our kids’ first taste of it. So I let them believe we will be back next summer, and hope it’s true. Fort Drum is our home, our history.
After eighteen years of marriage, we finally have the double-edged sword of a year to hang out with each other and fall back in love. The shared nature of our infantry-focused lives equips us to function better alone than together. Now we drive away from our home and cross our fingers that this year will allow us to fill in the facade of happy smiles that mask exhaustion in family pictures—to share “essences,” as our marriage therapist has told us. Gross. Tension we share; essences, no.
We soon discover that we don’t just not know each other, but we possibly don’t even like each other. The love is beyond question. What we lack is feeling natural together. We can’t complete one another’s sentences like other couples do. We don’t have a plethora of inside jokes. Instead we have resentment and lost ground. Neither of us is willing or able to show our true self. Our interactions with each other are like the neighbor or coworker who you never can quite figure out, the one you choose your words around and hope the conversation doesn’t stray beyond small talk. The desire to escape is mutual.
Simply saying there is a wall between us is an understatement. What we need to figure out is whether the wall is built of stones, which can be removed, or steel, which can’t. I do know it’s built by years of time apart and life decisions dictated by the pressure of the next looming deployment.
We married hastily on the eve of a deployment, young and foolish with a gut feeling of rightness—opposites attract and the other typical cliché nonsense. No matter what, marriage is a leap of faith. Even after the worst arguments or days of silence, I never questioned that I loved the idea of him. I never questioned his loyalty or his commitment to our family. Maybe this year we can find something to talk about, something that doesn’t feel forced.
We planned our children around deployments. The army was and is his mistress, the one who holds our secrets, the third party in our marriage. We can’t exhale until the mistress has her say. She is the one we each run to when we can’t stand being with the other any longer. She is our safe place; we’ve never had the opportunity to become each other’s haven. She keeps our lives inescapably intertwined. I blame our problems on him, and he blames them on me. Maybe in truth the blame lies with the mistress.
Our undeniable love for each other far outweighs the lack of natural interaction, though it is difficult to see sometimes. There is little indifference, and maybe the lack of indifference is what held us together in those years and the years since. Passion is never lacking in our marriage. Luckily we can thank the army for that gift. The army is our shared love far more than our shared enemy. Aside from our family of three children, our mutual investment in the army lifestyle is our glue.
One of the things I never quite grasp about couples who divorce is how they distance themselves from their identity as a family. How they untangle. No matter how low our moments get in the darkest times of our marriage, Jack is my family. Family stays. A life without him in it, though he is away more than he is here, is inconceivable.
While our year at the war college suffocates us with the shared realization of how far we’ve drifted from each other, it is liberating and magnificent in every other way. Life on Carlisle Barracks reminds me of one of those summer resorts with activities and leisure; picture the Dirty Dancing setting. There is no reason for stress. Every hour is happy hour. We take ballroom dance lessons and laugh at our power struggle, even on the dance floor.
Our tiny neighborhood of student housing in Carlisle is built for families the size of dolls and even bears the nickname Smurf Village. Somehow it works for our family of five, and despite the tension in our marriage, our Smurf house is the coziest of all our army houses. We are together, at least in our physical presence. Yes, if I happen to need to wash my hands or brush my teeth while Jack is on the john, then my butt practically touches his face. But somehow these are the good times, the moments we have a reason to laugh. I’m thankful for the levity provided by a tiny bathroom.
For an entire year, Jack wears a regular business suit to classes, but with his army backpack slung across his shoulders. He looks like a rogue Jehovah’s Witness as he sets off each day. For an entire year we have the privilege of pretending that we aren’t sandwiched between two long and lethal combat deployments.
The other students and their spouses come from parts of the world and military I don’t even know exist. The word spouse is the new, politically correct term we are encouraged to use instead of wife. Somewhere in the late 1990s, wives’ manuals became spouses’ manuals, and then wives’ clubs became spouses’ clubs. The wives smile obediently and follow the herd on the shift from tradition, so that much of our predictable manual for how to operate is lost in the modern military. The truth for us is that there are no women in the infantry, thus no handful of husbands to insult with the use of the word wife. So I enjoy the freedom in our tiny culture of combat to use wife without a hint of hesitation and with a nice dose of indignation. Taking it one step further, most army family readiness manuals and media outlets further embrace the term military spouse. Double yuck. I am an army wife. I doubt my air force spouse neighbor wants to be lumped in with me any more than I want to share an umbrella title with her.
At the war college, I quickly learn to keep my infantry bravado in check. In the class of three hundred or so puffed-up American and international overachieving, type A personalities, only 5 percent are infantrymen. So not only am I amazed at the number of military jobs I never even knew existed, but female servicewomen, international students, and Department of Defense (DoD) civilian students attending the Army War College surround us. I’m outnumbered, and no one cares how many deployments we have or don’t have. We are on an even playing field. And that weirds me out to an extent. I miss the familiarity of what we know.
Sure, our comrades at the 10th Mountain Division and other infantry divisions would pop back and forth to assignments for a few years at the Pentagon, but not us. We stayed, feet planted in infantry units, with the exception of two years Jack spent in a position as a small group instructor in the late 1990s. I hurried up and popped out two babies in those two years, because I knew it was the only guaranteed time he would be present for the births. Many wives have babies without regard to deployment schedules and possible Third World demands of their husbands, but not me. Present for the birth is my line in the sand, and one I’ve proudly predicted with accuracy. Jack experienced the heaven and hell of my labor right alongside me each time. In each of my pregnancies, I craved Jack’s presence. The feeling of needing him so much both terrified me and reassured me that we were meant to be.
