Chapter One
I Hate That Girl
I’m being followed by an invisible woman. Pesky girl, she trails me almost everywhere I go. She’s not here at the moment, so I can tell you about her: she’s probably baking something delicious in her spotless kitchen. Or writing a thank-you note, or packing up the tenth care package she’s mailed to her deployed husband this month, or having an engaging but noncontroversial conversation with her girlfriends. She’s the Perfect Army Wife, a mythical creature who seamlessly, selflessly performs every domestic task with patriotic resolve that would make Uncle Sam sit down and weep Yankee Doodle tears. She’s mindful, graceful, emotionally composed, and eternally in the right. She never falters, and heavens to Betsy, she never swears. For all I know, once the sun sets, she dons a red, white, and blue cape and flies around military installations solving crimes. Because she’s invisible, I can’t tell you what she looks like, but I can tell you one thing: I hate that girl.
Understand that there is nothing in my suburban punk-rock past that indicated that in 2002, I would marry an Army officer, thereby becoming an Army wife myself. My one connection to the military was tenuous-my dad was drafted into the Korean War, but that was long before I was born. In my family, my father’s stint in the Army was mentioned only in passing, like his former hobby of playing the saxophone or the fact that, when he packed out of sleepy little Sandusky County, Ohio, to attend Harvard on scholarship, his only suit was a helplessly out-of-date plaid. My husband was the first Army officer I had ever met. I was so military-ignorant, I didn’t know how to even talk to a soldier. When he called me “ma’am,” I busted his chops. “Did you call me that because you’re trying to be polite, or because you think I’m old?”
Thus began the relationship between Army Guy and Anarchy Girl. Ours isn’t a red state-blue state relationship-more like red state and smash the state. It baffled everyone at first, especially me.
There are more than a million military wives in the United States today, and millions more women who are married to retired veterans, so it stands to reason that there would be one or two (or one or two thousand) wild cards. To be honest, I’m hardly a Johnny Cash-caliber “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die” badass, but I’m not exactly glowing under the radiant light of my own halo, either. I do my best to make my way within a military lifestyle that is by turns rewarding, anxiety-making, exciting, and tough as hell.
I’d never try to tell another woman how to be a military wife. Books like that already exist, and they are helpful. When I first married Mike, I read them all. Some taught me a ton; others scared the living daylights out of me. Nancy Shea’s postwar-era classic The Army Wife told me to expect to be closely watched-and that my behavior, comportment, and hostess skills would be judged as an extension of my husband’s career. “As an officer has an efficiency report file in Washington,” Shea writes, “just so has his wife an ‘unwritten efficiency report,’ unfiled but known, labeled, and catalogued throughout the service. The unwritten efficiency report may be the means of bringing special assignments of honor to an officer or it may deprive him of an enviable detail for which he has worked faithfully. If she is the stormy petrel type, or the too ambitious type, she may have hurt her husband’s career permanently.” In other words, if I messed up, my husband’s professional prospects would suffer, so I’d better mind the rules. The female cognate to the soldier’s imperative to “Man up” when facing a challenge was “Watch yourself, little lady.” The book also told me that my “trousseau” required, among other things, girdles, hostess pajamas, and daytime dresses for cocktail parties with matching purses and hats. If this standard still held, I was in need of a massive wardrobe expansion and possibly a time machine.
I learned early on that such measures are no longer required to be an upstanding military wife. But over time, it’s been made clear to me that other standards may come into play. At a West Point luncheon one day last summer, a woman who has been an Army wife for fifteen years-the length of her husband’s entire career-said to me, “You know, some of the other wives might not like you because you haven’t done the time.” I felt as if I’d been kicked in the chest. Not like me? For days afterward, I felt a sore spot whenever I thought of it. But if I would be judged for not having been married long enough, then another woman would be judged for having been married too long-or too many times. Or because she’s got too many tattoos, too many kids, or no kids at all. She works outside the home. Or she doesn’t. She’s in the military, too. Or she isn’t. She’s too emotional, or she comes off as cold. She seems a little wild, or she’s too tame to trust. It’s the classic judgment-go-round concealed in camouflage and wrapped in the flag. When faced with such scrutiny, you can raise your defenses, you can raise your middle finger, or you can raise the white flag. As for me, I surrender. I am who I am, and I present my take on life as an Army wife as mine alone.
