Spring 2007. With almost no control over our lives, when something pops up that we can control, even minutely, we grab the opportunity and ride that monkey hard. Relentlessly.
With their nine-inch nails
And little fascist panties
Tucked inside the heart
Of every nice girl.
—TORI AMOS
NOW WHEN I look back at the last twelve years of war, somehow the turds stand out the most in my memory. The people who act like total assholes. The goodness fades into the background, and I have to think a little harder to remember the goodness. I wonder what that says about me. Maybe it reminds me of myself, the greedy parts of me I want to pretend don’t exist. It’s easy to take the goodness for granted and cling to the bad parts.
Nothing brings out the monster in all of us like political greed. Oh, and the offer of new homes. People like Janet Findlay, who is headed out of Fort Drum that summer, and not eligible to move. She puts off visiting our new house for months, because it sours her stomach just that much. She has to gear herself up to visit our new, cheap hardwood floors and look at our gas fireplace and then skulk back to her linoleum-floored duplex, the one we were able to leave behind.
After six years in the linoleum-floored ranch duplex, we move into a brand-new home. With the increased defense spending on the war, there is an emphasis on improving the quality of life for families. Maybe a new house will give the perfumed turds something shiny to hold our attention a little while.
Team Hawkins scores and moves into the new house before the Sweeneys, and Regina/Eeyore comes over with her precocious teenage daughter to take a look and to salivate and seethe, but says the visit is to plan her furniture placement. Unlike the familiar downtrodden Eeyore stereotype, this Eeyore has an agenda. Always an agenda.
The new houses are all cookie-cutter with the same floor plans and different facades. Sort of a metaphor for our lives.
Shortly after we move in, I see our new neighbors. She is a Korean-born woman with an ominous-looking, bald husband, a somewhat new major who does not have a history in the 10th Mountain like so many of the rest of us. Newbies in the division are rare. He drives a jacked-up Jeep and listens to death metal. Other battalion commanders’ wives are pissed that this junior major has jumped to the top of the housing list and has been assigned a brand-new house instead of paying dues in the old, ugly duplexes. When I first see them as they move in, I assume that Mira Harwood is like so many of the other Korean wives, ever-amiable and soft-spoken. That her husband is a macho jerk. I could not have been more wrong about either of them.
Mira is my next-door neighbor and often my voice of reason and calm in the storm. Little riles Mira; but when it does, take cover. Mira is the daughter of Korean immigrants, but other than her heritage, she has almost nothing in common with the vast majority of Korean women married to American soldiers. She never seeks the camaraderie of her Korean sisters, and there is a plethora of them in our community. When Korean-speaking army wives speak to her in Korean, Mira tells them that she is Vietnamese, because she doesn’t want to be invited to what she perceives as suffocating churches and because she doesn’t want to be a part of the tight-knit military community of Korean women. She was raised in Virginia, and aside from a few characteristics of many Korean women (great cook, immaculate housekeeper, and a taste for designer things, especially Louis Vuitton) she is all-American.
Mira is private about her personal life, more so than most of us. It takes longer to get a pulse on her because of this, but when she lets her guard down, there is no one more real and trustworthy. Her children are happy and well-behaved, something that is almost uncommon among the children of senior army officers’ kids. I see the behavior of perfumed turds’ kids as clear indicators of what possible familial perfection they might fake. Mira makes her children her priority, and it shows in their behavior. She does what her husband expects of her with his unit, but she maintains the balance between her own life and the unit, a balance that so many of us cannot find. Mira is generous, introspective, adventurous, and bright, but behind all this, there is a vague disconnect with her life as an army wife. Which is refreshing. Sometimes she gives an impression that she is just going through the army wife motions. Like so many army couples, she and her husband appear to be direct opposites; privately he is the class clown, the life of the party. A heckler, like me. The tough caricature of an infantry soldier, he is hard living. But a big softie behind the exterior.
I spend that spring meticulously transplanting bulbs and shrubs brought from the Bassett Street house into the new flower beds. Mira’s six-year-old son walks over each time he sees me bending over my flower beds and asks, “Miss Angie? Can I help you with anything? I’m good at weeding. I can help you dig those holes.” Before I even call the Harwoods friends, they’ve already earned my respect through the behavior of their son.