In early 2011, my family and I lived near the US embassy compound in Amman, Jordan—so near, in fact, that our apartment was inside the outer guard ring. I was very happy about this situation. Two weeks after my three-year-old daughter and I arrived, my husband was sent to Italy indefinitely to help with a NATO mission. Meanwhile, the Arab Spring was taking root and there were protests outside of the Syrian embassy, protests outside of the American embassy, protests in the rural areas outside of Amman over the high costs of cooking oil and bread, and protestors in Amman demanding political reforms. Then Osama Bin Laden was killed by US Special Forces in Pakistan, which was seen by many as another US invasion of a country’s sovereign territory. Prime-time news was filled with burning American flags.

So you can imagine how much I loved seeing the US embassy guards standing at the gates.

Everyone stationed at the embassy had to attend a Regional Security Brief within a few days of arrival. We were told to change up our driving routines in order to make it hard for us to be followed, to look under our vehicles for explosive devices, to not drive beyond Amman city limits after sunset, and to always let a fellow American know when we went on a trip.

We had also been warned about our Western ways, with a special emphasis on how American women needed to be sensitive to this culture quite different from our own. It was recommended our clothing cover us from wrist to ankle. That we be aware conservative Muslim men would feel uncomfortable shaking the hands of women not related to them. How it was verboten to sit in the front seat of a taxi, the front seat being reserved for the wife of the taxi driver and our presence there could be misconstrued as a sexual advance. How we should try to not touch the hand of a male cashier at a grocery store when he was handing over change, lest he view this as suggestive.

But the embassy guards, well, we did not need to worry about them; they had been thoroughly vetted, many had worked with Western companies in the past, some had even lived in America. Their English was better than the average Jordanian, and they were accustomed to our strange cultural differences, like American women wearing shorts and tank tops to the embassy gym (otherwise we were advised to never wear shorts and tank tops in Jordan).

There was the guard who showed me video of his son’s gymnastic competitions. The guard who handed candy to my daughter, his pockets crammed with single-wrapped mints. The guard who meowed because he’d seen us feed stray cats. I brought them cookies, bottles of water, chocolate bars. I would have my daughter present the treats, and the guards would direct their thanks at her, press their hands to their hearts, say “Alhamdillah,” or “Praise God,” pinch her cheek or ruffle her blond hair.

The guard who worked the gate closest to my house spoke very little English, and while I spoke very little Arabic we exchanged pleasantries almost every day. He was in his forties, clean-shaven, wore glasses, and would throw open his arms when he saw us. Most Jordanians said “You are welcome!” This guard would shout, “A million, million welcomes!” Then one of us would inevitably say something the other would not understand, we’d pantomime merrily for a few incoherent minutes, and I’d wave good-bye.

About a month after my husband left, my daughter and I came to this particular gate and found him on duty with another guard, a young man with beautiful green eyes whose English was better than most. The older guard reached into his back pocket as I drew close, produced a carefully folded piece of paper, and handed it to me. I hesitated, knowing this was out of the ordinary.

I opened the letter and began to read, the words in capital letters, the writing painstakingly exact:

You are beautiful. Your smile is the sun—

I looked up, startled, feeling a blush warm my neck. The guard was watching me, nodding. I glanced down to read more just as the younger guard tore the paper out of my hand. He began to yell at the older man in rapid, angry Arabic, pointing at the high embassy wall behind us, then stabbing his finger in the direction of my apartment. I froze, trying to keep a smile on my face and ignore whatever was going on.

The young man crumpled the paper in his fist. He stared with those green eyes into mine.

“He does not understand,” he said. There was something combative about his face, his words. I nodded, chastened, as if I did understand. I took my daughter’s hand and walked toward the embassy. Later, I exited the embassy by another gate, sneaking around to my apartment building without having to pass those guards.

He does not understand.

What could those words possibly mean? And how could I ever find out? He didn’t understand I was married? He didn’t understand it was odd for a near-stranger to tell a woman she was beautiful?

Or he didn’t understand that I smiled and chatted with everyone, that it wasn’t a declaration of affection on my part?

***

They relocated those guards.

I’d occasionally see the older guard at one of the farther gates. He always welcomed me but he did not put his arms out in the joyful way he had before; he did not say “A million, million welcomes!”

And he never wrote me a letter again.

How I wish I had held on to it, read it in its entirety, studied the intentions and misspellings. It could have been nothing more than a show of friendship, Jordanians often being more effusive than Westerners. I had strangers tell me I was like a daughter to them. Once, I spent a few hours with a woman and she yelled as I drove away, “I love you! I love you! I love you!”

He does not understand.

So I started writing a short story about Jordan as a way to figure it out.

That story became a three-hundred-page book, The Confusion of Languages, and could have been much longer. All those endless opportunities for miscommunication.

I lived in Jordan for a year. While I never wore a tank top or sat in the front seat of a taxi, I’m still not sure exactly what I understand—not just about the Middle East, but about men and women. About people. About the ways we get one another wrong every day, about the moments that seem small but for some reason linger.

About all the fragile messages we want so desperately to share with another human being, only to find the distance is just too far, and it’s too easy to lose the words before we ever get the chance to read them.

***

For more of Siobhan’s essays, fiction, photos of Jordan, or to order copies of her new novel, The Confusion of Languages, please see her website: www.siobhanfallon.com

This interview first posted on the Military Fine Artists Network, or MilspoFAN, on January 31, 2017. Thanks for letting me repost here!

MilspoFAN: Tell us a little about yourself, your journey as a military spouse, and where you are today.
Siobhan: The journey has been a fairly scenic one. I met my husband in 2000, while I was bartending at my father’s Irish pub right outside the front gate of the United States Military Academy at West Point. My husband, KC, had just graduated and was staying on for a few months coaching soccer at the USMA prep school before heading to Fort Benning. I was working my way through getting an MFA in Creative Writing at the New School in NYC, and my future husband, hearing this, told me he loved to write. I’d met plenty of West Point cadets and soldiers and officers over the years, but this one won me over with talk of literature.

