by Kim Perel
Oh. I swallowed a hard lump, trying to read Keith, figure out if he was mad at me. I’d probably be furious at him if our positions were reversed.
The wife in question was the family support coordinator, the one who organized the activities designed to provide support to the Ranger families. She had not invited us to the family picnic. I had found out about the picnic after it happened, during some wives’ meeting where everyone talked about it. It felt like being the only kid in the class not invited to a birthday party.
So I called her and asked her to please let me know about events in the future, because I would like to go. I may have added that though I understood it was unintentional, if I had her job, I’d remember how lonely it was to be new, try to include everyone. I didn’t yell.
I explained this to him as he unlaced his boots.
“I’m sorry,” I finished, finally, thoroughly confused. “I don’t know what I said.”
He enveloped me in a hug, crushing me deliciously against him. Two-hour daily workouts and twenty-mile road marches with heavy packs will do that. “It’s not your fault,” he said.
I blinked away tears. I didn’t know anyone in the unit. My husband’s immediate squad-team members were mostly unmarried, so I only saw other wives during larger general meetings. If I were the family coordinator, I would want to know who needed support and welcome them.
It wasn’t that simple.
This was my first clue that married life with an Army Ranger was going to be very different from being married to a civilian.
I’d never intended to marry someone in the military. Military wives must be strong and independent, and while superficially I appeared to be so, in fact I was a morass of deep neediness (see: early marriage). Keith, my husband, had decided to join for the adventure and for the experience; he wanted to be in the FBI or U.S. marshals. He had a bachelor’s in classics and was working at a going-nowhere desk job when he enlisted. Except, on his way to airborne training, he met me.
Actually, we’d first met when I was fourteen and he was eighteen. Keith was a friend of my brother’s. My brother had knocked on my bedroom door one morning, opened it, and said, “Hey, this is my little sister. This is Keith.” I have little recollection of this meeting. I remembered him for calling my pet cat “Big Cat” and that my mother liked him. Keith remembers me as a little kid wearing thick glasses.
And now here I was, learning that, indeed, military life was different from civilian life, and there was something like a secret rule book being passed around. Not only was there a defined hierarchy, there was an unwritten one, too.
Keith was in the 2nd Battalion of the 75th Ranger Regiment, a part of special operations, which includes, among others, the Green Berets and Navy SEALs. Army Rangers are a light and quick force, an all-male commando unit that jumps out of airplanes. They’re the ones who went up Point du Hoc on D-Day; liberated Grenada; they were the subject of the book Black Hawk Down. Their unit compound is walled in, topped with barbed wire, and signage that says Use of Lethal Force Authorized. Which means they’re allowed to shoot if you look suspicious.
The Rangers themselves had, it was rumored, the same general psychological profiles as serial killers. Hair-trigger tempers were encouraged. These men tended to settle personal disputes by hand, fighting in a sawdust fight pit, where the Gracie brothers had taught submission holds. When another soldier called a painting I’d made crappy, my husband told him they could settle the question in the “pit.” The other Ranger refused.
Disputes between Rangers and non-Rangers, however, aroused the wrath of the entire Ranger Battalion, much like an older brother rising up to protect his little brother. Once, a Ranger dating a female soldier from another unit had gotten beat up by a group of men when he went to pick her up; his unit returned to the barracks in the middle of the night, locked the exits, and pummeled the entire group. No one reported it.
The main goal for a newbie like my husband was to go to Ranger school, a three-month-long course at Fort Benning, Georgia. Once you went through this, then you didn’t have to be punished by doing things like clipping the grass with nail scissors. You would be promoted. Until then, you were treated sort of like a newbie at an especially unruly fraternity—except for the whole deadly weapons part.
Shortly after the wife incident, the entire battalion went away for a month to train. While everyone’s spouses were gone, I tried to figure out where I fit in with the wives. Some rules were easy to comprehend. There are, of course, ranks in the military. Officers hold four-year college degrees and get saluted. Everyone else is enlisted. My husband, despite his college degree, had enlisted as a specialist, which meant that his pay almost qualified for food stamps, except that he got extra called “jump pay” for his jumping out of airplanes, pushing us just over the salary limit.
During our first year, Keith was away three-quarters of the time—my husband went to Panama, Germany, the East Coast, California, Nevada, and various other undisclosed locations for training. Though this was pre-9/11, when no one flew American flags and everyone believed we were safe, the Rangers were always ready to go at a moment’s notice. Sometimes my husband could not be more than an hour away from returning to base, in case he had to be deployed.
His job was a forward observer, someone who sneaks ahead and radios airplanes to tell them where to drop bombs. He came in first on the forward-observer tests, and was optimistic about his chances to go to Ranger school.
Meanwhile, I’d just graduated from a liberal arts college in Claremont, an ivory tower of political correctness. As I was trying to navigate this new Darwinian world, I got a temporary job at a place that produced two weekly newspapers, one a city paper for Tacoma and one for the army. I did bulk mailings and entered classified ads. I intercepted a fax asking for reporters to fly on a C-141B; timidly, I asked the editor if I could go, and he said yes. I took Dramamine and was the only reporter who didn’t throw up. Before long, I was freelancing on the side.
