by Tanya Biank
“Like you’re one to talk, Brandon.” Andrea was now standing near the bed. Brandon was always wanting bigger, better, faster, stronger. It was part of his being a thrill seeker. “Don’t you dare open your mouth to me about money. Maybe we can get out of debt if you sell the top-of-the-line eight-thousand-dollar four-wheeler you just had to have. Or what about your sixty-dollar running shorts? Could you part with a few of your guns? I can take back the gun safe. Or what about one of your registered dogs? While we’re at it, did we really need a computerized washer and dryer on top of the eighteen-hundred-a-month house payments? You’re all show. All you care about is what other people think.”
The couple was deeply in debt, and, as it was for a lot of couples, it was a source of contention. As a Delta Force sergeant first class, Brandon made between $55,000 and $57,000 a year. Even that, coupled with Andrea’s $30,000 salary, wasn’t enough to cover their mounting expenses.
“With all the money you’ve blown, you’d think you could put up some decent curtains! These look like sheets on rods. Here we buy this beautiful house, and you manage to fuck it up.”
Brandon’s words stung Andrea, the kind of hurt that burns your chest. She had tried so hard to have the house ready for him when he came home from Afghanistan. She’d bought a beautiful cherry dining room set with a matching china cabinet and the leather club chairs Brandon liked. The promise of the house had been the one thing that united them, she thought. They had all the space and the land they could want. Brandon had his dogs and his dream job and the house he wanted. Why wasn’t it enough?
Andrea posed the same question to herself. She loved her job and felt good about her success. She hadn’t gone to college, and she’d been a stay-at-home mom for so long, she wondered what marketable skills she had when she first applied for the job. Now she was a supervisor. For the first time in her marriage, she’d made friends outside Brandon’s circle. The marriage never had been an equal partnership in her eyes. Finally she was something more than Brandon’s wife, or an Army wife for that matter, and she found it liberating.
Plenty of Army wives I know do it all. They raise families, have careers, and make brownies for FRG bake sales. They have friends both in and outside the confines of the Army and take an interest in their local communities. They are smart, well-rounded, organized women who have chosen a nontraditional path as an Army wife. The difference with Andrea was that her newfound self didn’t include Brandon. In Andrea’s eyes he wasn’t around anyway, and when he was, he was a jerk. Army wives with strong, loving marriages can withstand the hardships that come with lengthy separations. They view themselves as part of a couple, a team. More and more, Andrea didn’t want to be on Brandon’s team.
As a young person she had never partied, drunk, or smoked, but she was having a great time now, going out with a group of friends from work to dance clubs like the Palomino and Mojo’s. She hadn’t looked this good in a long time. She’d lost twenty-five pounds since she started at Dick’s—down to 138 pounds. She liked when people noticed, but she still wouldn’t wear jeans. She didn’t like the way she looked in them. Years ago Brandon had told her that they made her butt look big. That probably had something to do with it.
He was always telling her that she was too heavy and looked like a slob. No wonder she went on diets all the time. For a while she ate only bread with jelly and fruit. Another time she went on a watermelon diet. At Fort Campbell she’d get up and go running at 5:00 A.M., pushing her two babies in the stroller, while a friend of hers pedaled a bike and tried to keep up. It was nice to have other men notice her now and give her compliments, unlike Brandon, who was assailing her with his complaints.
“You know what else, Andrea, you’re a shitty mom. You don’t even keep the kids around when I’m gone, and when they’re home, there’s no discipline unless I’m here. Have you even had them to church since I’ve been gone?”
“Brandon, that’s not fair! You know I’ve had to work a lot of Sundays.” Andrea had one weekend off a month, and she worked alternate Saturdays and Sundays the other weekends.
Since they’d moved, Brandon had taken the kids to a few churches but still hadn’t found one he liked. And it bothered him how much time the kids had spent in Ohio when he was deployed. He always insisted that as soon as he got home from a mission he’d go and get them. In February, when he returned from Afghanistan, he drove with his dad and picked the kids up.