KC went to Fort Benning, Georgia, and then Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, and we were married on the beach in Oahu just before he deployed for a year to Afghanistan in 2004. I’m going to list the other posts we went to after getting married, it’s too exhausting to give a description of each and I have a feeling your readers know the deal: Fort Benning, GA (again); Fort Hood, TX (my husband did two year long deployments to Iraq during our three year assignment at Hood); Monterey, CA; Amman, Jordan; Falls Church, VA; and now we are in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

MilspoFAN: How has your role as a military spouse impacted your work as a writer- creatively, logistically, or otherwise?
Siobhan: Well, creatively each post has been inspiring, and all of them are so vividly different from each other that I usually can’t help but write about them. I like to think that the settings of my work are as important as the characters themselves. All equally determine the story. Perhaps I take the adage “write what you know” a little too seriously? I enjoy examining the different ways people live, whether it be how people are on a military base vs. outside it, or how Western women living in the Middle East blend (or don’t) into a different culture. You Know When the Men Are Gone is set in Fort Hood, Texas, during a deployment of a brigade and I worked very hard to get the real Fort Hood, from the vast, scrubby firing ranges to the clever street names like Tank Destroyer or Hell-On-Wheels, into the stories. I’ve also written about Hawaii: one of the characters in You Know When the Men Are Gone met her husband when he was stationed at Schofield, and my story in the anthology Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War, is also set in Oahu. The new novel, The Confusion of Languages, takes place in Amman, Jordan, where my family and I lived in 2011. Of course we were stationed at all of the above, so I feel like the writing that came out of these places were gifts from the United States Army. It’s also helpful that a writing career is portable; I can take it with me no matter what corner of the world the military throws us into.

On the downside I inevitably miss opportunities in America. It’s difficult to do a reading or book signing at an indie book store in Chicago when you live in Jordan or Abu Dhabi. And while planning the release of my new novel this summer, I know I have a very small window of time when I will be on U.S. soil during the school break of my small daughters. Combine that with the responsibilities of seeing family and friends, who I usually only get to see once a year, and my blood pressure starts to rise with thoughts of all the ground I have to cover in a such a short amount of time. I really have to be focused about what I can accomplish in advance, and get the word out as much as possible before I even get on a plane. Naturally, I also participate in fewer panels and conferences than I would like because of the tremendous distance. But every once in a while some generous writing program will send me a plane ticket, and of course there is social media, email, and Skype for staying in touch with readers or book clubs.

My husband is very supportive and there are times we can work in an extra trip stateside for me, as long as we can balance childcare and travel expenses with his long work hours. So yes, the distance and unpredictable nature of military life does make it more difficult. You do what you can. We military spouses know how to roll with the punches, and my family and I have been pretty darn blessed with some excellent locations. So like everything in life, it’s a trade off.

MilspoFAN: Of your 2011 work, You Know When the Men are Gone, the New York times wrote “This lean, hard-hitting short-story collection outshone some of the year’s most imposing doorstop-size novels.” How does your writing style and writing process for your first work of short stories compare to your upcoming full-length work, Confusion of Languages?

Siobhan: A novel is a pain in the ass. Honestly, I didn’t think I had any idea how hard it would be. I thought going from stories to novels was a natural progression, something that I’d be able to do without much effort, especially after I practiced so much by writing all those lousy novel drafts that are still lurking on my old hard drives. Right? And everyone was always telling me that my stories read like small novels, and that they wanted more. So I thought I’d just write, you know, more, as in a really, really long short story. HA!

You can read a short story in one sitting. Of course there are things that happen off the page, but the author can keep track of every detail in thirty pages, sometimes to the point where I remember whole snatches almost word for word. You can sit down and sip your coffee and read and say aha! I need to change this and this and then go get another cup of coffee and come back and make those changes. Thirty pages is a small town with a no name grocery store. But three hundred pages! I could never get my mind around the three hundred pages. Three hundred pages is New York City on New Year’s Eve. You can’t possibly keep track of what made it into the novel or not in one sitting, especially after all the editing and rewriting and gnashing of teeth. There are notebooks and index cards and piles of drafts taller than your four year old daughter of everything you deleted and reinserted and deleted again, how can you possibly remember everything?

But you do it. It takes time. Painstaking editing and screaming at your children not to come in and disturb Mommy again for another damn cup of apple juice! You feel like the worst writer (and mom) in the world and the biggest failure and no one will read you and those who do won’t ever be able to look you in the eye again because now they know you have absolutely no talent—and then you write the most beautiful paragraph you have ever written, or figure out why one of your characters behaves in a certain way, or how this one very important plot line can tie seamlessly into another. And that epiphany keeps you going. And when all those terrible thoughts seize your brain again, amazingly enough another epiphany will smile at you.

You need to remember that the things you want to say are there on the page, black and white and real, and it’s worth all the self doubt and agony and hangdog looks of your poor neglected children. Tomorrow you will take the kids to the park, you promise! Writing should be hard. Readers are going to dedicate hours and hours, days maybe, of their precious lives, reading what you have penned, letting your words fill their heads and linger in their thoughts. Those words better be your best.

MilspoFAN: What’s next for you?
Siobhan: The new novel, Confusion of Languages, will be out June 27, 2017. It started as a short story I wrote in Jordan in May of 2011. That means it’s taken me about six years. Dear God, that’s the first time I’ve done the math. SIX YEARS!! Plus more rewrites than I could even count at this point. I’d started each rewrite from scratch– I’m talking blinking cursor on a blank computer screen, five, six, seven times. I would work from a draft that I printed out (300 $%#@ pages!) next to my computer, but I would retype everything all over again because it felt like the only way to really be in the story, to allow myself to write new material and edit/ catch every nuance of the material I might want to reuse/retype. When I just cut and paste, I feel like I am less critical, I don’t get seized by words in the same way or see the story as something malleable that I can drastically change if need be.

That said, now I’m taking a little bit of a break. It feels good to let new ideas sort of well up in me again, rather than focusing so completely on The Confusion of Languages. I’m writing some non-fiction essays about life in Jordan, thinking about ideas for future projects, letting this incredibly weird and wonderful world of Abu Dhabi inspire me. But it’s nice to not be caught in the thrall of something as overwhelming as working on a novel, if at least for a little while.

MilspoFAN: Is there anything else that you would like to share with MilspoFAN readers?
Siobhan: Reach out to other Military spouses who are in the arts as much as possible. There are more of us than you think. And we are pretty freaking fantastic! Read Andria Williams most excellent blog Military Spouse Book Review (https://militaryspousebookreview.com/),every word that lady writes is brilliant (you should see her Lego creations) but Andria also shares the space with other mil spouse writers who chime in to review books or write blogs of their own on her page. It always feels good to know we’re not the only ones who worry about these insane mil lives of ours. For something a little more ‘highbrow’ but definitely worth being aware of, I recommend Peter Molin’s blog Time Now (https://acolytesofwar.com/), which reviews all military related arts, from photography to film to writing to dance to theater productions. Molin is incredibly supportive of mil spouses as well as female vets, so it’s not just a list of macho men war novels, if you know what I mean (I’m sure those of you who married to infantry men like me know exactly what I mean).

I want to thank you, Jessica, and I also want to thank all of you who are reading. We need to support each other, and this site is doing that beautifully. We are far flung, we don’t have the natural support system of the home town neighborhoods where we grew up, the libraries and churches and cafes and town halls where we could gather and spread the word about our different projects, so we have to improvise and create our forums online, in places like this. So let’s spread the word and support each other here, and show everyone how much mil spouses have to offer, how we’re not at all the way stereotypes paint us to be, how diverse and talented and amazing we can be.

