THERE ISN’T ALWAYS enough time for a slow getting-to-know-you build of relationships in army culture, so jumping into the middle suits me. Army culture and protocol are second nature to me—the only life I’ve ever known. So I’ve earned the right to practice a little irreverence, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve learned that irreverence puts people at ease far better than polite formalities. Protocol freaks out new wives—those who didn’t grow up with it. They assume it’s some complicated secret code. Here’s the secret: Protocol is just good manners. Some knowledge of more specific protocol is required of an officer’s wife, and since I grew up surrounded by it, the nuances of protocol come easily to me. I understand the protocol well enough to differentiate between the subtleties of what can be blown off and what is nonnegotiable. Wearing a name tag on the upper right chest is nonnegotiable. Discreetly ducking out of a boring ceremony is totally open for debate, as long as the exit is stealthy and unnoticed.
There isn’t much about army life I don’t love, but that’s a bold statement to make since I don’t have a framework for any other kind of living. From the time I can remember, I lived on post. Not on base. Other branches of the military live on base. Army has posts.
I met Jack on a hot summer’s night in a seedy dance bar in 1991, when I was home from Indiana University for the summer in Watertown and working as a bartender and teaching aerobics classes. Yes, how 1991. I had one year of college left, mediocre grades, a major that refused to settle, and no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. I loved shopping and wearing Doc Martens combat boots with dresses. I wanted to be a rock DJ. Or a fashion something-or-other. But no concrete ambition. Just ideas.
Fort Drum, where the 10th Mountain Division had uncased its colors and which the division had named as its new home in 1985, backed up to an interesting but also rundown factory town called Watertown. Before the 10th Mountain arrived, Fort Drum was just a quiet little training post used mostly in the summer. The arrival of the 10th Mountain shook the North Country awake and created jobs, establishing an infrastructure to maintain an entire infantry division. Most of the infantry posts I grew up in were adjacent to seedy towns with rows of strip clubs, tattoo parlors, cheap motels, and Joe bars. (Joes is the slang word we use for younger enlisted soldiers. “Stay away from the row of gross strip malls outside the main gate. Only Joes go there. And hookers.”)
Watertown was still unspoiled and unaware of what had hit it in 1991. It still held its innocent charm. Local, family-owned restaurants lined the downtown area instead of chain restaurants. It would be another ten or fifteen years before Watertown bore the slight resemblance to an infantry town. Watertown is surrounded by lakes and rivers, and everywhere I looked, it was green and fresh. Quiet and sleepy in the most lovely way. My parents moved to Watertown in 1987, the day after I graduated from high school. I pouted and refused to speak for the duration of the 1,100-mile drive from Alabama to Watertown.
But within a week, Watertown felt like home, more so than any other place we had lived. I loved the rural Northern accent of the natives. Only twenty minutes south of the Canadian border, Watertown residents didn’t say “yeah” or “yes.” They said “yup.” Within a month, I was yupping like a native and working as a waitress in a quaint little family restaurant on the outskirts of town. Before long I was working in the mall, at The Limited, which was the height of fashion in 1988, and going to a local college. After two years in Watertown, I transferred to Indiana University but came home to Watertown on every break and every opportunity, even if it meant driving my dilapidated Dodge Omni the eight hundred miles from Bloomington to Watertown. My parents loved Watertown and the 10th Mountain Division as much as I did, and we all dreaded moving. After four years, we knew it was coming.
My parents must have been a nervous wreck that I, an only child, would never find my way out in the big, bad, real civilian world on my own. My mother was right to assume I needed dates, even though she was the rare army wife with a career of her own and she wanted me to be equally independent. But she also knew that I hadn’t figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to be everything, but nothing. I can’t recall how many blind dates she sent me on, most of them dreadful but marginally entertaining. Her only criteria as far as I could tell was “lieutenant” and “Catholic.” It seems every time I left the house that summer, I recall my mother saying, “You might meet your husband today!” I wasn’t even twenty-two years old yet, but my parents knew what I have since discovered: Army brats grow up to become soldiers or army wives. We are a culture that perpetuates. My father was an infantry officer stationed at the 10th Mountain in Fort Drum, New York, and Watertown was not exactly a hot bed for available women.
