by Tanya Biank
As she turned onto Gruber Road she looked at her boys in her rearview mirror. “Okay, guys, now we start off on our big adventure.”
Life didn’t stop. Rita had to take an exam that afternoon. Soon she’d start her new job in the pharmacy at Highsmith-Rainey Memorial Hospital downtown. That night, after she put the boys to bed, she slipped one of Brian’s T-shirts over his pillow and placed her own head against it. She was experiencing what she had been so afraid of for the past two years, utter aloneness. In the middle of the night, Rita got up to check on the kids and found Johnathan asleep with his blanket and teddy bear next to the front door. She knew how he felt.
One day before class, a few days after Brian left, Rita found herself doing what she usually did, leaning over her classmate Patti’s shoulder to look at the newspaper. Reading the paper before class was Patti’s ritual, and she hated it when Rita read along over her shoulder. She good-naturedly swatted her friend away, but Rita kept reading about the stabbing death of a Fort Bragg Army wife. Hadn’t another Army wife died the previous month, also at the hands of her husband?
Rita began to worry, not that Brian would one day snap and kill them all, but about what the guy next door might do. If a GI could kill the woman whom he had pledged before God and family to love, honor, and cherish, then what was to stop him from turning on a neighbor he barely knew? She found herself a little more wary of her surroundings, eyeing the soldiers that were everywhere in Fayetteville and wondering, Is he a killer? … I wonder what it would take to make him break and kill someone close to him? … He doesn’t look like he has it in him … . Did those dead women think the same thing about their husbands?
The newspaper accounts also made Rita realize how glad she was that she had ended her earlier marriage. That man never served in the military, but there were many emotional firestorms. It didn’t take much to set off a furious quarrel with him: not having his dinner ready on time, refusing to have sex with him, hugging her friends, or, once, smiling too much at a child’s birthday party. She grew to dread the hour when he would come home from work.
Yet soldiers are trained to kill their enemy. What might they do, Rita wondered, if they suddenly felt, for whatever reason, that their wives were their enemies? Get a divorce? Punch the wall? Get drunk? Forgive? Move on? Or kill? Soldiers are not told that it is okay to have a problem. In fact, when it came to teaching soldiers how to live outside the Army, Rita believed the United States military was sorely lacking.
I have my own thoughts on these matters. Why blame the Army for every marital problem in the military? Sure, the Army affects every aspect of the lives of soldiers and their families, but there’s still a reasonable expectation that people are responsible for their own actions. Although the Army has room for improvement when it comes to helping its men and women deal with life outside the Army—including how to interact with loved ones—recently the Army has done more than most civilian corporations to help its people and their families cope with personal problems and crises. The gesture is not altruistic, though. The Army wants its soldiers mission focused, and spouses and families can get in the way of that. The best way to insure that a soldier’s attention isn’t diverted is to help him have a happy, peaceful home life. Do that, and the Army benefits with an undistracted, productive soldier—or so the theory goes.
The first time this was explained to me, I was shocked by the coldness of it all. I had thought all the outreach programs and resources were there for benevolent reasons. When I questioned it, I got this response from an officer: “This isn’t the Salvation Army, Tanya. This is the U.S. Army. We train soldiers to fight our nation’s wars and accomplish our nation’s missions.”
The Army has another stake in domestic affairs. Soldiers are extremely expensive to train. To cash in on the investment, it pays to take care of families. The Army has an internal saying: “The Army enlists soldiers, but reenlists families.” Most soldiers are single when they join the Army. They marry and start families along the way. To get a soldier to continue serving past his initial enlistment, the family has to be on board, too.
Rita didn’t know the murdered wives. She certainly didn’t know if the couples were having problems. It wasn’t uncommon for difficulties to arise if a husband was gone. She had seen for herself that some wives turn to the arms of another while their husbands are away. Hell, she thought, some wives turn to the arms of another while their husbands are still home. Her friends cheated because their husbands weren’t around or they were emotionally unavailable or just because there were so many horny men to choose from in Fayetteville—or over the Internet.
