Squint your eyes and look closer, I’m not between you and your ambition.
—ANI DIFRANCO
EVEN THOUGH I am numb to my surroundings—think I am tough and can handle the stress of a roller-coaster marriage, three children I too often procrastinate mothering, and the constant backdrop of the war—my body has taken a quiet inventory of each thing I have ignored. The long evenings of wine drinking and laughter that I tell myself are the catharsis I need aren’t enough.
In my long weeks of recovery that winter, I have quiet and a reprieve from the vigilance of minding the flock during deployment, even though I play second fiddle to Stephanie this go-around. My busy world of year after year of running-the-war-behind-the-real-war that has taken so much of my sweat, time, and energy maybe doesn’t need me as much as I think or hope it does. Our year at the war college wasn’t really a time to reflect. Yes, it was a time to unwind, but no, not to reflect. We used that year to recharge. The period of physical recuperation from an out-of-the-blue heart attack is finally my time of introspective reflection and taking stock. What have these two decades of life as an army wife cost me, and have I gained more than I lost? I am reminded of Tori Amos lyrics: These precious things let them break their hold over me.
Between Tori and Dave Matthews, they’ve unknowingly written the perfect soundtrack of an army wife’s life during wartime.
Our three children were toddlers and barely school age throughout the decade after 9/11. The impact that the rotation of deployments will have on them remains to be seen. They’ve spent their entire lives inside the wire, just as I have. While the kids seem resilient, I can’t deny how deeply they must be affected. Over the years, their ears have aimed at me while I hid behind closed doors on the phone, discussing in a hushed voice funeral arrangements for soldiers liquefied by IEDs. Funerals when there is nothing left to bury. Or hearing me talk a mother out of giving her children over to foster care because she can’t bear single parenting for another day. In many ways, my kids aren’t just robbed of their father’s presence, but are deprived of mine as well. I am here in body, but my mind is overwhelmed. On overdrive. Too preoccupied to play Chutes and Ladders.
I find myself almost embarrassed by the countless questions from friends and peers about why I had a heart attack. They’re probably also worried for themselves; what has happened to me could happen to them unless I can cough up a succinct answer. “Can you believe I had a congenital defect all these years and never knew it? I sure did get lucky that they caught it when they did!” The simple explanation I would like to have doesn’t exist.
A month before the heart attack, I rode with Julia, Sarah, and Kim to Toccoa, Georgia, to participate in a reenactment of the original Band of Brothers weekend. We dressed like Rosie the Riveter (Rosie the Riveter is now a lesbian icon, but I let that detail slide) and attended an old-fashioned dance in an airplane hangar. It was clear that this town reveled in its Currahee heritage and took the role very seriously. The people’s costumes flawlessly reflected the early 1940s wartime. We looked almost silly in our T-shirts with rolled-up sleeves, red bandanas on our heads and in Old Navy jeans. Oh well. The town welcomed us with a red carpet: the wives of the current Band of Brothers, battling the Taliban in Afghanistan.
I never had had so much fun on a road trip. We stuffed ourselves with junk food, laughed at nothing in particular, stopped for potty breaks, got lost, argued over directions, and quickly began laughing again, surely at something between Kim (the Korean American wife) and Sarah (the Japanese American wife), who jockeyed for leadership in the front seat. I sat in the back with Julia and enjoyed the laughter. Those two crazy Asians were an endless source of entertainment, mocking each other’s heritage and bickering over who was the “angrier Asian.” We never discussed the heaviest pressures of the deployment or the casualties. We’d become our own family unit, hunkered down until that storm passed. I liked their approach.
Stephanie had driven to Toccoa separately with our brigade command sergeant major’s wife, an innocuous, relaxed, and seasoned woman with grown children. I knew Jill from the Fort Drum years, knew she’d been around the block with deployments and was far more natural at the army wife game than Stephanie. But Jill was older and less feisty, so she let Stephanie be—didn’t even try to teach her the ropes. But looking back, I wonder if Jill’s unaffected attitude stemmed more from what we would all learn soon enough. Maybe Jill already had wind of what was coming. Just a couple weeks after we returned to Fort Campbell, Jill’s husband of nearly thirty years, the top enlisted man in our brigade, would be labeled a sexual predator in an investigation and removed from his position, sent back to the States right after Halloween, and allowed to quietly retire. I wonder if Jill knew this then, and that’s why she was quieter than usual.
On Saturday morning, we rolled out of our rooms at the Holiday Inn and stood ready and waiting at dawn to ascend and descend Currahee Mountain, “three miles up, three miles down,” just like in Band of Brothers. We were supposed to have eaten a big spaghetti dinner the night before, but we were still lost at dinnertime and the Angry Asians were bickering. We arrived late and only made it to the dance. On the upside, there would be no barfed spaghetti this morning.
Stephanie held court with a local news crew and made an impassioned speech about the brave fight being led by her husband. I cringed and hid my face in my hands, wanting her to stop talking in that weird voice. It wasn’t her words; it was her delivery. So staged and overly sincere.
The mountain climb wasn’t as bad as I had expected. I tried my best to ignore how out of shape I was, soak in the atmosphere, and imagine Dick Winters and his men training on this very trail for World War II. Such a different war than the one we fight now. I wondered where their wives were now, if any were still living. This weekend honored the soldiers, and I wondered about their families.
On Saturday night, the final evening of the two-day celebration, we attended a formal dinner. With seat assignments. Of course, Stephanie was at the head table, along with me, our rear detachment commander, and Jill. The other CurraShees had to scramble for seats. They were in the back of the room. Kim was fighting tears, and this broke my heart. Surely Stephanie at least helped dictate who sat at the head table; at least that was the perception. Stephanie often went out of her way to belittle Kim in subversive ways like this. Why? Because Kim is adored by the women in her battalion, because Kim has a natural grace and a considerate, quiet, and unassuming nature. Kim reminds me of a Korean version of Snow White. These are qualities Stephanie possibly envies. Also, Kim deserved a seat at the head table, above all the rest of us.
Why did Kim deserve a seat at the head table? Because her husband was the battalion commander of the actual unit we were there to commemorate. Stephanie’s husband was not the commander of the unit as it was in 1942. That was Kim’s husband. No one attending the weekend would have picked up on that slight technicality by the way Stephanie took over.
Finally we ended up in our seats, hoping the geezer Currahees around us hadn’t noticed the pissing contest over seating. Our group might have been the only people under the age of seventy in this entire banquet hall. I leaned over to Joel, Stephanie’s rear detachment fella, and asked, “Where is the bar? I need a drink, like an hour ago.”
He smiled at me, his cheeks bright red. “This is a dry town,” he said. “No booze at all here. Anywhere. But see that guy over there? The good-ol’-boy-lookin’ guy? He gave me this.” And he nudged my leg under the table. I looked at the mason jar of clear liquid. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and I was thankful for the moonshine and didn’t allow myself to contemplate how unsanitary it might be. I poured some into my empty water glass and gagged it down.
Stephanie was the opening speaker. Once again we sat through an even more amped-up version of the rousing speech she gave for the media show this morning. It was a spectacle. It ended in her wiping the tears from her cheeks, a gorgeous touch of dramatic flair. The audience seemed to love it. Or maybe half of them were asleep because we were hours past their likely bedtimes. Maybe we needed to take pulses. I looked around the room and wondered again. Is this me in fifty years? Still focusing on this one period in my life? Still defining myself through war? Still aching for that time in a sick way, because even though it was the hardest and most painful, it was when I felt the most alive? Would I do everything I could to recapture that feeling in fifty years, still grasping for that exhilaration?