summer 2006 r.kv.r.y non-fiction
Shooting Azimuths page 2
At home, however, my husband, a Marine captain, was finding
his role as a single parent to our daughter a challenging one.
Eight weeks earlier, I had been a sergeant, a reporter for the
base newspaper, ending each workday at four-thirty, picking
up our daughter at daycare, and setting dinner on the table as
my husband walked through the door. Now, I was an officer,
too, chosen to lead just as he had been chosen seven years
earlier.
There had been other separations during our marriage: my
photojournalism classes in Indianapolis when our daughter
was six months old; my coverage of desert combat training in
Twentynine Palms, California, when she was eighteen months
and of mountain warfare training in Bridgeport, California, a
year after that. My husband’s ability to cope as a single parent
had reduced with each separation, and after eight weeks in
Quantico, I was fully questioning my decision to follow his
career path.
“Not coming home for Easter?” he said the night I called. I
leaned against the wall in the barrack’s lounge, winding and
rewinding the telephone cord around my index finger. “But
that’s two weekends in a row.”
“Monday is the night compass march. I need to practice this
weekend.”
“But what am I supposed to tell our daughter?”
I gave the phone cord one long tug, a long sigh. “I know, I
know, but she’s only four and a half.”
Geographically, I was two hours north from our home in
Hampton, and felt fortunate to have made it home several
weekends. Three women who were also mothers didn’t live
close enough to commute; they spent their weekends in
uninterrupted blocks of study time for tests on Soviet weapon
systems and on nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare.
And then there had been the outburst of chicken pox–my
husband hadn’t known you shouldn’t place a child with chicken
pox in a tub of water. After six years of marriage, I was
learning he didn’t know a great deal about anything outside
his military self, which these days, close to retirement, included
golf handicaps more than General Orders.
But at night in my room at the barracks, I lay in a single bunk
with my M-16 rifle locked to the bed frame, and pictured my
husband a hundred miles away in our bed, our daughter in
hers, tucked beneath a Sleeping Beauty bedspread. One day I
would have to answer for all this, for leaving them months at a
time. Too, I wondered what our daughter would think about
having been raised by two parents who had been trained to
kill.
I’d had a revelation about my husband a few weeks earlier
during another night training exercise. It was the night all five
platoons were driven to a live-firing range at dusk where we
were divided into groups of two and instructed to dig fighting
holes.
The winter ground had been cold and unyielding. I had
struggled to match my partner, a man, shovel for shovel, and
despite the cold air that felt closer to winter than spring, I was
perspiring. My feet, however, felt numb and my fingers, like
brittle sticks, ready to snap.
After digging to four feet, we propped our machine guns on the
upper edge of the bunker, positioning the weapons into what
would be intersecting fields of fire. When the shrill whistle
commenced firing, I lunged for the machine gun and squeezed
off rounds, hot cartridge shells grazing my hands and cheeks.
My jolting body became one with machine; my mind, however,
floated with the red sea of tracer bullets crisscrossing with
such precision, such danger, such beauty I hated to see it all
diminished so by the white flares shot into the black holes of
space to illuminate a make-believe enemy.
This, I thought, is what combat looks like. Beautiful, just before
the ugly. And, if we were lucky, this would be the closest to
combat we would ever get. This, I remember thinking, too,
was what my husband must have seen in Vietnam, and now I
was seeing him not as the combat officer he had become, but
as the frightened private he must have been in ‘68, in Da Nang
and Hue. How had he, how had anyone faced this red
scissoring–of friendly fire intersected with enemy? And I
suddenly understood why, in the commissary on Okinawa
several years earlier, as I had been pushing our infant
daughter in the stroller behind him down the aisle of canned
meats and vegetables and past an old woman with bright eyes
and bowed legs who was speaking Vietnamese to her
daughter, he had dropped the can of tuna and flattened
himself against the shelves.
Back in the barrack’s lounge among the rows of black and silver
telephones, I heard my husband say he wanted me home for
Easter. Another woman Marine from my platoon was shuffling
into the lounge. She smiled, headed for a telephone across the
room, and inserted a fistful of quarters that were clinking as if
falling from a slot machine.
I turned my back on her and wound the telephone cord around
my finger. “Three weeks,” I whispered into the phone. “You
can hang on that long, can‘t you?” In three weeks, I would
pack the new uniforms–the dress blues and the dress whites–
the pearl-handled officer’s sword, the weapons guidebooks on
machine guns, howitzers, and Soviet tanks, and put Quantico
in the rear view mirror. And once home? Then what? All that
awkwardness of trying to become again the wife and mother I
had been forced to let go of for so many weeks. What if I
couldn’t become all that again?
his role as a single parent to our daughter a challenging one.