Andrea argued that Brandon had no idea what it was like to take care of three small children, work full-time, move into a new house, and remodel, especially while your spouse is gone for who knows how long.
Brandon wasn’t letting up now. “Did you go to work looking like that?”
“Like what?” Oh, God, here we go, Andrea thought.
“Like a slob, Andrea. Look in the mirror sometime. Did you bother to brush your hair this morning? Can’t you at least try to be feminine? Women wear makeup, Andrea. Would some eye shadow and nail polish kill you? I didn’t know I married a man.”
He was throwing his full arsenal at her now. She had put on mascara and a dab of lip gloss that morning and, yes, she needed to wash her hair, but she had other things to do. She had never been one to care much about her appearance. Brandon was constantly comparing her with her two beautiful sisters and talking about how they did their hair and makeup. To please him she had recently started going to the salon to get artificial nails and highlights in her hair. When Brandon said he didn’t like the way her eyebrows looked in last year’s family portrait, she had her eyebrows waxed, too. None of that seemed to matter.
“You cook for crap, you clean for crap, you don’t care for the kids, you look like crap—”
“Shut the fuck up, Brandon. Leave me alone!”
She was fed up with his sarcasm and carping. Other people didn’t treat her like this; why did he? If she didn’t want to wear eye shadow, she shouldn’t have to.
Suddenly she had had enough from Brandon. Andrea could be sharp-tongued, too, and now she lashed back, matching him hurtful word for hurtful word.
“You treat your goddamn dogs better than you treat me. You know what your problem is? You’re a control freak. Nothing’s ever good enough for you. Whenever I’m successful, you put your thumb down. You can’t stand it!
“Ya know what else? People think you’re so outgoing and friendly, always ready to tell a joke, always the life of the party. But that’s because they don’t know you like I do. You’re an asshole, always have been. Stop taking your frustration out on me because you went and busted your goddamn knee!”
“You’re a bitch!” Brandon countered. “I can’t understand why Dick’s would want you around. You’re worthless.”
Worthless. The summer before, Brandon had been so proud of her for getting a manager’s job, he had taken her out to dinner while Joanne watched the kids. On the weekends when she was in training, he’d pile the kids in his truck and drive the fifty-five miles to Cary so they could have lunch with their mom. Now he called her worthless.
“Well, fuck you!” and with that Andrea walked out of the room and slammed the door behind her.
It had come to this. After eight years of marriage and three children, they had resorted to shouting matches and ugly put-downs. They never used to swear at each other. Now door slamming and yelling was routine, even in front of the kids. Thank God, they were outside playing this time, Andrea thought, as she grabbed her coat and the cordless phone and went out on her front porch. She sat in a rocking chair and dialed her mother’s phone number. This was Andrea’s favorite part of the house, the place where she felt most at home.
“Mom, it’s me.”
“Hi, what’s wrong?” Penny Flitcraft knew by the tone of her daughter’s voice that something wasn’t right.
“Brandon and I just had a huge fight. Really ugly. I’m just so tired of him putting me down.”
“There’s no reason for you to put up with that,” Penny told her daughter. “It’s been going on
too long. You need to make a decision. It’s not good for the kids, and it’s not good for you.”
“I know. I’m considering a divorce. For sure this time.”
Only Andrea and Brandon knew the depths of the troubles they were going through. She was never one to draw her friends into her marital woes, and few of them knew how bad things were.
I learned that Delta has a chaplain and psychologists in the unit, and they have an open-door policy for counseling, too. Delta is a small community, and word might get around. Even more than conventional Army soldiers, Delta operators don’t want their home problems to be seen as a reflection of their professional abilities. The Floyds had never sought that help, and Brandon was never around for long enough anyway.
Once a few years back, at Fort Campbell after a blow out with Brandon, Andrea had called another Army wife, a woman to whom she was close, and told her she was leaving Brandon.
