by Tanya Biank
Leaving Rennie in Vietnam had been one of the most painful things Andrea Lynne had ever done. She cried all night before she flew home, and the tears never stopped on the airplane. When she arrived home, there was an emotional e-mail waiting for her from Rennie: “I will not rest until I know you are safe at home. I will call to check on you. I returned to our room at the hotel after our good-bye, where I held your pillow, your scent is still there … . My heart breaks each time we leave each other. The pain gets harder as we grow old together. I agree, we will never part again. It is too hard. You know my love is true for you, now as always. The way I touch and look at you, listen to you, and make love to you … you fill my heart, each day and night … . I impatiently wait for the moment I wrap my arms around you and bring you close and smell your breath and kiss, holding each other as we do … . I LOVE YOU … . YOURS, RENNIE.”
Now they were preparing to part again. Andrea Lynne had stayed in her pajamas because Rennie rarely allowed her to go into the airport with him. He’d always make her drive away before he went inside.
“I’d rather see you leave,” he’d tell her. “That way I know you’re safe.” Andrea Lynne knew he could control his own tears that way, too. He always cried a little when they said good-bye.
It was still dark when the Corys arrived in Raleigh, and Rennie drove up to the drop-off lane for departures. This time Andrea Lynne insisted on watching her husband walk through the glass doors and check in at the counter. When Rennie looked back, he was surprised to see that the guard had let the car stay there. They had already kissed good-bye, but he came back to the truck and got in. They stared for a while in silence, then Andrea Lynne reached over for his arm.
“I don’t want you to go,” she said, but she couldn’t tell him she felt afraid. You never told a soldier you had a bad feeling. Rennie pulled her to him, and they kissed, soft warm open-mouth kisses with the taste of salt from their tears. “I love you,” they murmured over and over again. Every time they tried to part, they just grabbed each other tighter and kissed again. Finally Rennie opened the truck door and set his feet on the curb. His face looked lined and sad.
“Think of Hawaii,” he told her, referring to the commanders’ conference for his unit that would take place in April. Hawaii was the headquarters for the MIA missions. Andrea Lynne would meet Rennie there for two weeks. “I have to go,” he insisted. He seemed intent, almost angry, perhaps from being put through such emotion, she thought. Then he walked away. Andrea Lynne didn’t move. She just watched him until she couldn’t see him anymore.
“It’ll be all right, it’ll be all right. I’m just getting a little too attached to that man,” she joked to herself as she headed south to Fayetteville down Interstate 40. She liked to pretend she was doing him the favor of being his date. Adopting that attitude now was her way of getting through the emotion of the farewell. And when the sun finally rose, it comforted her, as if seeing the light of day could make all the pain go away.
PART TWO
CRISIS FEBRUARY 2001 TO MARCH 2002
CHAPTER SEVEN
By the beginning of February 2001, I had just returned from an assignment in Bosnia, reporting on National Guard soldiers from Fayetteville who had been keeping a fragile peace in a region that had known little of it. This was the part of the globe that had rammed “ethnic cleansing” into the world’s vocabulary. In small towns along the Croatian border, I was struck by the obvious devastation—bullet holes pocking every standing structure, young people missing a leg and hobbling along on crutches, and a noticeable absence of any men, young or old.
The American soldiers I talked to had been in the region long enough to have tired eyes and weathered skin, surprising features in young faces, yet characteristic of these deployments. Looking back, I find it strange now to have witnessed Muslims smiling and waving as they welcomed American troops carrying M 240 Bravo machine guns in the turrets of armored Humvees. It was a different time, and it wasn’t the Middle East. To the south, in Kosovo, a battalion of soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division had just arrived for six months of duty maintaining harmony between ethnic Albanians and Serbs.
Meanwhile, back in Fayetteville, whether their husbands were home, on field training, or on distant posts, wives coped with humdrum everyday life. Errands, bills, diapers, kids’ colds, work shifts, college classes, and housecleaning all punctuated the days. Some women wanted a break from it all.
