IN THE DOZEN-PLUS years since that perfect-turned-tragic Tuesday morning in September 2001, “What were you doing on 9/11?” has become this generation’s question of solidarity. On the twelfth anniversary of 9/11, we sit down to eat dinner, and Jack starts the family conversation (he loves prearranged dinner topics, keeps everyone on their toes) with a broad opener of, “So how do you kids think America has changed since 9/11?” And we look at each other for a long, uncomfortable moment.
“Dad, I was like, three, then.” Joe is the first to answer. Bridget had been a year old, and Greta hadn’t even been remotely on our horizon.
I won’t dig into the horror of that day in 2001, because it’s been written about over and over. I am watching the Today show and getting Joe ready for his first day of preschool in Watertown, New York. We’d arrived at the 10th Mountain again two months earlier, and Jack is at a training center on the other side of the country. On his way to Kosovo. With the news and gravity of that day, suddenly a deployment to Kosovo seems superfluous. We can’t read the future and see then that there will be a plethora of other opportunities to join in the hunt for bin Laden. Afghanistan looks like a quick, easy, and almost fun victory. Like a really badass camping trip, but with a vengeance.
So I spend that winter after 9/11 with Jack on a completely ignored deployment, with the other half of 10th Mountain in Afghanistan. Families of soldiers in Afghanistan are suddenly offered free child care. This is my first wake-up call about the hierarchy of deployments. In our world, gone is not gone. All deployments are not created equal.
I cluster with my Kosovo-deployed girlfriends and listen to the Afghanistan wives rattle about whether they’ve heard from their husbands and how proud they are. Each of them wears sweaters with huge American flags knitted into them every chance they get. The presence of a flag on an outfit is a pretty good indication of where a husband is deployed. I endure a Longaberger party (no one loves a friggin’ Longasucker party like an army wife) hosted by my attention-seeking neighbor Virginia Hickman and hear her talk about the mini press conference she has set up outside the gate. She’s taken her wedding album and her daughter gussied up with red, white, and blue bows in her hair. I intentionally turn my head to appear not to listen. But I listen. And as soon as I get home on my 2002 dial-up internet, I look up the interview and shake my head. Virginia is exactly what army wives do not want to look like. A bossy, entitled glory hound who defines herself solely through her husband’s position as an army logistician. A self-promoter.
While it is considered gross to seek media coverage for ourselves, we revel in seeing our men on the news and in print. It shows us that what we do matters. In those immediate months after 9/11, of course Kosovo is wholly overlooked by the media. It’s old news.
It’s not that the first five years after 9/11 won’t be painful and won’t have a huge suck factor, but the gravity of the war life hasn’t set in yet. The weariness and the numbness. The straight-up bitter. Most of us will white-knuckle the first five or so years, and only the weakest will go batshit crazy or bail completely. Deployment Darwinism, dahling. In 2002 it is still an exciting novelty.
Afghanistan seems like a cinch. Sure, there are some high-adventure moments in those first few years and the length of deployments stretches from six months to nine months, but it still appears manageable. Especially for me. Deployments have a strange peace and predictability that always appeal to me. Jack has deployed three times before 9/11, and we fall naturally into a rhythm. The shittiest part of a deployment is the month before it begins, and the month before it ends. The months in the middle are mostly peaceful, fueled by routine. We live in a comfortable but rundown duplex on Bassett Street in Fort Drum, New York. A thirty-minute drive to Lake Ontario and the Thousand Islands, and an hour’s drive to the edge of the Adirondacks. Where snow is measured in feet, not inches. I relish the winters there, relish the excuse to hibernate with my kids and measure time between Tuesday pizza nights at the Commons with the other deployed mamas and their broods. We bond over star-shaped chicken nuggets while our kids eat cheese pizza and watch cartoons on the big screen. Plopping my kids in front of cartoons for some mommy time comes so easily. The subzero temperatures and mountains of snow don’t exactly make outdoor play very accessible. It’s one thing to build a snowman in six inches of snow, but in six feet of snow, it’s altogether impossible.
Somehow it feels like the kids will be little forever, like we have all the time in the world and that the time we sacrifice with Jack deployed won’t matter in the larger picture of their lives. This is an arrogant and naive assumption. It doesn’t yet occur to us that we might blink our eyes and realize that Jack missed years and that I was too distracted by playing reindeer games with other wives to soak up my time with our children.
Jack is still as hungry as ever, a new major now. During his lieutenant and then captain years, majors’ wives seemed so authoritative to me. They drive minivans and organize bake sales and call to remind me to clear the date of this month’s coffee with the battalion wife’s calendar before sending out invitations. In 2002, we still do paper invitations. Evites are new and surrounded with long discussions about their validity and break from tradition. Somehow, taking a stand against wasted paper defines an army wife as a pot stirrer.