On that July night, I can’t even remember my date’s name. Only that he never stopped bragging about being a West Point graduate. We’d gone out as a group, thankfully, to Alexandria Bay, a tourist village north of Watertown, and wound up in a dance joint with a dirt floor and lots of strobe lights. The music was loud, and I could see his lips flapping as he continued to brag about something or other, and I looked around the dance floor and bar, my eyes pleading for an escape route. I remember what I was wearing. A short white tube skirt and a white T-shirt. It was too hot for Doc Martens, and thankfully so. My white-bread husband-to-be might not have given my try-hard alternative self a second glance if I hadn’t been dressed so . . . so 1991 mall-esque.
Sometimes the cheesy clichés in life are true. Like love at first sight. I am here to say that it definitely exists. Jack walked past the guy checking IDs at the door, and I saw him immediately. In the snapshot I carry in my memory, a light from heaven actually shone on him as he stood just inside the doorway of the bar. My date must have noticed the look on my face, because his eyes went to where mine had landed.
“Hey! That’s Jack Hawkins! I graduated from Air Assault School with him yesterday! He’s a butter bar like me, but he’s not a West Pointer.” He had to toss in that detail, didn’t he?
On a regular night, I would have come up with a thinly veiled retort to make my awareness of his cocky attitude clear, but I didn’t want to wreck an introduction to this man I already knew would be my husband. Before Jack ever opened his mouth, I knew what his voice would sound like: Midwestern with a hint of a Southern accent. I knew what he would smell like: soap and hopefully not man-perfume, though the early 1990s were a cesspool of stanky men’s cologne.
Jack somehow saw my eager date waving his arms across the bar and made his way to our table. I don’t remember the introductions; the music blared and conversation was impossible. C+C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat” began, and Jack about-faced from our table and made a beeline for the dance floor. Little did I expect this would be an ever-present theme in our future life together. Jack making a beeline to the dance floor. He loves to dance, and he’s good. While his moves haven’t necessarily progressed past the mid-1990s, he still has the soul and moves of one of the New Edition, not quite Michael Jackson but definitely Bobby Brown.
I can move on the dance floor myself, and before the second chorus of that atrocious song, I was dancing with Jack. His date eventually gave up and huffed off, and I tried not to notice my date’s eyes boring into me. After five or six songs, the date started tugging on the back of my shirt and mouthing the words, “We’re leaving!” He was pouting, and it made him even less appealing.
“Okay!” I shouted back. “I have to go to the bathroom! I will meet you outside in five minutes!” In the short time it took me to say those words, Jack’s date had moved back in. I went to the ladies’ room and asked frantically for a pen. Of course no one had a pen. In a bar. On a Saturday night. Their looks told me how unlikely I was to locate a pen. So I tore a huge paper towel from the roll and used my Clinique Black Honey lipstick to write “Angie 788-2152.” I left the restroom and saw Jack way on the other side of the dance floor, clearly in the grips of his date again. It would take me ten minutes to make my way through the crowd, and huffy stuff was standing in the exit glaring at me and waving his arms again. That’s when I saw Jack’s buddy, who was hammered. I’d seen them walk in together.
“Are you Jack’s friend?” I asked. “Will you give him this?”
A drunken nod, a thumbs-up, and the paper towel got shoved into his khaki shorts. Hmm. That wasn’t very reassuring. As I walked out and was led to the car by my now-silent date, I wondered what had come over me. I never gave out my number like that. Ever. For all I knew, that woman he was with was his wife.
The next afternoon, the phone rang and I heard my dad answer in his rough and tough infantry voice, the voice that reeked of disdain for his only daughter’s gentleman callers. “You want to talk to Angie? Well, here ya go.” And he scowled but passed me the phone.
“Hello?”
“Hey! It’s Jack. From last night? Tom gave me your note. Are you available tomorrow night? Can I take you to dinner?”
