January 2006. The dreams we want to dismiss are the ones we should remember.
WHAT IS THAT sound? It’s 5:00 on Sunday morning, and Jack isn’t in bed. This is when he still slept in a bed. The clunking and thumping of things moving around is coming from our garage. Luckily the noise hasn’t woken the children, or else I’d be heading down the hallways to the garage not just curious, but pissed.
I walk to the garage anyway. “Honey? What are you doing? It’s freezing out here. And it’s really early. It’s still technically nighttime by my definition.” Our garage is tiny and not heated. January temperatures in Fort Drum rarely make it out of the negatives. The cement garage has black industrial storage containers from ground to ceiling. In the rafters are my far-too-many holiday decorations, stored in color-coded containers. On the other side of the garage are neatly organized storage chests holding Jack’s plethora of “hobby” gear: enough hunting, fishing, and sporting equipment to entertain a small village of testosterone-loaded dudes. Unfortunately most of it is rarely used, but he loves it nonetheless. Jack thinks it is important to have a vast array of interests and hobbies outside the army, even if the army rarely allows him to engage in these hobbies.
He turns from where he’s digging deeply into one of the containers, and I can see his breath hang in the air. For a second, he stares blankly at me, like he’s not quite sure what he’s doing there himself and even less sure how to say it. “I’m packing some more gear to send on the next pallet. I had the weirdest dream. I dreamt Rob Macklin was killed, and he’s a Cav commander, the same kind of battalion I’m slated to take in the fall after I get back. It occurred to me that I need to be prepared and take enough gear to stay for the whole deployment. If one of the commanders gets killed, I’m next in line. It would make sense to just keep me there. My dream was so detailed, so real, I mean, of course it’s not going to happen, but I need to be prepared. Afghanistan could go to hell any second.”
It’s three days before his second deployment to Afghanistan. I can’t help but picture the Macklins. Her swollen belly pregnant with their first child in a twenty-year marriage.
Jack comes back inside. The kids, who are seven, five, and one at the time, are awake now and demanding pancakes. Pancakes on the weekend are Jack’s thing. He makes breakfast, and the dream is easily dismissed among the bedlam of spilled syrup and our three young children vying for Daddy’s undivided attention. It lingers in my mind, though, the dream and my mental image of the Macklins. But we don’t speak of the dream again.
Rob Macklin’s wife, Laura, who seems a little too deadpan and guarded for me to fully call a friend, at forty-one is older than most first-time mothers. Their baby is due a few months after Rob deploys. As I eat my pancakes, an eerie but clear snapshot from a recent conference snaps into mind. Rob and Laura leaning forward in their seats. Rob, who normally appears too stiff and serious for any kind of real PDA, not unlike his entire peer group, rests his hand in an uncharacteristic and intimate gesture on his wife’s swollen belly and Laura’s face contorts in concentration as she takes frantic notes. I remember my curiosity about the notes, but from community information meetings, I’ve seen that the woman can be an intense note-taker. She is aware of details that seem irrelevant in my mind and slip past me in meetings. Getting caught up in trying to figure people out causes me to miss an awful lot of substance in those meetings.
Community leader information meetings, also known as CLIF. The grand stage for perfumed-turd posturing. This meeting is held by the division on the first Wednesday morning of each month. The purpose is for various on-post agencies and organizations to give updates and pass out information for the perfumed turds to pass down their food chains and into the hands of the wives under their umbrella. Mostly battalion commanders’ wives attend, but also other senior staff wives and, of course, the brigade commanders’ wives and the three generals’ wives on post. It is an event. But it bores me senseless. I am the president of a volunteer organization this year, which makes my attendance a requirement—though I sit in the back and can slither out if the tedious becomes too much. I don’t even remember the organization I presided over, which is bizarre. The clubs and organizations run together and seem to overlap in their redundancies. But their existence keeps the machine moving, keeps us busily taking notes.
CLIF meetings are the Kool-Aid factory. Only a select few make it into the doors to see how it’s made and hear how it should be driveled out. But the meetings are also an excellent opportunity to people-watch and provided fodder for weeks’ worth of playground discussions. And it’s far preferred to have endured the meeting and be able to participate in later rehashing than to be a nonattendee and have to just listen to the others.
I haven’t witnessed Laura’s levity, never heard her laugh, and I have no reason to force a friendship between us. But she is a close friend of my close friend Elizabeth, which tells me that Laura is a good egg. Laura is one of those people who I probably would become friends with if she lived in my neighborhood, but I have no real motivation to dig past her exterior to find a possible shared sense of humor or shared enjoyment in issuing silent fashion violations.
The battalion commanders and field grade officers at Fort Drum live in two neighborhoods separated by maybe a mile and a half. So if our husbands don’t work directly together and we aren’t in the same neighborhood, the only time we cross paths is for officers’ spouses luncheons or Bunco. I doubt Laura participates in either of those perfumed-turd venues.