SALON

Thursday, Feb 3, 2011 1:20 AM UTC

“You Know When the Men Are Gone”: The secret anguish of military wives

Siobhan Fallon's collection is an eloquent, unflinching and beautifully nuanced portrait of army spouses

By

Topics: Fiction, Nonfiction, Books,

"You Know When the Men Are Gone" by Siobhan Fallon

In the eight wrenching, compassionate tales that make up Siobhan Fallon’s “You Know When the Men Are Gone,” we get the stories that it seems we’ve been waiting for through America’s decade at war. The military wives of Fort Hood, Texas — seen here in all of their raw anxiety and gritty resourcefulness — represent a handful of the million-plus civilian families who have borne the brunt of the strain on the home front since 2001.

Barnes & Noble ReviewFallon, who lived at Fort Hood while her Army major husband served two tours of duty in Iraq, nails the details of life on base after the 18,000 soldiers in the First Cavalry Division are deployed, and the world dominated by camouflage uniforms shifts to one of “brightly colored baby carriages and diaper bags, Mommy & Me meetings … women on pastel blankets lounging on the parade field and sharing cinnamon rolls.”

“You learn too much,” she writes in the title story, hearing neighbors gargling, showering and crying themselves to sleep through the thin walls. This unwelcome knowledge blooms in the pervasive quiet that the absent soldiers leave behind them: “No more boots stomping above, no more football games turned up too high … without the men, there is a sense of muted silence, a sense of muted life.”

Meg, this story’s central character, scans the Internet for news of her husband’s infantry battalion each morning, meets weekly with her Family Readiness Group — women suddenly thrown together in times of duress, “all of them bereft and left behind in this dry expanse of central Texas” — and copes with loneliness. She watches with dismay as her new neighbor, Natalya Torres, a Serbian woman who met her husband when she was cutting hair at a base in Kosovo, leaves her twin toddlers sleeping, dresses up and goes out on the town once a week, a routine that becomes a miniature scandal in this close-knit world.

Infidelity is also the hinge of “Leave.” Chief Warrant Officer Nick Cash tells his wife he’s not coming home on a scheduled leave, maps out a surveillance mission, breaks into his own house, and camps in the basement, waiting to find out if a friend’s tip that his wife is seeing another man is true. In one of the many artful moments that link these stories, Nick recalls Staff Sgt. Torres (Natalya’s husband) going ballistic when a private has a radio blasting “Love the One You’re With.” The usually laid-back Torres stomps the radio to smithereens.

While worrying about a sexy e-mail a woman soldier has sent her husband in “Inside the Break,” Lailani notes an ominous silence on base — three days with not one wife in the battalion receiving a call or e-mail from her husband. This “comms blackout,” is followed by a telephone tree phone call: “Alpha Company got hit. Sergeant Schaeffer died.”

Several stories reverberate with the repercussions of this attack. Spc. Kit Murphy, a survivor with a ruined foot, flies home with a group of fellow battered soldiers, all wondering if their wives would be waiting, and, if they were, “how long would they stick around when they saw the burn scars, the casts, the missing bits and pieces that no amount of Star Wars metal limbs could make up for.” And the widow of the sergeant killed in the attack shudders as she pulls into the empty “Gold Star Family” parking space in front of the commissary. “Family members received a few special privileges like this lousy parking space, but that meant the pity rising from the asphalt singed hotter than any Texas sun.”

“You Know When the Men Are Gone” is an eloquent, unflinching and beautifully nuanced portrait of these spouses, transformed by combat as profoundly as if they’d boarded the transports themselves.

More Jane Ciabattari.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 14 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Kaitlyn Hunt refuses plea offer, will go to court over high school relationship - The 18-year-old rejected a deal that would have labeled her a sex offender and placed her under house arrest
161 points162 points | 92 comments
vote
Kaitlyn Hunt refuses plea offer, will go to court over high school relationship - The 18-year-old rejected a deal that would have labeled her a sex offender and placed her under house arrest
151 points152 points | 101 comments
vote
Ted Cruz against the world - How the Junior Senator is igniting the GOP civil war
77 points78 points | 21 comments
vote
Wikipedia’s anti-Pagan crusade
14 points15 points | 13 comments
vote
Developers evict historic women’s shelter to build luxury hotel - The 104-yr-old Anna Louise Inn has ended its 2-year legal battle with a Fortune 500 company & will now move. Many view the victory of the insurance company over a community touchstone as a major blow to the city.
12 points13 points | comment

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: Chekhov's story mirrors Russia's own

Recommendations