The Pentagon has lifted the ban on women in combat, but what does that mean? After all, we (and by “we” I don’t include me – I mean “we women”) have been in combat roles for some time. Unofficially.
What it means is that we should be eligible for the draft. (We should have been for some time.)
I say this not as someone who hates feminists
Diana Falzone, who calls herself the “Dear Abby” of the website Military.com, writes in her article Should military marriages include a ‘deployment sex pact’?, “Most civilian women would not defend their husband’s infidelity. But for the military wife, cheating practically comes with the territory.”
A friend told me I was being too “journalistic” when answering interview questions about
Pretty Much True… .
You wrote a fictional story in which the characters and actions were different but the feelings and the fear were the same. Get PERSONAL.
I never wanted to do that before, because I wanted to emphasize that the overall feeling of the experience, not my experience but the experience, was what was important. But she made me see that one experience, the story, wouldn’t exist without the other, the reality. Continue reading
I found this search term in my website stats today:
“resenting husband for being deployed”
If you copy and paste it into a search field, one of the results to turn up is a blog post written by a woman who resents her traveling husband for spending a lot of time away from home. A military spouse comes to her aid in the comments section:
There are LOTS of things you can do!!! I’m an expert at this! I’ve been an Army wife for 12 years. We’ve NEVER lived near family (we are currently in KS and family is in FL). And, during the past 8 years my husband has been deployed to Iraq more than once (he’s there right now). So, I am a single mom for 6-12 months at a time. I have 3 kids (5y, 2y, and 6mo). Here are my suggestions…
It’s not uncommon to read/see military spouses in this role: practiced when it comes to separation, pros at living the all-but-romantically single life, independent, and happy to help others learn to be independent, too. But Continue reading
In response to the Pentagon’s decision to ease some restrictions on women in combat roles, Rick Santorum said,
As Lifetime Network’s “Army Wives” is picked up for a third season, hailed for its accurate depictions of the lives of women living on an Army post, it might be unpopular to label the show as one lacking in accuracy and frantically clutching at dramatic straws.
But if the critique fits…
A recent episode of Army Wives contained such a gross inaccuracy for the sake of dramatic action that, had it been true, most Americans would no doubt skip work to protest the heartless military.
In the episode, which aired July 14, the character of a female sergeant is about to deploy, but her husband has eight months left in Iraq, and she has a daughter at home.
“Surely you have a backup in your family care plan,” says General’s wife Claudia Joy.
But she doesn’t have a backup. And when Claudia Joy tells her husband she fears the sergeant will refuse to deploy, the General — who really should know better — says that if she does, “She’ll get arrested.” Again: if the sergeant doesn’t abandon her daughter, the Army will arrest her.
In fact, the Army doesn’t want its soldiers to orphan their children. It even ensures a family care plan is in place prior to a deployment. In real life, under Chapter 5-8 of Army Regulation 635-200, a soldier in that position would have been given “Involuntary separation due to parenthood,” which is a general or honorable discharge. Or, as happens at the end of the episode, she might have her deployment deferred while she tries to find someone to care for her daughter.
But, never mind — the key is drama, and the storyline ends with Claudia Joy as a hero. Though as a general’s wife she’s not in the Army, she is repeatedly given incredible military influence in the show and, in this episode, is the one to make the sergeant’s deferred deployment possible.
This is but one example of “Army Wives” writers struggling to create conflict when there is already so much real-life strife inherent in today’s military climate. It would behoove the writers to trust their ability to use existing dramas without relying on wild contrivances.
Having been married to an Army officer who served in both Afghanistan and Iraq, news last year of Lifetime’s new drama documenting the lives of wartime military spouses enthralled me. “Finally,” I thought. “Their story will be told.” I say “their” because by that time my husband was no longer in a position to deploy.
I was thrilled for this reason: In under five seconds, I can name more than six movies that offer insight into the soldier’s story (Platoon, Casualties of War, We Were Soldiers, Letters from Iwo Jima, The Thin Red Line, Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Blackhawk Down). The closest Hollywood has come to exploring the psychology and emotion of having a lover at war was the 1984 movie Swing Shift, starring Goldie Hawn. More recently, a few brief scenes were given to women left behind in We Were Soldiers. Otherwise, even HBO’s “Band of Brothers” and “Generation Kill” has, until Lifetime’s “Army Wives,” neglected the surreal and complicated experience of waiting for a loved one to make it through a war.
