Under the Sabers: The Unwritten Code of Army Wives by Tanya Biank

Author:Tanya Biank [Biank, Tanya]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780312333508
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2006-02-07T08:00:00+00:00

Andrea was glad it was Friday. She needed a little break. It had been a busy summer. She had taken the kids down to Myrtle Beach for the day to see her mom, who was vacationing there. And Andrea had also traveled to California to donate her eggs to a couple who couldn’t have a child. It hadn’t been a year since she gave birth to the twins; why not give another couple a chance to have a child, even if the baby would biologically be hers this time. So what if Brandon didn’t feel comfortable with it. Andrea felt it was the right thing to do, and there was no changing her mind. She was regaining a confidence she had lost over the last few years.

Maybe that had something to do with their marriage, which had had a rocky start and many ups and downs. When Andrea first discovered she was pregnant in Germany, some of her Army supervisors encouraged her to have an abortion, but Andrea wouldn’t hear of it. She was discharged and went home to Alliance to have the baby, mortified that she was unmarried and pregnant.

Meanwhile, Brandon returned to the States for knee surgery after a ski accident, and Andrea and her sister and brother-in-law drove from Ohio to visit him at Walter Reed Medical Center in Maryland. When she told Brandon she was going to have his baby, she thought he’d be thrilled. Instead the visit was a disaster. Brandon—bedridden and angry—lashed out at Andrea and accused her of sleeping around. He had fathered a baby boy when he was a senior in high school, and his parents were upset that he was now having a second child out of wedlock. They even questioned if it was his, which hurt Andrea and angered her family. Brandon had been her first real love.

Eventually the couple made up and married at the courthouse at Fort Benning, Georgia, on May 17, 1994, more than a month after Harlee was born and a day before Andrea’s twenty-first birthday. Soon after that Brandon was out of the Army himself. Andrea had wanted to go home. Things between them had been so difficult, she thought maybe going back to Alliance would make life better. They settled in Andrea’s hometown, and Brandon took a job making train car frames at American Steel.

He hated the work, and Andrea was unhappy, too.

It’s not unusual for a soldier to realize the grass isn’t always greener in the civilian job market and to reenlist. After six months Brandon did just that, and the couple moved to Fort Campbell, back to an environment in which they both felt at home. Andrea had loved the Army, and her stint as a soldier gave her a unique perspective as an Army wife.

Generally female soldiers have more in common with male soldiers—their comrades—than they do with Army wives. When they marry another soldier, it’s easy for them to relate to their husbands on all things military. I’ve known lots of wives, like Andrea, who make the leap from soldier to Army spouse.

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