Standing By: The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War - Hardcover

Buckholtz, Alison

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9781585426959: Standing By: The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1585426954 ISBN 13: 9781585426959

Publisher: Tarcher, 2009

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Alison Buckholtz never dreamed she would marry a military man, but when she met her husband, an active-duty Navy pilot, nothing could stop her from building a life with him—not even his repeated attempts to talk her out of marriage. He didn’t want her to have to make the kinds of sacrifices long required of the spouses of military personnel. They wed shortly after September 11, 2001 and, since then, their life together has been marked by long separations and unforeseen challenges, but also unexpected rewards.

Standing By is Buckholtz’s candid and moving account of her family’s experiences during her husband’s seven-month deployment on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf. With insight and humor she describes living near a military base in Washington State, far from home and in the midst of great upheaval, while trying to keep life as normal as possible for the couple’s two young children. But she is not alone in her struggle. In Standing By, Buckholtz portrays her friendships with other military wives and the ways in which this supportive community of women helps one another to endure—to even thrive—during difficult times.

Throughout Standing By, Buckholtz speaks honestly about the culture shock she experienced transitioning into the role of a military wife. Because she had been raised to conquer the world on her own terms rather than be a more traditional wife and mother supporting her husband’s career, the world of the Armed Forces was at first as unfamiliar as a foreign land. But a remarkable and surprising series of events has challenged her long-held assumptions about the military, motherhood, and even the nature of American citizenship.

A rare and intimate portrait of one of the tens of thousands of families who now wait patiently for their service member to return home safely, Standing By is a window into what matters most for families everywhere.

Alison Buckholtz’s articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post and Washington Post Magazine, Real Simple, Forbes Global, Salon.com and many other publications. She was a resident of Washington, D.C. before she married into the military and now lives in Washington State with her husband and two children. This is her first book.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

PART ONE - Workups

Chapter 1 - Shock and Awe

Chapter 2 - Who by Water

Chapter 3 - Gone Mom

Chapter 4 - Lost

Chapter 5 - The Provincial

Chapter 6 - Pippi

Chapter 7 - O’Dark-thirty

Chapter 8 - Flat Daddy

Chapter 9 - A Day of Mother

Chapter 10 - Cryptology

Chapter 11 - Starfish

Chapter 12 - Beautiful World

Chapter 13 - The Loved Dog

Chapter 14 - Tell Me Your Secrets

Chapter 15 - My Sweetest Friend

Chapter 16 - The Feast of Crispian

Chapter 17 - New Beginnings

PART TWO - Deployment

Chapter 18 - By the Waters of Babylon

Chapter 19 - American Trinity

Chapter 20 - The New Normal

Chapter 21 - “People in the Navy Kill People”

Chapter 22 - The Navy Wife

Chapter 23 - That Stupid Boat

Chapter 24 - Pancakes and Ice Cream

Chapter 25 - Rock Bottom

Chapter 26 - A Draft of the Heart

Chapter 27 - The Happy Family Photo

Chapter 28 - COWs and Other Mammals

Chapter 29 - Everyday Fantasies

Chapter 30 - “If It Were Easy, Anyone Could Do It”

Chapter 31 - Diving into the Wreck

Chapter 32 - “When Is It My Turn?”

Chapter 33 - Pippi

Chapter 34 - Counting Down

PART THREE - Homecoming

Chapter 35 - Magical Powers

Acknowledgements

Selected Bibliography

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Buckholtz, Alison.
Standing by : the making of an American military family in a time of war / Alison
Buckholtz.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-02877-3

1. Buckholtz, Alison. 2. Navy spouses—United States—Biography.
3. United States. Navy—Military life. 4. United States. Navy—Aviation—
Anecdotes. 5. Naval Air Station Whidbey Island (Wash.)—Anecdotes. I. Title.
V736.B
359.0092—dc22
[B]

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and
Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author
assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication.
Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any
responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

FOR THE AMERICAN MILITARY FAMILIES
WHO SHOW ME THE WAY, EVERY DAY

“Child, my heart feels nothing. I have no words, no questions.
I cannot even look him in the eyes. If it really is Odysseus, and
he is home, we will recognize each other well enough; there
are secrets that we two know and no one else.”

