Under the Sabers: The Unwritten Code of Army Wives
Tanya Biank, . . St. Martin's, $23.95 (261pp) ISBN 978-0-312-33350-8
For four years now, combat scenes from the war on terror have dominated our newspapers and our television screens. And though the White House recently released its National Strategy for Victory in Iraq, there's no sign that the war is actually slowing down. "No war has ever been won on a timetable," the White House plan says, "and neither will this one." That makes these upcoming books about private lives on the home front all the more important. Authors like Biank and Henderson show us how war affects not just soldiers, but families, and how war's effects linger after soldiers are called home. With Cindy Sheehan working on a memoir to be shopped by David Vigliano after the holidays, homefront books are poised to become nonfiction's next wartime trend.
In this insider's account of the sometimes-lethal strains that military life puts on families, Biank, an award-winning journalist and the daughter of a career army officer, finds much to admire in military spouses. She follows the lives of four women at Fort Bragg, N.C., home of the 82nd Airborne Division: the wife of a high-ranking officer who adds luster to her husband's career with her own polish; a senior noncommissioned officer's wife who ambivalently watches her son follow in his father's footsteps; a woman who falls in love with an enlisted man early in his career and struggles with balancing army demands with her own needs; and a former soldier who finds that the counterterrorist operative she married may be just as dangerous to her as he is to terrorists. Though her prose is sometimes clunky and some of the history feels a bit dated, Biank's novelistic sense of detail and suspense vividly demonstrates how "the Army... could bring couples closer together... or it could rip relationships apart." Army wives cope with unpredictable deployments and struggle to raise children alone, often on small paychecks, in a community both tightknit and sharply judgmental. "Army wives serve, too," says Biank—in an institution ambivalent about families. She makes sympathetic both their pride and their tragedies.
Reviewed on: 12/12/2005
Genre: Nonfiction
