by Tanya Biank
Though Heritage Village was a new subdivision and mostly treeless, the Floyds had the best-kept yard. They often worked in it together, and if Brandon was gone, Andrea had to garden feverishly to keep it up. She planted petunias in clay pots on her porch and added them, along with impatiens and snapdragons, to her flower beds. It was a lot to water and weed, and in the back of her mind she always worried that Brandon might come home a few days earlier than anticipated—that happened more than once—and the house and yard would be a wreck.
The uncertainty of his schedule was a mixed blessing. When he served with the 5th Special Forces Group at Fort Campbell, Kentucky—the Green Berets—Brandon would be deployed six months out of every year. Now that he was in Delta, his time away from home was broken up—a week here, four days there. He was rarely gone longer than a month at a time. Sometimes Brandon could tell her where he was, but usually not. Delta guys were sent all over the world, including places one wouldn’t expect, such as Amsterdam, Rome, Boston, and Las Vegas. Andrea actually looked forward to the time she had to herself. She wasn’t the type of wife to get caught up in Army life, and she didn’t pal around with the other spouses, except for a few who were her age and had children. Growing up, she’d always had more guy friends than girls, and as a teenager she was “one of the guys.” She didn’t need to be around a crowd of people to be happy or to feel validated. As for the Army, she loved it when she was in it but felt a bit like a failure over the way she left.
Still, Andrea was happy for Brandon and his achievements, even if she had been around elite units long enough that she wasn’t in awe of them. She thought some of the training was downright stupid, like the training exercise in which Brandon was weighted down and then thrown in a pool. He nearly drowned before he was saved by his teammates. Sure it was supposed to teach soldiers not to panic and to trust teammates with their lives, but she thought it was silly.
When he was away she enjoyed the chance to relax and catch up on things. She’d let the house go and feed the kids SpaghettiOs or hot dogs. And Brandon wouldn’t be there to complain.
She had been looking forward to their Christmas together, particularly after Thanksgiving, when Brandon had been away. For that holiday Andrea had taken her kids home to Alliance. Her sisters and their spouses and her nieces and nephews all had a family portrait made for their mother, Penny, and Brandon had been the only husband absent. That hurt, but it was part of Army life when you were married to a Special Operations soldier. She understood that Brandon couldn’t tell her what he was doing or where he was going. That was a given. But the reunions were supposed to be happy, not like the Christmas cruise. Sometimes it worried Andrea that she was enjoying the separations a little too much.
CHAPTER FIVE
Delores was already awake when the alarm clock went off at 2:30 A.M. The day she had been dreading had finally arrived. It was Thursday morning, four days into the new year, and Gary Shane was leaving on a 5:00 A.M. flight back to Fort Benning.
Delores sighed heavily, grabbed her robe, and got up to check on her son, while Ski went downstairs and switched on the coffeemaker. Gary Shane, still in pajamas, was already headed to the bathroom to take a shower. He was always good about getting up on time.
“Would you like some breakfast, son? How ’bout some bacon?”
“No, Mom, it’s too early.”
The boy could eat his weight in bacon. Every morning he’d been home he had asked for bacon and toast, and Delores was only too happy to prepare it. She loved taking care of him again. She had even helped him open his first checking account a few days earlier.
Ski brought up her first cup of coffee as she was getting out of the shower herself. Delores had hoped they could take Gary Shane to the airport together, but Ski needed to help get Cherish ready for her first day back at school and then get to work, too.
Delores dressed, dried her hair, and put on makeup, then checked on her son again. When she walked in, Gary Shane was leaning on one knee and looking for something he had dropped under his bed. He had a towel wrapped around his waist, and she couldn’t help but notice the definition in his arms and shoulders. It was obvious that he was working out and lifting weights in his spare time. Suddenly Delores realized that Gary Shane was no longer her little boy. He was a young man in the Army, and he’d turn twenty in less than a month.
But still my son, Delores thought, my baby. She had always felt a special bond with him. He had been so sick with intestinal problems as an infant, he had to have several surgeries, but she was never more than a sneeze away. Back in those days Ski worked a second job delivering pizzas so his baby could have a crib. (Ski had never shared that detail with me, and Delores did so only as an afterthought. I know this may come as a surprise to some people, but the truth is, it’s not uncommon for enlisted soldiers to work evenings or weekends at auto body shops or restaurants to support their families. Funny how the Army recruiting posters never show a soldier carrying a pizza delivery box.)
Gary Shane had grown into a quiet child and a good student. He loved music, just as she did, especially blues and Motown. When he sang, he often startled people with a big, bluesy soulful voice that contrasted with his shy behavior.
Since he’d gone to Basic, she had seen how he had changed. Gary Shane structured his time better, and he didn’t drink soda or eat a lot of junk food.
When it was close to the time to leave, she checked on him again, knocking softly on his bedroom door.
“Come in.”
He was in his Class A’s, trying to fix the zipper on his duffel bag.
“Son, you can’t pack your things in a broken bag.” Ski had a new one, and she gave it to him. At least his uniform was perfect. She had it dry-cleaned for him, and made a point of telling the clerk that it was her son’s.