MilspoFan: https://milspofan.wordpress.com/
Time Now https://acolytesofwar.com/
Military Spouse Book Review https://militaryspousebookreview.com/

Learn more about Siobhan’s books at: http://siobhanfallon.com/books.html

Excerpt from You Know When the Men Are Gone, Siobhan Fallon

Three a.m. and breaking into the house on Cheyenne Trail was even easier than Chief Warrant Officer Nick Cash thought it would be. There were no sounds from above, no lights throwing shadows, no floorboards whining, no water running or the snicker of late-night TV laugh tracks. The basement window, his point of entry, was open. The screws were rusted, but Nick had come prepared with his Gerber knife and WD-40; got the screws and the window out in five minutes flat. He stretched onto his stomach in the dew-wet grass and inched his legs through the opening, then pushed his torso backward until his toes grazed the cardboard boxes in the basement below, full of old shoes and college textbooks, which held his weight.
He had planned this mission the way the army would expect him to, the way only a soldier or a hunter or a neurotic could, considering every detail that ordinary people didn’t even think about. He mapped out the route, calculating the minutes it would take for each task, considering the placement of streetlamps, the kind of vegetation in front, and how to avoid walking past houses with dogs. He figured out whether the moon would be new or full and what time the sprinkler system went off. He staged this as carefully as any other surveillance mission he had created and briefed to soldiers before.
Except this time the target was his own home.
. . .
He should have been relieved that he was inside, unseen, that all was going according to plan. But as he screwed the window back into place, he could feel his lungs clench with rage instead of adrenaline.
How many times had he warned his wife to lock the window? It didn’t matter how often he told her about Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, who had gained access to his victims through open basement windows. Trish argued that the open window helped air out the basement. A theory that would have been sound if she actually closed the window every once in a while. Instead she left it open until a rare and thundering storm would remind her, then she’d jump up from the couch, run down the steps, and slam it shut after it had let in more water than a month of searing-weather-open-window-days could possibly dry.
Before he left for Iraq, Nick had wanted to install an alarm system but his wife said no.
“Christ, Trish,” he had replied. “You can leave the windows and all the doors open while I am home to protect you. But what about when I’m gone?”
She glanced up at him from chopping tomatoes, narrowed her eyes in a way he hadn’t seen before, and said flatly, “We’ve already survived two deployments. I think we can take care of ourselves.”
Take care of this, Nick thought now, twisting the screw so violently that the knife slipped and almost split open his palm, the scrape of metal on metal squealing like an assaulted chalkboard. He hesitated, waiting for the neighbor’s dog to start barking or a porch light to go on. Again nothing. Nick could be any lunatic loose in the night, close to his unprotected daughter in her room with the safari animals on her wall, close to his wife in their marital bed.
Trish should have listened to him.
. . .
This particular reconnaissance mission had started with a seemingly harmless e-mail. Six months ago, Nick had been deployed to an outlying suburb of Baghdad, in what his battalion commander jovially referred to as “a shitty little base in a shitty little town in a shitty little country.” One of his buddies back in Killeen had offered to check on Trish every month or so, to make sure she didn’t need anything hammered or lifted
or drilled while Nick was away.
His friend wrote:
Stopped by to see Trish. Mark Rodell was there. Just
thought you should know.
That was it. That hint, that whisper.
Mark Rodell.

#confusionoflanguages

(This interview first ran on The Huffington Post Book Blog)

As part of Words After War’s September book club selection, Siobhan answers a few questions from Michael Pitre, author of Fives and Twenty-Fives.

Michael Pitre: You Know When the Men Are Gone was published a few months after I left the Marine Corps. My wife read it immediately, and showed me the scene from “Inside the Break” where Kailani finds a pamphlet of family reunion rules hidden among her husband’s equipment. The rules include, “Your family members are not your men; they don’t have to obey your orders,” and, “Do not engage in intercourse with your wife immediately upon your return.” My wife asked me if I remembered how many of those rules I’d broken when I came home, and we laughed because of course I’d broken all of them. So, having lived the experience, we found humor where others might’ve been dismayed. Do you think the book resonates differently with military families than with the general public? Which potential audience was more important to you when you were writing it?

Siobhan Fallon: Civilians always ask me if those pamphlets mentioned in that story are real! And of course they are, I used the one from my husband’s return from Afghanistan in 2005 as my template for the fictional version. If I remember correctly, it really did recommend, “Take time to be charming.”

There was so much I didn’t understand about the military even after I became a spouse. So yes, I hoped to show a glimpse of day to day military life to those who have never stepped inside our gates, to offer civilians more than the splashy headlines of deployments and homecomings.

As an officer’s wife, and especially as a Company Commander’s wife who led a Family Readiness Group, I was someone who was supposed to be capable and confident and I often found myself being a cheerleader. I was full of “You can do it!” or “Time will fly, before you know it your soldier will be home!” or, my least favorite, “It’s time to put on your big girl panties!” (OK, I never actually said that but I did have a magnet on my fridge that did).

None of those statements reflected the magnitude of shit spouses could go through with their mate halfway around the world when you need new tires for the car, when you, your three year old and your six month old all have strep throat and are awake at three a.m., when a tree falls on your roof during a storm, when you lost your husband’s dog, when you’re depressed and anxious and suddenly a stranger completely disconnected from your life wants to buy you a drink and that drink promises to give you a momentary escape. These are of course things that can happen to anyone, but the stress is heightened when every newspaper mentions dead soldiers in Iraq and you maybe haven’t heard from your soldier in four days, you’re in a new base far from family and friends, and on top of it all you’re thinking that to be a good wife and a patriot, you need to act like this is a breeze.

So more than thinking about ‘audience,’ I was hoping to be more authentic in my fiction than I could be as a living, speaking human being. I wrote the stories in an attempt to say yes, it’s actually OK to feel like this sometimes, the news programs are leaving so much out when they narrow military life into images of parades with heart swelling music, or even flag draped coffins. The fact that military life is so nuanced and weird, so potentially tragic as well as wonderful, is also why it’s fascinating to write about.

I was also writing while we were still there, boots on the ground, FOBs going full steam, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and seeing the evidence of that in every house or apartment in Fort Hood that was missing a spouse or parent. It was happening around me, the seemingly unending deployment cycles of deploy a year, home a year, deploy again. I didn’t have any long view or hindsight yet, I had no idea we would withdraw troops out of Iraq in December, 2011. I was busy writing the now, that small window of 2007-2009, for whomever was willing to read it.

MP: There’s a real tension between the husbands and wives in your stories. Deployed soldiers are convinced that their wives are cheating, and don’t know how to relate to their wives when they finally come home. Wives have similar suspicions of infidelity, and grow bitter while stranded in the middle-of-nowhere Texas by their husband’s profession. You walk a tightrope between these two perspectives, and both sides get an equal hearing. How did you retain your neutrality during the writing process?

