Under the Sabers: The Unwritten Code of Army Wives

by Tanya Biank

  The lieutenant’s wife shrugged her shoulders, got up, and started talking to some friends.

  Andrea Lynne plunged ahead. “I can pick up the phone and call my husband to make something happen—and believe me, I have—but sometimes I wait in line just to see how long it takes. That way, when I hear a frustrated enlisted wife explain to me what she’s been through, I can help her.”

  The room got quiet. The lieutenant’s wife sat back down. “I know what it’s like not to have your sick child taken care of in the emergency room,” Andrea Lynne said. She had the wives’ attention now, and she told them how, at Fort Bliss, Texas, when Rennie was away, she had had to take Madelyn to the hospital. The pediatrics section was closed, and after waiting for hours, neither her daughter nor the child of the enlisted wife behind her were even screened.

  Andrea Lynne raised hell that night, and eventually the clerk at the emergency room counter was reprimanded and transferred. When Rennie got home and checked on the matter, he took the enlisted father with him to make his point.

  The wives were now hanging on every word.

  “I feel that it’s unfair for me,” Andrea Lynne said, “to take advantage of my husband’s rank only for myself and not use it to benefit the troops. If I can help the White Devils, I will. If I have to work at Robinson Clinic to make sure our families get the best care, I will.”

  Let the lieutenant’s wife resent me, she thought. It wasn’t about power to Andrea Lynne, it was about what was best for the soldiers. She loved the battalion, and so did Rennie. The huge turnout at their Christmas party bore witness to that.

  Back inside the house, Colonel Maffey was standing near the CD player. He spoke in serious tones, mostly about work. Andrea Lynne chatted with him but kept an eye on the dining room table, which was covered by a burgundy chintz tablecloth and laden with food from her collection of special recipes: hot crab dip, marinated cheese, pineapple meatballs, tortilla wraps, Gouda bread, hot ryes, New Orleans hot wings, and party sandwiches. She had made so much there was no way she could run out of things to eat. She surveyed the assortment of sliced breads—pumpkin, zucchini, and banana—and another tray of everyone’s favorite cookie, apricot amaretto chews. There were also several tiered platters of petits fours, Russian teacakes, pound cake cookies, and homemade chocolate candies. When you give a party, go big, was Andrea Lynne’s motto.

  She was surprised to see that Lieutenant General Dan McNeill and his wife, Maureen, were still at the party. It was their anniversary, and Maureen, a kind, sincere woman, had originally telephoned to say they couldn’t come. But her husband had called back to say they would stop by after all. Andrea Lynne had spied the general a few times from the kitchen, apparently enjoying the hors d’oeuvres. He had a full head of salt-and-pepper hair and light blue eyes in a handsome face creased by life in the Army. Andrea Lynne found him likable and charming, and she could see him smiling at the quote she had painted over the china cabinet in the otherwise formal dining room: All’s well that ends in a good meal. Perhaps he is seeing us as individuals for the first time, Andrea Lynne thought. He seemed to appreciate the hospitality.

  Ten months earlier, after Rennie received his orders for Vietnam, he had gone to McNeill and asked to stay on at Fort Bragg. After two grueling years in command, Rennie didn’t want to leave his family for a year. Plus he had already been separated from his family for twelve months during a hardship tour in Korea. But Rennie’s presence in Vietnam had been requested by name, and the general had slotted two other lieutenant colonels for the only two 0-5 jobs (lieutenant colonel rank) available at Bragg. McNeill stood firm in his decision.

  It was a disappointment for the Corys and others who knew them, but Rennie, as usual, set his own desires aside and concentrated on his job. For someone so attached to his family, he had tremendous fortitude. When Andrea Lynne ended up in intensive care, ill from complications of diabetes, the spring before he left, her ordeal was all the more difficult since she knew Rennie would be leaving in the summer. Andrea Lynne considered her invitation to the general a way to show she had no hard feelings. Perhaps, she thought, that was why McNeill called to accept personally.