A few weeks after Brian and Charlie left for Afghanistan, Rita’s friend Sherry met someone in an Internet chat room called Hot or Not. His name was Jeff, and he lived in Atlanta, Sherry’s hometown. She told him she was a single soldier at Fort Bragg and passed off a picture of a Russian mail-order-catalog bride as herself. Sherry was just having fun, she insisted, and she enjoyed the attention. She never thought it would go anywhere, but Rita could see it turning into something more. One night, as she prepared cubed steak, she gave Sherry a call.
“Hey, I’m cookin’ with some grease tonight. Come over.”
“I can’t, Rita. Jeff is supposed to call.” Sometimes when Rita telephoned in the middle of the day, Sherry would be asleep because she had been up all night online chatting with Jeff. When she did come over to Rita’s, Sherry spent the time instant-messaging on Rita’s computer or talking on her cell phone with Jeff.
One day Rita suggested that she and Sherry send their husbands care packages. Rita knew Charlie wasn’t getting anything from his wife. As Rita sat on the floor in Sherry’s apartment and placed Starbursts, Combos, Pringles, beef jerky, and bourbon-flavored cans of Copenhagen in a box, Sherry seemed to think Charlie had become a nuisance. Instead she called Jeff. When Rita encouraged Sherry to put a letter in the package, Sherry merely replied, “Why do I care if Brian’s the one who gets all the mail?” Rita wrote Brian every day.
Rita realized her friend was hurt and lonely with Charlie gone, but an Internet fantasy affair was no way to deal with it.
Why couldn’t Sherry be a strong enough woman to be okay? Rita wondered. Sure, Charlie was a bit dim, but no husband deserved this.
She persisted. “You’re not being fair to Charlie. He’s over there fighting. He could die. All you do is complain about him. Why did you even marry him?”
“We had so much potential,” Sherry said. “I don’t know what went wrong.”
“Honey, nothing was ever right. You wanted him to be something he’s not. What have I always told you? You can’t marry a project. You don’t go to Lowe’s or Sears and go to the do-it-yourself section and pick out a husband. Why don’t you get a divorce?”
Sherry always gave the same answer: “No.”
Being married to Charlie took Sherry to where she wanted to go. She didn’t have to work, she liked the Army lifestyle, and Charlie’s family had money, at least enough to suit her needs. When the couple needed cash, her father-in-law wired money into their account. When Sherry got tired of lugging her laundry up steps, Charlie’s family bought her a washer and dryer.
Women like Sherry are notorious in the barracks, where seasoned sergeants warn junior enlisted soldiers about gold-digging women out to deplete their bank accounts. Of course, twenty-year-old privates don’t have much in their bank accounts to begin with, but that is beside the point. The moral is: Don’t get suckered by the first piece of ass that comes along.
Meanwhile, six thousand miles away in Afghanistan, Brian and the guys in his platoon gathered outside around the burn barrel, the soldiers’ version of the office watercooler. Wood was always burning in the fifty-five-gallon drum, and the men were supposed to burn all their mail so names and addresses wouldn’t find their way into the hands of the Taliban, who could then send envelopes of anthrax to their loved ones. That was the Army’s thinking, anyway. Brian didn’t want to disobey an order, but he wasn�
��t about to burn any of Rita’s letters, so he kept them in a locked metal box.
Some guys’ letters belonged in the burn barrel. Brian could always see it coming. Joe would be smoking and dragging his head.
“Man, what happened?” Brian and the other soldiers would ask.
His girlfriend, fiancée, wife—fill in the blank—had just dumped him.
And each soldier around the burn barrel would shake his head and take another drag on his cigarette. Damn females.
Oh, God, am I gonna get one of those letters? Brian worried to himself. What if she waits until I get home to dump me because she feels sorry for me being over here?
