Tell My Sons: A Father's Last Letters (14 page)

With my orders set for April 10, I proposed to Kristin that we marry on April 7—an intentional gesture on my part to communicate to her that I would, whenever I could, put her before the army.

It felt strange standing up at the altar with just our priest, two witnesses, and God. No room for pretense or family approvals and disagreements. No pomp or circumstance.

The scene provided an unanticipated level of intimacy and sincerity that told us a truth we would learn and relearn in the army: we were alone with our decisions and the outcomes, and we would face an imposing life together, without the families that had carried us so far.

*   *   *

Our “official” wedding event—still scheduled for its original weekend—was another foreshadowing of how unpredictable our lives would be.

Kristin planned most of the details while I was in training, and when I flew into the Twin Cities one day before the big ceremony, it was like being dropped into a “hot” combat landing zone. There was no bachelor party, I missed the rehearsal, and I was late for dinner. Add months of pent-up sexual tension, and we had the makings for a nice bonfire in the middle of the living room.

The next morning, as three of the bridesmaids were making their way to the church, a drunken off-duty cop ran a red light and T-boned their vehicle.

The accident was so bad that the bridesmaids were put in neck braces and taken to the ER. We later learned that the first responders hiked their dresses up over their heads while they were
being strapped to the gurneys because they pleaded not to have their dresses wrecked. They were late to the wedding and pretty banged up, but they made it.

There was no honeymoon. No long looks. I was on a plane the next day to return to army training.

We laughed when we later found out our wedding would be one of the last held at Saint Boniface Church, which was slated for demolition. We hoped our marriage would fare better.

My failure at Ranger School a few months later resulted in an unexpected early return to Minnesota from Georgia, and I had new army orders in hand for an immediate report date to Virginia. Unexpected, and unwelcome, because it meant Thanksgiving and Christmas with her family would be scrapped. It also meant the dramatic change she long feared was upon her.

Emotions flared.

With six days to pack up and say our goodbyes so we could report to Virginia by the date on my new orders, Kristin was beside herself with grief and anxiety. Things were suddenly moving way too fast. Adding to the stress, we opted to take advantage of an army financial incentive to pack up and move ourselves across the country.

The conversations that took place during those six days are hazy, but I know they included a lot of cursing and very raw emotions.

I remember yelling at her, “Why in the world did you marry me? You knew this was coming! You’ve known
for a year
this was coming! This is the army!”

She yelled just as loud in reply that none of it was fair.

The time and distance of the past five months had left our relationship littered with bits of miscommunication, and the recent frustrations had us both wondering if we had made a big mistake.

Before we knew it, we were standing in her parents’ driveway with nothing left to say except goodbye.

To help ease the transition, Kristin had hastily adopted two kittens, and Ed found her a used Mitsubishi Starion sports car in pristine condition. But she was still inconsolable. I remember thinking the only time I’d ever seen someone this sad was at a funeral, and the slow procession down the road only added to the effect. Kristin drove my new car, and I drove the moving truck, towing the Mitsubishi on a two-wheeled dolly.

About fifteen miles from Hastings, I passed a driver heading in the opposite direction, frantically pointing to the rear of my truck. I could only hold my head in my hands as smoke poured from under the hood of the Mitsubishi. When Ed and Kristin had loaded it onto the tow dolly, they missed two important facts about the Mitsubishi: it had a
rear-wheel
manual transmission, and it had been left in second gear.

We stopped for the night at the Dollar Inn just south of Chicago. Kristin balked at the cues about the quality of the place—a $19.99 room, a front desk enclosed by Plexiglas, and a sign that read “No refunds after five minutes of check-in”—but it was 11:00 p.m., so I insisted we stay.

When we opened the door to our room, we were transported back in time to the set of a 1970s porno movie. The carpet was a deep shag of reddish orange, the bed was sunken and had a visible piece of plywood under the mattress, and the air was filled with an undeniable smell of funk.