It was this inattention that led me to write Homefront, a novel that forces readers to experience the raw and intimate drama of a deployment through the unapologetic eyes of a young woman whose soulmate is sent to Iraq in 2003.
It was after the book published that “Army Wives” first aired, and I was excited that yet another medium was being used to propel the experience into the public arena. This year, each time I watch an episode I wince, hoping the writers have taken their time this time … that they’ve focused on the sublime torture of waiting and wondering that plagues every person caring for a deployed soldier … that the writers found a way to portray the intense pain of imagining a lover’s death, or the ease with which misunderstandings wreak havoc … that they didn’t twist another relevant storyline into something unseemly. And almost every time, the episode unfolds tainted by the common ploys Lifetime is guilty of using to excite its audience: affairs and male domination.
For example, in the July 14 episode mentioned above, Denise’s deployed husband Frank doesn’t like Denise’s sudden, uncharacteristic habit of “trolling around” on a motorcycle. He fears she’s becoming too independent.
In other words, he’s stuck in sandbox-limbo and is afraid his wife’s life is gliding along without him, if not ahead of him.
To create an understanding of what these people go through, the writers could have easily left it at that: Frank’s increasing frustration with what he imagines might be happening, and Denise’s hurt and frustration at having done nothing wrong and not knowing how to convince her husband otherwise. When any conversation could be the last, it is this need to be understood that causes incredible emotional friction.
Instead, the writers throw in an extramarital attraction. Next week, one of the wives will tell Denise, “I know what it’s like to have a husband away.”
Denise makes the third of five main characters to have an extramarital interest (last season it was Pam and Roland). As if an affair is the crisis apex of a deployment, as if the audience is too base to appreciate a more complex conflict.
Don’t misunderstand. I think “Army Wives,” for all of its faults, is an important and often entertaining show. I even have a favorite “wife” (Roxy). And at long last, television is recognizing a significant portion of the population involved in these Afghanistan and Iraq wars who were previously largely forgotten, except as yellow-ribbon stereotypes.
Perhaps I’m just angry after having expected so much.
Lifetime has a unique opportunity to do something substantial. The soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are real people who really are coming home dismembered, or really not coming home at all. The loves they leave behind often go from one day to the next experiencing incredible fear the person they love will die any minute. The pain of the loss is felt before it even happens, and is quickly replaced by passionate elation at the arrival of an email or an unexpected phone call. It’s disorienting and intense. And most of the negative emotions are compounded by guilt for feeling anything negative at all while living the “cushy” life at home.
If Lifetime wants to air a show about life on a military post during peacetime, then let it be trite and contrived. But not while something real wants to be written. Lifetime is throwing away a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give screen time to a story that’s been inadequately explored. So far, anyway. Because many Army Wives episodes seem to have been written the week prior to airing, changes could probably be made fairly seamlessly. Now that it’s been picked up for a whole new season, there’s still plenty of time for redemption. And if Lifetime can’t handle it, I’m sure HBO can.
(First published in the Journal Inquirer, July 2008)
________
Today: Lifetime’s desperation didn’t kill “Army Wives,” after all – in fact, it seems to be liked more and more every season. While I can see the great appeal of the show, I still wish HBO would take on the subject in a grittier, more subtle, and more powerful way.
I was married to an Army soldier, but I refused to call myself a Military Wife. He flew Chinooks during his 2003 Iraq deployment, even made a brief phone call over the unpredictable and crackling line from Mosul to tell me he’d been shot at while at a “hot” LZ (landing zone), and I still wouldn’t do it.
Patrick Henry Village, near Heidelberg, Germany
My first introduction to Military Wives came when I was attending a DoDDS middle school in Heidelberg, Germany where my father’s government job had moved us in late 1981. The school bus took us bratty little civilian kids, who lived on the economy, through the military housing area. Few mornings passed when we didn’t make fun of the Army wives standing with snarled bed hair outside their stairwells or smoking morning cigarettes on the parking lot sidewalks. They wore dingy pink sweatpants and their husbands’ oversized Army PT sweatshirts. Intimidated by public transportation and European roads, their slovenliness screamed of voluntary isolation. Our bus would bounce by, and we, at our small square windows, would point at them. “Army wives!” we’d squeal.
Predicting someone would grow up to be an Army Wife was not an uncommon insult.
After middle school came high school and a keen awareness of the GIs (as we called them) speckling the fringes of our teenage experience. We girls who had been in country for several years had assimilated. We knew the local restaurant etiquette. We’d learned to be quiet, in keeping with the larger German personality.