—The Odyssey, XXIII, 104-110. Penelope is speaking to her son after
seeing her husband, Odysseus, for the first time in twenty years. He has made
his way home after fighting in the Trojan War.

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
—Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas”

Author’s Note

When my family moved to Washington state during the summer of 2006, I had no inkling that I would write a book about our experience as a military family. Neither did the scores of new Navy friends who trusted me with their stories, or the spouses in our squadron who reached out for help. Within weeks of our relocation to Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, I obtained the most treasured security clearance of all: access into the lives of people who would come to mean a great deal to me. I heard their heartbreaks and triumphs in confidence, and to maintain that confidence I have changed names and significant identifying details of nearly all non-family members. In cases that required a greater level of sensitivity, composite characters and altered situations stand in for the real thing, though the essence remains intact. The only secrets revealed are my own.

So, first, a confession: I am not an expert on the military or even the Navy family. I read many books and articles on these subjects, and these texts tutored me in a heritage I am privileged to claim (though I alone am responsible for any errors in the telling). To gain the broadest understanding of the military-family experience, however, I talked to the people who constitute this extraordinary community. Many of the service members’ spouses I have met since embarking on this unexpected path have traveled it much longer than I have, and their experiences are richer and more dramatic than my own. Learning of the far-flung places they have established their lives, and the hardships and losses they have endured, has humbled me. Their adventurous spirit has inspired me. They have taught me valuable lessons about the challenges and rewards of a military lifestyle, and I feel honored to transmit what I have learned from them—especially if I can bring these stories to a civilian population with a limited understanding of America’s armed forces. But no one military spouse can represent another, and certainly not the entire group.

Finally, a note about the way I refer to military spouses. When discussing our squadron’s officer families, I often write about “wives,” and I use the pronoun he to refer to the married officers of our squadron. Although many officer spouse clubs include both men and women, ours was composed solely of women. Within the squadron, approximately one-fourth of the officers were women. While this is a larger proportion than in most similar units, the female officers were all single, so there were no men among the group of officer spouses. (There were several men among the enlisted spouses.)

I explain my use of pronouns in such detail because female members of the armed forces make up an ever-growing and important portion of the military’s enlisted and officer ranks. Their sacrifices and their service cannot be overstated. I don’t assume that all service members are male and that all spouses are female, because the reality is quite different. However, during the tour I describe in this book, my peers were fellow military wives, and my use of pronouns simply reflects the reality I lived at that time.

Introduction

A Navy wife should be proud of the Navy and her connection with it, and never by word or deed should she cast any discredit upon it. Times will be hard and separations will be long, but she should present to the world a cheerful agreeableness rather than a resigned stoicism. The Navy doesn’t particularly care for a wife who is too obviously carrying her load. Take life as it comes in your stride, my dear, and you’ll be loved all the more for it!

—The Navy Wife: What She Ought to Know About the Customs of the Service and the Management of a Navy Household (1942)

Scott paced in front of me, back and forth, back and forth, silent. But I knew what he was thinking.

“This will never work,” he finally said. “We need to break it off now before it becomes too painful. I’ve been in long-distance relationships before. They always go bad. I don’t want that to happen to us.”

He was breaking up with me, but it was hard to get upset. This was the third time he’d tried to call it quits, and we’d been dating less than a month. He was a nice guy—too nice—and though we both felt an intense bond immediately after we had met, he remained worried. The problem was obvious: We would have only another month to get to know each other before he moved from southern Maryland, where he was a Navy test pilot, to a base in Whidbey Island, Washington, where he would undergo two months of flight training. After that, he was headed to a squadron in Japan for three years.

“I think we can make it work,” I said, as gently as I could. After our two previous breakups, I saw how easily he could be persuaded. But I had a shred of dignity left, however tattered, and I refused to let him off easily again. Besides, this time, I had an inkling of what nagged at him. His sister, a high school friend of mine who had set us up, confessed that he feared I wouldn’t make a good Navy wife.

