by Tanya Biank
Ski expected people to think that he and his son had had an awful argument, that he must have said something to push Gary Shane over the edge. In truth his visit with his son had been one of their best. The bigger question for him was whether to return to work. He wasn’t concerned with what other people thought, but he needed to know if he could function in the military world again. He had his doubts.
“Delores,” he had said soon after he came back from Kosovo, “I don’t think I can lead young soldiers anywhere. I’m old enough to be their father. What do you think I see in these young faces? I see my own son.”
“Gary, you’ve got to pick yourself up and dust yourself off,” she said. Delores knew her husband, and she knew that being with soldiers would be the best medicine for him. “Go back to work. You must go back. You cannot end your Army career. You have to bounce back. I will be fine.”
Ski knew she was right. Not only did he have obligations—a family to take care of—he had to think of himself: If I don’t get off my ass, I’ll be lost, he decided. It was the old Ski talking.
He had returned to his job at the end of March, and within a few weeks he had realized he could make it as long as he stayed busy. The PT routine helped immensely. There was something about running down Ardennes Street on a summer morning, when the coolness of the previous night merged with the rising sun’s humidity. Ski thrived on the 0630 reveille, and the formation runs or calisthenics—the jumping jacks called side-straddle hops and the “leaning rests,” or push-ups. He loved “hitting the street” with some of the most physically fit people in the Army.
At one point, when Ski felt as though everything was being handled for him, he sat his battalion command sergeants major down and told them, “You guys have your battalions, let me run this brigade.” Things were back to normal after that.
He still had questions and anger, and Ski felt guilty over the times he had missed with his son. He blamed himself for not balancing the Army with his personal life. He realized he should have insisted that Gary Shane spend more time on family activities, too. He knew Delores had been both mom and dad much of the time. That was true in many military families.
How many times, summer after summer, have I heard a commander give a farewell speech to his unit and thank his wife, often sitting in the first row with a dozen red roses cradled in her arms, for raising their children.
“You can’t let the Army consume you,” Ski counseled other NCOs. “If you do, your children will be raised and gone.”
The first few weeks back, Ski called Delores every hour. He worried about his family, and he made sure people were around his wife. When he suggested she see a counselor, Delores responded, “Gary, my primary question is ‘Why?’ And I’ve worn that question out completely. Is a counselor going to be able to answer it any more than we can?”
The Command and Staff meeting had now been in progress forty-five minutes, and Delores was still inside her car, a pile of crumpled tissues next to her. The last thing she wanted to do was to walk into a room full of women and be labeled as the wife whose son committed suicide. There was so much more to who she was, to who Gary Shane was.
Delores had always known how precious and short life was. She believed that her story had been written by God long before she was ever born, and that all the things she endured as a child had prepared her for the death of Gary Shane. It comforted her to know that he was in God’s hands. But could she now walk into the building where she had heard the worst news of her life?
She regained her composure, dried her eyes, checked her mascara, and got out of the car. She walked into the building and down the hallway, pausing for a while at the closed double doors leading into the auditorium. Through the glass she could see the 504th table, where Ann Campbell sat with the other wives. Her old seat was still there with her name card—Delores Kalinofski—and her blue folder.
Delores took a deep breath, forced a smile, and strode in carrying the small binder that held a yellow legal pad and pen, the one she had always carried. As she sat down, Ann Campbell reached across the table and touched her arm.
“Delores, I’m so proud of you,” Ann said. “I’m glad you’re back.” Both women’s eyes welled with tears, as the other women at the table welcomed her. Delores couldn’t speak, but she made herself smile. She couldn’t help thinking of Gary Shane and that awful March day. But she had returned; she had made it back.
On a Saturday in August, Andrea Lynne gazed at her garden and noted the changes in the landscaping, the passage of time. The front yard was mostly finished, with gardenias and boxwoods and a few annuals like white impatiens. She had only white flowers, no color, except to mark a few occasions. She had put in three red tulips in the spring for her anniversary and two huge orange chrysanthemums for fall. She looked forward to their cool-season blooms after the relentless heat and a summer of drought, which had taken a toll on everyone’s lawn and flowers. Eventually she wanted a Zen garden in the backyard, with a gazebo, a spot for the birds, a fishpond with Japanese koi, and memorials for her father and Rennie. And she envisioned a huge signpost with hand-painted arrows and the names of all the places she’d ever been and the mileage to them, marking how far she’d gone, and how far she had returned.
Originally she hadn’t planned to keep the house for long, but she could see that the children liked it, that they wanted a place to call home. Perhaps they were too young to understand what all Army wives have learned—that home is less a physical space than a place where you’re loved. She just wanted her children to be happy again, to know what she once knew.
She was comfortable there, too. She knew most of the local storekeepers by name, and she herself was recognized in the neighborhood. They called her the “pretty widow” on Shawcroft. When people asked about her husband and she told them he died in Vietnam, they said she was far too young to have had a husband die in that war.
Andrea Lynne still grieved for Rennie, but she no longer lived in the painful past. She avoided old acquaintances and trips onto the post. They were all too much of a reminder of what she had lost.