Shortly after 9:00 P.M. on the third Friday in February, Rita and four friends shivered in line as they waited to enter Club Metro, a nightclub on Fort Bragg Road popular for its dollar-beer nights, hard rock bands, and wet T-shirt contests. Women got in free before 10:00 P.M., a club custom in Fayetteville. Rita shoved her hands in her jeans pockets. Rita, like the other women standing in line, had left her coat in the car. She had never been to a nightclub before, and Brian would be furious if he knew. But I’m with a bunch of married women. We have each other, she thought. Three of the women’s husbands were out on a training exercise with Brian. After six months in Fayetteville, Rita was finally getting to know some of the enlisted wives whose husbands were in Brian’s squad, thanks to the FRG meetings.
She had been eager to attend the first one in October, excited that it wasn’t just for wives but rather for soldiers and spouses. She saw it as time she and Brian would have together, as well as an opportunity to learn how to behave as an Army wife. It turned out that most of the information—aside from useful lists of resources on post and clinic numbers—was common sense as far as she was concerned.
The group had introduced her to other women, like Mandy, who had served in the Army and who liked to cuss. Mandy’s husband had lived on Brian’s hall in the barracks. She was slim, with long hair, dyed blond, and large eyes. Her father, who had been in the military, had met her mother while she was a prostitute in Germany.
“Just don’t call me Mrs. Gold Bond,” Mandy said after introducing herself. Mandy’s husband used so much of the foot powder in his boots he had taken on the nickname.
“That’s a deal,” Rita said. “As long as you don’t call me Mrs. Scrotum.”
The two became fast friends. Rita got to meet some of the other wives that autumn at cookouts, which were popular with junior enlisted families who wanted to entertain but were on a budget. Guests usually brought their own meat and beer. Rita always looked forward to these get-togethers and welcomed the opportunity to make some friends. We’re in this together, she thought.
And they were. Their husbands all worked the same hours and brought home the same paychecks and stinky PT clothes. They shared the same laughs and gripes, and secretly each wondered what she would do if the chaplain ever darkened her doorway with tragic news. They shared all the things that make for swift friendships on an Army post, but, as Rita would find out, some wives simply attract trouble.
On this Friday the women planned their night out much like a military operation. Tiffany, at nineteen the youngest wife in the group, was the designated driver. Later, the women would crash at Mandy’s, where they had put their children to bed before they left. Donna’s fiance was babysitting all seven children. Dollar-beer night always pulled a big crowd and promised as much watered-down beer as the women could stand. All Rita wanted to do was nurse one brew and dance.
That was naive on Rita’s part, for this wasn’t “girls’ night out” in the sense of dinner and a movie and in bed by ten. Fayetteville is a GI town, after all, and the bars are filled with testosterone-pumped young men looking to get drunk, scope women, and if they’re lucky, hook up. Wives who had been around awhile knew this, too.
After a bouncer with a mullet stamped the women’s hands, Mandy laid out the ground rules. “What goes on here, stays here.”
Uh-oh, Rita thought. What did that mean? Inside, the club resembled a black box with wood-topped metal tables bolted to the floor. Rita felt out of place in her Wal-Mart jeans, metallic blue button-down shirt, and black tennis shoes.
“Don’
t you want to put on something sexy?” Mandy had asked as they were getting dressed to go out.
“For who?” Rita asked.
Most of the women, including some from her own group, were wearing tank tops and tight low-riding jeans, but one black man near the bar outdid them all. He had on a powder blue, sequined miniskirt, and a white halter top that matched his electric white pageboy wig.
Rita pulled a crumpled twenty from her front pocket and bought her first Budweiser. Out on the dance floor, a swirl of heat and cigarette smoke enveloped arms, legs, torsos, and heads gyrating to the thumping of a bass and techno-colored lights. When she sat down at a table with Donna, Tiffany and Jenna were already out with partners, bumping and grinding to the “Thong Song.”