A few months after we married, our names came up on the base housing waiting list. We moved into a brick town house across the street from an airfield, planes landing early in the morning with thundering din. These would be condemned shortly after we moved out, with the white linoleum of schoolhouses for the living room floors.
All the lower-enlisted families lived together, from all sorts of jobs. In the middle of the night, I awakened to the sounds of the soldier next door shouting at his wife. “You don’t know how much stress I’m under! My job is hard!” the husband yelled once. He was a file clerk who worked in an office between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., with a ninety-minute lunch every day. The day started at five or earlier for my husband, and went on until after six in the evening or into the night. Other times, he was called into work at night, and wouldn’t return for days.
Though I now lived among soldiers’ families, it was still hard to make friends. We were different. When my husband, in the black Ranger beret that was then exclusive to them, walked across the yard to his car, the neighbors stopped what they were doing and watched. If he waved, they waved back. If he didn’t wave, no one spoke.
One morning, I looked out into the common backyard to see two four-year-olds engaged in a full-on fistfight, the mothers watching. I banged open the screen door. “What’s going on?” I asked as calmly as I could.
“They were arguing,” one mother answered, “so we decided to let them fight it out.” Both of them were perhaps twenty, maybe younger. “Do you think we shouldn’t?” Her question was genuinely earnest, her brow wrinkling as she waited for my answer.
I blinked at them, wondering if I’d landed on another planet. “Probably not.” Later, I found it wasn’t unusual around here to judge force as the best way to own another human being. At a picnic, a first sergeant’s son ran around punching the Rangers who ranked lower than his father in the testicles as his father watched with amusement
; the men couldn’t say anything to their superior.
I worried Keith would change, turn into someone worse than that clerk next door; or that maybe he was the type of person who thrived on violence, and I simply didn’t know it yet. Whenever he was home, it was like a strange honeymoon, each of us careful to spend as much time as possible with each other, figure out our boundaries. I always dropped whatever I had managed to get going on to spend this time with him.
When he could, he went to plays with me, local productions. I went to everything in the area: high school productions, community college productions, community plays. Inevitably, in the dark, tired from spending multiple days awake, he would fall asleep. I’d only poke him if he snored.
One morning, he asked if I wanted eggs. He made me an omelet, a thing so large it wouldn’t fit on the plate. “How many eggs did you use?” I asked.
“Thirteen,” he said. “Why?” He finished off what I couldn’t.
At Thanksgiving, he brought home his buddy—one of the soldiers he’d just been away with for three weeks. Without telling me. The guy in question wasn’t the problem; he was a gangly eighteen-year-old, far away from home; it was that Keith brought him back without asking.
“Don’t you want to spend time with me?” I asked. “I missed you.”
“Of course I do,” he said. “I should have called. But he doesn’t have anywhere to go for Thanksgiving. Don’t worry. I’ll cook.”
I couldn’t negate my husband’s kind heart. As we progressed through the weekend, the young man chuckling at Keith’s raw turkey, sleeping on the couch, playing us at video games, I had an epiphany. There was another entity in this relationship. Not this young man specifically, but the army. A mistress who would always come first. I was the second wife to his primary wife, only having custody of him on off days. And on those off days, the men he worked with would almost always be included. By necessity; these were the men he depended on to save his life. And I had better treat them like brothers.
At work, a full-time writing position opened. I got to do things civilians never do. Once, the Rangers had a family Range Day. We went out to a firing range, where I hunkered down with a machine gun and a rifle. The hot shells hit my side, and I’m scared of guns, but I didn’t dare flinch.
It wasn’t long before I figured out if I was going to write anything critical, it had better be under a pen name. Every time there was an article vaguely critical of the army, even if I didn’t write it, Keith would get flack. I mostly wrote happy articles about the military. One of the new columns featured an inspiring military family member. I looked for Ranger wives doing interesting things. Once I picked a first sergeant’s wife, who earned extra income helping a shut-in. Her house was cinder blocks on the outside, but on the inside it was a homey woman’s domain that could pack up and move at a moment’s notice. She had a nearly wall-to-wall fluffy pink carpet she took on each move. “My husband knows this is my space,” she said proudly, her husband being a notoriously difficult guy, with his name tattooed across his knuckles. After his wife was featured in the newspaper, the first sergeant was, grudgingly, nicer to my husband. The wives became, if not friendly, polite to me. They invited me to picnics and the Christmas party.
I, in turn, never got over my abject terror that somehow I’d say the wrong thing and my husband would be spit-polishing someone’s shoes for six months. The officers’ wives did not hang out with the enlisted wives; that would be even more fearsome. I still kept to myself. I learned how to be polite, not complain.
And, for the first time, I learned I could get along alone. The independence required for a military life, it seemed, could be acquired. “I love it when my husband’s gone,” one woman confided to me. “I let the house go and I can do whatever I want.”