The Army is like the bottom of the sea. What is there is soon gone. People move on, they retire, get promoted, or head to different posts. And in a world after 9/11 the Army had had massive disruptions with back-to-back deployments, war duty, and more widows.
Andrea Lynne felt as if she was no longer even a small concern in this huge machine, just a number in a file at the mercy of bureaucrats. Her military health benefits and Rennie’s paychecks and retirement pay, all things she thought would be secure for life, weren’t, and she had just enough to scrape by. She had no rank or status. She was a widow—a fact overlooked by the Army, which sent her letter after letter recalling Rennie to active duty.
Is this what the Army really had in store for me? For Rennie’s family? she wondered. Andrea Lynne thought about every soldier who packed his rucksack and kissed his sleeping wife and children good-bye. Is this what they would want in return for their sacrifice?
When news of the Army wife murders hit, implicating the Army to some degree, Andrea Lynne felt sad but numb. After the shock of Rennie’s death, nothing affected her in the same way. She could not be shocked, only more disillusioned.
She never discussed the murders with anyone. Rennie was gone, and his was the only opinion that would have mattered. Talking about the news or world issues was something she used to do with her husband over coffee or as a way of keeping each other up to date while they were apart. Now anything she saw, heard, or read in the newspaper just felt like more of the same.
But when she let herself think about the wives, it was stress that she blamed for the outburst of violence, stress from being apart under terrible circumstances, stress—and jealousy—over not being able to comfort your spouse and thinking that perhaps someone else would.
Rennie sometimes visited her in her dreams. He was still in her view, just a little more distant. It was Roland who was closer now. Through the love they both
had for Rennie, they had come to love each other. Her feelings for Roland were different from anything she’d ever experienced, more resonant, more shaped by loss. She couldn’t help but wonder if Rennie had something to do with Roland’s appearance in her life. She remembered how she had met the two men on the same day so long ago. It was an egotistical thought, she knew, but maybe, just maybe she was destined to be the woman for both of them.
Roland insisted that she had been meant for Rennie, and that never once did he imagine himself with her. Not even after Rennie died. Yet now he couldn’t imagine his life without her.
Still, it was Rennie who had shaped her, who was responsible for the person and Army wife she had become. He was her history, the father of her children. As she contemplated her garden, looking out through the window, she realized that Rennie was right: She was good. She was strong. She was the heart of this family. And she would always try to manage her life, their life, as he would have wanted. In a way, he never did leave her.
When she had started school the year before, Rita had hung a sign above her computer at home. YOUR GOAL: 4.0 YOU CAN MAKE IT! She looked at it every time she was tired, or whenever she felt frustrated or didn’t understand how to do something, or whenever she had to sit with Jay for hours on end getting his homework done, while she felt like quitting school herself. In the end she was the only person in her class to graduate with highest honors. Rita had the highest GPA in her class, a 4.0, and she got the one job all her classmates wanted: the only hospital pharmacy position available with Long-Term Acute Care, a new facility that treated seriously ill patients.
She wished Brian were there to share in her accomplishment, but it felt great to know that, with her husband in Afghanistan, she could feed, bathe, and clothe her three rambunctious boys, get them to school and day care on time, and still hold down a full-time, busy, balls-to-the-wall job that required constant diligence and attention to detail. Rita was proud that she could do all those things without her husband there to help. I’m contributing to the welfare of my family, not just depending on Brian to take care of us, she thought.
At night, after Rita put the kids to bed, other feelings took over. She tried everything to thwart the silence of the house. She watched late-night TV, surfed the Internet, and shampooed her carpets. Her house never looked better, and Brian wasn’t even there to see it. She kept up their private rituals. At 8:00 P.M. each night, no matter where she was, Rita looked outside at the night sky and at the same time Brian peered into an early morning sky. They had done this ever since Rita pointed out Orion to Brian on the Christmas Eve when they first met. It was something they could say they did together even though they were physically apart.
As time dragged on, it got increasingly difficult for Rita to get through the daylight hours, too. Her grandmother and uncle died, her mother was sick, and Rita got gastritis. The little things that Brian used to do—taking out the garbage, gassing up the cars, and wiping the boys’ pee off the toilet seat—were getting to her. Rita tried not to complain. It didn’t do any good to tell Brian how she felt. Instead she cried into her pillow or cussed at the tree in her front yard, which did about as much good as complaining to the first sergeant. She never wanted Brian to have to say he was sorry for something he had no control over, but Rita felt she couldn’t get by anymore without him. When her Ford Escort broke down, it was the last straw.
It took two weeks to get the car fixed. Rita didn’t trust Brian’s truck to get her around, so she had to get rides to and from work. Then the owner of the auto body shop wouldn’t accept her seven-hundred-dollar check. He was retired military, that’s why Rita and Brian had chosen him. As far as the owner was concerned, when it came to bounced checks, that connection didn’t mean a damn. Rita and Brian purposely kept their credit limit low so they wouldn’t spend much. Rita had to get her boss to pay the owner, and then write her boss a check. It was humiliating.
That night Brian called as Rita was getting ready for bed.
“Hey, sweetie, it’s me.”
