Chapter 1: A Rapidly Deployable Combat Unit CHAPTER 1 A RAPIDLY DEPLOYABLE COMBAT UNIT
November 2012, Columbus, Georgia

In the photo Andrew had texted, the little brick house looked out of another time. Just call me June Cleaver, I’d captioned the shot when I’d sent it to my oldest friend, Reina. In person, though, the 1940s home looked more like it had been forgotten entirely, the front lawn patchy, no shrubs or flowers bordering the foundation, not even a small porch to sit on. I hadn’t realized that I’d hoped for these things, but I’d lost an apartment next to a reliable subway line in the only city I had ever loved. A porch swing would have softened the blow.

“Maybe we should have gone with base housing?” I asked Andrew, who was standing next to me on our new driveway in the dusk. I didn’t have a driver’s license, had never had a need for one in New York City, so he’d driven all one thousand miles here. Over the course of two days, we’d had six hours of sleep and lukewarm showers at a Motel 6 in southern Virginia, but he looked untouched by exhaustion, his dark hair combed perfectly into place.

“Trust me, at my rank, it would’ve been worse,” he said, rolling up the back door of our U-Haul. “Plus, this place is $700 a month. We get to pocket a little bit of that BAH.” He looked at me with a mischievous grin, the evening light catching the flecks of gold in his green eyes, and I felt a surge of excitement. We were going to live in a house. We had never lived in a house before.

The Army issued you a “basic allowance for housing” to cover rent and utilities, calculating the amount allotted by looking at the cost of living in your area, your rank, and whether you had any dependents. Ours was $1,100 a month. After utilities, we probably wouldn’t be pocketing much. Still, I could not get over this number. $700. That had been my rent for a basement bedroom in Brooklyn when I was twenty-one. My view had been a brick wall.

“I wish we could leave this stuff out here for the night, but I don’t think it’s a great idea,” Andrew said, looking around. Getting off the freeway, the roads we’d driven had been lined with used car lots and fast-food restaurants. Then, when we got close to our street, a neighborhood park had appeared like an oasis, shaded by tall oaks, maples, and southern pines. The old homes bordering it were in good shape, even stately, but they had become smaller and more run-down as we’d driven up the hill toward ours. We were just two houses in from an intersection, after which the neighborhood dissolved into a wasteland of empty lots and old warehouses. Among them was a small clapboard church with an old marquee in front, one of its letters gone—SIN ERS ARE WELCOME.

“Oh, look,” I said to Andrew, pointing. “They knew the New York heretics were coming.”

He laughed as he picked up a box. I grabbed it from him and turned away from the truck.

There was a woman standing at the end of our driveway.

She looked about my age, late twenties, thin and freckled, her face red as though she’d been out all day in the wind. She wasn’t wearing a speck of makeup. Her long chestnut hair looked dry at the ends, like it needed a cut.

“Let me get that!” she said, rushing toward me and grabbing the box from my arms. “I’m Rachel, it’s so nice to meet you, can we help you unpack?” The words trailed after her, rushed and breathy, as she walked up to our front door and placed the box on the stoop. It was like she had been waiting for us.

“Maybe we should let them get settled in, babe,” said a guy standing at the curb. Rachel was so excessively friendly, so overwhelmingly there, I hadn’t even registered him until now.

I looked over at Andrew. A smile was spreading across his face.

This had to be Boyd.

Or Daniel, as Rachel introduced him now, rejoining him at the end of the driveway, her hand curled around his forearm in a way that was both tender and possessive. Wisps of blond hair peeked out from under his Mets cap.

“Dan,” he gently corrected, and shook my hand. There was something old-fashioned about Dan or Daniel or Boyd, with his ruddy complexion and white sneakers and big, toothy smile. Andrew had met him at Fort Benning, the Army base ten miles from our new house, at a selection process for an elite, rapidly deployable combat unit that was part of the Army’s Special Operations. After they’d made it in, both of them had gotten stationed here, and when Dan found the nearly identical brick house across the street from ours, he told Andrew about our place. The landlord, a plumber named Frank, had bought both for cheap during the height of the Recession. Theirs was nicer, I noted with some jealousy. It had a covered porch, some well-kept bushes, a feeling of having been recently loved.