  Near the food Andrea Lynne noticed Brigadier General David Petraeus, balancing himself on crutches. He had broken his pelvis during a recreational free-fall parachute jump one weekend and ended up in intensive care himself. For a man who had once been accidentally shot in the chest by one of his own soldiers during a field exercise, the crutches were no big deal.

  As she came closer, the general stiffened a bit. Andrea Lynne liked Petraeus’s wife, Holly, a lot, but she didn’t care much for the general. Petraeus may have been a brilliant man with a Ph.D. from Princeton, but he was too straitlaced and opinionated for Andrea Lynne’s tastes. Still, that didn’t keep her from her job.

  “Hi, I’m so glad you could come,” she said warmly.

  “Thank you for inviting us,” the general answered formally. “Holly sends her regrets. She really wanted to come, but she is picking up a friend at the airport as we speak.”

  “So you’re out on the town tonight?”

  He got Andrea Lynne’s humor, and for a fleeting moment seemed to appreciate being treated to the same teasing as the other men. But only for a moment. Andrea Lynne quickly turned the conversation to his injury. That was her style. Flirt a little and then get serious about something. She never really gave men time to respond to her flirting. She talked to the brigadier general for only a couple of minutes, then she moved on to the McCardles.

  “Hi, it’s so good to see you. Thank you for coming.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  A few minutes before midnight Command Sergeant Major Gary Kalinofski and his wife, Delores, said their good-byes and slipped out the front door of the Corys’ quarters and into the fog. Nothing could affect Delores’s mood. She felt as if she were floating on air. It was the Kalinofskis’ twenty-first wedding anniversary; their son, who’d just joined the Army, was home for the holidays; and they’d had a wonderful time at the party.

  The sergeant major had already warmed up their ‘96 Camry when Delores and their twelve-year-old daughter, Cherish, who’d been asleep on the Corys’ couch since nine o’clock, got in. Gary Kalinofski, known as “Ski,” usually avoided these kinds of officer-heavy functions, but he wanted to see his old pal, Rennie Cory. Ski considered Lieutenant Colonel Cory a charismatic leader and an easy-to-get-along-with officer. He was neither phony nor excitable, traits enlisted soldiers loathed in their commanders.

  The two had served together twenty years earlier at Bragg, in Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion of the 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, when Ski was a buck sergeant and Rennie a newly minted platoon leader. Now they had come full circle: Rennie had just finished his tour as a battalion commander in the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, and Ski was at the pinnacle of his career as its brigade command sergeant major. The most senior noncommissioned officer within the enlisted ranks, a command sergeant major serves as a confidant and adviser to the commander and is viewed as all-powerful by the enlisted soldiers.

  Rennie and Andrea Lynne Cory had greeted the Kalinofskis when they entered the quarters.

  “Delores, nice to see you,” Rennie said, as he touched Delores’s shoulder. Rennie Cory had asked Delores in the past to call him by his first name. She had to remind herself not to call him “sir” or “Colonel Cory.”

  Only officers are called “sir” in the Army, and Delores’s predicament was a common one. Whether to call an NCO or an officer by his rank or his first name can be awkward for wives, even if the spouses are friends. While rank is necessary for military order and discipline, how it applies to wives in social relationships can be a somewhat gray area. Although no one would want to be labeled “rank conscious,” only a foolish or inexperienced wife would discard the system. In my experience, when it comes to greetings, stature, situation, and personalities all come into play. A soldier equal in rank to one’s husband or below can be called by his
first name, but there are exceptions. Chances are good that a captain’s wife will still refer to her husband’s first sergeant exactly as her husband does, calling him “first sergeant” out of respect and not by his first name.

  The Kalinofskis quickly joined the group of friends catching up. The house was abuzz with laughter and lively conversation. At fast-paced Fort Bragg there was always news about assignments, promotions, deployments, and field exercises.

  Army couples who haven’t seen each other in months or even years have no problem picking right back up with each other where they left off. It’s expected in the Army to be close, then separated, and then sometimes reunited again at another duty station, which is often the case at Fort Bragg.