“Hey, sweet pea,” Rita said as she walked out with her cell phone into the driveway and sat in Brian’s truck. It made her feel closer to him. She had grown accustomed to the delay of the crackling and beeping telephone line.
“Hey, guess what, Rita? I got to name a mountain after you.”
“You what?”
“Yeah, it’s called Mount Rita.”
The platoon occupied a firebase on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan at a three-thousand-foot elevation. Their platoon leader, Lieutenant Truitt, a boyish-looking twenty-four-year-old who wore his hair in a high-and-tight (shaved on the sides and short on top) like his men, sent them up another three thousand feet to look for caves and do counterreconnaissance.
“I’m gonna break y’all,” Brian told his squad. “I’m gonna go straight up and not stop.”
“You’re not gonna do it,” one of his buddies countered. Brian was far from the biggest guy in the platoon.
“Watch me.”
Halfway up the mountain, it began to rain, then hail, though the region rarely had precipitation.
“Odom, ya gotta slow it down,” Brian could hear Lieutenant Truitt’s voice behind him. The soldiers had a lot of respect for Lieutenant Truitt, even if he was a privileged college boy. If the soldiers were digging holes, Truitt would grab a shovel and dig along with them. Brian gave him credit for that. Truitt couldn’t help where he came from.
When Brian reached the top, he bent over and put his hands on his knees and breathed heavily. He could look straight into the barren wasteland of Pakistan.
“All right, Odom. You were the first one up. Name it,” Lieutenant Truitt said.
Brian took out his knife, walked over to a smooth slab of rock, and in one-foot letters carved out MOUNT RITA.
Hearing that, Rita smiled, for the first time in a long time. It made her miss Brian even more, and she started to cry.
“What’s wrong, Rita? I didn’t tell you that to make you cry.”
“I just can’t handle this anymore,” she said. “I’m sick, and I’m exhausted. I feel like I’m failing. I’m not strong enough. I need you to come home.”
“Rita, look, you gotta hang in there. You’re not a failure. I can see that from six thousand miles away. Rita, you know I’d hug you if my arms reached that far,” Brian said. “We train all the time. We’re supposed to be the toughest men on earth, but Rita, you’re the toughest person I ever met. You put up with my sorry butt and take care of me.”
It was all Rita needed to hear.
Across town on a Saturday afternoon in late summer, a young woman is about to be brought into the Army fold. Shaded from the sun by a covered walkway of stucco stone and an orange cobbled roof, wedding guests gather and wait with their cameras for the traditional ritual of every military wedding. Six young officers, friends of the groom, in dress blues and white gloves, with sabers at their sides, form two lines, three men on each side, and turn to face each other. Suddenly the doors of Fort Bragg’s Main Post Chapel swing open, and down the steps comes a smiling officer, also in dress blues, with his bride on his arm. They have just said their vows.
The members of the saber guard draw their swords and form a steely arch for the newlyweds to walk beneath. They don’t get very far. As they pass under the second set of swords, two sabers are lowered and crossed in front of them. Only after the secret password—a kiss—can they proceed. The sabers rise again, and the couple continues. There’s one last step. As the bride comes through the final arch, the last officer lowers his sword and slaps her on the backside with it, bellowing: “Welcome to the Army!”
EPILOGUE FORT BRAGG, NORTH CAROLINA—SUMMER 2005
During the summer of 2002 I wrote twenty-six stories—many of them picked up by media far beyond Fayetteville—covering the Army wives’ deaths at Fort Bragg. It was important to me to look beyond the specific crimes, and throughout my coverage of the murders, I underlined the broader issues of how the military�
��s culture and perceptions and its stress and deployments affected Army marriages already in serious trouble. I also examined how the Army dealt with domestic violence by means of prevention and intervention. My reporting fostered discussion and debate, and the repercussions of the crimes echoed throughout the Army in many ways.
On September 30, 2002, five members of the House Armed Services Committee visited Fayetteville and Fort Bragg and promised to work for changes in the way the Department of Defense handled abuse in military families. Then, in November, the Pentagon released a forty-one-page report that found marital problems were a “major” factor in the murders, and that the stress from Fort Bragg’s high operational pace contributed to marital discord in marriages that were already experiencing problems. The report went on to say that the Army’s behavioral health services were flawed, since they discouraged early identification and therapy for marital troubles while problems were potentially solvable. It emphasized that families needed earlier and more accessible therapy and counseling that did not jeopardize careers. The report said Lariam was not likely to have contributed to the killings.
Congress authorized $5 million for domestic violence programs in the military, and on December 2, 2002, President Bush signed into law an act that makes state domestic violence protective orders enforceable on military installations.
The murders of 2002 raised enough concern for the Army to take a hard look at itself. Among other things, the tragedies, coupled with the war on terrorism, prompted the military to redefine its attitudes about the crucial role wives and families play. With back-to-back deployments to Iraq, ongoing war in Afghanistan, and no end in sight, it’s none too soon. Military families are venturing into uncharted territory. Andrea Lynne is no longer alone in her young widowhood, scores of parents are burying sons Gary Shane’s age who died in far-off places, and much as Rita did, wives are juggling jobs and kids while husbands are abroad.