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How did you meet your husband? Did you ever think you’d marry a soldier? What are some of the physical signs that the men are gone from the base? What is the Family Readiness Group, and what role did you play in it? Why did you become a writer? Was it a lifelong goal? What writer or writers have had the greatest influence on you? What advice would you give to aspiring writers? What do you hope readers will take away from YOU KNOW WHEN THE MEN ARE GONE? I was inspired by issues that I’ve seen come up again and again when soldiers deploy, but ultimately this is a work of fiction. Of course there are echoes of my own experience— since our marriage in 2004, my husband and I have lived in four different states, and are currently in the process of moving yet again. Since 2004, my husband has deployed three times, once to Afghanistan, and twice to Iraq. Which means that when I finished writing this collection in 2010, my husband had spent half of our marriage, three of our six years together, being deployed. When he left for his most recent deployment in 2008, our six month old daughter hadn’t even begun to crawl, and when he returned a year later, she was walking, talking, and picking out her own tutus. I think my army spouse experiences, the constant moving around from base to base, the long separations, the children who grow and change while a parent is away, the stress of trying to maintain a healthy marriage when a spouse is in a war zone, might seem strange to the civilian world but are universal challenges faced by all in the military community. I met my husband at my father’s Irish pub, The South Gate Tavern. My dad had been in the Army during the Vietnam War and I was raised right outside of the United States Military Academy at West Point, but I never dated soldiers or West Point cadets. Their lives seemed so different, so regimented and alien somehow. When my husband and I met, we exchanged email addresses, and then proceeded to write to each other for a few months before our first date. He’s a handsome, hunky, funny guy, but his writing and love of literature won me over. After we had dated for a few months, well, the regimented lifestyle of the army didn’t scare me anymore; I had never met anyone like him and I would have followed him anywhere. Fort Hood was created in 1942, on 340 square miles in central Texas, about 60 miles north of Austin. It is the largest active duty armored post in the United States Armed Services. Right now there are over 40,000 soldiers who work on Fort Hood as infantrymen, cavalrymen, tankers, engineers, mechanics and health care professionals. It is also the home of a division with a long and proud history, the First Calvary, which includes Custer’s 7th Cavalry Unit. So, there are a few traditions you would only find at Fort Hood, such as the First Calvary Horse Calvary Unit, which is the last horse mounted cavalry unit in America, or the way the First Cavalry “dress blue” uniforms include Custer-era hats and spurs. Like other bases, Hood also has its museums with retired tanks and helicopters out front, war memorials, distinctly military named streets like Battalion Avenue, Hell-On-Wheels, Tank Destroyer, or Warrior Way Commissary. I have lived near quite a few bases, but Fort Hood, to me, is the most all encompassing. Even twenty miles outside of the Fort Hood main gates, in the outlying towns, you see soldiers in their camouflage uniforms grocery shopping or eating at restaurants or mowing their lawns. You see pick-up trucks or Prius with bumper stickers that say, “My other ride is a tank” or “Half of my Heart is in Iraq.” In Fort Hood, you never forget that you are living in a military world. It was a bit of culture shock when my family and I moved to Monterey, California, and started meeting neighbors who have no association with the military whatsoever. I was so used to having deployment topics as fodder for small talk and suddenly I was in a place where that was no longer a shared experience. One of the most shocking things, especially in a base like Fort Hood, is how empty everything is when a brigade or division deploys. Suddenly there are parking spots available in the front of Wal-Mart, no more lines in the Burger King drive-thru, and tables open on a Friday night at Texas Roadhouse. I think it is a struggle for the local business community to handle the dearth of customers. Suddenly twenty thousand soldiers, who each day needed to eat lunch, buy gas, get a patch sewn unto their uniforms, are gone for an entire year. And that’s not including all the families that might move to their home towns when their soldiers deploy. This exodus can be devastating to the mom and pop businesses around a base. One the more positive ways you know that a brigade is deployed are the billboards that you see everywhere, the “We Support of Troops” or “Come Home Safe” signs in the windows, the flags and the yellow ribbons and military discounts. Local businesses from pizza joints to retirement homes might adopt an army company or battalion and send them care packages or phone cards. I always found