She was so proud of him, though the Army was not what the Kalinofskis had envisioned for Gary Shane. They wanted him to go to college, an opportunity they never had at his age. And they felt that Ski’s service to the country was enough for one family. Delores didn’t like the idea of her boy in harm’s way. Besides, the Army offered adventure but not high pay. They wanted a better life for their son.
This may seem unexpected from a couple who loved the Army life so much. The Kalinofskis wanted to make sure their boy knew what he was getting himself into by enlisting—the good and the bad.
“You don’t get what you’re worth,” Delores had told Gary Shane the summer he was thinking of signing up. “You’ve got a brilliant mind; anything is within your reach.” Yet in mid-July, when he asked her to go with him to the recruiting station in Spring Lake, she agreed to drive him.
“Please, hon’, don’t sign,” she told him, and then sat there and cried when he did. She waited until Ski came home a month and a half later to tell him the news in person.
Ski understood Gary Shane’s desire to be independent, though deep down he wished Gary Shane had talked with him more before making the decision. He had been away for two months at Fort Polk, Louisiana, when it happened. And then his son had disregarded all his advice about not joining the infantry.
Ski himself was an infantryman, and he loved the brotherhood. It was the only life he’d known since he was eighteen. The people he met and worked with couldn’t be beat. But there were no marketable skills in the infantry, especially for someone like his son, who had signed up for just a few years of Army service.
When Gary Shane first left for Basic, all Ski could do was give his son some parting advice.
“It’s gonna be tough. You’ll miss home. Just do the best you can.”
Gary Shane had only seen the Army from the outside, Ski knew, and he wasn’t sure how his son would handle the pressure and stress and discipline. He even called his son’s first sergeant at Benning a few times to check in on him.
“Don’t worry,” the first sergeant assured him. “He’s doing great.”
Ski had been closer to his son when Gary Shane was young. He told me they started dri
fting apart when Gary Shane was a teen. Ski left for Korea when his son turned thirteen. Puberty was a difficult time for the boy. He fell in with some kids Delores didn’t like and started coming in at all hours of the night. He needed his dad, and Ski felt helpless so far away.
At one point Gary Shane began mouthing off to his mother, telling her to shut up, something his father would never have stood for if he was around. The year Ski was in Korea, Gary Shane started hanging out in a neighborhood known for drugs and shootings. When Delores tried to exert some parental authority, a power struggle usually ensued. In Gary Shane’s mind he was the man of the house in his dad’s absence; hadn’t his father told him that? One time Delores blocked the front door, telling him, “I don’t want you in that neighborhood!” He shoved her aside, and Delores shoved back. Gary Shane pushed her again and left. Another time he kicked her hard in the shin when she wouldn’t let him leave. Once, inside a pizza restaurant, he argued with his mother about wanting to go out. It caused such a scene she had the waitress box their meals.
What happened to her mild-mannered son? Delores wondered. She had him tested twice for drugs that year. The tests came back negative both times. Ski had his brother in New Jersey and a sergeant major friend in the neighborhood talk to Gary Shane several times, but it didn’t do much good. When Ski came home the following year, he sat Gary Shane down to put the fear of God in him.
“This is not how you grew up,” Ski said, looking at his son from across the kitchen table. “You cannot hit women! I don’t care what you do. You can get away with a lot. But if you touch her again—if you touch my wife—I’m going to treat you like an adult. I’m not going to warn you. I’m going to find you. Don’t touch your mom.”
The bad behavior stopped, and Ski thought that was the end of it. But when Gary Shane was sixteen, Ski came home late one evening after five days in the field. He was still in his uniform with camouflage paint on his face and was fixing himself some soup when Delores came downstairs. She wouldn’t come close to him.
“Come here, Delores Anne. What’s wrong?” Then Ski noticed the swollen black eye.
“What the hell?” His fists tightened.
“He didn’t mean it,” Delores said. “He didn’t mean it.” She had asked her son to take out the garbage. In response Gary Shane had picked up the trash can and thrown it at her. The corner caught her face.
“Delores, go upstairs,” Ski said.
Delores took Cherish into her bedroom and closed the door. She heard her husband chasing Gary Shane up and down the stairs, then slapping and wrestling with the boy. Ski gave the sixteen-year-old a tough-love lesson he wouldn’t soon forget. He then told his son to take a shower and go to bed.
“Do not lock your bedroom door. Leave it open.” Ski then entered the master bedroom.
“This will never happen again,” he told Delores. There were no more outbursts after that. In 2000, before he joined the Army, Gary Shane wrote an apology to Delores in a Mother’s Day card. “I know that over the years I have put you through many things, which means that I’ve also put myself through many things, also. I am so sorry for what I have done. It is not right that you had to go through all that I have done to you. Despite all that I have done, you stayed strong and moved on with your life, trying to be the woman of the house. For this and everything in the past that you have done for me, I will always be thankful.”
Still, there were hints that everything was not perfect. A few weeks before Gary Shane left for Basic Training he said to Delores, “Mom, I want to talk to you.”
Delores was sitting at the kitchen table writing letters. She put down her pen. Her son’s tone was so serious that she told Cherish to go upstairs and watch TV.
