A military wife sees wounded soldiers at the Playboy mansion

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 four. Read part one here, part two here, and part three here.

Dear Sophia and Alison,

Sophia, your question about being faithful to your own dreams comes at such a funny time. I’m out on a book tour for I Love a Man in Uniform and feeling a bit like an exotic animal: Curious people pepper me with questions about being an Army wife, wondering about my care and feeding, habitat and mating rituals. One of the top three questions I’ve been asked is, as a military wife, how much control do you have over your life?

It’s often a lifestyle of dreams deferred. I met a woman who earned her bachelor’s degree at four different schools over the course of 10 years. One of my dearest military wife friends has a Ph.D., but is waiting tables while her husband gets some career-critical training overseas. As for me, I had to put more than one writing goal aside to prepare for things like moving and deployment (though I sure had a lot of time to write when Mike was gone during Operation Iraqi Freedom!).

No matter how committed spouses are to their own careers (and despite the Department of Defense’s Working Spouse Protection Act passed in 1987, which says the military can’t interfere with a spouse’s ability to pursue her own professional life), spouses are still seen as an adjunct power source to be tapped by the military community. There is an expectation that you will spend at least a little time volunteering, move where and when the military says, send your husband off to war, and receive him home again, all without complaint. I’m happy to support the military in whatever way I can, but it is tough to make it all fit around various personal life goals. I maintain that military wife life is just a slightly more extreme version of modern wife life: You can’t have it all, but you can have as much as you can make fit.

Now that Mike has left the Army, I’m fully understanding why one popular general at West Point would say to a wife, when presiding over her husband’s retirement ceremony, “Now you get your husband back,” and, in one telling slip, “Now you get your life back.”

One way that I was able to show up for the military on this book tour was to attend the Wounded Warriors benefit at the Playboy mansion in late May. Imagine, if you will, a Make a Wish Foundation outing for our wounded young vets—only instead of going to Disneyland, they head to the Mansion for a healthy dose of red-blooded revelry among the bunnies.

What I was not prepared for was coming down the ramp at the parking garage to catch the shuttle to the mansion, and seeing a young soldier and a young Marine, each in his dress uniform, pushing along in their wheelchairs. I started crying on the spot. Crying for their dumb luck, crying for my husband’s good fortune to come out of three hazardous duty tours with only hearing damage and a little combat stress, and crying because these warriors, goddamn it, couldn’t have been more than 25.

Tags: Hugh Hefner, Military Wives, the playboy mansion, Walter Reed, wounded soldiers

Lily Burana Lily Burana is the author of the memoirs I Love a Man in Uniform and Strip City and the novel Try.

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