Obsessing over every single day, smelling his shirts, not leaving the house for fear of missing the one phone call that comes every six weeks. Ain’t nobody got time for that shit anymore.
SOMALIA ROLLED AROUND on a regular Monday afternoon in December 1992. In my journal that night, I spelled it “Simalia.” That’s how unfamiliar I was with it. Jack barely missed the first Gulf War, and anyway, I didn’t know him then.
After a briefing on Tuesday night for the families, complete with maps and tentative details of where they would be and what they would be doing, I puked in a trash can right in the entryway of the battalion. Less than a mile from where I would watch another woman retch fourteen years later as we waited to hear who was aboard that Chinook that we knew belonged to us. I puked because I didn’t want Jack to die, because we had no idea of the duration of the deployment, and because I was so in love with him. I watched the clock every afternoon back then, waiting for his boots to clomp through the door of the little apartment we’d shared for just a few weeks. I barely even knew him, but I knew it was right. The things I loved about him were the things that were so very different from me.
It often struck me as funny in an ironic way as the years wore on and the leathery bitter dug into the fabric of who I was. With each deployment, I became more stoic, more removed. Less concerned with his safety and more concerned with carrying on with the details and caring for the growing number of families under his command. I quit holding my breath through each deployment and just picked up and carried on. But each one took a piece of me. Each one made me a little harder. I stopped crying in movies and started weeping out of the blue in the shower or the commissary parking lot.
Before I’d heard the word “Somalia” fall from his mouth, our wedding was less than two weeks away. In two weeks and one day, we were supposed to be in the Bahamas. Instead he would be in a balmy climate of a different kind; I would be in our empty apartment in Sackets Harbor, slugging NyQuil and hanging on Christiane Amanpour’s every word reporting live from Moga-dee-shooo. Back then I left his things out—his shaving cream sat in the prime spot on our already-tiny bathroom sink for over six months. I went through the first few deployments like that, pining.
Back then I felt my worry. I wore it on my face. I lay in snow banks and sobbed without giving a rat’s ass who was looking. I didn’t know then that I would eventually develop a callus from the dizzying merry-go-round of deployments. The cliché is pathetic but valid: A heart can only break so many times before it becomes unbreakable. It took mine awhile, though. It was maybe the summer of 2006 when I checked out. No more sobbing over what lay beyond my scope of control. Just wasted tears. Eventually I would figure that out. But it would take a handful of deployments to steel me.
My wedding was planned and replanned four times, my eternally optimistic self believing the promises that he would be home soon. Each time, I sent out invitations again, licked the stamps, and copied three hundred addresses to guests. Even though we got hitched quickly by his unit chaplain the night before he deployed, I still wanted the wedding. The fact that we were already married was a minor detail as far as my bride-obsessed brain was concerned. Eloping before a deployment for practical purposes is an unfortunate and unromantic reality for many army couples. But it doesn’t stop an eventual fairy tale wedding. Somalia won’t stop mine, either.
Each of those four times the wedding was rescheduled, I took one pound of hamburger meat out of my freezer to make Jack’s favorite homecoming meal, one of three things I knew how to make at age twenty-two, and each of those four times, I refroze the meat when his boots didn’t make it through our tiny front door. When I eventually made the grotesque casserole, the meat was rancid. I was too blinded by the glee of his impending arrival to notice. And he ate the entire pound without even stopping to take a drink of water. He had lost twenty pounds in Somalia. I wanted him to finish eating so I could jump his bones again. There is no sex as good as post-deployment sex. He spent the next three days in the bathroom, or sharting himself at work. He had to “take a knee” in a formation of soldiers, the kiss of humiliation for a hard-core infantryman.
It’s still his favorite dish, though. War and rancid meat.