Rita pulled out a cigarette and tried to hide her embarrassment. It was as if she were meeting these people for the first time. These were women Rita and her husband had socialized with. She’d been to their homes for barbecues. She had babysat their children. Now she watched as they pulled their jeans low on their hips, hiked up their tank tops, and dirty-danced with Jody.
No one really knows the origin of “Jody,” but the nickname has been around for years. It’s what soldiers call the civilian schleps and back-in-the-rear soldiers who court their wives and girlfriends while they themselves are slogging it out in field exercises or at war.
These women seemed only too happy to flirt with Jody. They seemed starved for attention. The women either had had no idea of what life in the Army would be like, Rita gathered, or they clung to some idealized vision.
Rita had her own fantasies when she married Brian nine months earlier. She thought her husband’s job would be like playing cowboys and Indians. At the end of the day, he would come home, wipe the green camouflage paint off his face, and spend the night with her. When three days in the field turned into three weeks, or when Brian came home with feet that looked like hamburger and fell asleep in front of the meal she had spent all afternoon preparing, she had to look at her life for what it was.
I know this isn’t making me happy, she told herself at the time, but there are times when you come first, and there are times when you don’t. That much of Army living she had already accepted. Maybe these women couldn’t deal with that. Or maybe their husbands always put the Army first, their own needs second, and their wives’ a distant third.
(From what I have seen over the years, some women settle for third place. Others threaten divorce if their husbands don’t leave the Army. These women fail to realize the Army often isn’t the problem in their marriage. And some third-place women don’t care, as long as they can be queens for a night in the bars and clubs around town.)
It was becoming clear from Rita’s bar stool perch that some wives just wanted to be entertained at all costs. Maybe they started out by expecting their soldier-husbands to be the director of activities. If that was the case, you married the wrong man, Rita thought as she took a drag on her cigarette. Most of the time Joe—the average, young, enlisted soldier—wouldn’t be around long enough to keep her happy, and when he was around, he’d be too exhausted.
As Rita sat at the table and sipped her beer, she could imagine a wife confronting Joe at the end of the day: “Oh, you want to have sex? I want to go out.” Rita could see Joe figuring out his options: Well, I road-marched twenty miles today, my feet kind of hurt, but let’s go to the Palomino and line-dance.
“Okay,” he tells his wife. Rita smiled at the thought of it. Joe was such a predictable sucker.
Now she felt like one herself. How could she have been such a bad judge of character? She had assumed these women were like her, blue-collar mothers, similar in age, with E-4 husbands. Were all Army wives like this when their husbands went to the field?
Brian had told Rita stories of guys coming home to find their wives in bed with someone else or of wives going wild at the bars when their husbands deployed. One guy came back from a deployment to a depleted bank account, because his wife had partied at the clubs and bought her boyfriend expensive clothes. At the time Rita thought it was the stuff of urban legends, but now she wondered.
Rita figured some spouses were going to cheat no matter what their husbands did for a living; that’s what she always told Brian. She was coming to realize that Army wives had lots of opportunities to do their husbands wrong if they wanted to.
And in the Army perception became reality. What you saw—or heard about—was what you believed. Rita thought of Brian. Oh, please don’t let anyone who knows him tell him I’m here. I’ve got to tell him before somebody else does. She was glad to have Donna, who was an Army medic, to sit with. Both women were from small Alabama towns about fifty miles apart, so they talked about that. Rita ordered a second beer and a shot of vodka. She hadn’t been drunk since the April cookout in Alabama. She’d been nervous then, and she was nervous now.
Tiffany and Jenna came back to the table giddy and sweaty. They immediately began singling out soldiers near the bar. “What do you think of that guy? Or that one? Oh, look at that guy. I’m going to ask him to dance.”
A GI with a gold chain around his neck approached the table. “Hey, you want Jell-O shots?” he asked the women.
“No, thank you,” Rita said.
“What’s wrong with you?” scolded one of the wives when the soldier left to get their order.
Rita shook her head. “I just didn’t want to give him a dollar’s worth of conversation.” She had come to the club to get out of the house, not to pick up guys. The twenty dollars in her pocket was enough to buy her own twenty beers if she wanted. Meanwhile her friends took the offered drinks and flirted. Sure, they wanted an escape from their drudgery, but did they have to tell these men they weren’t married? If they’re cheating, Rita thought, something is wrong at home.
