The War at Home

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.