Military wife memoirist Alison Buckholtz writes about living off base with a deployed husband

Welcome to "Threeway," a regular Double X discussion feature in which three contributors dissect politics and culture from distinct points of view. Our second discussion is among three women who have written memoirs about their experiences as military wives: Lily Burana, author of I Love a Man in Uniform: A Memoir of Love, War, and Other Battles, Alison Buckholtz, author of Standing By: The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War, and Sophia Raday, author of Love in Condition Yellow. This is part two. Read part one here.

Dear Lily and Sophia,

Funny you should mention Stepford Wives, Lily. Three days after my husband Scott and I got married, I moved with him to Japan, where he was serving in a naval aviation squadron based in metropolitan Tokyo. The only hiccup in the honeymoon? You, Sophia, and all the other military wives out there already guessed it: he left. The squadron was usually away, engaged in training and workups, or deployed on an aircraft carrier. This was the Shock-and-Awe era, and I certainly found my new life shocking. Growing up in a nonmilitary family, without any exposure to servicemembers’ spouses, I brought that image of the Stepford Wife with me to Japan—and I searched for her everywhere, certain that identifying her would be my antidote to becoming her.

But this is not a seek-and-you-shall find kind of story. Living on base, within butter-borrowing distance of scores of other wives who were also left behind, I too found myself stopped by strangers—fast friends who asked how I was doing, offered me rides to the mall, or, after I became pregnant, even hinted that they would coach me through the delivery if my husband was still away. A transplant from the anonymity of urban living, I was taken aback at first, but grew to love the sincerity of wife culture, and the easy way newbies were welcomed. These women became my social safety net during my husband’s frequent absences, both in Japan and in our current home in the Pacific Northwest—and especially during the squadron’s seven-month deployment last year.

But I am leaving them, perhaps at the worst possible time; Scott has been “voluntold” for a 14-month assignment in Baghdad. Although we love our small town, we decided to relocate to the Washington, D.C. area, where our extended family lives, so that the kids and I can have the benefit of family support during this painful separation.

I never dreamed my decision to move to a nonmilitary community would be controversial, but several of my military friends here in Washington state cautioned against it. They worried that our civilian neighbors, teachers, and colleagues would simply not understand what my children and I were going through—or worse, that my single-mom status would alienate me in a suburban scene of shared-partnership parenting. I hadn’t envisioned the sort of damning judgment that my military spouse friends believe I may receive from nonmilitary acquaintances. Sophia, you write movingly about your return home to Oakland after a stint living on base for Army War College, noting the irony that your neighborhood, adjacent to Berkeley, “an area where people like to pretend that the war doesn’t exist, was born out of the struggle to win the Second World War. Of course, that was such a different war: everyone was impacted by it, not just a minority of soldiers and their families.” That resonates for me, since I’ll be living just outside of the nation’s capitol, where elected officials decide every day how to run a war that affects me personally. I’ll be one of the very few in my neighborhood and town whom it impacts, however.

Tags: afghanistan, deployment, Iraq, Military Wives, navy, standing by

Alison Buckholtz is the author of Standing By: The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War.

Comments

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i really hate that you

By: jimb12345 | Sat, 09/19/2009 - 17:03

i really hate that you husband is being deployed. I really hope he stays safe. He is doing such a great thing for this country and is very brave. I am really honored to write about it.

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I don't think I could deal

By: JFlemming | Fri, 09/11/2009 - 15:47

I don't think I could deal with the worry of this to be honest, way too much!
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important to be able to complain

By: Davidsmith7 | Fri, 09/11/2009 - 11:30

nice post, great

By: sukabumi | Mon, 09/07/2009 - 00:07

Gaeta1, thanks for sharing

By: bennyandhika | Fri, 09/04/2009 - 18:03

Gaeta1, thanks for sharing your story. I don't understand your name-calling though. I'm hardly self-righteous or prissy. Everyone makes choices in life and lives with the consequences.
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WWII vs. Now (response to other comments)

By: joss | Fri, 09/04/2009 - 15:02

I don't think that WWII started out as being for anything, personally. When Hitler first tried to 'merely' expell the Jews, we tightened our immigration quotas so they couldn't come here. In response to his early eugenics program, we said the Germans were "beating us at our own game" as we were 'only' practicing forced sterilization on undesirables at the time. The war had been going on for quite some time before we even bothered to get involved and we didn't declare war on Germany until AFTER they declared war on us, which they did after we declared war on Japan which only happened because they attacked Pearl Harbor. It was an uplifting national mythology pieced together over time that we charged in with unflinching moral authority to throw ourselves on a grenade of absolute evil so as to save the world. http://hnn.us/articles/1796.html