“Sure, I don’t have plans tomorrow night.” Yes I did. I was supposed to work; I could feel a sick day coming on already. I couldn’t turn the date down. There wasn’t time to waste.
The next night, he pulled into the driveway in his jet black Bronco truck right on time. Punctual to the minute, as if he’d been sitting down the road killing a few seconds to time his arrival perfectly. My parents were standing in the kitchen, and as I ran out the front door, I heard my mother call out, “Let him come to the door! Play hard to get!”
Jack took me to a little restaurant in Sackets Harbor, a picturesque little village right on Lake Ontario. I wanted to stare at him, soak in his perfection. He looked like a Ken doll, but the badass variety. Not a GI Joe, because he was too pretty for that. He wore a gritty, tough exterior that didn’t naturally suit him. His features and radiant coloring and blue eyes will be gorgeous on our daughters, and our sons will be built like Adonis, I caught myself thinking. What the hell possessed me? I was gone. Gone and in love. All of a sudden, my future was clear.
We had two weeks together, and one of those weeks, he was in the field. Not exactly an ideal amount of time to make a boy fall in love. Jack was an army brat too, but left home at age seventeen to enlist in the army and then was later commissioned after graduating from college. He was a child of divorce and the eldest of three boys whose lives revolved around Ohio football, and aside from his happy-go-lucky personality, he wasn’t terribly interested in a girlfriend. He was serious about his career—no time for a relationship. My work was cut out for me.
Jack was a brand-new, hungry infantry lieutenant. He’d just graduated from Ranger School and had no intention of falling in love. His true loves were the army and the hope of finding battle. The first Gulf War had just ended. He’d regretted missing it by weeks. He was the complete opposite of me: focused, hyperorganized, and almost humorless—well, not humorless, but just not my kind of humor. But oh so cheerful. His gumption and drive amused and intrigued me. He was the most endearing and child-like person I’d ever known. While we had opposite personalities, the chemistry between us was intense and undeniable. When he kissed me, I forgot my name for a few seconds. He even had a recording of his voice, which he used as his alarm clock in place of the typical beep-beep. He played it for me, completely unaware of how hilarious it was. His bright and clipped voice cried out, “Wake up, Ranger Hawkins! It’s a great day! Make something happen!”
I cooked for him, and he devoured every morsel like it was the greatest thing he’d ever put in his mouth. That man could eat like I’d never seen. A dish called baked hamburgers, which, looking back, is borderline revolting, is still a favorite of his. It’s ground beef baked in a ketchup sauce, and I was so proud of my domestic skills, considering my room at home was a disaster area. Suddenly I knew what I wanted and where I wanted to be. The Doc Martens boots were given to a friend.
Two weeks later, my parents left after four years at Fort Drum and headed to my dad’s next assignment, in Korea. I was headed back to Bloomington to finish college. Jack came to say good-bye, and I knew he wouldn’t ask me to stay. He was a man with a plan, and I knew enough of him to be certain he wouldn’t stray from a goal once it had been set. I drove away with my parents that Sunday afternoon in August, with no reason to ever come back to Watertown, brokenhearted and sobbing like a fool.
He wrote me letters from the field, short and to the point. Factual information. He deals in facts. The letters almost made me smile, and it would be much later before I grasped that his pragmatic approach to life would cause many future moments of restraining myself from slapping his head. He called once in a while. Twice during my senior year, he bought plane tickets for me to visit for the weekend. Each time, we had an amazing time together, laughing and eating and watching movies and having dance parties in the little apartment he shared with another single lieutenant, and making out for hours. And each time he sent me back to Indiana, he gave me the speech. The speech broke my heart, but by then I suspected it was a mantra more than a nonnegotiable fact.
“We have a great time together, and you are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. I think about your smile nonstop, but I can’t get serious right now. Not until after my company command. My goals are mapped out, and my priority is the army. The army is all I ever wanted.” His company command was a handful of years and duty stations away; if I waited that long, I would be a late-twenties spinster. Hell no was I waiting that long, though beyond question he was the love of my life.
