I’ve got my sisters; keep your ass over there.
—ANI DIFRANCO
THE CHOICE TO move to Fort Campbell was right. Being here in the same boat with my new batch of army sisters is a comfort. A yearlong deployment lies ahead, and there’s no time to waste with polite getting-to-know-you dances. Our familiar template for how we operate gives us the foundation and structure to become a family even before I’ve finished unpacking and nailing curtains to the wall, because sometimes curtain rods are just too much work.
Being with the CurraShees is a refreshing departure from our eight long years at 10th Mountain, before the war college. Where is their bitterness? These women are full of vigor and energy. Feisty. There are six battalion commanders’ wives in the Currahee Brigade. Each has her own talent and contribution to the total overall package of the team—so unlike our brigade at Fort Drum. The CurraShees have their issues, but we keep them in our house. We don’t air our dirty laundry. So, as far as anyone from the outside can tell, we are the ideal brigade.
I live in the same neighborhood with the battalion commanders’ wives not just from our brigade, but from the whole division. We aren’t spread over two neighborhoods like at Fort Drum, and the togetherness in one place creates a refreshing dynamic. At Fort Drum, we identified more with our neighborhoods; here the esprit de corps comes from the unit or brigade. There is a competition between the brigades, and it’s very clear who belongs where. But it’s a healthy, mostly humor-based competition. Not backstabbing or plotting. Never those things.
A week after I move in, I’m still surrounded by boxes and melting in the August Tennessee heat and humidity. Melanie calls to ask if I want to go to Harper Village Bunco. Melanie knows I loathe Bunco. Bunco is one of those games that a few women take entirely too seriously, as if their fates depend on the rolls of the dice. The thought of enduring such a heinous activity with people I don’t yet know sounds even worse. I glance around at the disarray in my house. Every room looks like a giant monster has picked it up, shaken it upside down, and plopped it back in its place. “Okay,” I reply, “I’m in. I can be ready whenever you pick me up.”
I walk into the front door behind Melanie and take in the colorful, put-together home. For a second I want to back out and run back to my own house to dig into those boxes with renewed determination. I have too much work to do to be playing Bunco. But then I see the line of wine bottles and neatly arranged platters of lady snacks and desserts and abandon any idea of escaping. On the short drive over, Melanie has confided with pride that she is included in the Harper Bunco because she is still hip and approachable. Down with her people. Which is a complete departure from the perception of the other women in her neighborhood of the rolling hills and long driveways. Somewhere along the way, most of the wives of the big dogs lose the ability to have fun. Melanie grips tightly to that quality, enjoying being among this group more, in a looser crowd.
Melanie introduces me to everyone I’ve already met at the CurraShees’ barbeque the weekend before, but this is my first introduction to many of the other Harper ladies. Twenty women talking over each other, cackling with wild laughter, singing and dancing. Within thirty minutes, I am overwhelmed and overstimulated, but fascinated. This is a twist on unwinding. I don’t even know that I’d call it unwinding. These women feed off the energy of each other. At Fort Drum, we played reindeer games. We endured the people we could no longer stand and left the party at the first available opportunity. Then we each cloistered into our smaller groups and sneaked into one of our homes to finish the night with a bottle of wine and the people whose company we could bear.
One woman in particular intrigues me. She looks like a butchy phys-ed teacher, crazy but with cool, rooster-like hair. Carefree and wild. She is far and above the loudest and most obnoxious one in the group. Later, I won’t even remember playing Bunco that night, won’t recall being bored senseless by the rolling dice and number counting, the awkward intensity of women overly driven by a competitive desire to win a ten-dollar Starbucks gift card. These women don’t really give two shits whether they win; they only want to scream and throw the fuzzy Bunco dice across the room. The tedious nature of the game takes a backseat to the swirl of energy and chaos from my new crowd of people. My new social circle. The 101st mafia. Back in Carlisle, I would be playing a quiet game of bridge on this Saturday night.
“It’s my diiiiickkk! ‘My Dick in a Box’! Who’s got that song on their iPhone?” The rooster-haired, dubiously boyish one wants to perform. I’m not in Kansas anymore.
In the car on the way home, with the ringing in my ears from hours of noise equal to a post-AC/DC concert, I blurt out to Melanie before I even close my car door, “What the hell!?”
