by Tanya Biank
Otherwise they didn’t socialize much. There wasn’t a lot of time in Delta, and besides, Andrea didn’t like to go to a lot of the parties. She thought some of the wives in the squadron were snobby, though she could be standoffish herself until you got to know her.
Still, it was nice to kick back a bit now and then, especially with three old pals who were attending a course at Bragg. By now on that August evening, Brandon had been at the club for an hour and was feeling the alcohol. His cell phone rang.
“Heeello.”
Andrea could tell her husband was in good humor. “Hey, I was going to fire up the grill. Will you be home soon?”
Brandon could hear one of his kids in the background. “Yeah, I’ll be back in a bit. We’ll be winding down soon.”
“Tell the guys I said hello.”
“I’ll put ’em on and you can tell them yourself.”
Andrea was glad it was Friday. She needed a little break. It had been a busy summer. She had taken the kids down to Myrtle Beach for the day to see her mom, who was vacationing there. And Andrea had also traveled to California to donate her eggs to a couple who couldn’t have a child. It hadn’t been a year since she gave birth to the twins; why not give another couple a chance to have a child, even if the baby would biologically be hers this time. So what if Brandon didn’t feel comfortable with it. Andrea felt it was the right thing to do, and there was no changing her mind. She was regaining a confidence she had lost over the last few years.
Maybe that had something to do with their marriage, which had had a rocky start and many ups and downs. When Andrea first discovered she was pregnant in Germany, some of her Army supervisors encouraged her to have an abortion, but Andrea wouldn’t hear of it. She was discharged and went home to Alliance to have the baby, mortified that she was unmarried and pregnant.
Meanwhile, Brandon returned to the States for knee surgery after a ski accident, and Andrea and her sister and brother-in-law drove from Ohio to visit him at Walter Reed Medical Center in Maryland. When she told Brandon she was going to have his baby, she thought he’d be thrilled. Instead the visit was a disaster. Brandon—bedridden and angry—lashed out at Andrea and accused her of sleeping around. He had fathered a baby boy when he was a senior in high school, and his parents were upset that he was now having a second child out of wedlock. They even questioned if it was his, which hurt Andrea and angered her family. Brandon had been her first real love.
Eventually the couple made up and married at the courthouse at Fort Benning, Georgia, on May 17, 1994, more than a month after Harlee was born and a day before Andrea’s twenty-first birthday. Soon after that Brandon was out of the Army himself. Andrea had wanted to go home. Things between them had been so difficult, she thought maybe going back to Alliance would make life better. They settled in Andrea’s hometown, and Brandon took a job making train car frames at American Steel.
He hated the work, and Andrea was unhappy, too.
It’s not unusual for a soldier to realize the grass isn’t always greener in the civilian job market and to reenlist. After six months Brandon did just that, and the couple moved to Fort Campbell, back to an environment in which they both felt at home. Andrea had loved the Army, and her stint as a soldier gave her a unique perspective as an Army wife.
Generally female soldiers have more in common with male soldiers—their comrades—than they do with Army wives. When they marry another soldier, it’s easy for them to relate to their husbands on all things military. I’ve known lots of wives, like Andrea, who make the leap from soldier to Army spouse. They leave the Army for different reasons, often to raise children or pursue a different career path. Sometimes the wife remains in the Army and the husband gets out. Still, dual military couples—with both the husband and wife in the military—do exist, and the Army tries to accommodate them by giving them duty stations in the same area. It’s known as “joint domicile,” but it’s never guaranteed. The needs of the Army always come first. Today’s back-to-back war deployments to the Middle East are taking a toll on dual military couples, who find themselves geographically separated for a few years. Throw kids into the mix, and things get complicated. Each family has to decide what’s best for them.
The Floyd marriage had plenty of problems even after Brandon rejoined the Army. When things weren’t going well with Brandon, Andrea wished she were back home with her family. In 1996 she even filed for divorce, but Brandon desperately wanted to work things out. He had grown up as a Mormon, and divorce represented a complete failure. He believed that if he divorced, he wouldn’t go to heaven.