SF: Well, at times it did feel like a very black and white world, women on one side, men on the other. My husband was a company commander of an infantry unit (all male) and I was the Family Readiness Group leader of all those spouses (all women). More times than I could possible count, while he was either home or deployed to Iraq, we’d have a conversation or email dialogue where each of us had to advocate for the spouse of our own gender. I’d tell him the aggrieved wife’s side of things, and he’d come back at me with the soldier’s side. I’d like to think that some of those balancing acts surfaced in my stories.

MP: Speaking of tension between service members and spouses, I’m sure you’ve seen the bumper sticker around military installations with some version of the phrase, “Soldier’s Wife: Toughest Job in the Army.” I’ve heard young service members with extremely demanding and dangerous jobs express irritation at the sight of that bumper sticker. What would be your response to a young, unattached soldier who doesn’t yet understand the burden placed on military families?

SF: I can understand how that would make a young soldier, or any soldier/airman/Marine bristle. But that’s what slogans or bumper stickers or tweets do–find a glib way to express something has a lot more depth to it than a glance allows.

A spouse appreciates a sentiment like that not because her ‘job’ boils down to being more life threatening or specialized or physically taxing than her soldier’s. But it recognizes that there’s so much more to being a spouse than cashing your soldier’s check every month: being the one who stays and waits and manages to turn whatever quarters you are assigned into a real live home, being the one who picks up that home and takes it to the next place when the military member with the functioning career is stationed somewhere new every couple of years, being the one who usually does not get the certificates and medals and plaques, being the one who is there when the movers come, who is there with the kids every day when the soldier has a two week training exercise in the field. We are called ‘dependents’ in official military speak. There are plenty of successful men and women who would gladly depend on themselves but sometimes they chose to put their military member’s employment first, sometimes the demands of being a military spouse make it very difficult to maintain a stable career of their own.

So, yes, all you EOD techs getting blown up, you guys probably win. But mil spouses like to think that the work they are doing is valid, indispensible even, and that bumper sticker acknowledges that.

MP: “Remission,” is the story of a woman dealing with a rebellious teenage daughter and a possible cancer diagnosis, all while her husband is deployed. A good friend from my time in Iraq was the daughter of a colonel who got hooked on the family business and joined the Marines. She told me a story about how when she was a little girl her father deployed to Somali while her mother was battling cancer. The tone of her story was so casual, so matter of fact. Her childhood, harrowing in retrospect, seemed ordinary to her at the time. Her dad deployed, and there was no use dwelling on it. That was his job. Military reality can be harsh, but I’ve found very little bitterness among military families I’ve known. Why do you think military families are so loyal to the service? And what would you think if one of your children wanted to join the military?

SF: Military life takes a certain type of person, and well, I like that person. Obviously no stereotype is true of all people, but I usually feel comfortable with military spouses or members of the military, we ‘get’ each other on a different level, we have touchstones we can rely on, like comparing the bases/states/countries we’ve lived in or figuring out whose baby learned to talk or walk or read while their daddy/mother was deployed. The military community is made up of hardy folk; they can hold usually their liquor and are pretty proficient at profanity and gallows humor. But most of all there’s a sense of having lived through a very specific sort of fringe lifestyle, especially since September 11, and even if you’ve never met that person before you feel like you have shared something.

Do I want my two girls to join the military? I don’t know. I was there the day my husband graduated Ranger school. He had foot rot, could hardly look me in the eye because he was so socially retarded from being in a pack of filthy men, he was nothing but skin and cheek bones. If a woman can do that, then hell, she’s amazing, I hope she runs for President someday. But do I want my little Maeve or littler Evelyn to lose forty pounds and get recycled if she’s gets caught digging through a trash can for dinner? Not so much. Of course that’s the extreme. And I would probably feel the same way if I had a son. Worried, because that’s what a parent is supposed to feel about everything related to their kids. But I’d also be proud to have instilled a sense of service into a child, the way I’d be if one of my daughters decided to become a police officer or fire fighter, a social worker or a teacher. There are jobs that people do that serve a higher purpose than filling up a bank account, and I’d be pleased to have a child chose a path that puts others first.

MP: What are you working on now?

SF: A novel tentatively titled: The Confusing of Languages. It’s set in Jordan during the Arab Spring, and I turn to the embassy community in much the same way I turned to the military world in You Know When the Men Are Gone. Embassy culture is naturally diplomatic: on the one hand we are expected to embody American ideals, on the other we are meant to embrace the culture we find ourselves in. My novel revolves around two American couples, especially two female Army spouses who become fast friends. One wife embraces Jordanian culture while the one remains very firmly rooted in her idea of America, and the two outlooks and behavior collide. The word collision sums what I am trying to get at, the collision of American and Middle Eastern culture, the collision of very different personalities, the collision of female friendship vs. marital love, all with the Arab Spring unraveling in the background.

*****

Words After War is a nonprofit literary organization with a mission to bring veterans and civilians together to examine war and conflict through the lens of literature.

Follow Words After War on Twitter @WordsAfterWar
Follow Siobhan Fallon on Twitter @SiobhanMF
Michael Pitre doesn’t have Twitter, but for information about him or his terrific novel, Five and Twenty Fives, look here.

I’m an Army spouse and therefore I am used to moving around. In eight years of marriage, my husband and I have moved seven times, the most recent being our transplant from Amman, Jordan, to Falls Church, Virginia. None of the moves are easy. Right now we are hanging around our rental house, sitting on folding chairs, waiting for the furniture we brought to Jordan to wend its way back to comfort our backsides sometime next month. We have researched new schools, dentists, doctors, gyms, grocery stores, local dives. I have had to buy all those things you take for granted in the back of your pantry: salt, flour, sugar, cinnamon, parsley, multi-vitamins. The cats, Jordanian refugees who have never seen a squirrel, let alone a deer, sit on the window sills all day in mute amazement.

We are as settled as we can be. After nearly a month of hotels, movers, and airplanes, I am happy to have a home again, even though we have been complaining about our house ceaselessly, like, who the heck did this so-called paint job? And what professional cleaner left gunk in our freezer, goop that my husband adamantly claims is mucus dripping down the closet walls, and blood on the floor boards? Hmmm, perhaps our eight moves have set our expectations too low?

Lest you think I have forgotten my last year abroad, here is my list of all the…

Things I will miss about Jordan

Stray cats (of course).

The food.

People riding donkeys at rush hour. Or camels.

Seeing Beduoin camps in the middle of the strangest places, like on a rocky hill, along a stretch of lonely desert highway, or just glimpsed behind a row of nice houses. There would be the tattered tarp, perhaps a Toyota Hi-Lux parked outside, a few goats, a camel. Very Spartan except for the satellite TVs.