The following summer, I graduated from Indiana University, then eventually loaded the new black Acura Integra my parents had given me for graduation, and headed back to Watertown. Jack had called a month earlier and simply said, “Hey girl! Did you get a job yet? What are your plans? So hey, I talked to my roommate, and he said you could live here with us if you want. I mean, if you want to look for a job here in Watertown.” That was as close as I would come to an admission that he’d retyped the goals he kept on a frame in his wall. He must have added “Take a Wife” to that list of externally focused goals.
Does that sound incredibly unromantic? It wasn’t at all. It was sublime. I arrived at our shared apartment in Watertown, and a couple weeks later, he proposed on a whale watch in Maine. He’d bought a sterling dolphin ring at a gift shop for twenty bucks and knelt next to a puddle. Eventually I got a big, fat diamond, but the rock has never had the sentimental value of the cheap dolphin ring.
Jack and I shared a love of army life. He didn’t have to spend time assimilating me to the culture; in fact, I taught him about the intricacies of protocol and political nuance. Army life was the only life I’d known. I had been bored by college. I missed the military cocoon I’d been raised in. So I jumped right back in without a second of hesitation.
After spending an accumulated five weeks dating, Jack and I eloped one Monday night, with only a few hours’ notice. Just enough time to get the paperwork and then meet him at his battalion chapel for a quick, no-shit marriage ceremony. It was the eve of his deployment to Somalia in 1992. His unit was the first U.S. Army battalion on the ground in Mogadishu, in December 1992. It would be many years before I could look back on the Somalia deployment and realize the resolve and determination it gave us. Somalia was our litmus test, one that laid the floor of many deployments to come, and how we would each operate.
Before we married, Jack told me that one of the things he found most attractive about me was that I spoke army lingo. Isn’t that romantic? He didn’t have to translate acronyms or explain the complex politics of rank; I knew them better than him at that point. In turn, I trusted he would be a lifer in the military, and that I could remain safely in the only world I knew. We fit well in the life the army carved out for us.
Back then his sole thirst was for the gritty life of a badass infantry officer. I was hungry for the sisterhood and safety of a culture I knew well. I was eager to start at the bottom of the food chain with him and hoped he would ascend the ranks, even though I knew that with each rank and promotion, the level of competition and politics would grow and that our peer group would grow smaller and smaller. I understood the intricacies of fraternization; although our peers were our competition, they were also the ones we were expected to buddy up with. We’d maintain a congenial closeness with those at echelons above and below us. I knew the chess game well. Even better, I could play it without showing that I was familiar with the game. I didn’t make the game seem as awkward as it was, because the politics were second nature. In a strange way, they were a genuine part of who I was.
Many around me didn’t have the same fluid way of navigating that part of our lives, and I cringed at their bumbles. Especially their attempts to buddy up to senior wives. Bumbles like laying on compliments too thick, feigning fascination at boring chitchat, and making facial expressions far too exaggerated to be real. Now we’re getting into perfumed-turd territory, my pet name for senior officers’ wives. Back then, in the decade before 9/11, I looked up to the perfumed turds. I just knew they had an inside track on information, a special key or password that would suddenly be passed to me when Jack made his way to that level. But that was a decade and a half away.
From the day we met, I’ve loved the cadence of Jack’s footsteps. Our marriage has somehow survived two decades of the darkest of times, and I always cling to the familiar, fast pace of the clop thud clop thud of those boots on linoleum, or hardwood floors if we were lucky enough to score housing with hardwood. I realized a few years into our marriage that I married a stranger. A five-week courtship, not even enough time to pee with the door open in front of each other. We hadn’t let our guards down long enough to see who we each were behind our polite masks. Yet I was too proud to admit I might have made a mistake and maybe jumped in too soon, and I suspect that he felt similarly. But the deployments saved us. They were galvanizing and gave us a shared focus of the lifestyle we both loved. In that regard, we have always been perfectly matched. Distant enough from each other to survive the years spent apart, but close enough to share a common purpose. We were built for war. Autonomous enough for survival.