There is nothing more humiliating for a soldier than to have his wife cheating on him. That kind of infidelity is a serious stigma. No matter how effective a soldier is with his troops, the innuendo that his wife is fooling around—You can’t even satisfy your wife; she’s out with someone else—makes him somehow less of a man and thus less of a warrior. Now, if a married soldier wants to screw around while overseas, well, that is accepted enough in some units for men to do it openly. As long as what happens on the road stays on the road, according to a saying popular among soldiers who bend their marriage vows. What some of them don’t realize is that the same thing might be going on at home.
Rita looked down at her forty-dollar white gold wedding ring. Hadn’t Mandy told her wedding bands didn’t matter?
“Go ask that guy to dance, Rita.” The women were encouraging her to approach a tall GI leaning against a pole. “You haven’t danced with any guys.”
“Shut up,” she said. “I don’t want to.”
But finally Rita gave in. She walked over to the man and tapped him on the shoulder. “My girlfriends are making me ask you to dance, but I don’t want to, so blow me off.”
“You don’t want to dance with me?” the man answered, almost hurt.
“No, I want you to shake your head and walk away.”
“Come on, you want to dance?” the man asked.
“No, I don’t. Now, when I ask you to dance, you say no, got it?”
“Wait, so you really don’t want to dance with me?”
Finally he shook his head dramatically from side to side and moved away.
Rita returned to the table, and the women patted her on the back. When they got up to dance again, her friend Donna stayed put. “I can’t believe you really asked that guy to dance.”
“I didn’t,” Rita told her pointedly. She’d never betray Brian like that. She loved her husband. Ever since those first lonely weeks in Fayetteville, she’d told herself, Rita, you better grow a set of balls. You need to be less dependent on your husband to entertain you. Perhaps the wives in her husband’s unit had reached a similar conclusion. Maybe spiting the Army and their husbands by turning into harlots on the dance floor was their way of dea
ling with it.
When the club closed at 2:00 A.M., the women headed to the Waffle House on Skibo Road. They were inebriated, and Rita was eager to get some food in her stomach. She sat in the backseat of Mandy’s car, staring out the window and trying not to vomit.
I’ve always thought of the ten-mile strip connecting Fort Bragg to downtown Fayetteville as a ready-made backdrop for a low-budget movie. Motels catering to drug addicts, prostitutes, and transients share space on the strip with dirt and gravel parking lots filled with everything from move-it-yourself rental trucks to $2,500 cars for sale, the small American flag tied to each antenna not included. Soldiers come to Bragg Boulevard to get a tattoo, pawn an engagement ring, or see bare breasts. And places like Sharky’s Cabaret, the House of Dolls, Mickey’s, Show Girls, and Foxy Lady Bar give them plenty of opportunities. Nothing good has ever happened on the Boulevard after the sun went down. It is as if the darkness nourishes all the desires that lay dormant by day.
As Tiffany drove, Rita peered at people in other vehicles, thumping along to the sounds of their radios and sticking their cigarette tips out the tops of their windows. Where had they been tonight? Where were they going? Were they, too, escaping their daylight drudgeries? She placed her head against the back of the seat while the women laughed about their crazy behavior in the club. In the darkness the Boulevard’s slanted utility poles, connected by sagging wires, looked like a string of drunks holding hands. Billboards passed off trailers as “1, 2 and 3 bedroom apartment homes,” and cash-advance signs promised money before payday. As the women pulled up to the Waffle House, the mostly glass restaurant glowed like a fluorescent bulb.
Rita and Brian had taken the kids there for a Christmas Day meal, but on weekend nights the restaurant did brisk business serving drunk soldiers and their hookups. The women crowded in and found seats at the counter. Within minutes the smell of grease and the sight of bits of pancakes and bacon on the floor had Rita stumbling to the bathroom, with Donna right behind her.