Fruit sellers on the corner, offering fresh figs and pomegranates and peaches for next to nothing.

Hijab dolls, cereal, candy, etc.

Random strangers telling me my four year old daughter is beautiful. Arabs genuinely LOVE children.

Being able to hop in our car, drive 30 minutes, and see something literally biblical (Bethany-on-the-Jordan, Lot’s Cave, the Dead Sea).

Feeding a family for four dollars (though you might have some intestinal problems for a few days afterwards. However, if we are talking about the incredible shwarma from the small town just outside of Petra, then the two days of diarrhea was worth it).

Climbing all over thousand year old scupltures, ruins, mosaics (just about whatever you damn well please, even if it is all roped off, and you are usually urged to do so by the official tour guide/guard)

The weather: six months of cloudless blue sky and temps in the 80s.

Pictures of King Abdullah (sometimes with his father and son) EVERYWHERE.

The friendly customer service, from MacDonalds to gas stations, felt like four start treatment.

All the interesting people, American and various other expats, who also found themselves in Jordan during the Arab Spring.

Things I will NOT miss about Jordan

Stray cats (especially when they wound up in my house for some kind of surgery).

Seeing the food before it looked like food (and suddenly understanding why it might give you intestinal problems).

The driving. Each day I took my daughter to preschool could have been my last.

Feeling like a total floozy because I was wearing a short sleeved shirt in the summertime.

Getting honked at by every single taxi that passed by, whether I was dressed like a floozy or covered head to toe.

Random strangers telling me my four year old daughter is beautiful, then grabbing her, kissing her, throwing her up in the air a few times, even if she looked terrified. Then handing her a piece of bubble gum, which she would inevitably put in her mouth and swallow before I could stop her. Maybe Arabs love children too much.

The Israeli border crossing, which was so prohibitively slow, confusing, and frustrating, even with our diplomatic passports, that we only dared to cross the border into Israel/Palestine twice. (I actually took a photo of the border crossing but am afraid that if I post it, the Mossad will hunt me down and seize my computer.)

Absence of sidewalks. If there is a sidewalk, you can be assured that it was put there so someone could plant a tree on it or park their car. Sidewalks are mostly decorative and not meant to be a walked on. Just ask all the people that like to walk in the street during rush hour even when there is a treeless sidewalk directly parallel to them.

A barrage of gunfire in the middle of the night, indistinguishable from either a wedding/funeral celebration or the US Embassy under siege.

Public toilets, especially at the above mentioned biblical sites.

When we were planning our trip to Saudi Arabia, I knew from guidebooks that I’d have to wear an abaya (dark robe) over my clothes to cover any hint of feminine curves. I’d also have to wear a black veil over my hair, ears, neck. I was prepared for this, even went shopping at Amman’s Mecca Mall and picked out an abaya that snapped up the front and had rhinestones on the gold-velvet sleeves, as well as a black Kuwaiti headscarf that squeezed my face through a small hole and felt suggestive of strangulation whenever I wore it. But I was excited to don this gear in Riyadh, for both the costume appeal and the odd anonymity of it, but most of all to get a glimpse of what it felt like for millions of women who cover themselves in such a way every day.

However, I was not prepared for Saudi Arabia’s segregation between men and women. I didn’t realize that our very nice Sheraton Hotel would not allow me to swim in the hotel pool. Or go to the main gym on the first floor. Instead, I had to use the small women’s gym on the fourth floor with it’s two elliptical machines and a stationary bike. Even Starbucks would not allow my friend, Katie Monge, and I to sip in the main area, instead directing us to go through the frosted-glass automatic doors and sit inside wooden cubicles, lest someone see us with suggestive cappuccino foam on our lips. At this point we started to re-examine our guidebook, realizing that many of the restaurants we had circled with enthusiasm (baby camel anyone?) had the words Men Only in tiny italics near the operating hours, and that the museums had “Family Hours” (the euphemism for “Hours in Which Women are Allowed Entrance”) only in the late afternoon.

It seemed a little bleak for we women at first, especially since mine and Katie’s husband had meetings at the American Embassy at Riyadh for a couple of days. We ladies were left stranded at the hotel (it was also recommended that women not take cabs without a male escort, and the only thing within walking distance was a mall that didn’t open until 4 p.m.). Outraged, I filled out a hotel comment card in capital letters, letting the Concierge know how upset I was about not being to swim with my four-year old daughter. A few minutes later,  I was amazed and a little abashed to find the Concierge knocking at my room door and handing me toys for my sequestered child to play with.

This would be my emotional reaction to everything: at first my American sensibilities were frustrated at a situation and I would get all fiesty about perceived injustices. But a moment later I would glimpse the Saudi solution, and while not always perfect, I realized that I had to try to think outside my veil.

I was peeved that there wasn’t one treadmill in the women’s miniscule gym (my husband told me there was an entire wall of treadmills in the main/male gym on the first floor). Yet I couldn’t help but appreciate having the women’s mirrored-room to myself, using the free weights without worrying that grunting men in lifting belts were going to smirk at my sissy eight-pounders held shakily aloft.

I was annoyed we had to eat our Taco Bell in the family seating area (ahem, yes, we were in Saudi Arabia and our first stops were Starbucks and Taco Bell, but no one was in the mood to try that aforementioned baby camel…), away from all the young men in their white dishdasha robes and flowing red and white checked head scarves who merrily munched at crowded tables right in the center of the action. Yet the “family area” looked out on a wall of windows facing a manicured garden with fake balloons staked to the ground, was sparkling clean and, unlike the men’s section, had plenty of open tables to choose from.

Though we were supposed to be accompanied by a male member of our family at all times, Katie and I happened upon a “Ladies’ Kingdom” floor of the mall only opened to women, where gals took off their veils and unzipped their abayas, drinking coffee in the open, even ignoring the call to prayer (everything in Riyadh, including all the shops in the malls, closes for about 30 minutes during each of the day’s five calls to prayer). The women of the Ladies’ Kingdom certainly did not seem like a meek or submissive lot.

Taking the veil (and abaya) to the mall with my daughter and Katie

During our tour of The Gulf, we’d attended some deliberate educational events, including a lunch at the Dubai Culture Center.  A man lectured while we ate the local spread, and since he was a man, and since he was a man wearing white, I was a little skeptical when he claimed, “Wearing a black abaya is like wearing sunglasses—you don’t sweat from your eyelids when you put on your dark sunglasses, do you?” He also said abayas were great when his wife was running out of the house and didn’t want to get “dressed up.”