  Rennie filled the sergeant major in on Vietnam, while Delores sipped red wine and talked with other wives from the brigade. At forty-five Delores had smooth, unlined skin, naturally pink cheeks, and innocent hazel eyes that gave her the appearance of a much younger woman. She rarely touched alcohol, and it took only a thimbleful to turn her nose red.

  As a command sergeant major’s wife, Delores had a slightly peculiar status. She wasn’t one of the officers’ wives, so their pecking order didn’t affect her, but she often found herself at meetings and social occasions with them because of her husband’s position in the unit.

  Delores was neither catty nor gossipy and always excused herself from any discussion that tended in that direction. Her innocence and sunny outlook were disconcerting to some of the women, who didn’t always know what to make of her. A few avoided Delores, but the kinder ones saw her optimism for what it was—genuine goodness. As the months would prove, they had no idea just how good. Delores kept her past to herself and long ago forgave those who had hurt her.

  “This is a really special Christmas for us,” Delores told the wives at the Corys’ party. “We have our Gary Shane home from Basic.” Their nineteen-year-old son, who had left for Fort Benning, Georgia, in October, had returned home for the holidays ten days earlier. She was beaming, and the other women gushed with compliments about her appearance. Her brown hair had been cut just that afternoon and arranged in a new pageboy style.

  Delores stood five feet nine and a half inches, and she wore a size-8-tall stonewashed denim dress that buttoned from collar to ankles over a long-sleeved white T-shirt, black tights, and black flats—all Christmas gifts from her husband.

  Ski had on his usual winter attire for semicasual parties: Dockers and a Sunday dress shirt under a black crewneck sweater embroidered with his name and regiment; he had more than a half dozen of them. Kalinofski was only a half-inch taller than his wife, and he, like her, was forty-five. His face was grizzled, punctuated with wide-set blue eyes, beneath thick gray-specked hair, shorn on the sides and cropped like a bristle brush on top. This was one face soldiers didn’t want to see angry. Though he was really a teddy bear at heart, he reserved that side of his personality for his wife and daughter.

  I saw Ski lose his cool just one time, in Albania, as he tried to get his driver, a not-so-bright kid, to cut through rows of backed-up Army vehicles stuck in the mud that blanketed the countryside like snow. All the yelling just made the kid mess up more. I was in the back of the Humvee trying to sink into my seat. Finally Ski got out of the vehicle wearing his full battle rattle. I thought he was going to boot the driver to the passenger’s seat and drive the damn thing himself. Instead he stopped oncoming traffic and made a path for his Humvee to fit through. In the end Ski patted the kid on the back, saying, “See, son, you can do it. You’ll be fine.”

  Ski prided himself on being in better shape than most of the privates—the Nintendo generation, as NCOs liked to call them—filling out the ranks of the 82nd Airborne Division. Ski was the best specimen of an old paratrooper on the street. He had landed unscathed in holes, on hills, and in trees. Sure, he had hurt his neck and knees, hit his head, bumped his chin and his nose a few times, and cracked his glasses, but there were no broken bones, no broken back, no lifetime disabilities or career-ending injuries.

  “It really was a terrific party,” Ski said as he drove the car out of Normandy and turned left onto Reilly Street. Cherish was already asleep in the backseat.”It was great to see Cory and Andrea again.“Like a lot of soldiers, he generally referred to other military men by last name.

  “They seem so much in love,” Delores added. “Just like us.” She felt like a bride all over again, as she always did on their anniversary. She squeezed her husband’s hand.

  He looked over at her. “You were the most beautiful woman there.”

  It was a second marriage for both the Kalinofskis, who had a close, loving relationship, a far cry from what Delores had known growing up. She had an uneasy relationship with her mother, and her Navy father was almost always at sea, so her grandparents, who were warmhearted people, raised her on their dairy farm in western North Carolina. In high school Delores’s parents wanted her to stay with them. They were living in a trailer outside Fayetteville. By then her father had retired from the Navy. The reunion proved to be disastrous. He beat Delores, who tried her best to cover the bruises by wearing long-sleeved shirts. A neighbor reported the abuse, and the state put Delores in foster care. She was headed for an orphanage when her grandmother came and took her back to the family farm.