that incredibly comforting, how the entire community around Fort Hood seemed aware of the soldiers at war, and did their best to show their support. During my husband’s most recent deployment to Iraq, I volunteered as a Family Readiness Group leader. The Family Readiness Group is a support network composed of families attached to an army company, a unit of around 160 soldiers. My husband was the company commander who dealt with the soldiers, and, almost by default, I tried to deal with all the questions and issues of the spouses. Officially, my role was to act as an information consultant, telling spouses about services the army offered them, trying to co-ordinate assistance, and giving them authorized news about their soldiers when the soldiers were training or deployed. We also had monthly meetings, holiday parties, made posters and sent packages. But the most time consuming part of my role, and also the most rewarding, was when I was fielding phone calls, from giving directions to the Tri-care office, to trying to get food pantry supplies to wives who didn’t have enough money for Thanksgiving dinner, to finding the phone number for a marriage counselor or chaplain for a spouse afraid that her soldier was cheating. It gave me a tremendous amount of empathy and insight into the lives of soldiers and their families. I don’t know if adultery actually occurs more often in the military than in the civilian world. But I think the present situation of every-other-year-deployments puts a lot of strain on even the best of marriages. We all know that relationships are hard work, but military spouses have the added stress of being separated for long periods of time, with the husband and wife living in worlds completely at odds with one another: America vs. a third world war zone. A lot can happen in a year apart, especially when communication is difficult at best. And when adultery does happen, well, the army is a fairly small community, a soldier doesn’t have much individual privacy, and life on a base can feel a bit like living in a fishbowl, so sometimes word gets out. One of my husband’s commanding officers used to say, “Deployments make strong marriages stronger.” I think the inverse is also true. Upheaval is intrinsic to military life with the constant moves and readjustments. A deployment naturally amplifies preexisting trouble in a relationship. My own daughter was very young during my husband’s most recent deployment and she couldn’t articulate her feelings when he returned. While he was gone I tried to play a lot of video I had of him so she would be familiar with his voice, and I think that that helped. And nowadays a lot of people can Skype with their deployed soldiers, even at some of the smaller and far-flung operating bases. There are also amazing tools available to military families, everything from free Sesame Street DVDs about how to help kids handle deployments, to the USO recording soldiers at their forward operating bases reading a book aloud, and then sending both the DVD and the book to the families at home. I kept busy. I didn’t watch the news. I cried a ridiculous amount at weddings. I sent care packages. I adopted too many stray cats. I wrote and wrote and wrote. During my husband’s last deployment, I knocked a valve off my sprinkler system while gardening, causing a fire-hydrant-like geyser I couldn’t stop. It was a Sunday afternoon. I called the company who installed my sprinkler. I called the contractor who built my house. I called the water department. Standing in my front yard, dripping wet and covered with mud, no one answered my call. Almost all of my neighbors’ husbands had deployed but I remembered there was one house that still had a man inside it, a pilot whose name I later learned was Tim. The Army is really striving to help returning soldiers transition back into their lives at home. But it is an enormous task. On the one hand you have the spouse, let’s just say wife, and the person she depends on the most is suddenly gone. So she learns how to handle the household for a year. She disciplines the children, pays the bills, gets the oil changed, and mows the grass. She has figured out how to manage on her own, this resiliency feels like an accomplishment, and she thinks her soldier will be proud of her. Then her soldier returns home and it is, of course, amazing for the first couple of weeks. But then he starts paying the bills and doesn’t like how she’s balanced the check book, or thinks she’s been too soft on the kids, or wants to watch 24 instead of Army Wives. There is bound to be conflict. He has returned to the place he has been dreaming about, and suddenly feels like he no longer belongs, that his family doesn’t need him. The kids have changed, they have new routines, and perhaps they can’t help but resent him. And meanwhile the soldier is dealing with his own problems, the completely different life he himself has led, being surrounded by soldiers twenty-four hours a day, where he had a very specific role to play, maybe he yelled a lot to get things done, maybe he cursed like a sailor, maybe he never had to wash his hands before he ate, not