May 2004. Jack spends a year minding the flock, which gives him an appreciation of the bedlam during deployments.
“I’M PREGNANT!” I blurt out this news to Jack at his office at the brigade headquarters building. I called ahead to make sure he isn’t in a meeting with his commander, Colonel Douglas O’Malley. This brigade commander works Jack harder than he’s worked since the lieutenant years, but Jack doesn’t mind. He respects Colonel O’Malley and uses this time under him to watch and learn; Jack is never one to shy away from the toughest jobs. This attitude is both a blessing and a curse for me, the one waiting at home for him. Which is exactly why I just went to his office that day. Secrets are not my thing.
Jack is exhausted but smiles as he leans back in the chair at his desk in the corner office where the primary staff works, just within shouting distance from O’Malley, and looks at me, not surprised by my statement, but summoning some enthusiasm through his work distractions, for the sake of the moment. I’ve clung to the images Jack paints in stories about O’Malley, who keeps a framed piece of artwork on the wall in the conference room and points to it with his laser pointer during endless staff meetings. Well, calling it artwork might be a stretch. Inside the frame on the wall are the words A FIELD GRADE OFFICER MUST BE PUT TO DEATH ONCE IN A WHILE TO ENCOURAGE THE OTHERS. That sums up O’Malley to a T. Being here is risky, not because we’re not allowed to visit, but because he intimidates the crap out of me; no one wants to be the silly wife hanging around the office.
“That’s awesome, Ang! Will the housing office at Fort Knox take a pregnancy as enough to get us on the four-bedroom list?”
“Yep. I checked the website. I remember exactly where the houses are; it’s those historic redbrick ones. I used to take my morning walks over in that neighborhood around the parade field with Joe in his stroller. I secretly hoped I would get to live there someday. How cool is this? They have fireplaces, and it’s walking distance to the pool. Do you remember the place with the—”
“Hey, can we talk about this tonight? I might be late getting home because we’ve got a lot going on. I have a meeting starting in five minutes, and I have to prep these slides.” Everything in his world when he’s not deployed revolves around PowerPoint slides. How exactly that works in combat, I’m not sure.
“All right,” I say, disappointed that I can’t squeeze in just a moment to congratulate myself for timing another pregnancy just right. “Want me to bring you something to eat?” He doesn’t even get to answer me before someone from another office calls impatiently for him and he feigns a light hug on his way out the door. No PDA in uniform. It’s a bummer that my pregnancy isn’t more thrilling news, but we’re not surprised. With each of our three children, we’ve been blessed that babies came easily. With the deployments, it would suck to try and try and then put it on hold. Plotting and planning our babies’ arrivals around projected deployments are my small victory.
This is the spring of 2004, Jack has been home from his first tour in Afghanistan for barely a handful of months, and we have slipped back into our family routine pretty seamlessly. Deployments are still six months long, maybe slipping to nine months here and there, but manageable. Jack is still working with relentless focus toward his goal of his own battalion command, and I stay busy spinning my wheels as the Officers’ Spouses Club vice president.
We’re finishing up our third year at 10th Mountain now, which is our second tour since we were married here before Somalia. We have orders to move back to Fort Knox, Kentucky, to spend a couple years in a relaxing job away from an infantry division, a couple years to recuperate before, hopefully, returning to the 10th Mountain for battalion command. That’s Jack’s grand plan, anyway, and his branch manager assures him he is a lock for it. The 10th Mountain is Jack’s first choice, and we haven’t yet reached a time when he doesn’t get his first choice in anything—which is easy to take for granted, but can end at any moment. The army is a fickle beast. Anyway, only a handful of folks wanted to stay in the frozen tundra of 10th Mountain year after year. So it wasn’t exactly like we had to fight too hard to stay.
Joe and Bridget were born at Fort Knox, where Jack was an instructor in the late 1990s. We were only two hours from my parents, and those were wonderful years, having my parents close by to dote on the kids and take the endless videos of them—videos that I was too tired to take. I look forward to going back, and most of all, I look forward to qualifying for a four-bedroom house. The army gives one bedroom per child, sometimes fewer if the kids are the same gender and close in age. I hope I’ve sidestepped that policy with baby number three.
Just weeks before our packers come to move us out of our ranch duplex in May, six and a half years before I lie in a cardiac cath lab, Jack calls home on a Wednesday afternoon with the news that our orders for Fort Knox have been pulled. My pregnancy with Greta planted just enough to qualify us for another bedroom on post at our presumed destination of Fort Knox. His whole brigade is headed to Iraq for a year.
The brigade is leaving for Baghdad in three weeks. Jack is still a major and has barely been home four months from his first deployment to Afghanistan. Long enough to knock me up, per our plan for baby number three. I got pregnant knowing we were leaving Fort Drum and knowing he would be present for her birth. After I hang up, I lie in the hallway and sob on the floor. Joe comes out of his bedroom where he was playing with his Playmobil set. He asks me if I fell and need ice or a Band-Aid.
Jack quickly brainstorms and presents Colonel O’Malley with an idea. He volunteers himself to Colonel O’Malley to stay back to be the sheepdog for the flock of families as the rear detachment commander. He has an idea to develop an army-wide system for rear detachments, to fill a huge, unplanned-for void left by a constant rotation of deploying units—and now deployments are a year long, which is unprecedented. It’s one thing to white-knuckle it through a six- or nine-month deployment, but a year at that point feels like an eternity. A few months earlier, the wife of a deployed soldier at another army post killed herself in her home, and the death went undiscovered for weeks. Finally it’s time for the army to notice that its families are desperate for an infrastructure to help them during deployments. It’s too soon for us to comprehend that this might be the beginning of a generation of self-entitled military families. No time to think of the long-term effects.