  When she was just seventeen, Delores had fallen in love with and married a Fort Bragg soldier six years her senior. She was attracted to his bad-boy nature, which was so different from her own. She had secretly dated him since she was fourteen, and after they married, her new husband signed her high school report cards. Delores thought marriage was forever, but after enduring five rocky years with her husband, she left him, and at twenty-two got a job as a cocktail waitress at a rowdy Fayetteville rock-and-roll club called the Flaming Mug, on Fort Bragg Road.

  “Are you sure you want to work here?” a scantily clad waitress asked Delores her first day on the job. “You look like you came from the convent.”

  In fact she was wearing her high school clothes.

  “I desperately need the money,” she told the waitress, who took Delores under her wing and taught her how to do the bunny dip and get tips. She lived off peanuts and yogurt, along with one big free meal, a steak and potato, each night at the Flaming Mug.

  One Friday night in 1977, Ski sat in Delores’s section and ordered a seventy-cent can of beer. He was a staff sergeant then, a wild guy in his twenties, and he told her he hoped to see her again. The two didn’t meet for a second time, though, until a Veterans Day cookout two years later. This time Ski didn’t wait. He proposed after only four days, and a month and a half after that, the couple hopped into Ski’s baby blue ’73 Monte Carlo and drove seventy miles from Fayetteville to Dillon, South Carolina—the wedding factory capital of the Southeast—and were married under an arch of dusty artificial flowers.

  Ski treated his bride to a flat orange soda and dinner at Pizza Hut. Back in Fayetteville, no hotel would take a soldier’s check, so the couple spent their wedding night on the floor of a buddy’s den. The next morning the soldier kissed his new wife good-bye and left for three weeks of field training.

  Delores had always dreamed of a chapel wedding, complete with gown and guests. Ski had given her an elaborate renewal-of-vows ceremony on their twentieth wedding anniversary at the 82nd Airborne Division Memorial Chapel on Fort Bragg.

  I had been at that ceremony, and it really was like a wedding. Delores carried flowers and wore a full-length bridal dress and veil. Cherish was the maid of honor and Gary Shane, the best man.

  “Did I do okay?” Ski had asked me later at the reception. “Boy, was I nervous!”

  “Remember our ‘wedding’ last year?” Delores now asked her husband. “Yeah, that was something, wasn’t it? I’m glad you didn’t expect me to top that this year,” he joked. Before the party the couple had gone out for an early anniversary dinner with their kids to one of their favorite restaurants, the Olive Garden.

  Ski had grown up in
New Jersey, the fifth of nine children of a mechanic and a housewife. He knew nothing about the Army airborne except what he saw in war movies, but after high school he filled out an advertising card in an Outdoor Life magazine, and shortly afterward he got a call from an Army recruiter. He joined in 1974 and had planned on staying only long enough to fulfill his four-year enlistment, but he remained for more than half his lifetime. He loved it that much—the adrenaline and the thrill of the jump, the mission and the elan of a proud unit. Some of the best leaders and most motivated officers and NCOs were at Bragg; that was why he had stayed so many years and put himself through the breakneck pace and the pressure. Ski was a “Bragg baby.” He had come as a private and was “grown” here. “Just like a fungus,” he liked to say. When he was twenty-one he got married. Ski was the woman’s fourth husband. After a year of marriage the relationship abruptly ended.

  For two decades Delores had been Ski’s center of gravity. He liked to joke that if it hadn’t been for her, he’d be in jail. Instead, he was a member of the post’s inner circle, the old-boy network. Ski wouldn’t have considered himself a member of that group, but he was. Delores kept him grounded and focused on his job and responsibilities, all without being pushy; and as a bonus, she never complained if he went out for a few beers.

  Supportive and nonjudgmental by nature, Delores carried those traits over into her life as an Army wife. She adored that job. For her it was a way of expressing pride in her husband, love for her country, and satisfaction in her own ability to carry on during the tough times when Ski was away. She had learned through experience that she could be strong and still be gentle. And Delores always depended on God and her Catholic faith to get her through the hardest of times.