Stories about the home front spread through the platoon like dysentery. One wife in the platoon showed up to an FRG meeting in her pajamas, high on methamphetamines. Another contracted herpes, and a third was busy racking up three thousand dollars of debt. Another would come home to a wife three months pregnant.
Of course there is another side to all this—the wife’s version of events, and it doesn’t always mesh with the burn barrel brigade’s. Sometimes a husband or boyfriend deploys after he’s been a perpetual asshole. Back home, the wife or girlfriend thinks, Ya know, I’m not gonna put up with this shit anymore. And she writes a letter.
Sherry finally admitted to Rita that she loved Jeff, and she made plans to meet him at a bookstore and fess up—partly. She planned to tell Jeff she was married, but that picture she sent him, the one that didn’t look all that much like her—well, that was because she had broken her nose and had surgery. Meanwhile she told Charlie she’d be visiting a gay cousin and flew out to Atlanta.
Once more Rita was torn between being loyal to her best friend and confiding in her husband. Charlie was one of Brian’s soldiers, after all. The affair was weighing on her, and she couldn’t keep secrets from her husband. I like Sherry, Rita thought, but I don’t want to be associated with this.
One night when Brian called, she told him all that had happened. “What am I going to do?” she asked him. “I’ve avoided people like this. How am I supposed to be best friends with her?”
As disappointed as Rita was in Sherry, she was even more annoyed with herself for being a bad judge of character. “I can’t believe she was weak enough to let the Army get to her,” Rita said. “She behaved like everybody else.”
“Just stay out of it,” Brian counseled.
He was pissed, but he wasn’t going to tell Charlie. What good would it do to let him know that his wife was a cheat when he was so far from home?
While Rita tried to distance herself from Sherry, she got acquainted with a woman named Ginger whose son went to Johnathan’s day-care center and whose husband was stationed overseas for a year. The two boys were friends, and the mothers instantly hit it off. One afternoon Rita and Ginger exchanged phone numbers and made a date to take their boys out for lunch and a day of shopping at the Cross Creek Mall.
That weekend over pizza at the mall’s food court, Rita decided to find out how Ginger felt about what some wives do when their husbands are away. Brian was so big into guilt by association.
“I have a boyfriend,” Ginger said matter-of-factly.
“Oh, really? What about your husband?”
“Well, he’s been gone all year.”
“Oh, okay.” Rita realized how naive she still was. She looked at her boys, who were laughing and playing with their food. She no longer felt like shopping. “Well, we need to go. Hurry up, guys. Finish eating. Mama’s got things to do.”
She never got together with Ginger again.
If Rita had wanted to cheat, she had lots of chances. One day when she was eating lunch and watching CNN in the hospital cafeteria, she commented about the news to a soldier in uniform who was sitting near her. The soldier responded by asking her out.
“Thanks, but I’m married,” Rita said.
“Well, so am I. You’re married, I’m married, so doesn’t that kind of make us married?”
“That’s original.”
Everyone at work knew Brian was deployed, and every day a greasy-looking custodian gave Rita a Tootsie Roll. Once she asked him why. He told her, “I’m weaseling my way in, so when your husband comes back you won’t want him.”
“The only thing you’re doing is weaseling your way into a hole. My husband would kill you,” Rita shot back.
She had come a long way to reach this point, and she wasn’t going to allow some sleazeball to shoot her down.
Since the Army wife murders, I have been asked a lot if I thought infidelity was higher in the military than among civilians. I doubt it, but I once had a conversation with a very candid retired Green Beret, who had done and seen quite a bit in that department. He didn’t think infidelity was more prevalent in the military, but he made a valid point: Because of the lengthy separations, the Army provides plenty of opportunity for those with cheating on their minds.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Andrea Floyd had met Danny Wilson through a coworker at Dick’s a month before, when she was out at the Palomino Club, a lively country-and-western dance club on Owen Drive. Danny shared Brandon’s Southern accent and good-old-boy nature, but otherwise he couldn’t have been more different from her husband. He was thirty, a year older than Andrea, and ran two low-end convenience stores. At six foot two, Danny weighed two hundred pounds, but had a slender build and a gentle manner. Brandon was meticulous in his appearance and exacting in attitude; Danny wore shell necklaces and had more of a Joe Six-pack outlook on life. Andrea found it refreshing. (Of course he never told her about his repeated run-ins with the law. He allegedly attempted credit-card fraud, made “unauthorized use of a conveyance,” and “tampered with a motor vehicle.”)
