Books |
You Know When The Men Are Gone
Siobhan Fallon
By
Published: Feb 16, 2011
Category:
Fiction
Six American soldiers have died this year in Iraq, 30 in Afghanistan.
They might as well have died on Saturn.
We hear very little these days about these two unwinnable, ruinously costly and morally debilitating wars because no one we know fights in them, and, even more, because the media and the government conspire to bury them. Even if you care, what’s left to say?
This: “You Know When the Men Are Gone,” a set of eight interconnected stories about Army wives who live on the 340-square-mile base at Fort Hood, Texas. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle download, click here.]
The women of Fort Hood — it’s a brilliant concept. First, because it’s about people no one writes about and is thus automatically compelling. Second, because it removes politics and morality from the narrative — these are women who are busily looking after kids and keeping their households running, and, in the darkness, praying for their husbands’ safe return.
Siobhan Fallon is uniquely positioned to write about these women — her husband is a major in the Army, and she lived on this base while he did two tours in Iraq. Because of this, we don’t read these stories just as fiction.
Fallon writes, on the first page of the first story, “Without the men, there is a sense of muted silence, a sense of muted life.” But there’s quite a lot of life happening at Fort Hood. And it’s messy.
Natalya Torres — there’s a name for you. She met her husband when he was stationed in Kosovo. She was cutting hair. He was married. But not for long. She speaks English now, but she adheres to none of the codes of the base — and that troubles her next-door neighbor.
Ellen Roddy — in remission from cancer. And burdened with a rebellious daughter and a clinging son. Who, one day, don’t show up at school.
Christina Diaz— ten months into her husband’s deployment, he goes silent. So she hacks into his e-mail and finds: Are u coming over tues? My roommate is on duty we will have the whole nite. I want ur body so bad. Let me no asap.
Helena Murphy — her husband is coming home, but not whole. “When he got to D.C., to Walter Reed, when the surgeries didn’t seem to be doing him any good and nothing was healing the way it was supposed to, when a month had passed and then six, seven, eight weeks, it was harder to get in touch with her.”
Carla Wolenski — her husband, recently returned, calls her collect from jail.
And Josie Scheffer — war widow, about to be visited by the man who is alive only because her husband threw himself over his body.
Some of the stories are about the men.
A former investment banker, now responsible for more important concerns in Baghdad, has such a crush on his Iraqi translator he can, on leave, hardly bring himself to sleep with his girl friend. Then his translator is kidnapped, and…
A Chief Warrant Officer comes home without announcing his arrival, convinced his wife is cheating on him. So he hides in their basement, waiting for proof. He imagined “her bedroom table set with the glass of water she filled every night but never drank, her wedding ring and pearl earrings in one of her grandmother’s china teacups, the framed picture of Nick in uniform holding a confiscated AK, smiling as if he owned the whole damn world….what woman would bring a lover to bed if there was a picture of her husband holding a gun staring down at them?”
I read this book months ago. Recently I read it again. Yes, it holds up. It’s worth your time. It’s a keeper.
