When there is nothing to do but wait, nothing to do but hope it isn’t you.
ON A FRIDAY in May 2006 in the remote mountains of Kunar province, a Chinook helicopter crashes while picking up an infantry squad on a mission and careens down a mountain in flames, killing ten soldiers inside. Difficulty in accessing the wreckage site and confusion about who exactly was on the helicopter create a hush of silent chaos following the crash. Fort Drum families of soldiers who are in Afghanistan hold their breath for two solid days until notifications of KIA (killed in action) are confirmed and complete.
Before I hear of the crash, I shop for groceries early Saturday morning in what is usually a crowded commissary. Not even the cashiers are their chatty selves; no whines about empty carts not returned to the trolley. No cars enter or leave my neighborhood; everyone with a husband in Afghanistan hunkers in her home watching CNN with the curtains drawn on the beautiful spring day. Playgrounds are devoid of children and the usual mayhem of activities.
No messages on my machine, and I flip on the news. Thanks to the ticker scrolling across the bottom, I learn only that it was a 10th Mountain Chinook. A transport helicopter intended to carry up to fifty soldiers. While the media spend the day freely hypothesizing the details of the crash, back here we endure an immediate, mandatory blackout of communication between Fort Drum and Afghanistan. No calls, no emails. Nothing. Strict protocol to ensure that word of mouth doesn’t spread a soldier’s death before the unaware widow has the privilege, honor, and dignity of hearing per regulation, from a gussied-up chaplain and officer who knock at her door. From the news, it must be us. We just don’t know who. Sometimes information finds its way through commo blackouts.
The soldiers aboard the crashed helicopter were incinerated to the point of requiring dental records for identification, according to CNN. I make sure my kids are in their rooms playing. Sometimes, oftentimes, the media get facts wrong. They forget we are watching, the families of those who might have been incinerated. The CNN anchor smoothly moves on to a story about Britney Spears.
I look outside again to see if anyone is standing in the street talking. On our street of about thirty families, maybe five homes have a husband who isn’t deployed. Most men are in Iraq, though, so I would think some neighbors would be outside. News from Iraq seems mild today. No reason for my neighbors to hunker down in their hovels. I say hovels, because these houses are hovels. One-story duplexes slapped together in a big, bad hurry in the late 1980s, when Fort Drum expanded with the arrival of the 10th Mountain. The linoleum floors were patched with whatever kind of linoleum the housing warehouse had stocked. No one even bothered to make it match. The vent for our dryers blows directly into the front door and covers the entryway with lint, no matter how often we step outside with a broom to clean it up. The heating vents are in the ceiling, even though we live in the coldest part of the country besides Alaska. So the story went, when the houses were slapped up, they borrowed blueprints from houses in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and didn’t bother to make even slight adjustments for climate. The floors are colder than a witch’s titty in winter, as my dad liked to say when he visited.
Summers could be blistering, and the houses weren’t built with air conditioners. In the summer of 2005, the powers that be decided we needed air conditioners. The residents of Bassett Street were tickled with relief and waited impatiently for theirs to be installed, each of us keeping track of who got hers first, and wondered if there was rhyme or reason. For two weeks no one talked about anything except the air conditioners. We assumed it would be an outside unit, one of those little boxes in the backyard. Nope. They came and carved a huge hole in the living room wall, dead in the center, and installed the loudest, ugliest window unit I’ve ever seen. Surely it was cheap, and that’s why we got it.
But all of that changed the next year, when the army decided we all needed better “quality of life.” They threw grandiose (but when you look really closely, cheaply made, not unlike Bassett Street, just grander and newer) new homes at us. Hopefully to take our minds away from two wars with no end in sight.
Bassett Street is probably ugly and rundown, but nearly every resident keeps an immaculate lawn and does her best to decorate the facade of her home. Army wives really are masters of making even the hugest dump seem like it’s not so crummy after all. Life on Bassett Street is about the camaraderie, not about the aesthetics of the gross duplexes, though the gross duplexes give us a galvanizing and always-available topic of discussion. When we run out of things to talk about, we can always bitch about the housing.
Bassett Street is usually overflowing with gangs of kids of all ages. They spend their days going back and forth to and from the woods behind our street and creating worlds and games on the playground. Saturdays are normally a flurry of noise and a cascade of wagons, Big Wheels, and bikes left in the center of the street; cars had to stop and move the toys just to maneuver into their driveways. Today there are no bikes and no water wars with hoses. And it is probably the warmest, most gorgeous spring day we’ve had so far this year. But it’s a ghost town.
I think I will drag the kids to Mass this afternoon.
I wrack my brain to remember the last time I heard from Jack. Was it Monday? He’s in a staff position and spends his days in the headquarters, the JOC, right? It’s impossible he was aboard that Chinook. But I allow my mind to go there, to imagine the nondescript sedan pulling up in front of my house and the formally dressed notification team of soldiers walking to my front door. Would I open the door? Would I scream like the women in movies? Or would I reach deep into my black soul to allow myself to hover from above and feel nothing? I am tremendously unruffled in crises; it’s the little things that push me over the edge. But that scenario doesn’t even qualify as a crisis situation; it would be the end of the only life I’ve known.
As an only-when-I-need-it Catholic, I drag the kids in the afternoon to a standing-room-only Mass. Crowds of families pray their asses off in silence. Again, the weight of the stillness is crushing, smothering, and sickening. On the way to my car after Mass, I see a woman heave through her sobs and vomit into a trash can.