I didn’t want to dance around the issue any longer. I had already started to grow my hair long for our wedding. We needed to move on with this thing.

“Are you afraid I wouldn’t make a good Navy wife?”

“I know you’d be good at it,” he finessed. “I just think you would hate it. It’s not for you. It’s not who you are.”

Scott counted all the things required of an officer’s wife at his level: relocating frequently, involvement with the wives’ club (the “knives club,” as it is sometimes referred to), “mandatory fun” with people you hardly know, being left behind during long and frequent deployments, shouldering the problems of younger service members’ wives, exposure to the ever-present possibility of death.

Carrier aviation, after all, is a dangerous business. Just a few months before we met, two friends from Scott’s test-pilot school class had crashed while he was flying. He witnessed the event and the subsequent fire from his jet. He’d been close to the wife and girlfriend of both aviators who died; watching them at the funerals and helping establish scholarship funds for the children forced him to think practically about what he required of a girlfriend, even though we’d been dating for such a short time.

I understood why Scott believed military life wasn’t for me. I loved my urban Washington, D.C., apartment. I loved my job handling communications for a national nonprofit association. I loved dining at the numerous ethnic restaurants within easy walking distance of my place. My parents lived twenty minutes away, and I visited them nearly every weekend. Two of my younger siblings rented nearby apartments, and the third was a short Amtrak ride up the Northeast corridor.

Most of my friends’ lives mirrored mine. Like me, they were in their early thirties, with graduate-school degrees and jobs that promised either great riches or deep fulfillment (depending on the diploma). We read The Washington Post and The New York Times and The New Yorker and Harper’s. We agreed on most issues and voted for the same political candidates. We commuted from condos within three subway stops of one another on the D.C. Metro’s Red Line. We met for readings at Politics & Prose, a nearby bookstore-caf�. We scheduled brunches on Sundays. We dated one another. None of us had friends or relatives in the military.

Before I met Scott, I imagined service members to be well-intentioned robots, necessary to society but alien to my thirty-one-year experience of life in America. We began dating during the spring of 2001—before the attacks of September 11 and the subsequent war on terrorism brought faces in uniform to morning newspapers and evening broadcasts. So no military presence peopled my consciousness. I’d never heard of a wives’ club, except maybe as the punch line to a joke. I didn’t understand Scott’s point when he referred to the responsibilities of an officer’s wife or the ways the Navy consumes your personal life.

But none of that mattered to me in those early days. Since I’d never seen Scott in his flight suit or his uniform, just in the polo shirts and khaki pants he wore on our dates, it didn’t really seem like he was in the Navy.

“I think we can make it work,” I repeated.

I was falling in love, and I brushed away my fears. So we talked for hours, repeating ourselves, circling back to the same issues, until he said he couldn’t take it anymore. He broke up with me anyway. But he was too tired to drive the two hours back to base, and he asked to sleep on my couch.

I undressed in my room, in the dark, and slid under my quilt. I lay awake, certain that Scott would knock lightly at any minute or just push the door open and proclaim that he was all wrong. He didn’t. He slept on the couch. All night. And when I peeked out in the morning, he was gone.

By the end of that year, we were married.

In the seven years since we stood under the wedding canopy, Scott and I have moved four times and have had two children: Ethan, who is now six, and Esther, who is four. After tours in Japan and Washington, D.C., we currently live in Anacortes, Washington, a friendly town of 16,000 tucked into the far northwest corner of the state. My husband is the commanding officer (CO, also known as Skipper) of a squadron of EA-6B Prowler jets at nearby Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, and I am the “wife of.” Fortunately for me, many requirements for military spouses have changed over the decades, and expectations have shifted even further during the last few years. When Scott became skipper of his squadron, he offered me the opportunity to opt out of the responsibilities that are normally associated with being the CO’s wife—those same challenges he counted on the fingers of both hands during that anguished night in my old apartment.

But our tour here is just three years, and a lot of good can be done in that time. I’ve seen firsthand how visiting an enlisted couple with a new baby can boost the morale of the whole squa...

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