That was where June Cleaver actually lived.

“Well, if you need anything, anything at all, we’re right here,” Rachel said, pointing at their house as Dan practically dragged her off our driveway. Even their walkway was lined with petunias. I had never before wanted petunias, but suddenly I was painfully envious of Rachel and her tidy flowers.

“Apparently, the last tenants trashed the place, but it’s been renovated, sort of,” Andrew said as he fished the keys out of his pocket, unlocking the front door as we reached the stoop. He turned on the overhead light, illuminating a small, box-shaped living room with shiny wooden floors. The smell of fresh lacquer hung in the air.

“There’s even a mudroom,” Andrew said, opening a windowed door just off the living room. I peeked in. On one of the walls were appliance hookups. “We’ll need to get a washer and dryer,” he said, pointing.

“We won’t have to go to the laundromat,” I countered before walking back through the living room to the dining area and turning on the light, bringing to life a chandelier that hung from the ceiling. It was plastic, but it shimmered beautifully. At the back of the house I found three bedrooms. 1,300 square feet. Just being inside it made me feel like someone had opened a window in my mind and let in the breeze.

Once we’d brought in every last item from the truck, Andrew and I lay down on the living room floor. My body ached. The last week had been a conveyor belt of boxes to pack and goodbyes to say and a thousand loose ends to tie up at my office in the Flatiron District, where I’d worked as an editor for the digital division of a publishing company. By the time we’d finished loading the U-Haul, we’d probably walked a half-marathon up and down the four floors of our Harlem building.

Reina had helped us move out of our one-bedroom. I’d known her since I was twelve. She was like my sister. I didn’t know when I’d see her again, when I’d even next be in New York. Would I ever get another chance at an editing job like the one I’d just given up? It seemed unlikely. I’d only had it for a year and a half, still couldn’t believe I’d even landed it.

And now, here I was, twenty-eight years old, an Army wife.

Andrew found my hand and fingered my wedding ring, a tiny diamond that had belonged to his grandmother. We had married nine days before he left for almost eleven months of training. During his ten weeks of boot camp, he’d been allowed just three five-minute phone calls, so I had survived on his letters. In them, he had sounded happy, like something that had been jostling around inside him his entire life had clicked into place. It was strange, the way time had both expanded and compressed while Andrew was gone. I had been living with this ring on my finger for close to a year now, but my husband was still getting to know my hand with it on. My husband. The word, as comforting as a hearth, sent a warmth through my body every time I said it.

A knock came at the door. Andrew and I looked at each other.

“That’s odd,” I said, and got up.

It was Rachel. She had pulled her hair back into a bun. There was blush on her cheeks and color on her lips. She was holding a plate full of chocolate chip cookies covered in Saran wrap. “I just thought you guys might like some cookies. I baked a bunch earlier. I like to bake—a little too much.” She laughed nervously.

I didn’t know if she was doing this because we were new neighbors or the only people she’d met in the Unit, but no one had ever, in all the apartments I’d lived in during my decade in New York, brought over cookies when I’d moved in.

I took the plate from her. Even through the Saran wrap, I could smell the warm butter and chocolate. “Wow, thank you,” I said, smiling stiffly, standing there for a moment before remembering that I should invite her in. I inched back from the door and opened it farther so she could enter, realizing, as I did this, that there was nowhere for her to sit. But she was already backing away, looking toward her house, as though she could hear her husband from across the street: Leave them be, babe.

“I’ll let you guys unpack!” she said. “But please, please let me know if I can help.”

“Of course,” I said. “Thank you so much.” I smiled again, relieved that the expression felt more natural this time, and closed the door. When I turned around, Andrew was standing behind me.

“She seems really nice,” he said. “You should be friends.”

“I’ve never been friends with someone just because they’re nice,” I said.

“Maybe you have some things in common,” he said. “I mean, other than your husbands.”

