Inside the war at home for military wives

Angela Ricketts' memoir of her years as an active-duty Army officer's wife "can't be told in a linear way," she writes, but rather in a "zigzagging" style, a metaphor for the lives of military families as they move frequently and cope with long overseas deployments.

In the military, as Ricketts points out, there is safety (insurance, health care, subsidized groceries), hilarity (Longaberger basket parties, competition over garden upkeep, blowhards of both sexes) — and terror (deployments, deaths, fear of failure). In their 20 years together, Ang and her husband, Darrin, have weathered 10 moves, eight deployments, parented three children and experienced one major heart attack.

"No Man's War" by Angela Ricketts

Hers, not his. The memoir opens with the cardiac episode she suffered at 38 while living at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, the one that sent her into the ICU for two weeks — two weeks that a "waiting wife" (as they call them in the Army) with young children can hardly spare. Ricketts was neither a smoker nor a drinker, didn't have a family history of heart problems and had recently completed a 10-mile foot race.

Did military life break her heart?

"I left that open on purpose to make readers feel as awkward and uncomfortable with the incident as I did," says Ricketts by phone from her Colorado home. (Darrin Ricketts, now a colonel, remains on active duty with the Department of Homeland Security.) "But that's kind of what I meant it to say. One Amazon reviewer wrote, 'This woman was far too invested in her husband's career,' and I wanted to write back to that person and say, 'Yes, yes, I was. We all are. We're so indoctrinated that we believe we are part of this command team.' "

But even though Ang had "drunk the Kool-Aid," she admits the difficulties of reintegrating as a couple.

"I had given up my entire life, given up everything, to follow this person and then here he is in my kitchen simultaneously pinching my butt, but not knowing which drawer the spoons are in. When you take people who are so different — and most Army marriages are cases of opposites attract — and you separate them for such long periods of time, you have less common ground than many other couples because you didn't 'get' each other to being with!"

Any civilian reader might wonder why Ang and Darrin never separated or divorced. "It's because we saw each other as family," she says. "I couldn't imagine abandoning him. I couldn't untangle myself from the family bond we had."

Those bonds can lead to much darker territory. In a chapter titled "Stuffed French Toast and What I Can Never Forget," Darrin confesses that during his latest deployment he targeted a household of insurgents and blew them up without knowing that there were two children in the dwelling.

Ang, meanwhile, faces battles on the home front. When the couple were first married and Darrin was deployed to Somalia from upstate Fort Drum, Angie wandered home tipsy from a Watertown bar one night and was attacked by a soldier (she could feel his Army belt buckle) who was bent on rape if not worse. "I'll never forget the sound of unspooling military tape. He intended to tie me up and gag me, I think." She managed to fight him off and escape.

Sadly, although she eventually does tell Darrin, Ricketts never reported the incident to authorities. She tells me that NPR's Terry Gross took her to task for it, asking, "Did it ever occur to you that by telling someone about him you might have saved someone else's life?"

"I wanted to tell her that I wasn't protecting myself so much as I wanted to protect my husband's ability to focus, and not to be seen as someone who was just trying to get my husband to come home."

Now that her husband is home more often, Ang expects her life will change. But even that presents its own challenges.

"Maybe calmer seas lie ahead for us," she writes. "But maybe chaotic seas are our home. Maybe that's where we thrive. What we could even do with peaceful waters?"

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