Until this time, units typically left their weakest behind for rear detachments. But this deployment will be different. New policy lengthens deployments to a year each—this is the first of those at 10th Mountain. In Iraq casualties are expected to be high. So Colonel O’Malley buys into Jack’s revolutionary idea, and I am nothing short of relieved. Score another win for me for accurately planning a pregnancy after all, but barely.
The next week, at a standing-room-only brigade-wide meeting for the thirty-five hundred families who still reel from the announcement of the sudden deployment, Colonel O’Malley shows slides and maps of where the soldiers will spend the next year. Gives details about their living conditions. Babies cry and wives look around, bewildered and disinterested in operational details. The walls of the auditorium swell with tension and frustration.
Colonel O’Malley leans into the microphone and asks, “Is Major Hawkins here? Please stand up, Jack. Major Hawkins is the best major in the brigade. He’s currently my brigade S3, the operations officer. The top one percent of the army today. And that’s why I selected him to serve as my new rear detachment commander. He will be available day and night to ensure our families are well cared for.” For a second, there is complete silence.
Then the wives stomp and cheer. I feel pride well in my chest. That’s my man. The robust and barrel-chested Colonel O’Malley steps back from the mike, smiles, and points to Jack: You da man. I smile too, anticipating the year ahead. Being the only man on our block of husbandless wives will be the least of his worries.
I’ve never seen Jack in a more beautiful light than I do over the following year. In the thirteen years we’ve been married, I’ve known him as tough and determined in his career. Approachable but not exactly relatable. That year, I see him become a human, and it sounds weird to hear myself say I didn’t see him as human until then. Of course I did. Maybe what I mean is I see him in a different light once he gets a taste of the chaos and restlessness we go through on this side during deployments. Even with his army BlackBerry constantly at his ear and the juggling of the unpredictable nature of rear detachment responsibilities, he has time to organize massive nature hikes for up to twenty of our neighborhood’s kids—kids who are temporarily fatherless because of the war. The kids love him and follow him like the Pied Piper. He treats them like miniature soldiers on these epic hikes, gives them all packing lists for what to bring in their backpacks to sustain them through five hours of humping through swamps and thick forests. Inevitably he returns with at least one kid on his shoulders and another tapped-out mini-adventurer wrapped around his waist. He’s always had a connection with children that I don’t quite feel. I have trouble thinking of what to say to kids, how to speak to them. For him, it comes as second nature.
I can’t wait to see the look of contentment on Joe’s six-year-old face when they return from their long hikes. He beams at Jack over his glasses and grins, loves the opportunity to share his dad. The dad who in the past has had such little time for him now has time for everyone.
My own appreciation for him develops far beyond his simple presence with us as a family, because we see him so little that I’m dying to say the words “He might as well be deployed.” But God forbid an army wife complains about the amount of hours her husband spends at the office when everyone around her is deployed. She could lose an eye or a limb or an ovary. And I am smarter than that.
What I watch that year is a gradual appreciation grow in him, an awareness for the amount of shit families go through on this side. Most guys who served previously in rear detachment positions saw their job as a smack in the face and spent their time absently minding the flock, ticking off days until it ended, just squeaking by. Jack is the first to see a huge void in the way the army handles deployments. He ends up on the cover of the Association of the United States Army newspaper that year, hailed for the systems he put in place to handle just about any sort of shitty situation that could arise during deployment. He creates something called the Soldier Readiness Contract, which ends up being used army-wide by deploying units. Each soldier must complete a two-page form, kept by the rear detachment, which outlines where his family lives, how they wish to be contacted, anticipated funeral details in the case he should be killed, everything short of what his wife’s favorite color is. I helped Jack brainstorm that contract, and it feels awfully close to Big Brother territory. But in 2004, we need this added protection and change in the way we conduct rear detachment procedures. Things are escalating quickly in terms of casualties and frequency and length of deployment. Wives panic more easily, expect more support from the army system than ever before.
Luckily, Jack and Colonel O’Malley’s wife, Kate, have an excellent relationship, even friendship. They click. I’ve seen other commanders’ wives go to battle with their rear detachment commander, and their symbiotic relationship is a nice added bonus. Kate and Jack are two peas, in a strange way. Unlike her husband, Kate is nurturing and infinitely generous with her time and her energy. Even-keeled and an excellent listener, she doesn’t play games with the wives. She is a grown-up. Although she’s mildly intimidating in her own way, it isn’t because she needs to be the center of attention or craves recognition. She just wants things to be right. Yes, she and Jack are a perfect duo, and I love that she adores him for his exhausting energy and his work ethic.
Jack becomes a rock star that year. But the coolest part for me is that he gets it now at a gut level. I appreciate how engaged he is with the other wives, how he never has a bad day, never is without a reassuring smile. The wives feel safe with him, and beyond that, he gets an invaluable glimpse at what my life is like during deployment. It’s nothing like the extended slumber party complete with pillow fights that he likely imagined. I will never have a true grasp of his secret world during deployment, but now he has a real picture of my world.