Andrea agreed to stay together. “I don’t want these kids to grow up without a father, like we did,” she would tell her two sisters whenever she confided in them about her troubles with Brandon.
She could see both sides of her husband’s personality. He could be playful. He’d dance to a Christina Aguilera CD, laughing and giggling with the kids. The next minute he’d be short-tempered, becoming furious if the boys were playing too rough or if something got knocked over. He was strict—it was always “yes, sir,” and “yes, ma’am”—but then the boys would be in his lap. They worshipped their dad, and Harlee, who took after Andrea in so many ways, was a daddy’s girl. She idolized her father, though he was gone a lot.
Andrea kept trying to find her own path. In 1999 she worked briefly at a sporting goods store, but she quit after less than a year. She wanted to be with her kids. To earn a little money she did day care, watching three or four children in addition to her own.
Managing a house full of kids was difficult when Brandon was away, and when he was there, he didn’t like seeing other kids running around his house. She had recently decided to go back to work. Brandon gained satisfaction from his job. Why couldn’t she have something to call her own? And soon they would need the extra income. Brandon had liked the house in which the surrogate twins lived so much, he told Andrea that’s how he wanted to live. For months they had been looking for a bigger home to buy, even though Andrea knew they couldn’t afford one.
This time she found a job at Dick’s Sporting Goods, and just a few weeks earlier she had started job training. That was another reason the summer was so hectic. She had to drive all the way to Cary, outside Raleigh. At least when the store opened in Fayetteville in the fall, she’d be working closer to home. She was looking forward to that. Sticking her toe out into the unknown was exhilarating.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I was at my desk in the newsroom on September 11, trying like everybody else to process what had just happened at the World Trade Center, when the wire services announced that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon. I ran up to my managing editor, Mike Arnholt, with the news. He was standing under a TV suspended from the ceiling in the center of the newsroom.
“The Pentagon was just hit,” I said. “And my sister’s there.” He just looked at me. What could anyone say? Events were unfolding so quickly it was hard to grasp the scope of what it all meant. Maria had followed my father into the Army. Now she was somewhere in that enormous building. I called my parents, who lived in Virginia. My always-in-control father had a quaver in his voice as we tried to remember which corridor Maria worked in. When I got off the phone, I sobbed at my desk.
The Pentagon, the headquarters of the Department of Defense, has about twenty-three thousand military and civilian employees, and most officers and senior NCOs at Bragg knew someone who worked there. In the end 184 people died at the Pentagon, including some of my sister’s coworkers. Later that afternoon Maria telephoned my mother to say she was safe. When I heard the news, I cried tears of relief and joy.
Meanwhile I had a story to cover. Bragg was unusually silent. Yards, parks, soccer fields, and the youth center stood empty. The gates to the 82nd Airborne Division headquarters, which were always open, were locked shut, and soldiers started laying down concertina wire and plastic barricades. Amid the feelings of profound sadness, shock, and loss, there was also a call to action. I saw soldiers m
ove with more determination and sense of purpose.
In peacetime, soldiers like to grumble they “never get to do anything.” Now they knew it was only a question of when. Fort Bragg, like U.S. military installations everywhere, tightened security to its highest level, training ceased, and soldiers came in from the field. Those on recall status readied their rucksacks and equipment.
I went home to my apartment around eleven that night, bleary eyed and emotionally drained. I opened a bottle of beer, sat in front of the TV in the dark, and cried again. I got a call early the next morning. It was Mike Adams, my editor, giving me my assignment for the day: head out to Bragg and cover the traffic mess that was backed up for miles.