“It’s over; we’re getting divorced,” Andrea had said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m thinking of going home. Can I stay at your place for a night?”
“Whatever you want,” her friend said. She didn’t ask what had happened. She didn’t want to pry. The following day Andrea had called back and said everything was okay, that they had worked it out.
It was always like that after a bad fight. Andrea would threaten to leave, and Brandon would promise to change. What had just happened upstairs seemed different, though.
Love wasn’t supposed to hurt, she thought. Brandon used to tell everyone about his beautiful wife and wonderful kids. What happened to the man who used to kiss her forehead and dote on her? So many of their friends thought they made a beautiful couple, Barbie and Ken, they called them. Friends could see how similar they were—independent and strong willed, athletically competitive but supportive of each other. They both loved the outdoors, country music, and NASCAR. They liked to drive to Charlotte for the Sunday races, and they rooted for Dale Earnhardt. When he died in a crash, they were so devastated that they missed church that Sunday night. Now they weren’t even going to church.
“This is it, Mom. I’m done. I’m not going to live like this. When he gets better, I’m getting a divorce. If he doesn’t move out, I’m coming home.”
They talked for an hour. When Andrea hung up, she stayed on the porch. It was dark now and much cooler. The kids were inside.
She tried to think back to better times, like the Special Forces winter formal they’d gone to at Fort Campbell a few years before. That night she wore a low-cut green velvet dress. Her hair was short and spiky, like Faith Hill’s. Brandon loved that country music star and thought Andrea resembled her. When Faith cut her hair, Brandon asked Andrea to do the same. Brandon had been the only enlisted soldier on his team wearing dress blues to the dance; the rest were in their greens. His buddies joked with Brandon about being all show. They didn’t want to buy the expensive formal uniform. But there was no doubt about it, Brandon looked sharp.
And she had been so proud to be there with him. She watched him talk with Special Forces living legends, officers like retired Colonel Aaron Bank and retired Lieutenant General William Yarborough. Brandon chatted easily with the elderly men as if he knew them, and Andrea could only watch admiringly.
What had happened to the husband she looked up to?
Later that night Andrea went upstairs and crawled into bed. It took every bit of willpower she had to get in next to Brandon. Like two wounded animals, they lay there in the dark. Neither spoke. And although her presence was an olive branch, her body was rigid.
She had made up her mind. She was leaving Brandon.
PART THREE
RESOLUTION SUMMER 2002
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
By May 2002 spring was fading fast, like the dying jonquils that blanketed Fayetteville’s flower beds. Summer always came too early in Fayetteville, and the coming months would be particularly brutal, with a punishing drought. There would be other surprises, too.
Even as Time magazine put Saddam Hussein on its cover, with the tag line “The Sinister World of Saddam,” I was busy reporting on an upcoming summer deployment of three thousand 82nd Airborne Division soldiers to Afghanistan. Leaders were telling soldiers to stay “mission focused,” to be mentally and physically ready for whatever might come. Not an easy thing if your kid is having trouble in school, your spouse is grumbling about not enough quality time with you, your car needs three thousand dollars in repairs, and your in-laws are coming for a week. Everyone has a life outside the mission, and tensions typically rise before a major deployment. Soldiers have told me the worst part is waiting to leave, without knowing the exact date of departure or how long they will be gone.
Lengthy deployments were always big news, but looking back, I see that I had no idea of the future events that would put a chill on the Fayetteville heat. At Fort Bragg, May started off routinely enough. It was the season of endings and the anticipation of new beginnings as tours wound down and families geared up for PCS (permanent change of station) moves to new Army posts. Their life—now memories in transit—would be packed off on moving truks alongside the dining room set and the Corning Ware. But not everything can be tidily packed up and shipped off; the human condition is a more fragile thing.
