a new screaming eagle and his indecisive wife

OUR LAST MONTH at Carlisle in the spring of 2010 is nothing short of a comedy of errors, caused wholly by my indecisive nature. Jack graduates from the Army War College in June at a ceremony where the keynote speaker, Steve Forbes, drones on for a ridiculous amount of time. I try not to let my mind wander to what a perfect opportunity this would be for a terrorist strike. So many of the nation’s and world’s up-and-coming leaders, all in a beautiful outdoor garden on a quintessential June Saturday, held captive in folding chairs by an endless speech.

Will I stay in Carlisle with the kids for another year, or will I move to Fort Campbell with Jack? With a Jack who won’t even live there, but is headed to Afghanistan for a year later in the summer. The decision I must make nauseates me. Army wives are not cut out to make decisions. We follow the herd; we follow orders, even if we argue and roll our eyes. But actively having a choice? Beyond comprehension. I am paralyzed. And I’m still seething that we aren’t going back to Fort Drum. We have no history at Fort Campbell. Sure, we know people there, but it has its own mafia. There are off-the-record mafias in each of the infantry divisions, and we are a part of the 10th Mountain mafia. I feel too old and cranky to learn the shenanigans and interworking of a new mafia. The 101st Airborne mafia. The Screaming Eagles. Ugh. That place is a whole new level of gritty energy and macho. But I’m not sure I have the energy to keep up the perky, vacationing attitude in Carlisle. I feel limp and depleted. But restless at the same time. Not unlike Jack.

“Ang! It will be great!” Jack says. “This is the 506th Regiment! Remember when we watched Band of Brothers? This brigade is loaded with history even better than 10th Mountain. Don’t get me wrong, 10th Mountain is our home, but I can’t let this opportunity pass us by.” Yes, he says “us,” as if this is my opportunity as well. “I know, I know,” he continues. “I said I never wanted to go anywhere but the 10th Mountain, but you know I’ve always wanted to do some time with the 101st. It’s meant to be. This is my last hurrah. After this, I’m done. I promise. After this, we will go wherever you want. But you need to make up your mind, pros and cons on either side. I will deploy just a couple weeks after I get there, and no guarantees the army will let me stay there after we get back next summer. Who knows what will happen. But if you come to Campbell, you will have the unit to lean on. And you’ll be three hours from your family in Indiana versus ten hours here. But if you stay here, well, this is just not even the real army at all. It’s like a constant vacation. But you have to choose. And stick with your decision!”

Jack is speaking in bullets again—a speech loaded with emphasis and enthusiasm, but scary and a little intimidating too. Like I have to decide rightthisverymoment. We had this one-way conversation two weeks before being held hostage by Steve Forbes, and Jack was in the middle of his own diatribe when I closed the kitchen door in his face. He kept talking anyway.

By the time Forbes’s unending speech blathers on, I have decided to stay in Carlisle. At least, that’s my party line. Inside I’m a disaster of indecision.

I waffle for weeks, and I probably waste some good taxpayer money while I am at it. For that, I apologize. So for weeks I go back and forth, each time certain I have made the right choice. Yes, all of our war college friends will be moving on, but I already know people in the new class, so that isn’t a big deal. I have one good friend at Fort Campbell, a general’s wife, Melanie Evans. This connection will, of course, immediately put me into a category as a suck-up, but at least I won’t have to ease my way in with no one familiar. I hesitantly accept a housing assignment at Fort Campbell and receive an address via email. This is it, the boat has sailed. Melanie takes pictures of the blue house, twice the size of our Smurf house, and texts them to me. Very cute but cookie-cutter. New. A tremendous departure from our minuscule and sweet Smurf house, but I like our Smurf house. It has character and a soul, along with the ghosts of at least fifty war college families before us—families that maybe fought the same battles within these same walls. Biding time between war zones. Also holding their breath and smiling polite smiles.

Melanie tells me I will like the new team at the 101st, comparable to the “10th Mountain of the South.” She assures me our new Currahee team is incredible, no crazies that she can identify, and I will fit right in. Currahee is the moniker of the 506th Infantry, made famous by Dick Winters’s Band of Brothers, the original paratroopers from World War II. The cool factor of this assignment definitely appeals to me.

Okay, Fort Campbell, here I come!

Wait. Deep breath.

I feel myself pick up the phone and dial the number to the transportation office. I hear myself cancel my pack-out dates from Carlisle. I watch my fingers email the housing office at Fort Campbell to take my name off the housing list. I give up my coveted number one slot in the housing wait list. Jack flips out, and flips the kitchen trash can. “Why can’t you make a decision and stick with it?”

I just glare at him. I’m still pissed that we aren’t going back home, to Fort Drum. To 10th Mountain. I didn’t properly say good-bye. I blame him that I’m in this position at all. I had told the kids we would go back.

“Okay, this is all on you,” he says. “I’m trying to track down my deployment gear and get ready to move out. You have two perfect options. Neither choice is wrong. But you make us both look weak because you can’t decide. I’m out. This is all on you now.”

Here’s the big appeal of staying in Carlisle. I won’t have to move and deal with broken dishes and boxes piled to the ceiling in every room and nailing a dozen holes into the wall to get each picture hung just right. No digging through my inventory of curtains to see which would fit this house and no weeks spent trying to create a home that would look like we’d lived there for years. Home is essential to me, and to Jack as well. We are on the same page with that. We both have a lot of stuff (okay, I have way more stuff), nonessential stuff. Sentimental stuff. The stuff that makes a house a home. Sometimes I envy those army folks who could move in and be established and ready to host a barbeque the next day. With the Carlisle option, I can stay put. Avoid that entire unpleasant dance altogether.