All the emotion of the day—of the week—was released in a torrent. Curse words flew, and the scene ended with me childishly throwing my wedding band at her as she stormed out the door. Kristin’s mom, Karen, still recalls the phone call that came that night: “Mom, I think I made a mistake … I want you to come get me.” She didn’t come.

Kristin returned to the room an hour later, her eyes still red from crying. We made peace, but it felt more like a temporary truce meant only to allow the battlefield to be cleared of dead bodies before the next fight.

The night brought no relief. She insisted on bringing her two kittens into the room, then let them roam instead of keeping them in their carrier. They meowed incessantly, climbed up onto the bed to play, and twisted themselves into Kristin’s hair and my face. By 3:00 a.m., they were being tossed across the room like obscenities and wedding rings.

The next morning, we got ready and loaded our things without saying a word. Within minutes of being on the road, we hit an obstacle that was nowhere in our planning for the trip: toll roads. I had no cash. It was long before mobile phones, and Kristin was too far ahead for me to signal for her help.

“Honey,” the attendant told me with a mixture of pity and contempt, “we don’t take no checks.”

“Well,” I replied, “a check is all I’ve got. Ya see, I’m a moron, and I don’t have any cash.”

Uncharmed, she took my one-dollar check. The same scene would play out twice more before we finally stopped for gas.

In hopes of changing our luck, I pointed at the car we had destroyed the day before. “Want to see if she still runs?” I asked.

Kristin smiled, for the first time in two days. It took me a while to figure out how to unhook everything, but we finally got the Mitsubishi off the dolly, and it seemed to run okay. (We would find out later that the engine was blown, but that didn’t matter in the moment.) Encouraged, we loaded it back up and drove across the freeway overpass to “Grandma’s Kitchen.”

We had a breakfast so cheerful that I actually strutted out into the parking lot to get back on the road.

But then my hands moved from pocket to pocket on coat and pants in search of the keys. My heart sank as I approached the cab of our locked moving truck. From the ignition the keys hung, glimmering in the early-afternoon sun.

I found a metal hanger in my trunk and popped the lock open, but the victory was short-lived.

As we departed the parking lot, I checked my side mirror
while entering the highway on-ramp and saw a shower of sparks flying from the rear of my truck. I had failed to tighten down the safety latch on the hitch, and it had popped off the truck. The only thing that kept the dolly and Mitsubishi from careening into the ditch was the safety chains.

By some miracle, we finally made it to Fort Lee, Virginia, utterly exhausted.

At 6:00 a.m. on our first morning in the army together, we were jolted awake by the sound of a cannon blast, followed by a trumpet echo of “Reveille” booming through Fort Lee’s loudspeakers. I leaned over to Kristin, kissed her on the cheek, and whispered, “Welcome to the army, honey.”

“Hmmph,” she snorted. “I ain’t puttin’ up with that bull every morning,” she said as she snuggled in closer to me.

She would end up putting up with a lot worse than that during our life together—but we’d always become closer in the end.

*   *   *

Kristin’s birth into army life was a hard labor, but she quickly established who she was going to be and what she was going to do. She had no interest in rank or position and no patience for pomp among army spouses, so she quickly ran afoul of those spouses who possessed those things.

She was not “the lieutenant’s wife.”

“I have a name,” she’d say. “It’s Kristin.”

Military functions were something she begrudgingly attended. One of her common refrains was, “Loving you does not mean I need to love or even like the army.”

For Kristin, the army was something to be tolerated for about five years until we returned to Minnesota. And if her antipathy toward army life upset the lifers’ spouses, it drew younger soldiers’ wives to her, because so many of them felt the same way.

One issue we weren’t conflicted about was having kids. “What
do you think? Time for a baby?” went the conversation. “Sure, let’s have a baby.”

It was that easy. Matthew, you were born exactly nine months later—one year into our first army tour.

*   *   *

Kristin’s constant companions during my many long absences were those two cats she adopted, Max and Casey. She loved them just as much as you boys love your pets. Back then, this was another source of friction in our marriage. Even with a cat box, I thought they smelled, and I was determined not to have our first home smell like a farm.