The GIs wrestled like dogs in the Fest beer tents and, often younger than 21, would drink more than they were used to in quiet German restaurants. “Ein Bier, bitte!” they would howl, pounding the table. In public, they walked in loose clusters, shouted their words, and leered at—and hit on—American high school girls because we were girls and, more importantly, we spoke English.
I learned at an early age to avoid GIs, but in 2005, after having been away from all things military for a decade or more, I married someone in the Army. We’d met in Germany during our senior year of high school when he, with his cross dangle earring, untied shoelaces, and heavy-metal band T-shirts, was the last person anyone would expect to join the military. Still, he joined a year after graduation, and we kept in touch for eleven years before deciding to be together.
When he deployed to Iraq, and for months after his return, I again found myself judging Military Wives. Their cars sported bumper stickers reading, “Army Wife: Toughest Job in the Army.” Women on the military spouse forums would list, as their occupation, “Military Spouse.” Their names were “Army wifey” or “Sgt. John’s Wife.”
If being a Military Wife meant losing my identity, I wanted no part of it.
I avoided all things FRG (Family Readiness Group, a spouse support group), even when Ian became a Commander and I knew the Commander’s wife typically headed the FRG. Before one of Ian’s promotion ceremonies, I told him I didn’t want him to present me with the yellow roses wives usually receive; instead, I wanted the battalion coin. I didn’t want him to thank me for being his support, or to give me credit for his accomplishments and success. I asked him to refrain from mentioning me at all because he had done it himself – with or without me, he would have been where he was.
After thirteen years in, in 2007, Ian separated from the Army. We wanted to be the ones to decide where we lived, when we could travel, and when we would move. He got work as a freight pilot for one year, and as a salesman the next.
Recently, he told me he wanted to enter the military again, be a member of the National Guard. He wanted that sense of purpose again, he said. He wanted to use his (considerable) leadership skills.
And I?
I could not have been more thrilled.
Sometime in the many months I’d spent on the military spouse forums, even after Ian had separated from the military, it became increasingly clear I was on the outside of the military community—and to my surprise, I wanted back in. The spouses had (lo and behold) become individuals as I’d come to know them in online conversations, and I learned we weren’t so different, after all. Or, rather, at all. They had diverse skills, passions, fears, and interests, and they led complex lives. They were not—as I had unfairly perceived them to be—walking yellow ribbon car magnets. And the women I’d seen when I was a little girl, standing outside in their husbands’ PTs and smoking cigarettes?
Marktplatz, downtown Heidelberg, Germany
Well, it turns out that when you’re the one who does it, yourself, you see it a bit differently. The sweats are comfy. Partly because they’re his. And of course hair is messy in the morning. (But there really was a disinclination on the part of the wives to explore the off-post world, and as a kid, I thought it was silly. But, then, I grew up there, so none of it was foreign to me. Now, as a grownup, I suspect that if I went somewhere very foreign I might take some time before venturing into the unknown.)
In short, over the years and through the online conversations, I realized I’d been guilty of stereotyping military spouses in precisely the same way I’d fought against being stereotyped, myself.
But as much as I may have come to enjoy them, I had to accept that I was no longer a part (as if I’d ever been one) of what I’d learned was indeed a unique community of people with a profound shared experience. No one but a military spouse or significant other can know the passionate torture and tumult of sending a lover to war. Few, outside of military families, can claim to have lived in five different states in under ten years, or will have spent considerable time in a foreign country. Military spouses/significant others have the common advantage of knowing the souls behind the uniforms as men and women they love, rather than as political talking points or wars’ game pieces.
When Ian and I move and he enters the National Guard, I can’t say that I’ll participate in an FRG if there is one (or start one if there isn’t). A natural loner, I may not commiserate with other Army wives. And I probably won’t call myself a Military Wife—but, then again, I wouldn’t refer to myself as a salesman’s wife, a pilot’s wife, or any other kind of wife. But I do know I’ll welcome his position in the military family and feel privileged that I, by extension, can call myself a member of that family. A far more appreciative member.
[Jan. 19, 2010 - some military spouses did not respond well to this entry. Read the resulting defense/explanation/clarification here.]
If the Today Show has the time to offer condolences to the family of the deceased elder Russert, do they not also have the time to offer quick condolences to families whenever they announce troop deaths?
It would be easy: “Five more troops died Thursday in Afghanistan. Our sincere condolences to the families.”