In Riyadh, I had no choice but to wear the abaya (it is enforced by the religious police, or Mutawa, who supposedly carry around paddles to beat people who commit religious infractions). I might be a little skeptical about the sunglasses theory, but, man, it only took me a couple of hours to fall in love with my abaya. I adored its instant elegance, its flowing length and shining sleeves, especially when I had my non-treadmill-using-gym-clothes hidden underneath. Even my daughter started asking to wear her mini abaya by the end of our trip, willingly wrapping a purple scarf around her blond hair before leaving our hotel room.

Which made me wonder what other presumptions I had made, how many subtle details of dress and culture my untrained American eyes had been  missing. Since arriving in Jordan last March, every time I’d see a woman in a black abaya walking down the street I’d feel a flash of irritation, especially if she was walking next to a man in a t-shirt and jeans, wondering how she allowed herself to be made invisible, wiped clean of individual flair, of color and form and identity. But on this Gulf trip of ours (seventeen days in the Sultanate of Oman, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia), where traditional clothing is worn by both sexes much more often than it is in relaxed Jordan, I saw women wearing black abayas of every shape and style. I couldn’t help but notice the details, the bedazzled cuffs, the embroidered hems, the glint of sequins and metallic threads in the dark veils. Most interesting of all, the women who are completely covered with the niqab, with only the area around their eyes revealed, even these women have found ways to express themselves, sometimes using an intricate knot system at the back of their heads to keep the veil across in place, the cord looped and twisted so that it looks like a braid different than anyone else’s.

Now, back in Jordan, when I spot a woman in head-to-toe black walking down a hot and sun-lit street next to a man in a t-shirt, I might narrow my eyes a bit about whether or not she is wearing bodily sunglasses, but I am also wondering if maybe she’s just got gym clothes underneath.

DAY 1: Harker Heights Barnes & Noble, just outside of Fort Hood, Texas

Pure author bliss.

It’s not a bad idea to kick off the official tour in the place where you wrote the book, even though you will be incredibly nervous, thinking someone will throw Texas tomatoes at you (which are of course much bigger and much riper than anywhere else in the country because Texans do everything bigger and better), or, worse, no one will show up. But, maybe, there will a full house, even people standing up in the aisles, and they might seem to actually like your reading, gasping at just the right spots, acting like they want more. You even see a few of your old neighbors and gals from Alpha Company FRG (yay 2-7 Arrowhead!).

But just when you think you might have done everything right for one whole day of your life, I am going to remind you of something foolish you might have done earlier that afternoon. You may have driven around your old neighborhood in the incredibly obvious Lincoln Continental that your publishers sent to indulge you. Be warned that if you make that mistake and ask your driver to swing by your old house, he might decide to stop in the middle of the street and show you a picture of himself with Sean Puffy Combs from the last time Puff Daddy was doing a concert at Fort Hood. While the driver is scrolling through his cell phone pictures, you might see all the children in the neighborhood, who were just playing dodge ball on your old yard, stare at that big black car, then start to scatter for their homes, and it might even seem like they are screaming. That’s when you will ask your driver to hurry up and drive away but for some reason he will just take his time making a K turn in the middle of the street, then hand you his phone to show you a picture of his Texas-bred football playing son. I tell you all of this, because when you are smiling at Barnes and Noble, signing books and chatting away,  the woman who lives in your old house will peer at you, a little embarrassed, and asked if there is any chance that you drove by her house earlier? She will be with a couple other of your neighbors, who will also be staring at you a bit oddly. And you will feel yourself go all red and wonder if you should lie, but you will nod, and she will tell you how there has been a pedophile loose in a dark car, how the entire neighborhood was worried sick all day when their children came sprinting in talking about a big black car lurking.

This will now be part of your legacy, how you wrote a book about Fort Hood, and when you came back to town, you scared the hell out of all your neighbors’ kids.

But it will still have been a close-to-perfect day.

You might also be a bit nostalgic as you leave Fort Hood the next morning, wishing you had more time to get on base, to see the front gates and Battalion Avenue and those tanks and helicopters outside of the First Cav Museum that you wrote about. And you will close your eyes for a minute, think of the neighbors and FRG wives who now have soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, all those Fort Hood heroes, those soldiers and spouses and families, those who deployed, those who stayed, and be grateful to them.

DAY 2: Tattered Cover Books, Denver, Colorado

Marti and Charles at Tattered Cover-- the BEST!

This will be one of the most beautiful book stores you have ever seen. You’ll also get to hang out with Charles and Marti, who are the most enthusiastic, loveliest booksellers ever, and you will want to bring them back to your hotel, feed them chocolate, and listen to their author stories all night, they are that wonderful. I got to glimpse two branches of this fab indie—the cavernous, labyrinth, books-in-all-the-nooks one down town (LoDo location), where I got to sign a tremendous stack of You Know When the Men Are Gone, as well as the refitted old theater with the statue of an old man that you will be certain is a real old man (Colfax location). When that old man hasn’t moved a hair from the time you arrived until the time you are about to leave, you might wonder if you ought to alert a clerk that they have a corpse on the premises and wonder if you should really ruin your night by being the bearer of bad news. Fortunately Marty points him out definitively as a statue and the crisis is averted. (Podcast of the reading, minus any mention of the old man, can be found at http://authorsontourlive.com/siobhan-fallon-podcasts-you-know-when-the-men-are-gone/)

Day 3– Book Passage, Corte Madera/San Francisco, and Capitola Book Cafe, Capitola/Santa Cruz

Elaine and Karen, The Goddesses of Book Passage

Book Passage! Fabulous in every way! Elaine Petrocelli and her incredible staff  will make you feel doted upon and adored. Olivia Boler, your friend for a decade and one your best readers, gives you a smile and a thumbs up during your entire reading. Michael David Lukas, author of The Oracle of Stamboul, shows up and he has even brought his sweet mom to help cheer you on. As you leave, Book Passage packs you up a little to-go bag of goodness–soup! Two pints of it! I ask my kindly media contact, who drives me all the way from San Fran to Santa Cruz and back again, if he wants some, but I say it in the kind of way that definitely lets him know I really don’t want to share, sort of, “Um, you don’t want any of this spectacular soup that I am very quickly devouring, do you? Since, you know, you are driving on a windy California highway, and I have already put my dirty spoon into both pints?” He graciously demures.

KUSP 88.9 The Agony Column

(DO try to talk to Rick Klieffel of Agony Column/KUSP 88.9 if you are in Santa Cruz, he has the most amazing radio voice, asks really insightful questions that make you sound smarter and more thoughtful than you actually are, and he’s fun. Podcast of this interview can be found at the Feb 6, 2011 segment at http://www.kusp.org/shows/agony.html)

Lovely Tamera Walters of Capitola Book Cafe

Capitola Book Cafe will have been worth the drive. There might be another fantastic standing room only crowd.

Blue Star Moms

The Blue star Moms will be there talking about their soldier sons and daughters in Iraq and Afghanistan (more about their amazing charity at http://www.santacruzbluestarmoms.com/).