Our husbands were exactly why I doubted we’d have much in common. Because I had nothing in common with the Army. Even the language of this world—rapidly deployable combat unit—was so foreign to my ear, we might as well have just unloaded a spaceship on the moon. The South, too, was new territory for me. Before today, Virginia was the farthest I’d gone beneath the Mason-Dixon line. Columbus, Ohio? New York friends had asked when I’d told them where I was moving. No, not that Columbus. The one in Georgia. The one no one had heard of. It was a city of nearly 200,000 people, but when I’d called the New York Times’ customer service to transfer my subscription, the woman on the line had told me they didn’t offer delivery here. There just wasn’t the demand.

“Give her a chance,” Andrew said. His voice sounded hopeful, but his eyes were pleading. He was leaving for Afghanistan in two weeks.

I had a high tolerance for loneliness. Andrew and I had just spent almost a year apart. But I’d had a life in New York—a career, friends, more than a decade of history.

I looked across the street. Through the Boyds’ window, I could see Rachel gliding across her kitchen. She looked so at home in the space already. There had been an urgency in her voice, though, when she’d dropped off the cookies, like she needed something she didn’t know how to ask for.

“Sometimes I think about joining the military.”

That was what Andrew said to me one evening in the winter of 2007, when he was twenty-four and I was twenty-three. We’d just moved in together and were out walking in Annapolis, the colonial Maryland capital where Andrew was studying the classics at a small liberal arts college.

“I would leave you,” I said, without thinking. The air was cold enough that I could see my breath.

Andrew’s face went still.

“Join the Army? You would never want to do that,” I continued uneasily. The Global War on Terror had been going on for six years already. We were in the midst of the Iraq surge, the deadliest year for US forces since 2004. I had moved to New York for college just two weeks before the Twin Towers fell. By the time I graduated four years later, it was hard to imagine not being at war. But it wasn’t my war. Everyone I knew was against the invasion of Iraq, which seemed, in every sense, like a costly conflict with no clear rationale, and I had marched with friends in protest of it. Afterward, we’d gotten drinks at an East Village bar. That had been the extent of my involvement. It wasn’t like my generation was being drafted. US soldiers fighting this, I thought, must either be true believers, from military families, or out of options. Andrew was none of those things.

He always had an answer or an argument. This time, though, he’d said nothing.

Two years passed. Andrew finished his degree, working as a bartender while I waitressed at an Irish pub and freelanced for the local weekly paper. He dropped the Army idea, or so I thought. As he finished up school at age twenty-six, he considered his options. He was fascinated by geopolitics. Maybe the State Department could be a fit? Then he discovered how much paper-pushing the job entailed. The Peace Corps was an exciting post-college idea, but he needed a decent income to repay his mountain of student loans. He also felt like he didn’t have time to dally.

When most of his peers had gone off to college, Andrew had chosen to dedicate himself to Wushu, a modern martial art China was bringing to the 2008 Olympics. He’d started practicing traditional Chinese martial arts when he was four, becoming so invested in it that, by the time he was a teenager, he was waking at 6 a.m. to instruct classes alongside his teacher. In late high school, he began working with a coach who trained members of the US team for Wushu. He didn’t love it the way he’d loved Shao-Lin, a practice based in Buddhist philosophy that had been much more than a sport to him—it had been his purpose, his cosmology, his spiritual center. But the Olympics was an athletic goal he couldn’t pass up. He trained seriously for three years in the Bay Area before leaving, at age twenty, to spend six months practicing Wushu full time in Beijing. When he returned to California, he was so burned out on the sport that he quit martial arts entirely and became a bartender, renting a studio above a taqueria on Market Street in downtown San Francisco, where he spent his mornings diving into books by Western philosophers and twentieth-century American novelists and questioning the limits of the narrow world he’d grown up in. By the time he entered college at twenty-two, he had already worked hard for and given up on a lifelong dream.