A few days later, Jack and I load the kids and the cat and head to spend a couple weeks at my parents’ farm in Indiana before he signs in at Fort Campbell. Campbell is an easy drive from the farm, so Jack will go back and forth on the few weekends that remain before he deploys. The kids and I will just crash here, our every summer ritual in my parents’ wonderful safe haven in the country, until a week before school starts and then head back to Carlisle and meet all the new neighbors who now surround our cozy Smurf house.

In the beginning of July, Jack reports to Fort Campbell to sign in with the Currahee Brigade and calls to tell me how cool it is and how great everyone is. The word great is Jack’s favorite all-time word. He has that sound in his voice, the distant, little-kid excitement. “There’s a huge black spade on my office door! The esprit de corps at this place is amazing. It feels awesome to be back with soldiers. I’m staying in the on-post billeting; it’s a little gross by your standards, but come down and stay with me for a few days. You can visit Melanie.”

So off I go, driving the three hours to Fort Campbell and trying to push thoughts of how convenient and comforting it would be to be so near my family for a deployment. Stop! I made my decision. No dreadful packing and unpacking, remember? I drive toward the Fort Campbell main gate, and the grittiness, the realness, of being back on a badass infantry post smacks me right across the face. Jack didn’t quite capture the feeling in the air. This place reeks of adrenaline and hard-core war seekers. Even the post looks hard-bitten. No pristinely manicured rose bushes and quaint housing areas like Carlisle. This place was built for function, and no one stopped to consider that it might be a little ugly. Ugly is part of the charm. Carlisle is an illusion, a vacation; this place is reality.

All my life experiences and intricate training as an army wife have prepared me perfectly to forsake the ability to make a single decision for myself. I’m a perfect zombie.

I stop at the front gate and a soldier snaps my ID card back into my hand through the open window. “Welcome to the 101st Airbooooorne! The home of the Screaming Eagles, ma’am!” Even the gate guard is loaded with an almost pornographic amount of testosterone.

Melanie has given me her address and encouraged me to stay with her, giving me a welcome reprieve from the billeting Jack warned me about. Melanie’s house is tucked in a hilled neighborhood with tall trees and long, curvy driveways—a clear indication of where the big dogs live. Her house is the oldest on Fort Campbell, a two-hundred-year-old log cabin rumored to be haunted. Melanie and I are long friends from my early Fort Drum years. We share a love for horror movies and cool boots, and she is also an astute people watcher, but quieter about it than me. Melanie doesn’t fill silences with mindless chatter, and her silence doesn’t mean she’s plotting; it just means she has nothing to say. Thriving in her role as a senior wife, she does her best to be one of us, the midsized dogs. She pulls it off exceptionally well, but now that her husband is a general, her house reminds me that she is no longer one of us. Despite her tiny frame, to those who knew her best, she is Mighty Mo. Melanie considers herself a workout nazi and an exercise addict. Even the wives of the 101st emit badassery.

As Melanie and I sit at her kitchen table, I am overwhelmed with certainty that Carlisle is the wrong choice, and she must know it too. Instead of giving me an I-told-you-so speech, she smiles with reassurance and says, “Carlisle will be fine. The Currahee girls are a tight-knit group. Stephanie Roark is”—she pauses to choose just the right word—“quirky. But in a good way. She’s fresh and full of excitement. She and Aaron haven’t been married long, less than ten years probably. She’s loaded with energy. You two would have made a good team. The rest of the ladies are so much fun to be around; I can’t really publicly admit to a favorite brigade, but it’s the Currahees.” I’ll bet she says that to all the brigades.

I’m not sure if she’s trying to make me feel better or twist the knife. Stephanie Roark is the wife of Jack’s new boss. Jack is now second in command of the Currahee Brigade, only one heartbeat behind Stephanie’s husband, Aaron.

I drop my head with a heavy thump on her kitchen table and feel the tears well up. She sees it and tries to lighten the mood. “Hey, you made a decision. I know it’s hard for us to make decisions. But you’ll be fine. No sweat. You can come to visit.” She draws out the last word with her Georgia drawl that tells me my error is catastrophic. I belong here. What was I thinking?

“So hey, where is the housing office?” I ask. “I’m just going to go talk to them.”

Melanie smiles and gives me a map with directions to an office five minutes down the road. I sign in at the reception area and wait my turn to speak to someone about the housing list. “Hi, I’m Angie Hawkins. I turned down a house about two weeks ago, and I realize I lost my ranking on the list. But I wondered if, well, if maybe there’s any way I can . . . um . . .”

The Tennessee woman working at the desk interrupts my stammer. “No problem, Mrs. Hawkins. We knew you’d get here and realize you wanted to stay. We have a house for you. It’s just across the courtyard from the one you were assigned before. It doesn’t have a sweeping front porch, but it’s the same layout otherwise.”

My punishment for being a dumbass. No sweeping porch.

And after all, I will spend the year waiting for Jack in Fort Campbell, among my people, instead of insulated in Carlisle’s cozy escape from the Real Army.

Jack does not take the news well. I carefully plot that telling him at a crowded Chinese buffet is the best option to avoid another tantrum; I think the audience of buffet foragers will force him to keep his cool. His foot taps vigorously under the table, and the muscles in his jaw bulge. His blue eyes drill into me. But by his third overflowing plate of kung pao, I plead my case in the most pathetic way I can muster and convince him that this is it. This is right.

Through shovels of steamed broccoli, he says, “All right, Ang. All right. But this is all on you. You have to set up the movers and handle the move on your own. I don’t have time for this.”

He will be gone in less than two weeks, and I have two weeks to haul my ass back to Carlisle and move out in the most inconspicuous and stealthy way possible, hanging my head and avoiding the judgmental consequences of my indecision.