Defense Language Institute Ladies

And a bunch of your army spouse friends from the Defense Language Institute at Monterey might be there, having smushed into a big van to surprise you. It will be another great day altogether, actually,  it will all have been too good to be true so far, which is why you deserve what happens next at…

DAY 4: Powells at Cedar Hills Crossing, Portland, Oregon

Lydia's very nice mom.

You might be getting a little cocky there, cowgirl, thinking your boots are mighty nice. Which is when you ought to get your come-uppance. And it will come. Maybe at Powells in Portland, which is enormous and beautiful, and the event planner might have put out way too many chairs that will remain empty, even though you start your reading about fifteen  minutes late, hoping some stragglers will come by from the gaping wide entrance to the  mall beyond.

Be prepared, there is a chance you might actually get heckled. Maybe heckled is too cruel of a word, but while you are begging the five people in your audience to ask you a question (one of them is your husband’s wonderful second cousin, the other an army wife friend’s mother), three very pretty teenage girls will come strolling through, talking to each other loudly, and they will sit in the last row and begin elbowing each other, as if on some kind of dare, and then all three will shoot their arms in the air and since you are answering a question and don’t immediately call on them, they will start shouting out things. Like, “DID YOU WRITE A BOOK?” and/or “WHERE ARE YOU FROM?” and even “IS THIS FICTION OR NONFICTION?” which will illicilt something like impressed high fives from her friends. At this point you might have forgotten what you were talking about, stop speaking, look at the teenagers, Irish skin of yours getting flushed and red, and you will feel like a teenager yourself that just slipped near the water fountain in the gym and landed on her butt. You answer all three of the teenagers questions, trying to be witty and self-deprecating in hopes that you will get a laugh, but you don’t get any laughs, you just get pitying looks from the five people in your audience, which makes you manically try to be even funnier but you are just not very funny to begin with on good days, and you will go back to your nice hotel room feeling very very tired and a little scared about the readings to come.  But come on, no more pity party, this is your dream, so you take a bath, tell yourself to buck up, and get ready for an incredibly early wake up call and the next day’s adventure in LA…

Links mentioned in this blog:

Market Heights B&N http://store-locator.barnesandnoble.com/event/68695

Tattered Cover http://www.tatteredcover.com/

Book Passage http://www.bookpassage.com/

Rick Kleffel and The Agony Column http://www.kusp.org/shows/agony.html and http://www.bookotron.com/agony/index.html

Santa Cruz Blue Star Moms http://www.santacruzbluestarmoms.com/

Capitola Book Cafe http://www.booksite.com/texis/scripts/community/eventcal.html?sid=4892&cal=1

Powell’s http://www.powells.com/

In an ideal world, with a book about to come out, you think you’d do all sorts of healthy things in preparation: get lots of sleeps, go to the gym to lose those five pounds, maybe get a manicure for those ragged nails you’ve been chewing as you wait for the reviews to roll in. 

Or you could make sure your immune system is completely shot, your sleep schedule non-existence. You could pack up your home in Monterey, CA, and send most of your worldly belongings to Amman, Jordan, live out of suitcase for a month and a half, stay with your in-laws with your toddler who despises her air mattress and wakes you up all night, your two cats singing meow-duets at 4 a.m, preferably when standing on your pillow.

Intersperse that with a manic trip to Disney World with same toddler waking up at 3 a.m and opening all the hotel room curtains, claiming the street lights are the sun and it is now time to visit Snow White. Then maybe drive from South Carolina to New York, including a stop in Raleigh just when Mother Nature makes an appearance, throwing her most delightful ice storm your way. Oh, and make sure your most troublesome cat decides to crawl through a hole in the hotel room, slipping into the fiber-glassed beyond of water pipes and dry wall, getting so lost that the hotel maintenance supervisor, after removing all of the sink paneling, tells you that the cat could be just about anywhere in the five-floor hotel. Then send your husband and daughter on to DC while you sit in that same now naked-walled Raleigh room with a can of cat food, your face in a hole flaking with insulation, and call your cat for about eight hours, until he comes out well rested enough that he will meow straight through until the next morning. 

That bad-idea trip to Disney (but yes, it was fun).

Wait a minute, aren’t you supposed to be talking about books at some point? 

Right. Exactly. You are supposed to be talking about books. Reading and rereading your book and the meticulous Questions & Answers that you filled out for your publisher in preparation for the questions you might get from kindly NPR interviewers or people sipping lattes at book stores. 

But instead you show up at your childhood home in Highland Falls, New York, strung out on sleeplessness and caffeine and toddler/cat drama. And maybe your whole family is also at your mom’s house because they love you and want to catch up with you and don’t realize you have an interview or two a day until the book release, not to mention random writing deadlines. You hope that the interviewers can’t hear all the toddler-rattle from the three cousins chasing each other each day with cardboard swords while you hide out in your mom’s bedroom and talk, very nervously, to The Fort Hood Sentinel, The Killeen Daily Herald, Rick Kleffel of The Agony Column, USA Today, PBS NEED TO KNOW, Irish America Magazine. By the time you go into New York City to do NPR’s Fresh Air, your eyes are so blood shot and your nails so chronically mutilated that an undertaker couldn’t get you looking fresh. 

But if you are really really REALLY lucky, and your editor and publicity team are made up of the finest fairy godmothers Walt could ever dream up (Marilyn Ducksworth, Mih-Ho Cha, Stephanie Sorensen, I adore you!!!), they will put you up in an incredible hotel the night before the book release, and you and your husband will suddenly have absolute quiet, no meows, no Angelina Ballerina swordfights. You might get up at 5 a.m. for an interview with NPR’s THE TAKEAWAY, but your husband gets to go on the air with you so that one is a breeze. 

Then you get to go the Penguin/Putnam offices and sign books! You think your daughter is pretty adorable but those books, stacks and stacks of a dream, Pinocchio becoming a REAL BOY, is one of the prettiest sights you will have ever seen… 

My Pinocchios!

Maybe you do another short radio gig with NPR’s Leonard Lopate with the lovely writer Lily Burana and you try not to be jealous that she looks so gorgeous, well-rested, and put together.

Siobhan Fallon and Lily Burana at WNYC-AM Studio

Then the book opening at Barnes and Noble. Whatever you do, DO NOT FORGET TO THANK THE PEOPLE WHO CAME OUT!!! Especially those incredible Penguin/Putnam folk who made your book a reality, who are sitting in the front row, smiling with such support, who have seen your book as a loose page manuscript and managed to take that mess and make a BOOK! A real BOOK! Well, don’t be an idiot, you absolutely must thank them or you will be kicking yourself for the rest of your life. (Yes, I forgot to thank the amazing people at Penguin/Putnam. Unbelievable. Please don’t let it happen to you).  