I’ll be blunt: There’s a Green Curtain rule in effect when it comes to communicating about the military with people who are strangers to that world. Unless she’s a soldier herself, an Army wife is a civilian; still, a militaristic sense of discretion is expected of her. But six years into a tough war, I don’t see an upside to sugarcoating the occasional hard truth. We’ve got a strong Army made of strong soldiers, and the whole gig won’t crumble from a little honesty or a dash of political incorrectness. We’re a nation built on a foundation of free speech, and anyway, I doubt you’d believe me if every page of this book broadcast, “Hey, everything’s 100 percent fine! 100 percent of the time!” Beware of women bearing relentlessly good tidings.
Still, I do sometimes worry that I’ll say something truly over the line, and the next thing I know, Mike will be handing out basketballs at the West Point gym and I’ll be the fourth Dixie Chick. And because of OPSEC (Operations Security) regulations, there is some information that I simply cannot share. But I can give you a crash course in Army Wife 101-how a soldier courts, talks, thinks. What it’s like to see your man off to war, and to welcome him home again, as is. I can share the emotional duress of a months-long deployment and the majesty of 200-plus years of tradition that lives on at the United States Military Academy at West Point. The trial of moving, and the thrill of a husband’s promotion. The language, the rules (both written and implied), the customs, the joy, the anguish, and the searing, pulse-quickening pride. To know, and tend, the fierce heart that beats beneath an armed forces uniform. To watch soldiers go from being background noise to rock stars in the wake of national tragedy. To be married to the military during an exceptionally challenging war. And what it’s like to ponder the answers to the questions that shape every military marriage: What if? and What next?
When it comes to speaking the truth about being an Army wife, there is no “we” in this book. There is only me. I won’t whitewash who I am, but I’ll happily offer a trade: If you lend me your reader’s eyes for the length of my testimony, I will give you undiluted dispatches from one military wife’s real, imperfect life.
So here we are. You and me. And her, the see-through specter of military spouse perfection, flying around us both, stirring the air and making me nervous. But I’m willing to believe that what intimidates us also instructs us, so when Mrs. ArmyPants, the World’s Most Perfect Military Wife, is buzzing about, I don’t just swat her away. She shows me, in part, who I’d like to be, and who, by choice or by nature, I have no chance of becoming.
So I may say I hate her, but for all she has to teach me, I kind of love her, too.
The Mating Call of the High and Tight
Before leaving the house, I carefully dot concealer on the small, pitted scar over my upper lip, where I used to wear a stainless-steel ring, and on the spot just slightly right of my lower lip, where I wore a small diamond stud. Over the years, my hair has been dyed ultraviolet purple, shaved into a Mohawk, shorn close to the scalp with a fringe of dime-store-bleach bangs, and worn down my back in long black and platinum stripes like a gothic vampire princess. But on this day in August 2003, it is side-parted, brushed straight, and skimming my shoulders; I’m your basic all-American salon-born blonde.
On my husband’s arm-and since he’s an Army officer, I am to hold onto his arm when he’s in uniform; he must not hold my hand or wrap his arm around my waist-I’m a weirdo passing for arrow straight. He is ushering me across the grand Plain at the United States Military Academy at West Point to a reception for newly arrived personnel and their families. In many ways, it is our first public appearance as a military couple. Certainly, it is our most auspicious. In a pale yellow sundress, low heels, and no makeup except for a little red lipstick, I am traveling in my own camouflage, deep under the cover of normal.
I have been married for less than a year, and I’ve been in the physical presence of my new husband for a total of seventy-eight days. He returned from the war barely more than a month ago, and we were married just nine weeks before he left. Women like me, who screech to the altar right before a beloved’s deployment, are called “war brides,” though that makes it sound as though we pledged union with the war itself, not with a man who signed up to fight it. The term is a holdover from the selective-service days of the two World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam; lately, soldiers elect to serve and it is their families, should they have them, who are drafted. And the modern Army wife? Well, she falls somewhere in between a volunteer support system and an adventuress-curious to see where she’ll go in a marriage where the military calls the shots.
At the West Point Club, my husband guides me through the receiving line-as the wife, I go ahead of him and we each shake hands with the Academy top brass. I’m introduced to the superintendent, General Bill Lennox, and his wife, Anne. Afterward, we move into the dining hall and mingle with Mike’s new boss and his wife. Once I’m through the buffet line, the boss’s wife introduces me to a small group of other wives. I put down my plate of Swedish meatballs, eager to make new friends.
One of the women looks me over. “Is your husband an Academy graduate?”
