June 9th, 2008
Thoughts Inspired by “Army Wives”
I am not a military wife, and my grandfather was retired from the Army and working on post with the civil service when I was born, and retired completely not many years after, so I’m probably the last person who would be interested in, and later addicted to, a show depicting military spouses living on a fictional base, and yet, ever since the very first episode of Lifetime Television’s show Army Wives last summer, it has captured my interest, and sometimes moved me to tears. My last direct experience with the military was at his funeral, when my grandmother was too grief-stricken to accept the flag from his coffin, and that duty fell to me. It was sixteen years ago, and “Taps” still makes my throat swell.
Last night, I spent a quiet hour sitting on the couch flanked by my two dogs, watching the second season premier. It picked up a few days after the cliffhanger season finale from last year, in which a distraught husband (and officer) strapped a bomb onto his chest, and went to the bar where the central characters hang out. We were left wondering who would survive.
The question of who lived and who died was answered in the 2nd season opener, of course, and I won’t go into details, because there may be some people who read this and haven’t seen it yet, but it’s definitely a tear-jerker, jumping back and forward over the four days between the bombing and the “present,” with everything book-ended by the radio show hosted by Pamela Moran (played by Brigid Brannagh), who offers these words: “To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.”
Counterpoint to the bombing story is the b-plot - character Roxy’s (Sally Pressman) worry over her husband Trevor, who shipped out on the same day, and who may or may not be part of a unit that was ambushed upon arrival.
I’m not a military wife, but I am a member of a group called Soldiers’ Angels, a non-partisan organization that supports men and women serving in harm’s way (and recuperating after) by sending letters and packages. You get to know the soldiers assigned to you – from their return letters written in cramped script on notebook paper, or whatever paper they could find at their local PX, from two line emails letting you know they’re still alive when you haven’t heard from them in a month, from their MySpace and Facebook and Blogger pages. Some of their stories are sad - parents who can’t get past the politics and refuse to correspond with their kids serving in the Gulf, or Afghanistan, or Korea – spouses who really do write “Dear John” letters when waiting for their deployed partner to come home gets to be too much. You start feeling like a surrogate parent, older sister, best friend. You are the voice in the darkness that doesn’t judge and just says, “Hey, I care about you.”
Army Wives is, of course, meant to entertain, and so if they push the edges of plausibility at times, it’s to make good television, but the thing about good stories is that if they begin in a place of emotional truth, the audience will take the journey anyway.
This television show has that truth.
A few weeks ago letters to one of my soldiers, sent in February, began coming back. I know, from checking the sources available, that his unit is not on mailstop. I can’t say I was as terrified as his wife must have been, but I can honestly say that after finding out today that he’s alive and well after all, my tears during the new episode of Army Wives were as much from relief as because the show was sad.
“To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die.”
Pretty good words from a tv show…don’t you think?