to mention maybe he was constantly in danger, maybe he was wounded, maybe he saw things no one should ever have to see. And this man and woman, who have been apart for a year, leading utterly separate lives, are sleeping next to each other, sharing a bank account and the family car, helping the kiddos with homework. They have to learn to depend on each other again, knowing that in another year, they will probably go through the same cycle of separation. So ostensibly everything should be just great, the soldier is home and whole and safe, and yet there are new issues that must be dealt with, things that seem so small and unworthy after handling suicide car bombers and kidnappings, and yet these things make up daily life. Ideally you spend about three years at a base. But, depending on other assignments or mandatory professional development courses, it is often less. So yes, it is difficult to put down roots, for the spouses to find jobs outside of the homes, to make friends or find a church or a dentist that they like before they have to pick up and move all over again. But there are also benefits. All the other families have gone through the same thing and are willing to help each other out. And I am not exaggerating when I say that a military base is its own little world—they all have their own daycares, libraries, grocery stores, post offices, shops, schools, hospitals, barber shops. So I can show my military ID and drive through the main gates of Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, or Fort Benning, Georgia, and, no matter where I am, I know I can pretty much find whatever I need. That’s comforting. That makes you feel like you are home. I think that the Army does its best to create support systems for soldiers and their families, with everything from the Family Readiness Groups to the counselors at Military Life Consultants. At Fort Hood, the military daycare gives the families of deployed soldiers sixteen free hours of daycare a month per child. That’s amazing! That’s enough time for a doctor’s appointment, a hair cut, a couple of grocery store visits, maybe a chick flick matinee. That is a real attempt to alleviate the stress in a spouse’s day-to-day life. If I didn’t have those sixteen hours, if I wasn’t told that not only was it OK to put my daughter in daycare but it was FREE, I would not have been able to write this book. I’ve always loved to write. And my family has always been incredibly supportive of my writing. My father is from Leitrim, Ireland. Yeats’ grave is near the town where he grew up and, for as long as I can remember, my dad has been giving me things that relate to famous Irish authors: bookmarks with Oscar Wilde quotes, postcards of Brendan Beehan, James Joyce novels he picked up at an odd library sale. My dad also owns an Irish pub, The South Gate Tavern, in my hometown of Highland Falls, New York, and my mother, brother, sister and I have all spent long shifts working there. So there were always plenty of stories in my house, lots of sitting over hot pots of tea talking about the people who came in and out of the bar. I think bartending trained me to observe, listen, and take note of all the different characters. When I was working on You Know When the Men Are Gone, I read Benjamin Percy’s Refresh, Refresh and was completely mesmerized. Percy’s title story is about these scrappy teenagers trying desperately to become men. Their dads are deployed and their absence hangs over the action, it creates the momentum, but the reader learns very little about the actual soldiers, instead an echo of the war reverberates in every daily action of the fatherless boys. And in Percy’s latest book, The Wilding, he has a character who is a wounded veteran. I admire how Afghanistan and Iraq inform Percy’s fiction; he doesn’t let the reader forget what is going on in the world and how soldiers are affected. He keeps the dialogue alive. Likewise, in my stories, I’m not as focused on the bombs on an Iraqi street as I am on the small, rippling tragedies that occur in American homes. Don’t give up. Try to say things in a way only you can say them, and then just keep at it until someone notices. And eventually someone will notice. It’s been more than ten years since I got my MFA, and there were plenty of times I started to lose faith in my writing. But right now I know all those years of rejection, of writing in my own little praiseless vacuum, were worth it to have ended up with my wonderful literary agent, Lorin Rees, and my extraordinary editor, Amy Einhorn. I hope they come away with a new understanding of military families. Military life, especially since 9/11, is so different than civilian life and I wanted to capture the reality of this small portion of society that deals daily with war, the pride and fear and loss that is never far from an Army’s family’s thoughts. Even the ordinary things that happen, kids doing poorly in school, husbands and wives fighting over bills, seem to take on a different meaning because everything in their lives is heightened by the stress and threat of deployments.
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