Andrea hadn’t set out to meet someone else. It just happened. Perhaps now that she had actually decided to leave Brandon, she was more open and aware of the people—particularly the men—around her. Danny was so much fun, so sweet to her, and nice looking, too. It was easy for her to fall for him. She told him she was unhappy in her marriage. In fact she told him all about Brandon and her family. She liked being with him. She even liked helping him with his business. And she loved it when he handed her a wad of bills to pay for store items at Sam’s Club.
Everyone thought they were just friends. In the beginning, that’s all it was. She’d see him out at clubs or talk with him at company softball games. Soon she was going over to his house and crashing on his couch. After a while they were in each other’s beds. They’d had sex for the first time earlier in the week.
The previous night they’d gone to the Palomino for Dollar Beer Night and met up with her coworkers, many of them from her softball team. The Palomino was a popular place to sit back with a beer and watch the social action. The club could have come right out of Nashville. On most nights of the week, the Palomino was filled with couples, some in matching outfits, two-stepping to the songs of Garth Brooks and Toby Keith. On Wednesdays the specials drew more than the usual cowboys, as soldiers who generally preferred heavy metal or hip-hop packed the place for the cheap longnecks. By the time Andrea and Danny arrived, the parking lot was already jammed with pickup trucks. Harleys lined the curb near the club’s entrance. Inside near the front door, in the corner, soldiers tried their luck riding the mechanical bull at two bucks a shot. Women rode the bull, too, but usually at the lowest speed, so their movements resembled a sex act. That always drew a big crowd.
I’ve always thought of the Palomino as the kind of place where you leave your troubles at the glass doors. The windowless club and the country tunes provide a haven for people who needed a break from reality. Perhaps that is why Andrea allowed another man to come into her life.
Andrea enjoyed two-stepping. By her second Long Island iced tea, she and Danny were gliding along the dance floor, which was shaped like a wooden racetrack. Above them, a rhinestone saddle turned and twinkled like a disco ball. At the bar young men wearing Stetsons, boots, and plaid shirts tucked into tight, starched Wranglers stoo
d in packs of five or more, holding longneck bottles and ogling every female who walked by.
Soldiers, especially those in the combat arms, like to call women “females,” said in such a distinct way that “alien” could be easily substituted. Whenever I called or waited at Bragg to talk with someone, I was often referred to as the female on the phone or in the lobby, and in my interviews soldiers always referred to women other than their wives or mothers as females. Once on the phone, I overheard the soldier who took my call tell his boss, “Sir, there’s a female lady on the phone for you.” I took it as a compliment.
I remember one evening at the Palomino seeing a visibly pregnant female out on the dance floor holding a cigarette and swiveling her hips. The girl was having a grand time, and so were the two soldiers dancing with her. “Some guys go for pregnant females,” a young GI standing near me told me, as matter-of-factly as if he were talking about redheads or blonds.
I was well aware of the saying soldiers had about the women in Fayetteville: “Females are either brought here or left here.” In Andrea’s case she may have been brought here, but she certainly wasn’t going to be dumped here or treated like trash either.
Andrea downed her third Long Island iced tea. She had never been a drinker, and the alcohol went straight to her head. She had to be helped out of the club by Danny and a friend. She spent the night on Danny’s couch, then early in the morning went into his room and woke him up to make love.
Although people at Dick’s, including her boss, knew she planned on leaving Brandon as soon as he returned, no one knew about the affair, and the secret weighed on Andrea. God, what would the Stricklands think? She could never tell them, or her family.