He isn’t, I explain. He received his commission through ROTC.
She nods, her lips pursed.
When she discovers that my husband is a major, she makes a point of telling me that hers is a colonel. She asks where we were stationed before, how long we have been married, and if we have any children. The expression on her face shifts with every question I answer, and I get the sense that our conversation is not so much a friendly exchange of personal history as a way of gathering information that can, and will, be used against me.
“So,” she says, “where did you meet your husband?” She pauses for a chilly, bristling beat. “In a bar?”
In this moment, I’m reeling from being dropkicked into a totally foreign culture-the United States Army. I am surrounded in this crowded room by women who have already been in this life for ten, twenty, and in a few cases, thirty years. I don’t get it. What did I do wrong? Is it my lipstick? It is, isn’t it? The shade is too dark, more appropriate for a cocktail waitress. Right? Or maybe this verbal hazing is part of the getting-to-know-you process. I can’t tell if this woman expects me to fire back; I didn’t get my secret Army wife decoder ring. All I know is that she intended to make me feel bad and she succeeded. We are a nation at war, yet right now the biggest threat to this woman is the new girl with the too-red lipstick.
I cherish and rely on the kindness of other women-I am what my nearest and dearest call “a friend to girls.” As far back as ancient Greece, Euripedes wrote, “Woman is woman’s natural ally,” and centuries later, I believe it. But I don’t sense a friendly corner here. Instead, I feel like I’m standing in the cafeteria at a new school, scanning the tables full of laughing Queen Bees, and I can’t find a place to sit down with my tray.
I excuse myself and walk away from the group. I look out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the sweeping Hudson River view. Wrapping around a naturally occurring Scurve that forms the narrowest and deepest point in the river, the water slowly winds its way through the steep green hills, the current’s course leading sixty miles south to New York City-not just any city but my city, rich with variety and blessed with anonymity. I want the deep water to swallow me up and carry me off, back to a place I know and understand. Back to my home turf.
My husband comes up behind me. “Are you getting along okay?”
“Sure.”
“Meeting any nice women?”
I fake a smile. “You bet.”
He walks away and I turn back to the picture window with a sigh. Have you ever had the sinking feeling that you’re just not going to fit in?
* * *
In fact, I didn’t meet my husband in a bar. I met him in a graveyard, three years earlier. If I hadn’t moved back to New York after living in Wyoming for two years, and if I hadn’t agreed to help my friend Molly with her project for the Daughters of the American Revolution, Mike and I never would have met, no way, no how. But I did move back and I did agree to help Molly, and whoa-ho-ho, of all the historic graveyards in the world, he had to walk into mine.
My dear friend Molly is convinced she missed her era, that she would have been better suited to being a refined 1950s lady who lunched at the counter at Schrafft’s, hosted a nightly cocktail hour, and greeted every day in the right pair of gloves. Fueled by the spirit of feminine tradition and a yen for genealogy, she helped revive the Peter Minuit Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Manhattan.
During a guided tour of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery in 1999, Molly discovered the gravestone of Joshua Sands, an unheralded commissary captain from the Revolutionary War. As part of its commitment to historic preservation, the DAR will mark the grave of any documented patriot of the Revolution, and Molly had supplied the proper paperwork for Mr. Sands.
On the day of the grave-marking ceremony, in October 2000, I tagged along with Molly in case she needed a hand. Also, I was curious about this stuffy organization she’d been trying to get me to join. Molly had pored over my genealogy records and prepared the lengthy DAR application for me, even though I felt conflicted about joining an organization-however patriotic and civic-minded-that was organized around something beyond your control: your family tree. My family’s heritage is boiled-potato Ohio Valley pacifist on my father’s side, and warrior hillbilly (cut with some latter-day Norwegian mariner blood) on my mom’s side-both lines dating back to the Revolutionary War. Little about this impresses me, except for the family legend that my father’s people were so committed to their pacifism that they locked themselves in a church during one of the battles of the Revolution and were burned to death, and that my great-great-grandfather on my mother’s side was so eager to join the Confederate Army that he ran away from his family’s home in Tazewell, Virginia, to sign on with the infantry at age sixteen. These two stories reveal a lot to me about my family’s hereditary tendency toward stubborn adherence to belief and poor impulse control.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from I Love A Man In Uniform: A Memoir of Love, War, and Other Battles
by Lily Burana
Copyright © 2009 by Lily Burana.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Weinstein Books
Copyright © 2009
Lily Burana
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60286-083-4
