While They're at War: The True Story of American Families on the Homefront

Kristin Henderson is a journalist married to a military chaplain who has served in the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq. In While They're at War, she draws upon the trust she's earned from military families and her unique access to military staff to give us a "powerful, revealing, and sometimes painful . . . look behind the scenes" (Booklist) at the modern military's untold story.

We first meet Marissa Bootes and Beth Pratt, new Army wives undergoing intense indoctrination on Fort Bragg, North Carolina, while their husbands are fighting in Iraq. Their stories unfold to reveal often hidden aspects of life on the homefront. Through gripping storytelling, we see families battling the overwhelming effects of isolation and anticipatory grief, the strongly enforced codes concerning infidelity, their feelings of alienation both from military staff and from nonmilitary citizens, and the harrowing impact of e-mail/cellphone/CNN culture. Moving scenes bring to life the special struggles of children and those who teach and care for them, as well as the toll that combat exposure takes on families, especially if it erupts into homecoming violence. Finally, Henderson reveals the life-changing solidarity experienced in an informal support group like Fort Bragg's Hooah Wives.

While They're at War is an indelible portrait, too, of virtually invisible figures such as homefront fathers raising teenagers alone. We meet the chaplains, social workers, and psychiatrists dedicated to helping military families cope. And, through Henderson's brilliant reporting from Walter Reed Army Medical Center's Ward 57, we are given a searing view of the wounded and their families confronting changed lives.

"In a country of nearly three hundred million people," Henderson writes, "only two and half million serve in the active duty armed forces. . . Yet in our American democracy, the warriors themselves don't get to decide when [sacrifices] are to be made. Civilians make that decision. It's up to our civilian Congress to declare war. . . and it's up to the civilians who elect those leaders to pay attention, to make sure that the cause of the hour is worth the sacrifices being made on their behalf." While They're at War is moving and necessary testimony for all Americans, from the military families who make possible America's way of war and way of life.

Kristin Henderson has written frequently on military issues; this book had its origins in two cover stories for the Washington Post Magazine. She is also the author of Driving by Moonlight, an account of her experience during her husband's deployment to Afghanistan. A practicing Quaker, she is married to a Navy chaplain serving with the Marines and is active in the Marine Corps's Key Volunteer family readiness program.

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Incisive portraits of two military wives with spouses at war in Iraq reveal intimate scenes from the lives of these women as they experience intense indoctrination into life alone at Ft. Bragg, South Carolina.

Chapter 1 Welcome to the Sisterhood

Does it get easier?” asked Beth Pratt.
She had a voice that was flat as the Midwestern Plains state she came from. She had a long, fragile neck and a willowy dancer’s body that drooped with sadness. She had a husband in a war zone. She was asking me because, twice already, I too had waited for my husband to come home from a war — first Afghanistan, then Iraq.
I was visiting Fayetteville, North Carolina, home of the Army’s Fort Bragg, when a friend said he knew a woman who needed to talk to me. He introduced me to Beth.
“This is our first deployment,” she said.
Her eyes were wide and blue green and shadowed by her straight, dark hair. She gave me a level look before withdrawing her gaze and adding, “They say it’s supposed to get easier but it’s been four months and so far it’s just been hard.When does it get easier?” “Oh,” I said, and the oh dragged itself into a sigh while I decided whether or not to lie. I wanted to fix it for her; I wanted to make it all right. But I knew the only thing that would make everything right would be for her husband to walk through the door right now, safe and whole in body and mind, the same man he was when he left. So in the end, I couldn’t. I couldn’t lie to her. When does it get easier?
“It doesn’t,” I said. “Wartime deployments are always hard.” “Don’t tell me that,” she said.
But they are, they’re just so hard. Eventually you figure out ways to cope — or not. But they never get easy. A wartime deployment is always a mountain, no matter how you climb it. All I could do was tell her some of the climbing techniques I’d relied on to help manage the fear and the loneliness, and listen to her anger and bewilderment as she climbed it now herself. When Beth left, she hugged me. And I thought, Welcome to the sisterhood.
Over the course of her husband’s deployment, while she was worrying about his survival, Beth Pratt’s own survival was hanging in the balance.
Though I didn’t realize it at the time — no one did — Beth had begun to think about killing herself. This is her story.

I came across Marissa Bootes on the Internet. She belonged to a group of Fort Bragg wives who had formed their own private support group online. The first time I met Marissa in person, she had tied her long, dark hair in a ponytail. She was broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped in a black tanktop and black pants with a racing stripe down each leg. She looked faintly exotic and streamlined; she was moving fast.
She talked fast, too. “When my husband deployed, I was working sixty-plus hours a week and suddenly taking care of our five-year-old daughter by myself, and this house, and the bills, and volunteering with the Family Readiness Group for my husband’s unit —” She paused long enough to light a cigarette. “I’m an overachiever.” She exhaled smoke. “I was doing the Superwoman thing, I felt awesome.” I was forty-two, nearly twice her age. I saw right through that smoke she was blowing, spotted a part of my younger self through the haze. I used to get busy like that, too.When the feelings got to be too much, I’d just get too busy to feel.
The first half of the deployment, that’s what Marissa did. Gave herself four hours each night to sleep, the other twenty hours devoted to constant motion, because when she took the time to think about her husband she couldn’t breathe. But before this deployment ended, because of this deployment, Marissa Bootes would find herself crashing head-on into the memories of a painful past she was trying to outrun. Not only that, she would be forced to give up one dream — the career she had hoped for since she was a child — but she would make another dream come true. This is her story, too.