September 12 was another bright and beautiful morning—Mother Nature’s big lie, I thought. I left my car in the Ponderosa shopping center parking lot—I was lucky to get a space—and surveyed Yadkin Road, known to soldiers as the Yadkin 500 because reckless drivers darted in and out of traffic on its narrow lanes. Now traffic was at a standstill. Between thirty-five thousand and forty thousand cars pass through Fort Bragg during a typical twenty-four-hour period. By 10:00 A.M. vehicles were lined up like boxcars. In fact all major roads leading to Fort Bragg were at a five-mile standstill for much of the day.
Fearful that Fort Bragg could be targeted next for an attack, the brass had scrambled to man every road leading into the 160,000-acre post. Armed soldiers inspected every vehicle—interior, trunk, and engine—for explosives and went to the trouble to match every face to a driver’s license. Soldiers named Muhammad received extra scrutiny. There was some comic relief, thank God. Some resourceful soldiers ditched their trucks and SUVs in parking lots and bought bicycles at the Wal-Mart on the corner of Yadkin and Skibo Roads. They made their way to Bragg on whatever they could find in stock, mostly dirt bikes, though one Green Beret pedaled past on a baby pink bicycle, his knees near his chin and the price tag flapping behind him. Despite warnings not to leave vehicles on the side of the road, doctors and emergency-room nurses at Womack Army Medical Center ditched their cars along the All American Expressway, the major highway that slices through Fort Bragg, and walked to work, only to find that the Army had towed their vehicles at the end of the day.
For those who stuck it out in traffic, the usual fifteen- or twenty-minute trip to work would take up to ten hours. I sat with some people in their cars and interviewed them. By midafternoon cars had overheated; some had run out of gas. Fast-food workers walked out and took orders from the road, and office clerks offered to sit in cars while motorists used the restroom. Meanwhile, on the post, armed soldiers guarded schools, neighborhoods, the hospital, and every road entrance into Fort Bragg.
In the weeks to come, as war loomed, I spent time with many military wives. Pregnant women wondered if their husbands would be around for the due date, and kids asked, “Will Dad be here for my birthday?” Wives also had to field questions from worried relatives. I was struck by the comments of one pregnant military wife I met. As she showed me her baby’s unfinished nursery, she told me it gave her comfort knowing that her child would be born in two months. Why? I wondered. It seemed like a horrible time to be bringing a child into the world, and she had no idea if her husband would even be there. Her answer taught me a lot. In a world of uncertainty, the child was a definite, the one joyous thing she and her husband could talk about.
One day at a time, one day at a time, that’s the other lesson I learned from Army wives after 9/11. Many took refuge in their daily routines, which provided a sense of normalcy and stability. In fact, everything had changed. For one wife in particular, the terrorist attacks merely underscored the changes that had already taken place in her life.
It was Monday, the first day of September, and the Corys’ quarters at 11 South Dupont Plaza had stood empty for a few days. Andrea Lynne spent the last weekend of August there by herself, sweeping floors and scrubbing bathrooms, hardly stopping to eat or sleep. Now she sat alone on the hardwood floor, her back against the wall in the living room, as light streamed through the bare windows.
She looked over to the mantel, where she had lit a candle next to some dried flowers from Rennie’s grave, faded red, white, and blue blooms sent by his old battalion. There was also a Mary Engelbreit card she had found while cleaning. It showed a lone person carrying a suitcase down the left fork of a path in the woods. The signpost pointing that way said “Your Life.” The one on the right read: “No Longer an Option.” Above the picture the card admonished in strong, tall letters: DON’T LOOK BACK. On the “No Longer an Option” side of the card Andrea Lynne had leaned an unframed photograph of herself and Rennie in their Harley clothes—one of their happiest times. She sat there in silence, which was unlike her, a woman who always sang to herself, even if no tune was playing. Inside she had a dark melancholy that no music could ease.
Throughout her marriage she’d occasionally let herself imagine what the pain would be like if she ever lost Rennie. Most Army wives have privately imagined the worst, but nothing Andrea Lynne ever conjured in her mind could have prepared her for the horror and agony of the past few months. She’d spent April dealing with the funeral and receiving visitors. All through May people continued to fill the house. It was a prelude to the yearly summer turnover, when soldiers and their families move off the post and are replaced by new ones.