The spring Andrew graduated, I noticed an Army recruitment pamphlet on our nightstand. I intended to ask him about it but forgot in the tumult of moving. We were heading to do forestry work in the Ontario outback for a summer, where we would live without electricity or running water, a last adventure before we moved back to New York so that I could attend Columbia’s graduate school for journalism. Life was so busy, and the Army seemed such a far-fetched idea to me, it was easy not to think about it. Maybe because I didn’t want to.

Then, sometime in the fall of 2011, when I was knee-deep in school, I found an extremely detailed workout regimen scrawled on a pad of paper on our coffee table. Andrew was so devoted to the gym that he often went at 3 a.m. after work, but there was something about the specificity of the goals, and the goals themselves—X number of push-ups, two-mile-run in X time—that made me pause.

“Are you planning on running away and joining the Army?” I asked that night. It was Wednesday, the only weekday evening he had off. We were at our neighborhood park. It was June and steamy out. Shirtless men were grunting and sweating, doing pull-ups on rusty equipment. Bill Withers wafted from someone’s giant boom box.

“Not running away,” he said, smirking. “But yes.”

“You haven’t stopped thinking about this,” I said.

“I haven’t,” he said. “It’s what I want to do.”

And suddenly, I understood what I hadn’t wanted to understand two years prior: This was real, whatever this was. A desire—a calling, even? For the next month, I came at him with the same question over and over: Why? I asked, riding back with him to our apartment on the subway at night, drinking whiskey at a neighborhood bar, sipping coffee out of paper cups on our stoop. Why did he have to get his hands dirty with these wars?

Andrew’s grandfather had fought in World War II, like mine. Otherwise, his background was about as far afield as you could get from the military. He had been raised in California by children of the ’60s. His mother was a modern-dancer-turned-marriage-and-family-therapist. His father, who died when Andrew was eighteen, had been a charismatic ecumenical spiritualist. He had run a commune where Andrew spent the first six years of his childhood. But Andrew had also grown up on a steady diet of Rambo and Predator and Saving Private Ryan, and felt drawn, as a kid, to the Vietnam vets who came through his life, like his father’s friend, a helicopter gunner who loved to show Andrew his war wound, the gunshot to his stomach; and a boyfriend of his mother’s, a limo driver who lived with a bullet lodged next to his spine that had traveled there after he’d been shot during a firefight. In Annapolis, he lived on the same block as the Naval Academy, bartended with Iraq vets, and watched college friends commission as officers in the Marines. His vision broadened, and he became increasingly curious about the war, inhaling books like Robert Kaplan’s Imperial Grunts, about American Special Forces soldiers, and Where Men Win Glory, John Krakauer’s biography of Pat Tillman, the football player who left his sports career after 9/11 to become an Army Ranger.

All of these influences stirred in him a possibility that had maybe always been there. Still, he struggled with the ethics of this impulse. He’d been raised to do harm only as a means of self-defense. If he didn’t have to hurt or kill people, he reasoned, then wasn’t remaining a civilian the moral choice? He knew there were no clear-cut answers, but he mulled this conundrum for years as though it were a hard but not-impossible-to-solve math equation. Eventually, he came to this: Soldiers were as necessary to a society as shelter was to an individual. If he had both the aptitude and proclivity to be one, then maybe enlisting was the moral choice. And a soldier, he decided, was no more responsible for a country’s war than a tax-paying civilian. He also felt it was his duty as a citizen to vote and be informed, but it wasn’t a soldier’s job to weigh in on political decisions. Once he’d clarified this thinking, he spent months looking at photos of seriously wounded vets, soldiers who’d lost both their legs or all of their limbs, fates that scared him more than the prospect of death. He thought that in doing this, he might burn out his desire. But it remained. He was willing, he decided, to take the risk.

There was the matter of the particular conflict, though. Like me, he had been against the war in Iraq. But after thinking and reading about our involvement in Afghanistan, he came to feel that responding to 9/11 in the way we had was important, even imperative. And he understood our need for a presence in a country that shared borders with strategic competitors like Iran and China.