Eight weeks earlier, I had been a sergeant, a reporter for the
base newspaper, ending each workday at four-thirty, picking
up our daughter at daycare, and setting dinner on the table as
my husband walked through the door. Now, I was an officer,
too, chosen to lead just as he had been chosen seven years
earlier.
There had been other separations during our marriage: my
photojournalism classes in Indianapolis when our daughter
was six months old; my coverage of desert combat training in
Twentynine Palms, California, when she was eighteen months
and of mountain warfare training in Bridgeport, California, a
year after that. My husband’s ability to cope as a single parent
had reduced with each separation, and after eight weeks in
Quantico, I was fully questioning my decision to follow his
career path.
“Not coming home for Easter?” he said the night I called. I
leaned against the wall in the barrack’s lounge, winding and
rewinding the telephone cord around my index finger. “But
that’s two weekends in a row.”
“Monday is the night compass march. I need to practice this
weekend.”
“But what am I supposed to tell our daughter?”
I gave the phone cord one long tug, a long sigh. “I know, I
know, but she’s only four and a half.”
Geographically, I was two hours north from our home in
Hampton, and felt fortunate to have made it home several
weekends. Three women who were also mothers didn’t live
close enough to commute; they spent their weekends in
uninterrupted blocks of study time for tests on Soviet weapon
systems and on nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare.
And then there had been the outburst of chicken pox–my
husband hadn’t known you shouldn’t place a child with chicken
pox in a tub of water. After six years of marriage, I was
learning he didn’t know a great deal about anything outside
his military self, which these days, close to retirement, included
golf handicaps more than General Orders.
But at night in my room at the barracks, I lay in a single bunk
with my M-16 rifle locked to the bed frame, and pictured my
husband a hundred miles away in our bed, our daughter in
hers, tucked beneath a Sleeping Beauty bedspread. One day I
would have to answer for all this, for leaving them months at a
time. Too, I wondered what our daughter would think about
having been raised by two parents who had been trained to
kill.
I’d had a revelation about my husband a few weeks earlier
during another night training exercise. It was the night all five
platoons were driven to a live-firing range at dusk where we
were divided into groups of two and instructed to dig fighting
holes.
The winter ground had been cold and unyielding. I had
struggled to match my partner, a man, shovel for shovel, and
despite the cold air that felt closer to winter than spring, I was
perspiring. My feet, however, felt numb and my fingers, like
brittle sticks, ready to snap.
After digging to four feet, we propped our machine guns on the
upper edge of the bunker, positioning the weapons into what
would be intersecting fields of fire. When the shrill whistle
commenced firing, I lunged for the machine gun and squeezed
off rounds, hot cartridge shells grazing my hands and cheeks.
My jolting body became one with machine; my mind, however,
floated with the red sea of tracer bullets crisscrossing with
such precision, such danger, such beauty I hated to see it all
diminished so by the white flares shot into the black holes of
space to illuminate a make-believe enemy.
This, I thought, is what combat looks like. Beautiful, just before
the ugly. And, if we were lucky, this would be the closest to
combat we would ever get. This, I remember thinking, too,
was what my husband must have seen in Vietnam, and now I
was seeing him not as the combat officer he had become, but
as the frightened private he must have been in ‘68, in Da Nang
and Hue. How had he, how had anyone faced this red
scissoring–of friendly fire intersected with enemy? And I
suddenly understood why, in the commissary on Okinawa
several years earlier, as I had been pushing our infant
daughter in the stroller behind him down the aisle of canned
meats and vegetables and past an old woman with bright eyes
and bowed legs who was speaking Vietnamese to her
daughter, he had dropped the can of tuna and flattened
himself against the shelves.
Back in the barrack’s lounge among the rows of black and silver
telephones, I heard my husband say he wanted me home for
Easter. Another woman Marine from my platoon was shuffling
into the lounge. She smiled, headed for a telephone across the
room, and inserted a fistful of quarters that were clinking as if
falling from a slot machine.
I turned my back on her and wound the telephone cord around
my finger. “Three weeks,” I whispered into the phone. “You
can hang on that long, can‘t you?” In three weeks, I would
pack the new uniforms–the dress blues and the dress whites–
the pearl-handled officer’s sword, the weapons guidebooks on
machine guns, howitzers, and Soviet tanks, and put Quantico
in the rear view mirror. And once home? Then what? All that
awkwardness of trying to become again the wife and mother I
had been forced to let go of for so many weeks. What if I
couldn’t become all that again?