What happened next may sound cruel—and Kristin never actually agreed to it—but we kept them outside on our back deck, placed a child safety gate at the steps, bought a small doghouse, put leashes on them, and called it all good. We have an army saying about such ideas: “It briefed well.”

It did cross both our minds that our new neighbors—whom we hadn’t met yet—might find us odd for treating our cats like dogs. So it wasn’t a total surprise the next day when I arrived home ahead of Kristin and found a note taped to the door from our neighbors: “Please come see us when you get this note.”

I walked the long driveway to their front door and rang the bell. Three or four kids suddenly appeared in the living room window adjacent to the door and stared at me wide-eyed.

Great
, I thought,
spectators for the finger-wagging lecture about the proper care of cats
.

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” my neighbor started, “but I came home from work today and found your cat hanging from your deck. Kind of freaked the kids out, so I took it down.” He handed me a covered shoebox. “Here she is. Sorry, man. I’m really sorry.”

As I walked the long driveway back to our home, I wondered how I was going to explain this to a pregnant Kristin.

“Honey, I’m sorry, but Casey hung herself off the deck on the leash.”

She immediately burst into tears and blurted out, “You
idiot
, I
knew
this would happen. You killed my cat!” She beat her fists on my chest but let me hug and hold her as I apologized over and over again for being such a moron. And though my fellow officers still rib me about it seventeen years later, she never gave me grief about it again.

(Until she read the story again in a draft of this book; into the Word document she typed a single colorful expletive meant just for me.)

*   *   *

Deployments were never far from our minds, because we knew at any moment, long days of field training in the woods could turn into a yearlong absence abroad. We saw our neighbors going through it while raising their newborn, and we both wondered how we would be able to get through such a trial, considering our difficulty just getting across the country together.

My first deployment came when you were only six months old, Matthew. You and I seemed to get along pretty well before I left, but when I returned several months later, it seemed a purple dinosaur named Barney had effectively replaced me as your male role model.

I don’t remember a more painful feeling in my life than the one I felt when I reached out to you and you recoiled as if you didn’t know who I was. I thought it would get better with the passage of time, but you seemed distant for years after that.

With Kristin, the time apart was difficult, but it was also apparent that separation gave us a greater appreciation of each other.

Although we still bickered about everyday things as most married couples do—how and what we spent our money on, how we spent our free time, our clashing likes and dislikes—the only issue that seemed to truly plague our relationship was how to manage life in the army.

*   *   *

Packing up and moving a house is one of the most stressful experiences a married couple can go through. It’s even more stressful when you’re a Minnesota couple with army orders to Alabama—a place where “yah” and “you betcha” draw some attention.

Three years earlier, I had to pry Kristin free of Minnesota to go to Virginia. Now the idea of leaving Virginia was just as traumatic and undesirable.

When I got to Alabama in the winter of 1997, I started my job and fell in with a group of soldiers that shared the same values, work expectations, and organizational culture as the ones I had just left.

When Kristin got to Alabama, she got, “Ya ain’t from ’round here, are ya?” One woman approached Kristin after a CPA review course in Birmingham and said in a deep Southern drawl, “Ah just love yo British accent.”

There was no job waiting for Kristin, and no business interested in hiring someone who was going to leave in two or three years. Fort McClellan’s housing was full, so we rented a house in the Alabama countryside. And unlike in Virginia, our neighbors were anything but pleasant.

We found out part of the frustration came from the Pentagon’s plan to close Fort McClellan. For the local community, which faced a $600-million-per-year economic loss, the news was devastating.

Even so, after a few months with no welcome to speak of,
Kristin decided to walk to our neighbors and introduce herself. When she rang the doorbell, she saw a quiver of movement in the curtains of a nearby window and awkwardly waited for someone to answer the door. Just as she turned to leave, an angry barking dog came bounding around the corner of the house.