“Countries are in a constant power play with one another,” he told me when I asked what he meant by “strategic competitors.” I was romantic and naïve. Countries, to me, were beautiful patches on a quilt, mountains to ride trains through and beaches to sleep on, not chess pieces vying for dominance on the board of geopolitics. “Countries need armies, and armies need soldiers,” he explained, though he admitted it wasn’t quite that simple. But he believed in owing your country rather than it owing you. He believed it was meaningful to be a soldier. He wanted to be part of history, to be, as he told me once when he was feeling lofty, “at the beating heart of the world.” He longed to be of service, to get high on purpose. And, despite his unerring decency, he wasn’t soft. He had an edge, a restlessness, an outsized energy that filled any room.

“Andrew? The Army?” people would say when they discovered that he was enlisting. Usually, they’d pause, then nod to themselves. “He’s intense,” they’d admit. “It does make a weird kind of sense.” His mother was the most worried but least shocked of any of us. Once, when he was in the first grade, she found a piece of paper on which he’d scrawled the words I love WWII.

When it came down to it, for Andrew, the Army was like anything else we can’t talk people out of: He wanted it.

And I wanted him.

We fought hard about his desire to join, winding up in a therapist’s office together in downtown Manhattan, not far from where the World Trade Center had once stood. He had proposed just weeks before. In therapy, I found out that in his past two years of silence, he had been fighting with himself. He worried that maybe he wouldn’t make it out whole and alive, but mostly, he worried that I would leave him, just as I’d threatened.

“If I have to choose between you and the Army, it’s the Army,” he said during one of our sessions. The words hit me with the force of a physical blow. We had been together for four years by then. He had wanted to marry me from our very first date.

“I’d give up my writing for you,” I said without thinking. What had I even meant by that? I didn’t have to sign away my civil rights to be a writer. I didn’t even have to take a shower. But I meant it, at least in the way that people mean things when they feel desperate and terrified. Don’t leave. I’ll do anything.

“Well, you shouldn’t,” Andrew said, frustration contorting his face.

“What if we just don’t get married at all?” I asked after the session as we walked back to the subway, pushing against the autumn wind. I had never been sure about marriage anyway, had been a skeptic of the entire enterprise since watching my parents tear theirs apart. Even the most ordinary marriage seemed designed to fail, and this would be no ordinary marriage.

“What do I do with all my stuff? Just stick it in storage?” he asked.

“No, leave it! We’ll still be together,” I said.

Andrew stopped suddenly, just a block from the subway entrance. Leaves skittered across the sidewalk. “We need to get married, Simone. Girlfriends don’t count for shit in the Army. If something happens to me, no one’s gonna be calling you, no one’s gonna take care of you. And we’ve been together four years. It’s time to shit or get off the pot.”

I looked at him. His face was calm, no longer twisted with emotion, and I felt every impulse I’d ever felt toward him. I wanted to slap his cold, rough cheek and touch it, softly, just to warm him.

“How romantic,” I said, looking down at the feet rushing past us.

“You could stay here, keep your job,” he said.

“So, what? We break up?”

“No, I could just do one contract, then get out.”

One contract? That was more than three years. “A long-distance marriage?”

“People do it,” Andrew said.

“People are idiots,” I said. “It would crumble. We would crumble. Can you imagine? With how much you’ll be deployed and training? It would be like saying goodbye for the next three years. And then what?”

“We’re strong,” he said.

Were we? I had always thought we were. I knew, somehow, from the beginning, that our relationship wouldn’t be one to just run its course. This fact had intimidated me at first, but once I’d summoned the courage to commit, being with Andrew had been like building a home from cedar and cement. Time wouldn’t tear it down. You’d need heavy equipment, a fire fed with kerosene. You’d need violence. That’s how I’d felt about our relationship. And then Andrew’s single-minded ambition about the Army came blowing into our house, threatening to knock it down. It was a force of nature I hadn’t foreseen, a decision he was making that required me to make my own tough decisions: Could I marry a soldier? Could I support him in a war with a purpose that seemed more gray than black and white? Could I reconcile that man with the man I loved? And was it worth it to leave behind a life I’d made for the life he’d chosen, simply because I loved him?

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