I moved here from New York City nine months ago after my husband, a corporal with the 10th Mountain Division, returned from a five-month tour in Iraq. I couldn’t have come from a more different world.
Despite the terrorist attacks of September 11, New York is still a place of fabulousness, of decadence, of that-only-happens-in-New-York-ness. It is about as far from the war as you can get. It was the perfect place to escape from the worrying.
Whenever I was desperate for distractions, I would meet friends at clubs or hip bars and drink apple martinis, or walk through SoHo or Central Park. Of course, there would be a moment in every day when I would be amazed that people were going on with their lives–laughing, gossiping, flirting–while my husband was in a war halfway around the world.
On the base there is no escaping the war, even though my husband has returned safely from the fighting. Whenever I drive around here, I see groups of men in desert uniforms preparing to leave for Afghanistan or Iraq. When a C-17 jet flies overhead, I wonder whether the passengers are headed toward war. Last month when I went to a bank on base, a man was showing the teller the scars on his hand, courtesy of a shrapnel wound he got in Afghanistan.
There are always rumors that some company here is going to be the next one to leave. I constantly worry that my husband will be deployed again and that he may not be so lucky the second time around. We talk a lot about the possibility that he could be killed, especially since the casualty rates have started to rise. In February my husband was part of the military-funeral detail for a fellow 10th Mountain soldier who was killed in Afghanistan when a weapons cache exploded.
I see the war on terrorism differently from most because it’s so personal. It’s not just about theories and principles–pre-emption versus deterrence and unilateralism versus internationalism. My intellectual side questions the government’s assertions about weapons of mass destruction. But in my heart it’s simpler. The war is about wondering whether my husband will ever come home if he is deployed again. It’s about the woman I see at the grocery store pulling two shopping carts filled with three toddlers. Is her husband deployed? Has she heard from him recently?
The last time we went to the movie theater on the base, the row behind us was taken up by three mothers and six young children. The movie was “50 First Dates.” I knew their husbands were gone and it was not the kids who wanted to see this film.
When my husband comes home from work, he tells me about his day. If he did hand-to-hand combat training, he’ll show me the moves. If he shot weapons, he’ll tell me about their capabilities. When he returns from urban-warfare exercises, he teaches me how to clear a building. When he calls me from field training, I hear explosions in the background.
Despite the strangeness of these everyday moments, the base offers the staples of normality found in any neighborhood: a grocery store, a laundromat, gas stations and even a bowling alley. It’s strangely idyllic in a Pleasantville sort of way. The streets are lined with pines, maples and oaks. In warm weather, children play outside after dark. The military police who check on the neighborhood wave as they drive by.
But then you find yourself driving on 4th Armored Division Street or General Patton Street, and you pass by a Humvee painted in camouflage. And your neighbors are always being sent overseas or returning home again. The sergeant who lives upstairs was deployed to Afghanistan soon after we moved in. His wife left a few weeks later to be with family. She returned a month ago, and her husband is scheduled to be back in two months.
This is a world I never thought I would know. Before my husband–at the time, my boyfriend–enlisted, I didn’t know anyone who was in the military. When he gets out of the Army this summer, this place may become another story to tell my friends. But I can’t avoid the fact that the military and I now have an inextricable connection. I know the soldier’s lingo, and I’ve hung out in his barracks. I’ve been his spouse, waiting for his return home from war. Whenever a soldier is killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, I grieve because I feel as if someone I know has died. In that way, a part of me will always be an Army wife.
