No Man's War : Irreverent Confessions of an Infantry Wife (9781619023833) by Ricketts Angela

Author:Ricketts, Angela [Ricketts, Angela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619023833
Publisher: Perseus Book Group

a surge, some spin, and a sucker punch

Isn’t a one-year deployment enough? Elizabeth’s husband and Rob’s battalion, which is now led by Martha Schneider’s husband, is en route home from a long, glory-less year in Afghanistan. Some men are already home; others are due back within days. The entire brigade, thirty-five hundred soldiers, is called back for a three-month extension. That’s the second time my practical and buoyant friend Elizabeth winds up in a pile of tears on my hallway floor. She says, “We’ve been sucker punched again.”

I REMEMBER THE PHONE call from Elizabeth Bianci so well. It’s the middle of winter 2007, which in Upstate New York is the end of February. In many parts of the country, spring is right around the corner. For us, winter has months to go. March is the worst, April almost as sketchy and unpredictable. The snow and slush and cold and isolation only get worse. Elizabeth’s husband drives a little VW Bug (no, not the norm for an infantry officer, unless he is secure in his manhood and has nothing to prove, something so respectable and almost hot about a man who doesn’t need to prove his masculinity by his stupid vehicle, a quality shared by Jack). The VW is bright yellow. Only one piece of the hood remains visible under the piles of deep snow and ice. She gave up on keeping it cleared in January. By the end of February, he’s supposed to be on his way home, and he could dig it out. She’s ready for him to come, not just because she misses him, which of course she does. But more than that, she is exhausted by taking care of the families in her FRG on her own. They’ve lost dozens of soldiers, an unprecedented amount for one battalion, in the Korengal Valley. The same place Sebastian Junger would film Restrepo just months later. Elizabeth wants Eric back for many reasons, the greatest of which seems to be simply to relieve her of her duties. Those duties that have never come naturally to her to begin with.

Maybe it’s Kat Dalisay who calls me first. Her husband is a dentist, and she has done her best to ride this deployment like a pro, keeping her whining to a minimum. Who thinks in a million years that marrying a dentist will wind up like this? Not Kat. But he’s due home in just a week. So is Eric Bianci. So we think. Both Kat and Elizabeth call me within an hour. Both of them with quivering voices hovering on tears.

“Did you hear the news?” Elizabeth asks. “I can’t fucking believe it. There’s a town hall meeting in an hour, and these women are going to lose their shit. It’s going to be a riot. Can you keep the boys for a while?”

When she drops the boys off, she doesn’t come to the door. This must be serious. A few hours later, she returns to pick them up and it’s maybe the worst I’ve seen her look.

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