a surge, some spin, and a sucker punch

Isn’t a one-year deployment enough? Elizabeth’s husband and Rob’s battalion, which is now led by Martha Schneider’s husband, is en route home from a long, glory-less year in Afghanistan. Some men are already home; others are due back within days. The entire brigade, thirty-five hundred soldiers, is called back for a three-month extension. That’s the second time my practical and buoyant friend Elizabeth winds up in a pile of tears on my hallway floor. She says, “We’ve been sucker punched again.”

I REMEMBER THE PHONE call from Elizabeth Bianci so well. It’s the middle of winter 2007, which in Upstate New York is the end of February. In many parts of the country, spring is right around the corner. For us, winter has months to go. March is the worst, April almost as sketchy and unpredictable. The snow and slush and cold and isolation only get worse. Elizabeth’s husband drives a little VW Bug (no, not the norm for an infantry officer, unless he is secure in his manhood and has nothing to prove, something so respectable and almost hot about a man who doesn’t need to prove his masculinity by his stupid vehicle, a quality shared by Jack). The VW is bright yellow. Only one piece of the hood remains visible under the piles of deep snow and ice. She gave up on keeping it cleared in January. By the end of February, he’s supposed to be on his way home, and he could dig it out. She’s ready for him to come, not just because she misses him, which of course she does. But more than that, she is exhausted by taking care of the families in her FRG on her own. They’ve lost dozens of soldiers, an unprecedented amount for one battalion, in the Korengal Valley. The same place Sebastian Junger would film Restrepo just months later. Elizabeth wants Eric back for many reasons, the greatest of which seems to be simply to relieve her of her duties. Those duties that have never come naturally to her to begin with.

Maybe it’s Kat Dalisay who calls me first. Her husband is a dentist, and she has done her best to ride this deployment like a pro, keeping her whining to a minimum. Who thinks in a million years that marrying a dentist will wind up like this? Not Kat. But he’s due home in just a week. So is Eric Bianci. So we think. Both Kat and Elizabeth call me within an hour. Both of them with quivering voices hovering on tears.

“Did you hear the news?” Elizabeth asks. “I can’t fucking believe it. There’s a town hall meeting in an hour, and these women are going to lose their shit. It’s going to be a riot. Can you keep the boys for a while?”

When she drops the boys off, she doesn’t come to the door. This must be serious. A few hours later, she returns to pick them up and it’s maybe the worst I’ve seen her look. Even worse than nine months earlier during the Rob Macklin tragedy.

“I feel like we got sucker punched,” she says. “Half the guys are already home; the other half are on their way. People have paid for cruises, vacations. Some of the women who left have moved back. It’s a goddamn disaster. They extended us four more months. Maybe three. After the year we’ve had, this seems like an eternity. That meeting was straight-up anarchy from the outraged wives. I was waiting for them to start hurling tomatoes.”

She stands there telling me this, and I am distracted by the knowledge that Jack’s battalion is supposed to go for a year; they leave within six months. I wonder if this applies to us. Somehow it seems like a shitty time to ask.

Spring of 2007 brings an announcement from the Department of Defense. All Iraq deployments will become a minimum of fifteen months for combat brigades, as part of General David Petraeus’s surge. Our brigade is scheduled to leave at the end of summer, and preparations for deployment begin. With this announcement, Jack makes an unpopular decision to replace several key members of his own senior staff, and I do my best to navigate the backlash from the wives. I lose the one levelheaded, helpful, and experienced major’s wife, Patricia Reid. Low-key and direct, she reminds me of Peppermint Patty. Jack replaces her husband with a politically minded, driven (but never deployed) major who has been freshly hitched to Miss Audrey-Jill Jude Fontenot Sherwood of Someplace, Louisiana. Audrey-Jill is naive, sweet, and beloved by everyone, mostly because she is so innocent and helpless. I envy her airiness; it must be lovely to be so unaware. The Delicate Cajun has no idea what is about to fall in her lap in the next fifteen months, and maybe her oblivion will be her greatest asset.

Audrey-Jill makes even the youngest and greenest wives feel like they have their shit together. Her husband is a major, and so she falls into the mini-perfumed-turd category. I quickly realize that Audrey-Jill will not be the tough battle buddy I need, but she will also not be divisive and argumentative like Liesel Leonard. Audrey-Jill is determined to prove herself and volunteers to organize a chili dog fund-raiser for the battalion. She refuses my guidance, tells me to take this one off: “I’ve got it covered, Miss Angie! Frito pies are a Southern specialty!” The result? Twenty leftover gallon-sized cans of Hormel chili and a loss of $50. Audrey-Jill is galvanizing, though, thanks to her natural people skills and helpful nature. She is the kind of person who needs looking out for, and I worry how she will cope with the upcoming fifteen-month deployment and her first pregnancy.

I have identified the so-called problem children within the battalion, and I puzzle over how to handle them. With no viable experience from Liesel or Audrey-Jill, I establish an off-the-record group of younger wives in the battalion who’ve proven themselves to be steeled and reliable: Lindsey Grundy, Alicia Ramsey, Sophie Abbott, Abby Collins, and Anna Shaw, none of whom qualify anywhere on the spectrum of perfumed turds. They’re wannabe perfumed turds at this point. Their husbands are not all in leadership positions, but these wives become the trusted backbone of our unit. Some married their husbands after 9/11, some before. All but Sophie have been through multiple deployments, but none of us for longer than a year. Three of them are pregnant. But they all have the intestinal fortitude and resiliency that both Liesel and Audrey-Jill lack. Liesel and Audrey-Jill haven’t proven their buoyancy to me. Both strike me as fainthearted, and I can’t see either of them going hip deep into the trenches with the families during deployment. Audrey-Jill knows her place in the pecking order and respects the experienced wives. Liesel does not. She challenges me at every opportunity, unwilling to work but also unwilling to relinquish responsibility. I have three babies at home, yet we schedule family steering committee meetings around her piano lessons and Bible meetings. We remain cordial for the sake of appearances, but the tension is impossible to dismiss. Inside I am dying to scream at her, “Shit or get off the pot, woman! Are you in or out?”

Much of what determines army wife protocol is nothing more than the practice of the Golden Rule and simple good manners; Audrey-Jill excels in these areas. She never misses an RSVP, a birthday, or a thank you note. The younger wives revere Audrey-Jill because she is so relatable and quick to laugh at herself. Though she misfires and needs an awful lot of encouragement and guidance. She is unjaded and full of the bright-eyed enthusiasm that so many of us have lost along the way. A breath of fresh Louisiana air in the frozen tundra of war. Audrey-Jill has no enemies, a feat that is a nearly impossible achievement in our competitive world. Since she lives off post as her husband insisted, I find myself worrying that she suffers without the nearness of army sisters.