BookLife Review by Carol O’Day: The Wives, a Memoir (Simone Gorrindo, author)
Memoir, U.S. Army Special Operation, military life, Army wives, Fort Benning, Georgia, anxiety and depression, friendship, pregnancy, motherhood
The Wives takes us behind the green military curtain into the world of Army wives. Author Simone Gorrindo is a young 28-year old working in New York City in the publishing world, dating Andrew, the love of her life, who occasionally references his interest in joining the Army’s Special Operations unit. Simone dismisses the notion, thinking Andrew will outgrow it. But the idea crystallizes for Andrew into a concrete goal. When asked if forced to choose, would he choose Simone or the Army, Andrew says he would chose the Army. This gut-punch brings Simone up short. She reassesses her own priorities and goals, and takes the leap. The couple moves to Fort Benning in Georgia, and Simone begins her life as an Army wife.
Gorrindo’s memoir is full of inside-baseball details of military life and raw emotion. She lands in Georgia without family or friends and with a husband who is frequently deployed. The couple lives off base. When Andrew is in Georgia, he is often incommunicado and deep in exhausting training programs. Simone, a writer by vocation, does not quickly make friends. Before too long, though, Simone befriends Rachel, another transplanted Army wife renting the house across the street. Slowly, Simone is introduced to other similarly-situated women–wives of other men either in training in Andrew’s unit, in parallel programs or otherwise employed by the Army. She observes the spillover of military hierarchy from the military itself to the social structure among spouses.
Simone documents her experience with a complexity that renders it compelling. Her transition is not smooth. She struggles to find points of connection and commonality with the other Army wives. She is older than many. She is more educated than most. She is not religious. Neither she nor Andrew hail from a multi-generational military family and its nuances are foreign to her. She does not have small children. She finds herself regularly in the company of young mothers who married high school sweethearts and did not attend college. She moves among deeply religious Southerners and Midwesterners for whom the military is a second family. She launches a book group only to find that the books are often not read and are rarely discussed, pushed aside for the more pressing issues of deployments, child care challenges, pending births with absent spouses, financial stress, adjustment disorders, alcoholism and domestic violence that preoccupy the Wives, as they are known.
Simone suffers greatly through Andrew’s intensive Ranger training and deployments. She experiences frustration, anger, fear, and loneliness. Though she knows Andrew is at times deployed to Afghanistan, there are clear directives that the specific whereabouts of the members of the Unit not be disclosed to or even discussed with spouses. There are limited opportunities for the deployed soldiers to call or video call home, and when they do, the content of the calls is strictly limited and monitored. The Wives must live in and with the unknown, and yet always be prepared for the dreaded arrival on their doorstep of a casualty notification team while their husbands are deployed on a mission.
Late in the (first) four year enlistment period, Simone becomes pregnant. Andrew is deployed but due home in time for the birth. During this multi-month deployment, Simone receives a red alert call. The Unit Wives are informed that a major event occurred in Afghanistan. The anticipated conclusion of the deployment and the return of the soldiers to Fort Benning is delayed. The reason for the delay and the length of the delay are withheld. Stress mounts. Simone describes in heart-wrenching and effective detail her onset of severe anxiety and depression. She does not know if Andrew will survive this mission. She becomes anxious, isolated and engages in compulsive behavior in a fruitless attempt to control her environment. Ultimately, she is held up and sustained through the circle of support only the Wives can provide.
Departures and reassignments are an inevitable and integral part of military life. For soldiers it is understood. The carefully cultivated circles of Army wives also shift, dissolve and change as members move, leave the Army or are relocated elsewhere around the world. Some wives reunite at other bases and locations, others fade into the wallpaper of the past, and a few remain in a long-distance network that is now more sustainable through social media and cell phones.
In an era of global conflict, insight into the lives of our military and their families and the stresses and challenges that are part and parcel of their service, is valuable to all of us who enjoy uninterrupted liberty and freedoms. Simone Gorrindo’s memoir, The Wives, is an act of service in its own right, opening for us the world of Army wives.
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