Book Release Reading, B&N Tribeca

Book Party. You should definitely have one. Especially if you have an amazing agent who will help you out in every way and then pick up more than half the tab. Best of all your parents will finally realize that this little hobby of yours that they have probably been bemoaning ever since you switched from pre-med to English Lit in college, is actually kind of cool and maybe even potentially lucrative (I said maybe, but let your parents think you are making a bundle, they will sleep better at night). You have finally given your folks something to talk about with their friends other than that cute granddaughter. Make sure you have alcohol, preferably an open bar, and invite as many people as you can. Ask your fabulous literary agent, Lorin Rees, and gorgeous editor, Amy Einhorn, to get up and say a few words about how magnificently talented you are. You will feel like a superstar and it will be one of the best nights of your life. 

While you are feeling like a superstar and remembering to thank everyone you forgot to thank at your first reading, don’t forget to thank your husband. If you don’t, someone at the party will shout out that you forgot to thank your husband and you will feel like a total jerk and have something new to kick yourself about for the rest of your life.  

Book Party (author with husband she forgot to thank).

If you are lucky, you can go to your father’s Irish pub and continue to party as if you were young. Unfortunately your child will not care that Mommy was out until 2 a.m pretending to be a super star, and she will be up at 6 a.m, eager for breakfast. And since you forgot to thank your husband at the book party, your penance is that you now have to get up with the toddler. 

Kick yourself some more.

And the official book tour hasn’t even started yet…

It seems like my first official on-site blog should address another first: attendance at a conference. Granted, it was a little bit like the rest of my life– half military, half civilian. It was the War, Literature, and the Arts Conference, held at The United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. Perhaps it was a strange introduction to writers’ conferences, but, as an army wife, everything bizarre about it was absolutely ordinary to me.

We had a rigid schedule; after showing identification and having our names checked off a list, we boarded a bus that took us through the guard gates and onto the Air Force Academy grounds. There were young, smiling cadets in their shiny dress blues, who made sure we crazy artists didn’t stumble off on our own and get lost on the parade grounds. We were not allowed to leave the main area of the conference EVER, unless guided by one of those cadets. Every sort of military uniform was represented among the attendees, from your current desert-ready Marine, Navy, and Army camouflage, to the snazzy dress blues that those Air Forcers shined up, to the office greens of the West Point English Department professors, to the strange little Star Trek outfits of even more of those adorable cadets. (Do I spot a trend? Am I in love with cadets? Perhaps. College students all over the world are doing keg stands and these cadets get up at 5 a.m, don uniforms, get into formation, debate Just War Theory, make out their wills, AND knowingly face deployments soon after graduation. From a gal who stupefied half of her brain cells in college, how can I not think these kids are super?)

 While some of the writers maybe have done a double-take at all the uniforms and rules, this is the world I am most comfortable in. The in-between life of military and ordinary. The guard gates, the imposing face of military buildings, even the awkward mouthfuls of acronyms, make me feel safe. As do the salutes and disciplined ‘yes, sirs’ overheard at every turn. And I always feel relieved talking to people whose daily lives have been impacted by deployments, who feel lucky to spend Thanksgiving and Christmases with their spouses and kids: after a few short sentences we know that we share many experiences. We understand so much about each other immediately.

Cadets sat in the back of the lecture halls, drinking their Gatorades and chewing their gum like students who spent the previous night cramming everywhere else in the world. There was a sprinkling of more weathered military faces in the crowds, with rows of medals on their chests. There were a lot of men, yes, but also a lot of women. Women who were Air Force professors or Air Force students. Women who were instructors at small mid-western colleges and taught War Literature courses. Women poets. Women writers who had nothing to do with the military, and women writers who were military spouses like me. Sometimes the presenters wore uniforms, most often they did not. And while the themes might have been related to war, there was no topic that was off limits. Here we were, standing on official military property, near huge American flags and a hallway lined with paintings of American Air Force Deans who kept their students in tip-top order, yet everyone, from cadets timidly raising their hands, to poets reading anti-war comedic riffs, were able to speak their mind. Even within the rank and file world of the military, all types, religions, and political parties, were represented.

Ultimately, military-themed or not, I had the time of my life.  Like I imagine most other conferences to be, there was a well defined delineation between the Famous and the Unfamous. The Famous were the key notes who dabbled in war: from Benjamin Busch, war photographer, ex-marine, actor and director; Mark Boal, previously embedded journalist-turned-screenwriter of Academy Award winning The Hurt Locker; Dexter Filkins, renowned foreign correspondent from The New York Times and author of the book The Forever War; and Brain Turner, Army veteran, of Here, Bullet and other acclaimed books of poetry. They had an entourage of dress-blued majors and colonels showing them around, they went to nice restaurants that required reservations, they did not take the bus with the rest of us, they did not stay at the Embassy Suites but somewhere rumored to have leather couches and personal Jacuzzis.

The Unfamous lapped up the “manager’s special” at the Embassy Suites and listened to spastically bad karaoke at the hotel bar afterwards (except for that dapper older gentleman who sang Sinatra. Thank you, handsome septuagenarian with your gold cuff links and suave twirling of your microphone!). But we Unfamous had fun, dammit. I hung out with a brilliant non-brat pack: Matt Gallagher of the electrifying war memoir Kaboom: Embracing the Suck of a Savage Little War, poet Victor Inzunza, literary critic Matt Hill, poet and English professor Bradley Johnson, Australian iCinema researcher Timothy Barker, fiction writer James Moad. We talked war and writing, MFA programs and literary magazines, new books and old, and, most informative for me, even after my third glass of Chardonnay, we took notes as Matt Gallagher, whose book came out a few months ago, told us about his book tour and what worked best when he gave a reading.

Reading an excerpt of You Know When the Men Are Gone.

On the final day of the conference, I shared a panel with Matt Gallagher and James Moad. I hadn’t read any of my fiction in almost a decade, but I managed to stand up, read an excerpt, and I didn’t die. People even made eye contact with me afterwards and claimed that they just might order my book.

When the conference was finished, we Unfamous hopped on our bus and rode away from the military installation, the Air Force Academy and its strange nuclear silo-looking cadet chapel safely disappearing behind its check points and mountains. We grabbed our bags from the hotel, shared a long cab ride to the airport, talked excitedly about the conference, swapped business cards, promised to find each other on Facebook. We went through security, stripping off our shoes and belts and lap tops, forgetting perhaps, that all of these new security measures are a result of recent wars (no one had given a lecture about TSA).

We went directly to the airport gift shop, buying Colorado themed stuffed animals and t-shirts, admitting sheepishly that we were excited to fly home to our families. We did not run into any of the Famous when we boarded Economy Class.

And I? Well, I returned, very happily, to my mostly civilian world.