To me, the disappointing difference (aside from the general bungling of the invasion) has been the government/civilian response. I don't mean the war protestors (with a civilian-controlled military, I WANT people paying attention and thinking about what's going on and speaking up much more than I want don't-rock-the-boat-or-you'll-demoralize-the-troops-B.S.). No, I mean the "keep America rolling," "keep shopping," nothing-to-see-here reaction. Or the just-stick-a-flag-on-your-car response. In the beginning, the Red Cross had to turn blood donors away, recruiting stations were swamped, and everyone wanted to DO something. I wish we could have held onto that.
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I suppose that kind of bleeds into the offense taken at the author's idea that World War II was more of a common, shared experience than the war now. I don't even see how this can be disputed. People were drafted for that war and not for this war; that alone distributes the experience across the population very differently. I think all the author meant was that, back then, it seems like everyone personally knew someone who was "over there." You didn't have to live on or near a base to see a star in someone's window. She's referring to what could be considered part of the Civilian-Military Gap that has grown as a result of an all-volunteer force. Everyone may be affected, as you say, by the financial cost or the damage done to our government's image abroad, but she is referring to personal, intimate, daily-life effects. None of the civilians I've worked for or with from 2001 to the present know anyone else in the military or know what to say to someone who is in that community. The common response seems to be pity. They don't understand why we'd do this; it must be because we had no other options. Either that, or they think I want a thank you and some praise, which they resent. I don't. I didn't choose this life so I could ask everyone to fawn over my burdens. ********************************************************** This in turn bleeds into you feeling like you "must again remind" military people that they chose this life, which is an idiotic thing to say. Yes, I know. I'm aware of that. But two things: 1. Just because the commitment is voluntary doesn't mean it can be handled lightly or nonchalantly dropped. For some spouses, the military is their home country and nothing is going to convince them to renounce their citizenship. For other spouses, it is and will always be a foreign land where they try to live, racked with homesickness, to be with the one they love. 2. Choosing to do something difficult doesn't mean you forfeit all rights to complain or have a bad day. This is where I want to be, but I'm still good and pissed when some incompetent corpsman almost kills my husband or one of his fellow Marines. If my husband was a firefighter and I expressed concern about the firefighters who have died in California, you'd be kind of an ass to dismiss me with "Well, he chose to be a firefighter." Ditto if I had an especially trying day as a social worker or a public defense attorney or what-have-you. Every choice has drawbacks and precludes other choices. If you want to know more about what it is like, one view is While They're At War by Kristin Henderson http://www.kristinhenderson.com/whiletheyreatwar.htm Besides the usual, cathartic purpose of griping, sometimes the point is to raise awareness, in this case by telling a voting U.S. citizen. As we have a civilian controlled military, if a soldier tells you she's having to buy her own body armor or a military spouse tells you her servicemember has been home only 4 months in the last two years, she may just be trying to keep you in the loop. ********************************************************** As for the "suck it up, soldier" idea. The author says it well in a Military Spouse Magazine interview:

"I think there’s a mistaken idea among military spouses that silence equals loyalty – that we have to be as stoic as our husbands and keep a stiff upper lip despite the challenges. This keeps us from being honest with each other and from supporting each other. It’s only when you show your vulnerabilities to others that they show theirs to you, and there can be a true exchange of feelings and constructive advice."

I think it is important to be able to complain. When we make the decision to NEVER be angry with any aspect of the military lifestyle, we set the bar too high. We just wind up being angry with other spouses instead, for not coping as well as we (think we) are. We privately roll our eyes when we hear they are going "home" for a week or two, first because we think it means they're not up to this task and second because they just referred to their parents' house as "home" and everyone knows home is wherever their service member is stationed. I was afraid to be angry because I thought it meant I would fail or that we would divorce. Thinking you're not holding up is frightening, like "till death do us part" maybe just meant "till I can't take this anymore" or "until they put the rat box on my head" (a la 1984). All I could hear were those people who say "This is what you signed up for..." as a way of terminating any conversation that involves negativity of any kind. I finally realized: 1. Even if this is what I signed up for it doesn't mean I have to be prozac-happy all the time. It's satisfying and normal to vent to someone who understands. It's validating. Denying that you're angry (because anger seems so dangerous, like the beginning of the end) is counterproductive; shutting someone else down is hurtful. I think spouses react poorly to an upset spouse because they want to distance themselves from someone who may bail and because they're coping by not thinking about how they feel, which makes it impossible to actually empathize. Instead, they're analyzing your story for what it is you're doing wrong so they can be sure to do something different. 2. People throw around "That's what you signed up for" like "that" is some kind of blank check. I could express dismay that my husband's squadron had been instructed to murder their families as an initiation and be told that I had somehow signed up for that, too. "My half of the bargain" has somehow become a magically bottomless well. Did I know my husband would deploy? Yes. Did I know that there's always the possibility of war and death and dismemberment and helicopter crashes and friendly fire? Yes. Not so much the absolutely insane tempo, the obscene over-stretching of everything and everyone, the mismanagement of resources, the unfulfilled enlistment promises, insufficient gear, Walter Reed, inadequate psychological care, troops housed in condemned barracks, and other forms of abuse and neglect.   Civilians and politicians have a part in the bargain too and it's this: service members and their families join in good faith. Don't abuse it. **********************************************************
Last, spouses going in "with blinders on." I grew up in the military and immediately married into the military, yet the only part of this package deal that wasn't a foggy abstraction was my fiance. Growing up an Air Force brat in the Cold War and the first Gulf War was nothing like being married to an enlisted Marine before and after 9/11 (and in that window, two years with one command made for a radically different life from two years with another command) which in turn has been nothing like being married to a pilot now. Despite my continuous exposure to the military, it's not been possible for me to know every last part and feeling in advance; even the big picture changes substantially.

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