Melanie laughs and starts in with her Georgia drawl. “You’ll be fine. The one with the spiked hair, the loud one, you will love her. I saw you trying to figure her out. She’s actually very likable and easy to be around. Everyone in there is at a different stage in their deployments, and they get together to let loose. They were certainly a little wilder tonight than normal.”
“Someone asked me to come to one of those murder-mystery parties next week,” I say. “I think I’m supposed to wear some sort of Texas beauty queen costume. Really? Me? I guess I need to dig out some kind of Anna Nicole Smith getup.”
“Here’s the best news. You’ll be so busy this year that you won’t even notice the year has flown by. In Carlisle, time would have crawled.”
The next Friday night, I host the first Pizza Friday for our neighborhood. I haul folding tables and chairs to the large courtyard our homes share, right next to the playground and under a huge spreading tree. I invite the six CurraShee battalion commanders’ wives and our brigade commander’s wife, Stephanie Roark. I also mention it to the other neighbors and ask them to spread the word. Each Friday night that late summer and early fall, and then again the following spring and summer, we gather on Friday nights for pizza and drinks. Each mother pitches in drinks and snacks for the kids, and ten bucks toward pizza. The worst part is, I open my house for potty privileges, and some of the younger kids have poor aim. Small price for camaraderie.
The impetus of Pizza Fridays is something I heard from the six CurraShee commanders’ wives. Before my arrival, they interacted very little with Stephanie Roark, who lives in Melanie’s neighborhood. I wonder if the logistics of living in another neighborhood keep Stephanie and the other women at arm’s length from one another. Why doesn’t Stephanie invite the CurraShees over for drinks or even a potluck dinner? She never hosts anything informal at her house—a house that is made for entertaining. Each echelon of command comes with a progressively more fabulous house, whose purpose is to entertain. Considering Stephanie’s young children, possibly she’s just too overwhelmed. Most brigade commanders have children who are grown and off at college, but Aaron and Stephanie Roark married later in life and thus still have rug rats. Very mischievous, but redeemingly cute rug rats.
With Jack only second in command, Pizza Friday will be my little contribution to the team. My role requires little of me, really, but I want to bring Stephanie closer to the group. The rest of our brigade team has been in place for a year already, and Jack’s position was only added for the deployment. The team has a year jump-start on the dynamics of their relationships. Maybe Stephanie feels left out by the group members’ closeness and clear, deep connections with one another. I can relate to that sense in this group but I quickly overcome it. I marvel at their banter and natural way of relating. They tease each other ruthlessly, but no one ever gets pissed off or bursts into a fit of tears. It never seems mean-spirited. Possibly I can be a bridge between the six CurraShees and Stephanie.
Stephanie Roark can seem awkward and has a kinetic energy that makes her fun and fascinating, if a little superficial. Melanie has a masterful way of framing her words and descriptions in a positive way, and shame on me for swallowing her descriptions without a grain of salt. When Melanie said “quirky,” she meant straight-up cartoonish. But beneath Stephanie’s quirkiness I find something very vulnerable and relatable about her.
By the time Aaron Roark reached his brigade command, Stephanie had clocked less than ten years as an army wife. The six battalion commanders’ wives under her, and I, each married our husbands while they were lieutenants; we have the street cred. Instead of acknowledging the experience of the other CurraShees, which would earn her a sympathetic pass and an embrace from our group, she plays the role of wise mentor. But she doesn’t get the nuances and lacks the army wife finesse that has taken the rest of us two decades to perfect.
Stephanie has some entertaining quirks, such as dancing while engaged in regular conversation. Literally, she boogies with no music. It must be a nervous tic. This is her first long deployment, and Stephanie tries a little too hard to take it all in stride. I would hug her if she would let me, but I have to remember that she thinks she is mentoring me.
Before Jack and I arrived in the unit, Stephanie gave a famous speech to the six CurraShee battalion commanders’ wives at a social event, and the speech defined the rest of her existence in their eyes. Again playing the sage, she said, “You must have your close friends outside of the army. These are business relationships, not friendships.”
Oh man. What a rookie-ass move. When the famous speech is retold to me, I am sympathetic to her clear naïveté. Stephanie underestimates how vital to each other’s survival our bonds are. These are sisterhoods, not even friendships. We don’t choose each other like normal friends do. We’re plopped here in this boat regardless of how our personalities fit. Just like a family.