For Andrea Lynne her refrain, “Home is where the Army sends us,” no longer applied, but the Army still echoed in everything she did. Delores wondered if she could ever return to her old Army life, which seemed meaningless now, and Rita would deal with the biggest curveball the Army had thrown her yet. By May these three women were each coming to grips with their own predicaments, trying to resolve their crises within the institution that defined their lives in so many ways. Would they cut ties? Or forge forward “as the Army goes rolling along.” The fourth wife, Andrea, had already made up her mind to set herself apart. She was planning to leave her husband. Of all the wives, she was distancing herself the most from the Army’s orbit, defiantly at times. Ironically the Army would have the strongest impact on her fate.
More than a year after her husband’s death, Andrea Lynne was still subjects to the scrutiny and expectations that confront every Army wife, and officers’ spouses in particular. From kitchen cleanliness to wardrobes to relationships with others, what these women do reflects on their husbands, and therefore on the Army itself. That Rennie Cory was no longer a visible presence at Bragg was irrelevant when it came to his widow, who could only draw on inner strength and fortitude when it came time to defining her future.
At Terry Sandford High, students streamed out the main doors of the school and into the afternoon May sunlight. Andrea Lynne left her motor running as she waited behind a line of cars, all parents picking up their kids. Her mind was on a difficult conversation she was going to have to have with little Rennie.
Her seventeen-year-old son seemed to be having trouble adjusting. He played sad music constantly, especially the CDs his father had loved. He wore his father’s clothes and shoes, and when Andrea Lynne was depressed, he cried with her. He was also spending a lot of time at Bragg with his friends, staying overnight in their quarters in Normandy or working at his job at the golf course there. Andrea Lynne thought the time in his old environment would help her son heal, but that wasn’t the way everyone saw it.
One general’s wife had been questioning little Rennie’s presence on post. And according to a rumor going around the PTA, Andrea Lynne was soon to be married. Don’t feel sorry for her. She’s already engaged, one wife who served on the board told others. Andrea Lynne heard about it the way she heard about everything: through the wives’ network. And a friend had recently informed Andrea Lynne that a colonel was spreading rumors about her and Roland: She doesn’t miss Rennie. She’s got a live-in lover, the officer had told Andrea Lynne’s friend. That was why little Rennie was so upset. The colonel had said he’d reprimand her himself.
It was too much for Andrea Lynne. For someone to question her son and criticize Roland infuriated her. She knew that i
t didn’t take much to start the rumor mill at Bragg, and she was an easy target.
She’d had suitors since Rennie’s death, including a married officer, an out-of-town newspaper photographer, an artist in Raleigh, even one of Rennie’s former lieutenants in the battalion, a thirty-year-old who was now a Special Forces captain.
She’d run into the captain one Saturday evening the previous fall when her college roommate was visiting. Andrea Lynne had been feeling low, and to cheer her up they went out to Cross Creek Brewery and then on to a dance club, It’z. The captain pursued her, and he was so physically attractive that the thought of actually going out with a captain caught her off guard. It was daring and inappropriate—but tempting.
They’d kissed, but the courtship ended before it ever got started, with the captain’s phone call on Monday afternoon.
“I can’t date you,” he told her.
“Oh,” Andrea Lynne responded, rather shocked. “Okay. Well, I suppose I should ask you what changed your mind?”
He went through a litany of reasons: marriage, children, age. All things that hadn’t come up two days earlier.
Then he got to the real reason: “Andrea, you know a lot of important people. If they decide that it’s not right for you to be dating me, then it might hurt my career.”
“What?” she said.
“Well, you are good friends with a lot of people—everyone, in fact—on Bragg. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Well, I don’t know what you are thinking now,” Andrea Lynne said. “It doesn’t matter anyway. This is a silly conversation. We are not going to go out, but even if we did, who would care?”
“Look, I was talking to friends today,” the captain said, “and people already know that we were at It’z. They know who you are, and the word is not to go near you. Don’t you know that?”
“Who said that?”