So finally here I am, the one with a minivan, planning coffees and volunteering to help the time pass. Child care is free for volunteers, and I am all over that like white on rice. In the early years, I want to be right in the center of activity. Can’t bear the thought of missing something, anything. I believe the fund-raisers and luncheons and newsletters and team-building workshops and mentoring matter. It will be years before I see those activities as Kool-Aid. In retrospect, whether these flossy activities themselves matter in the grand scheme is open to debate, but they certainly keep our time occupied and prevent wives from sitting still while the men are gone. What does matter is that an adherence to these shenanigans fosters a sisterhood while also carrying on tradition. But more importantly, it hasn’t occurred to me yet to question the overall meaning of anything about my role. And that’s the difference between then and later, attitude and awareness. Perhaps the focus on being a solid mentor also keeps me afloat, helps me even more than the wives I think I am molding.
Those strictly protocol-driven activities keep my hands from lying idle during long winters and longer deployments. Something within me easily lures me into mischief, catches me up in an impulsive moment of pouring glitter into a carefully selected set of invitations for the monthly coffee. Both creative and passive-aggressive, all at the same time. Brilliance on my part. Glitter is festive! An impeccable excuse! If pressed, I can feign ignorance at what a calculated, bitchy move the glitter was. My greatest hope and delight are that the recipient of the glitter-filled invitation will open the envelope in her minivan, sending glitter cascading into every nook and cranny, then walk around for months with sparkly, pesky, unrelenting glitter strewn haphazardly on her black capri pants. I perfect my technique early. No one tries harder or believes with more passion that she matters than a newly anointed major’s wife. And I do not disappoint.
I am aware that this is Jack’s dues-paying time, and mine, too. The politics at Fort Drum are thick and heavy. Obvious. How an infantry officer performs as a major dictates the rest of his career. While I am cognizant of this fact, it doesn’t prevent me from harassing Jack and berating him for the nights he spends working in his office and napping on a cot next to his desk. So yes, deployed is better sometimes. At least then the kids and I don’t wait for him to come home, don’t hope he might make it in time for dinner. It’s easiest to just tell the kids Dad is at work. Even if he’s deployed. Whether he is gone or home, they don’t notice the difference.
We, the soldiers and their families, are fueled by the momentum and patriotism of the entire country and the media focus. Those things might seem insignificant, but they matter to us as a culture. Yellow ribbon magnets are displayed in their newness on vehicles, before the tags are faded and forgotten. Walking with my husband into a gas station to pay for gas and having the attendant tell us it is already taken care of. The eventual waning of public support of the war isn’t what eventually takes a toll on us. The first two years after 9/11 seem easy almost, in and out and the Taliban taken care of. Still no bin Laden head on a plate, but the public rage and need for revenge over the attacks on our soil appear to be satiated. Deployments at 10th Mountain the first couple of years are six months, nine at the most. We can handle that. Piece of cake. Our army spent the 1990s in various Third World dumping grounds acting as police and peacekeepers, kind of like the older brother who saunters in and tells everyone that it will all be okay because he’s arrived, but nothing really changes. But 9/11 changes everything. Then, two and a half years later, Iraq is added to our army plate. Very different wars on vastly different soil for vastly different reasons. But it’s all called the War on Terrorism, so the public falls right into line. It happens so fast that it confuses even us in the U.S. military and our families at first. We drink the Kool-Aid, can’t gulp it quick enough on the way out the door to rid the world of bad guys. We have the power, and we are in control. A swagger that only an American can master.
It takes a few years to notice that the same soldiers go back to both war fronts, Afghanistan and Iraq, over and over. I look for 10th Mountain patches on the shoulders that whiz by on the nightly news screen. Privately I wonder if we are a large-enough force to spread out and sustain a long war, but I’m just a wife—surely someone bigger has this covered? None of us in the thick of it has the time or energy to stop and really take a broad look yet. Only a handful of guys are tagged “it” for back-to-back deployments. Infantry divisions like the 10th Mountain, 101st Airborne, and 82nd Airborne—they’re the real workhorses. The light infantry divisions. Easy to move and quick to be ready. And a handful of heavy armored divisions are back and forth as well.
Yeah, there are things about those first years after 9/11 that suck, but they’re mainly inconveniences. Missed births of babies, weakened marriages that can’t go the distance, too many missed holidays to count. The loss of soldiers, mostly young enlisted men and a handful of young, junior-grade officers. Senior leaders? No way. Maybe a close call or two, but those were and are likely to be exaggerated. In the early years, at our level we feel impenetrable.
Then sometime a few years in, someone in Washington decides that one-year deployments will be more efficient. A promise of at least a year dwell time between deployments is made, on paper, but it doesn’t always hold. So there we are, a year gone, a year home. Sometimes Iraq, usually Afghanistan. At least for the 10th Mountain. Our main presence until 2004 is Afghanistan. Then Iraq is added to our now overflowing plate.