“Mom, ever since Cherish was born, Dad acts like he loves her more than he loves you or me. Please don’t act like it’s not true, and please, Mom, get out of the house and start doing some things for yourself. Spend some money on yourself instead of always on me and Cherish. Stand up for yourself and quit letting people walk over you and use you.”
Gary Shane sounded like an adult, and for the first time she saw that her son was no longer a child. It was as if everything her son had wanted to say for a long time was coming out now, before he left home. Delores started to cry. She stood up and took Gary Shane’s hand.
“Gary Shane, son, please don’t underestimate the love your father has for you. Your father loves you so much, don’t you know that? It’s not just her, it’s you, too. He loves you both the same.”
How long had he been harboring these feelings? she wondered.
“I love you,” she said. “I cannot tell you how much. Do you know that I love you?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I loved you before I ever saw you. Please don’t sell yourself short by thinking that your father loves your sister more.” She held both his hands. “Please, Gary Shane, use the time you have left before you go to Basic to talk to your father.”
A few weeks later, however, Gary Shane left without talking to his father about his feelings. After much deliberation Delores decided not to mention the conversation to her husband either. She didn’t want to cause a rift.
By Christmas 2000, after a few months at Fort Benning, Gary Shane seemed fine. He had written a neatly penned letter home the month before telling them he was “having the best time of my life” at Basic Training and that he was learning new things each day. He talked of wanting to buy a used car after graduation, and he thanked his parents for all they had done for him.
Though he still didn’t drink, smoke, or swear, and Ski knew the boy had a good heart, it was still hard for him to reach his son emotionally.
As a friend, I could sense his exasperation and sometimes desperation over his relationship with Gary Shane. Ski disciplined, encouraged, and molded young men his son’s age every day, but his role as a father was far more difficult for him than that of a command sergeant major. During the holiday he made a special effort to spend time with his son. They jogged in the mornings, went to the gym, and had pizza afterward.
The day before Gary Shane had to return to Georgia, they worked out, got haircuts, ate lunch, and saw a movie, then went home and put up a storage cabinet in the bathroom.
Every time Delores heard, “Yeah, Dad, it’s straight,” she knew she’d miss her son all the more.
And now the moment of departure had come. Father and son hugged and said their good-byes.
“Hang in there. Keep your head up. I love you. We’ll see you at your graduation.”
“I love you, too, Dad.”
It was 3:45 A.M., plenty of time for Delores and Gary Shane to stop for gas on the way to Fayetteville Regional Airport. She drove into the Texaco up the street and shivered as she filled up the Camry. It was dark and cold, and she felt so sad. She tried to focus on her plans for the next few months. She wanted to sign up for some adult continuing education classes—a basic math refresher course, and maybe creative writing or public speaking. Getting up in front of a crowd always scared her. Later, in January she’d take her substitute teacher exam. She was interested in subbing for phys. ed. or home economics.
Since 1995 she’d worked part-time, cleaning four houses each week. When Ski was in Korea, the extra money came in handy. Even after Ski came back, she kept cleaning houses. Delores was no stranger to work. She had grown up feeding the calves in the morning before school, gathering eggs, scooping hay, and leading cows to pasture. And besides, she liked having money she had earned herself.
As an Army wife she’d held all kinds of jobs over the years. She had babysat six infants and toddlers during weekdays in her quarters on post, had worked at several restaurants, and had been a teller at a savings and loan. When the family accompanied Ski to Germany, she took a job serving lunch in the grade-school cafeteria so that she could see Gary Shane come through the line.
And she continued to volunteer in the division any way that she could. She took part in whatever was going on at the 504th—fr
om meetings and donut sales to car washes and hot dog sales. She and the other wives were always coming up with different ways to involve young, new, or junior enlisted wives. Early on she had learned that everyone needed to have a voice or you’d lose the group; you’d have a leader and no one else.
Delores didn’t want to head things up anymore. She believed in new blood and fresh ideas. The opportunity to step into the limelight gave younger women experience and a feeling of self-worth, she felt.
“If you want my knowledge or input, call me,” she’d say, though she had learned from experience there were times when she had to say no.
The more I talked to Army wives the more I discovered there is a fine line between being part of a support network for Army spouses—being there for other wives, because they are all in the unit—and being seen as “obligated” to help another woman out.
Delores knew what it was like to have more month than money, but the modern Army had built safety nets into its system to help out in those situations. Some immature wives new to the Army—and perhaps new to real life—expected other wives to go out of their way for them when their husbands were in the field for weeks at a time. That could mean anything from buying groceries to acting as babysitter or taxi service. Usually it was just a matter of immaturity and lack of planning and budgeting. A few women were just lazy or taking advantage; they knew the other wives would not let them and their children go without.
Years ago, when the Kalinofskis were stationed in Germany, Delores got a call from a twenty-year-old wife whose husband was in the field with Ski. She said her spouse hadn’t left her any money for food or the electric bill. Delores took the woman shopping and paid for everything, delving into her family’s emergency money. These days she handled such calls for help differently. Instead of running to a wife’s rescue, Delores taught the woman how to access the post’s emergency resources.