Anyone who watches TV has seen the familiar images from the warfront: military men and women in desert camouflage uniforms riding in Humvees, patrolling dusty streets, firing their weapons.
The homefront gets a lot less screen time — the camera swings around to focus on military families just long enough to peek through the window at the tearful goodbye and the joyful homecoming and, in between, the occasional yellow-ribbon moment. The rest of the homefront experience is hidden behind a closed door. Out of pride, or perhaps from a feeling of vulnerability, those of us who live the homefront life often feel the need to protect ourselves from anyone who has never been left behind during a deployment.
“They don’t have any idea what it’s like,” I complained to an Army chaplain. “They just can’t understand.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. Then he said, “Maybe they don’t understand because we don’t tell them.” So this is the story of Beth and Marissa’s friendss and fellow military spouses, and the chaplains, social workers, teachers, and support staff with whom they crossed paths. It’s the story of the Beths anddddd Marissas scattered across America and on military installations around the world, who, like them, hurry through their days listening for the distant sound of guns.
Both Marissa Bootes and Beth Pratt are married to junior enlisted men in the 82nd Airborne Division. Beth’s husband, Private E-2 Luigi Pratt, drove Army trucks on convoys through Iraq’s Sunni Triangle. On other convoys along those same roads, Marissa’s husband, Specialist Charlie Bootes, manned a Mark-19 fully automatic grenade launcher.
Marissa and Beth never met while their husbands were deployed. Marissa was twenty-three when the deployment began. She grew up in foster homes, had a two-year degree under her belt, and was married to her high- school sweetheart. On the subject of the war, she had no patience for Americans protesting in the streets; it killed morale, she said, made life harder for soldiers and their families. Beth was thirty-three.
She had a happy childhood, held multiple postgraduate degrees, and was newly married for the second time, with no children. As for the war, she believed it was wrong from the start. The UN weapons inspectors, it seemed to her, had been doing just fine.
Beth and Marissa didn’t have much in common except for this: In the fall of 2003 they both faced the frightening challenge of their husbands’ first deployments. And they knew it wasn’t likely to be their last, either. Given America’s increasing military commitments around the world, even if their husbands came home, they wouldn’t be home to stay.
This shared experience creates a bond like sisterhood. Those of us who are married to the military may be female, or may be male — our honorary sisters. We may be white, black, or brown, young, old, Republican, Democrat, or independent. We may worship different gods or no god at all. We may be high-school dropouts or holders of advanced degrees. We may not even be officially married, may be engaged or living together or seriously dating. But at one time or another, we have all been left behind while the one we love has gone off to train for battle, or keep the peace, or wage war. Particularly for those of us who have waited for our loved ones to return from a combat zone, it’s like joining a secret society — when you encounter another member of that society, not much needs to be said.
“Is your husband home?” I asked a woman I had just met at a conference of military spouses. She looked like a southern belle and talked like a trucker.
Her ma

KRISTIN HENDERSON has written frequently about military issues, including two cover stories for the Washington Post Magazine, where this book had its origins. A practicing Quaker and occasional amateur racer of Corvettes, Henderson is married to a Navy chaplain who served with the Marines in Afghanistan and Iraq, and she is active in the Marine Corps’ Key Volunteer family readiness program. The idea for Hidden Homefront came to Henderson when her husband was in Iraq and a neighbor asked, “Wow, what is that like, having him in harm’s way?” Henderson says, “It hit me then, that most Americans no longer personally know what it’s like to send someone you love to war.”

By the time Beth Pratt's husband returned from Iraq, they had been apart longer than they had known each other. Not long after Charlie Bootes's first deployment, his wife, Marissa Bootes, became a leader in one of the army's Family Readiness Groups, heading up phone trees and organizing girls' nights out while also managing a job and motherhood. When three uniformed soldiers came to Michelle Hellerman's door, she thought that they were picking her up for a comfort team; she didn't imagine that the terrible news was for her. "This is the war story you never hear," writes Henderson about what is actually a series of engrossing and often heartbreaking stories built from more than 100 interviews. The Quaker wife of a military chaplain, Henderson is a compassionate expert witness. For military families, her explanations of the official and unofficial support systems that serve (and sometimes fail) Fort Bragg's soldiers amount to a useful handbook. For civilians, the stories provide a revealing look into what it really means when a country goes to war. Though many of the soldiers Henderson writes about are serving in Iraq, she takes neither side in the war debate, and keeps to a style that is both intimate and professional. This is an emotional book that effectively plies the complexities of military life. (Feb)

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