The collective Fort Drum years were focused on the comings and goings of deployments; I was unaware of the military jobs and positions beyond our tiny scope of infantry units. As the daughter of an infantry officer, I was, when I married my lieutenant in 1992, well aware of the cult of the infantry, the “queen of battle,” the knuckle-draggers, the grunts. But somewhere along the way, I forgot that there are others, many others. The infantry is the gut and the fist, but we need the whole body and the brain to work. But the gut and the fist are the coolest, right? Don’t tell the brain and the rest of the body we said that. One army, one team. That’s our motto.
So for a year in our snug Smurf Village cottage on Carlisle Barracks, I embrace my identity as a military spouse. Most days, Jack seems like a haunted stranger who is unavoidable in such tight quarters. We do our best to not bump elbows in the minuscule kitchen. I learn to play bridge and attend self-growth seminars and team-building workshops. It becomes clear that focusing on personal, individual growth and learning will best facilitate the semblance of peace in the tiny house built for dolls. Jack and I quickly become experts at the Meyers-Briggs personality types and relish the excuse to blame our problems on our vastly different types. I make new friends, most of whom are married to combat officers and have been through many deployments. Birds of a feather. Most of my friends at the war college are reconnections with old friends from earlier duty stations, but I gain a few new ones. In the past, whenever we moved to a new duty station, I felt unsettled until I found “my people.” Very quickly in Carlisle, I find my people.
I catch myself staring curiously at wives whose husbands have never deployed, and I try to wrap my mind around how that could possibly be true. Like a cow that has never crossed paths with a horse in the barn. We cows know the horses exist, but seeing them and munching grass alongside them for the first time are altogether titillating. There is no resentment or negativity, only curiosity.
In our home, we avoid topics like the kids and Jack’s hypervigilant parenting style (compensating, hmm?) versus my laissez-faire style of picking my battles. Parenting is a volatile topic for Jack and me, so I cling to nonexplosive subjects as fodder for our conversations. One night I bring up how so many in the army and the rest of the military have never deployed, not even in a capacity beyond infantry units. Lots of guys deploy as part of a staff or joint team, higher than the division level. Those aren’t terribly sexy deployments, but at least they come with deployment bragging rights. Where have these never-deployed guys been?
“Ang, it’s not like that,” Jack tells me. “Most aren’t intentionally avoiding deployments. Everyone has a key role. Lots of guys would love to deploy, but it’s timing and the needs of the army. They aren’t in the right place at the right time. Other guys have no desire to deploy for their own reasons, and that’s fine by me.” He slides his reading glasses back on before returning to his required reading. He peers over the glasses for one last remark. “This is just my opinion, but my point of serving is to be in ‘The Fight.’ Otherwise, it would feel like going to practice every day without ever playing in the game. But not everyone sees it like that, which is great as far as I’m concerned. More room for me. Who cares what others do or don’t. Everyone has a purpose. Quit keeping track.”
Jack really speaks like that. In bullets from a manual. Bullets that sound an awful lot like propaganda bullshit sometimes. I’m the one who spits out the Kool-Aid when no one is looking. He gulps it. But this—this doesn’t sound like propaganda-laced Kool-Aid.
I let his words sink in and listen to the voices of CNN playing softly in the background. March 2010. I hear the word surge tossed back and forth like a magic bullet. I don’t watch the news on purpose, but it’s hard to hide from where we are headed. I give up trying to pretend I’m not listening and turn my head to look at the screen of war-torn chaos with mountains in the background. Afghanistan. Iraq is the footnote of the news these days. I wonder if random folks from Podunk, Wisconsin, who have no one close to them going back and forth to war even know the vast differences between the two hells. The emphatic and wide-eyed war correspondent yammers about troop levels and a rising Taliban and high American casualties. Out of the corner of my eye, I see that Jack has closed his book and is watching, too. Like lonely crack addicts staring at a crack pipe on television. The war college is our rehab, but the addiction will jump onto our backs soon enough.
The cold truth is, we wouldn’t have traded our deployments for anything; we love them. We love the thrill of our place in history, the thrill of having something bigger than us to steal our focus. When I say we, I mean Jack and me. The deployments are my bragging rights, too. I can play the role of the exhausted martyr when need be. I can climb on my high horse of sacrifice and mentally place the back of my hand against my forehead in feigned victimization. Half Scarlett O’Hara and half Jack Nicholson.
At the end of our war college year in Carlisle, I’ve become a semi-proficient bridge player and I’ve figured out that Norwegian “water of life” is too strong for even my liver. Meanwhile, our kids have exhaustedly explored museums and battlefields and run thousands of soccer drills with their tirelessly enthusiastic father, an attempt to cram in as many lasting memories as possible before the mistress calls him away again. Beyond war college classes, Jack focuses the rest of his restless energy toward a half dozen intramural team sports with his fellow students and realizes he missed his calling as a professional soccer or basketball player. Our marriage is not magically mended, and we are bored and missing the shared focus on The Fight. Which is a good thing, because halfway through the year, Jack’s career is thrown an unexpected curveball that knocks both of us on our asses.
And we would never go back to Fort Drum after all.