Finally, my husband’s turn came up for Ranger school. He did the tests—push-ups, pull-ups, a run—and passed. He came home happy, ready to pack. Then, when he returned to work, he got this news. “You didn’t do all the pull-ups,” a sergeant told him abruptly. His squad sergeant was away training, and wasn’t there to speak up for him. “You’re not going.”
That was that. Keith’s goal of going to Ranger school was over. Now, with a little over a year left in the unit, they transferred him to the headquarters unit, as close to an office job as you could get in his unit. The Ranger school slot went to someone who had reenlisted. Keith went on fewer training missions; he rode his bike to work, came home early most days. Just as I’d gotten used to the crazy schedule, it turned into a normal one.
But though both our dreams and goals had changed that first year, sometimes disappointingly, we learned we could depend on each other, no matter what. And, in a strange twist, it was only by becoming an army dependent that I had finally become independent, someone who wasn’t afraid of loneliness. In marriage, I discovered my own small brand of toughness.
525,600 Minutes
JENNA MCCARTHY
Many people believe that the first year of marriage is one of the hardest, a transitional period of extreme sacrifice, compromise, and adjustment. I am not one of these people. In fact, I am pretty sure that if you find the opening twelve months as newlyweds to be tough, you are in for a long and rocky road to side-by-side cemetery plots.
I say this based on the assumption that you married someone whom you knew for some length of time greater than a few hours or days. (Mail-order brides and Carmen Electra can skip to the next essay; there’s really nothing for you here.) You asked him what he did for a living and what that job entailed, saw him eat, and negotiated your divergent tastes in movies and music. You probably rode in some type of vehicle simultaneously at least once. You met each other’s family and decided to stay together anyway. Eventually he got on bended knee or rented a banner plane and gave you a ring that he (actually, now, the collective you) still will be making monthly installments on five years from now. You knew with an absolute confidence that allowed you to profess your everlasting love and devotion in front of God and family that he was your soul mate, the one and only. You planned the mother of all parties together—well, he watched you do it and maybe went to the cake-tasting thingy—and afterward spent a week attempting complicated new sexual positions on a balcony in Aruba. Then you came back to your lovely marital home, the one overflowing with fluffy matching towels and a fortune in All-Clad pots and pans and enough gift cards to tile your master bathroom, and discovered that the son of a bitch you just wed eats sunflower seeds in bed and couldn’t close his underwear drawer that last half an inch if someone held a gun to his testicles.
What the fuck? Where are the romantic candlelit dinners and the sunset strolls wearing matching white outfits like they promised you in the marriage brochures? Where’s the chocolate Lab puppy and the white picket fence and the doting, happy husband wearing his “My Grill’s Hotter Than Yours” apron, flipping filets for you and your closest couple friends? Where are the roses, the spontaneous tokens of affection, the philosophical debates over the meaning of existence that you can only have with your life partner? And how could he forget that today is your five-and-a-half-month anniversary?
If you were expecting marriage to be a nonstop parade of rainbows and back rubs that don’t double as foreplay, I guess I can understand the whole miserable-first-year bit. Otherwise, consider a few realities: in the lifetime of togetherness you just signed up for, these 525,600 minutes are pretty much your extended honeymoon. Odds are he’s still occasionally opening your car door for you, grabbing your ass (in a flirty and not annoying way), and actually listening when you talk. You probably don’t have thirteen kids to fight about, you haven’t gained forty-five pounds apiece, and while his boisterous snoring may no longer fall into the “adorable” category, it also doesn’t make you want to smother him yet. You have time and energy for things like date nights and sex. It will be years before one of you will storm into the bathroom uninvited and attemp
t to have a conversation without actually noticing or caring that the other is on the toilet. Peer, if you will, into my imaginary crystal ball:
Future Him [throwing open the bathroom door with a startling flourish]: “Honey, do you know where I left my tape measure?”
Future You [not even bothering to put down your People magazine]: “I’m a little busy at the moment.”
Future Him [exasperated]: “I’m not asking you to get it; I just want to know if you know where it is.”
Future You [scrutinizing Demi Moore’s impossibly line-free face and wondering exactly how much work she’s had done]: “Would you mind giving me just a minute? I’m on the toilet here, in case you didn’t notice.”
Future Him: “Who cares?”
Future You: “I do.”
Future Him: “You should light a match.”
Future You: “GET OUT OF THIS BATHROOM, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!”
Relative to the rest of your married life, there will be few times in those initial fifty-two weeks of wedlock when you will call your husband a fucking asshole. For one thing, you’ll still be comparatively high on the drugs known as hormones that propel two people in love to commit to a lifetime of togetherness in the first place and then temporarily blind them to the host of behaviors that will one day drive them both batshit crazy. Secondly, you will be extremely busy writing thank-you notes and finding ways to throw the words my husband into every third sentence. In your remaining slivers of free time, you will be folding his boxer briefs or marveling at the way the sunlight glints off the eternity band on your left hand or searching for new and exciting Crock-Pot recipes. (He’ll be watching TV.) And in most cases, it takes more than a dozen months for the deep-seated anger and resentment born of proximity to fester to “fucking asshole” levels.