Her dad stayed with her for a month, helping her buy a five-bedroom house with a three-car garage across town in the King’s Grant neighborhood. After nine moves and two hardship tours, it would be the first house she’d ever owned; the Corys had always lived in government quarters or rented. She and Rennie had talked about getting their own house after retirement. By the end of May, Andrea Lynne had used the $250,000 from Rennie’s Servicemen’s Group Life Insurance policy to pay off their credit card and car debt and come up with a down payment. Rennie had another $250,000 in life insurance that she applied toward the rest of the house cost, and she saved what was left over. For months she couldn’t bring herself to go to the new place and get it ready. Instead, every night at sundown she visited Rennie’s grave.
During June and July she spent whole days in bed. Sometimes she had trouble breathing. Her heart literally hurt. For two months the women of the neighborhood cooked her meals—though Andrea Lynne had no appetite—and a friend did her laundry. Her daughters brought up her food, watched movies with her, massaged her feet and hands as she cried. Caroline read poetry to her, and Natalie read prayers. She didn’t want to talk to anyone on the phone, but friends checked in on her. She saw Alice Maffey a lot. Melissa Huggins would ask her to come down for wine with the girls, and she agreed to help decorate for Jim’s promotion party. Occasionally Andrea Lynne went for walks with her neighbors, and every Sunday she took the children to mass and then to brunch at the officers club.
With close friends she referred to herself as the “token widow,” a comment that made them wince but somehow also broke down barriers. Everyone has a place and a role within the Army system. The question was whether Andrea Lynne wanted to play. The wives in her social circle encouraged her to continue with the luncheons, the workouts at the club, the volunteer work at the post thrift shop—things that would keep Andrea Lynne “current.” She enrolled her kids at the youth center. Show my happy little face, she thought. Someday, she figured, she’d be the guest speaker at the ladies’ coffees and lunches, but she wasn’t ready for that.
She dragged herself to the change-of-command ceremonies and the farewell parties, where she was never alone for long. The men usually helped her find a seat, sometimes at the expense of their own wives. It got so embarrassing, that she stopped putting in an appearance. And it was just too painful: Never was she more aware that Rennie would have been home July 7.
At every event she missed her husband’s face zeroing in on her. She missed standing on tiptoe to whisper in his ear. She missed seeing his reaction to long-winded speeches. She even missed singing the 82nd Airborne Division theme song—she knew every
word by heart—and knowing Rennie was trying not to laugh.
Everywhere she went that summer—the hospital, the commissary, the PX, the youth center—she imagined him entering, looking for her, always looking for her and the kids. His ghost was everywhere. Andrea Lynne remembered how, the summer before Rennie left for Vietnam, they had done a pretend “pass and review” of the neighborhood. They walked hand in hand through Normandy, joking and saying good-bye to each house they passed. Andrea Lynne saluted the ones that housed a family they knew.
She had looked at her husband. “You’re the best of them all, Rennie,” she said and started to cry at the thought of his leaving so soon.
Rennie turned and lifted her up. “Don’t cry; we’re only halfway home!” He put her back down. “Do you know how much I love you? I can’t do this without you. I need you to be strong.”
She had never imagined she would have to be this strong.
Young Army widows are a rarity in peacetime, and because of the Corys’ status and connections at Bragg, the post brass took a personal interest in how Andrea Lynne’s affairs were administered. Typically a widow was given six months to stay in quarters if she wished; after that she would be charged the basic housing allowance. Andrea Lynne knew it would be acceptable for her to remain for a year, but the thought of that hurt too much. It was time to acknowledge that there would be no happy farewell, no “We’ll see you back here one day!”
Finally, in August, she pulled herself out of bed to take Natalie back to college and start preparing for the move. A few weeks earlier Rennie’s friend Roland had stopped to see her. They had sat in the kitchen, drunk a few beers, and talked and cried over old times. Before Roland left he gave her his phone numbers.