I live in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a place referred to, even by civilian locals like me, as “Fayettenam”. Fayetteville, located in the southeastern part of North Carolina, is next door to Fort Bragg, the home of the 82nd Airborne and one of the largest military bases in the United States. Fayetteville enjoys a unique symbiosis with Fort Bragg. The military and civilian communities interplay with the strangest mixture of dependency, respect, and disdain. It is a place scattered with pine trees, pawn shops and people waiting for people to come home.
There are certain things that you pick up on as a civilian kid in a military town. One is the constant transition around you. One year you are best friends with a girl named Rachel. The next year, she is living in Kentucky and you have a new best friend name Jenny. Yellow ribbons have always been slung around pine trees around here. I can remember playing games on my elementary school playground and plucking the tattered pieces from the trees while counting to 100 before I went out to “seek”. American flags of various sizes and conditions wave proudly or sadly depending on the day, the wind, the observer.
My parents lived over 20 miles from the military base, but it was common for artillery fire to shake the very foundation of their two-story brick home at all hours of the night. I remember the tremors causing the Westminster chimes in the grandfather clock in my mother's foyer to “ding-dong” at unexpected hours. Likewise, we had a cocker spaniel once who loved to chase the C-130's (flying warehouses, more or less) that would circle the sky above my parents' home. The monstrous planes would roar overhead and the little dog would run off into the woods, barking quite threateningly. When I moved back to Fayetteville after college, I moved into a house closer to the base, and I would sit in my back yard, where I was treated to a symphony of crickets chirping and machine gun rounds firing. Sounds of artillery will always be home to me.
In military communities, someone is always missing. When I was a girl, I was often invited to spend time with a friend when her dad was “in the field.” To this day, I do not really know what the “field” is, where it is, or what exactly is done there. But, for a tag-along like me, when someone's dad was “in the field” it usually meant that I would get invited to sleep over and eat pizza and sometimes go to the PX with my friend and her mom. Another term you often hear in explanation of why a person has gone missing is “school”. When, in the civilian community, an adult goes to school, they're usually taking some time away to seek some higher level of education where the long-term goal is known and understood and the time in which this goal will be obtained is defined. In the military, when someone goes away to be in “a school”, the particular type of education they are receiving is unknown and should remain as such, though the common goal can be succinctly defined.
Schools are where soldiers learn how to fight, kill, evade, attack and survive more efficiently. It's not quite writing your dissertation. The length of time and purpose of the school is not always clearly known, even by family members. Generally, it's simply accepted that the person is gone for a period of time, and that they will return within a reasonable number of weeks or, at the most, months. To the civilian, the thought of a spouse or other beloved family member being gone for months might seem trying, but it's more common that you hear the phrase “He's just in school” uttered with a sigh of comfort or relief. The reason is because the alternative is graver than the civilian world can grasp. “Field” and “School” are sweet as nursery rhymes compared to the most common answer you receive when you inquire about a soldier's whereabouts these days. The word you hear in reply most often is, “deployment”.
Deployment started to be a household word in Fayetteville after September 11th, 2001. Two towers fell, we put American flag magnets on our cars, and we had to start arriving at the airport two hours ahead of our departure time. For most of America, the repercussions of a war on terror stopped there. But, in Fayetteville, another war was just beginning. The first deployments were for six to eight months, either to Afghanistan or Iraq. No one knew much about what was going on in either place at that time. I was in college then, only 60 or so miles north on interstate 95, and though geographically, I was close to one of this war's greatest puncture wounds, the mental distance afforded by that hour long drive was eminent. I'd come home on the weekend and see that my church, already small in numbers, was missing some of its members, mostly male. At the end of the service the pastor would pray for those men who were “down range” and I'd bow my head and try to focus on that, but, by that afternoon, I'd be 60 miles north and my mind would be a thousand miles away from that “range” and those men were on it and also from the “homefront” guarded by their families. My war in those days was with my GPA, and while I tried to appreciate the sacrifice I would casually observe every other weekend when I noticed empty chairs in a church service, I was completely unable to comprehend the gravity of what was really happening.