Outside of these circumstances, though, we would be great friends. I am attracted to Stephanie’s free-spirited vibe, and she has great style and taste in clothing. Her house is filled with eclectic and refined pieces of artwork collected from around the world—not the typical, sterile army family home that looks as if a folksy Americana craft store had exploded inside. Because of my sympathy toward her, I consider pulling her aside and telling her to knock off the pretenses, but I know it won’t go well in my favor. She will react defensively. These women don’t need a mentor, anyway. Every single one of them is gutsy and levelheaded. Stephanie can learn from them, if she lets her guard down long enough to realize it. Even in her quirkiness, Stephanie is galvanizing. And it could be much worse.
The slight void she leaves as a mentor is fine by me; I enjoy filling in as the unscary big sister to the other CurraShees for a change. Jack isn’t a threat to their husbands; he’s not their competitor or their boss. Jack and I are a sidestep to the left of the storm for a change. It’s nice to be nonthreatening to these women; my position in the middle feels just right.
Three months after that first CurraShee party, in the predawn after my blind drive to the ER, they will be the ones helping me stay afloat. Right at my bedside, as if we’ve known each other a lifetime instead of three months.
Somehow, my three favorite CurraShees, Julia Ortega, Sarah Gray, and Kim Dunn, appear in the ER less than an hour after I leave my car running in the ambulance bay. Nothing is kept quiet for long in our neighborhood.
That early morning in the ER, before the words heart attack are even spoken, these women form an instinctive, protective cocoon on both sides of me. They mask our worries with snarky jokes about the lengths I will take to score a morphine drip. I hear Julia, the sensible one with a limitless amount of well-directed energy, make a hushed phone call to arrange for a neighbor to help my kids get ready for the school bus, and to be sure to tell the kids that I have food poisoning. Sarah, the nurturer, leaves to tidy my home by making the bed I left and hiding the box with the still-packaged pink vibrator from the “passion party” we attended together as a group (sex toy parties are a rite of passage for combat wives, marking the beginning of a long deployment). Kim, the benevolent and compliant soul, rubs my feet even after I ask her to stop. Through my morphine stupor, I remember an awareness of how fluidly we fell into our get-shit-done roles during a crisis. They bring the book that was on my bedside table, my old pink bathrobe that they make fun of for my wearing it over my clothes in the middle of the day, and lime LaCroix. I remind myself again that I’ve known them only three months.
My CurraShee sisters at the 101st, whose husbands are deployed with Jack, are with me each step of my heart attack ordeal. It could have happened to any one of them, the fear and realization evident on their faces. They’ve known me for only three months. Somehow this fact bears repetition.
Jack is a quarter of the way into his deployment in the mountains in eastern Afghanistan as I lie in the ICU, and an option for him to come home is never presented to me. The Currahee Brigade engages almost daily in heavy combat; we’ve lost half a dozen soldiers that week alone. I have plenty of support here from my parents, and as much from my army sisters, so asking for him to come home would be redundant to the support system I already have in place. Unlike my family, my army sisters are in the same boat of deployment with me. They walk the same walk. Our neighborhoods are like giant dormitories. We leave our front doors open and wander from house to house. We are just that present in each other’s everyday lives. Yes, we delicately balance that iron bond through the filter of competition and politics as our husbands are brothers in arms, but we also jockey for the top position when ratings time rolls around. I’m sure these political plays were made here, but since I was an outsider to the 101st mafia, I wasn’t yet wise to the intricate playing style. And anyway, Jack isn’t competing against his fellow Currahees this time. He’s competing against himself.
Regardless of their own hectic schedules as battalion commanders’ wives, their daily flurries of meetings and phone calls and putting out fires and doing their best to be the voice of reason and an ambassador of calm wisdom for the wives in their husband’s commands, it is those wives who stand at my side immediately following my heart attack and who stay there for weeks while I slowly recover. Even in their exhaustion from treading the waters of war themselves, they reach out and hold me up when I need it. Not for a second do I think they’ll let me drown.
Jack and I speak on the phone in my ICU room after surgery, and I insist that I will be fine. I’m not sure yet if that’s completely true. I’m in no mood to reassure him. No mood to deal with the delay, echo, and static from the crummy phone connection. My parents are here now, my whole family. My army sisters float in and out of the room, ignoring ICU protocol. Jack doesn’t argue with my insistence. Dealing with illness is not Jack’s strong suit, and the thought of his impatient presence is stressful. I’m not sure if this is something he can quickly “fix.” Before I even leave the hospital, it’s already decided that Jack will stay in Afghanistan, where he has a clear mission. Back here? The mission isn’t quite as clear.