Even before Roy and I became engaged, I had some awareness of what being a Navy officer’s wife entailed. Of course a good bit of it was dated, from reading about the early astronauts and their families, along with a ton of historical fiction set in World War II. So by the time we got married and headed off to Pensacola for his flight training, a lot of the stuff I read about was ancient history. No, I didn’t need calling cards, for the simple reason that formal visits were ancient history. I had some business cards made up when I started looking for freelance assignments, and those worked just fine for what few meet and greets we had down there.
When he got shuffled off into the reserves and put into an airlift squadron, I didn’t think a whole lot about it. He already had his civilian pilot’s license, and it wasn’t that hard to get the necessary jet endorsements to get a job flying for a civilian cargo carrier. In fact, what Roy was flying for them was fundamentally the same airframe, just without the military gear and with corporate livery instead of camo.
Except then the Energy Wars started and his unit got activated. Suddenly I got tossed into a very different situation than what I’d experienced in those last halcyon days of peace. Being based right outside Washington DC had been neat in peacetime, especially going to visit the museums and historic buildings that I’d seen so briefly during the 4H Citizenship Focus course the summer before my last year of high school.
Now we were all too aware that we were in a war zone, that the national capital would be a primary target. Which meant that the military community suddenly became a much larger part of my life.
Sure, I’d met the wife of Roy’s commanding officer when he first reported to his new duty station, so I knew she was an older woman and came from a multi-generation Navy family. But as long as his unit was still on the “one weekend a month and two weeks a year” program, it was pretty much a formality. I saw her a few times at family events for the squadron, but otherwise I had my own life, working for a local silkscreening shop.
Everything changed when Roy’s squadron got their orders to the Middle East. Suddenly I was pulled into the whole officers’ wives’ club thing far more deeply than even at Pensacola. So fast I nearly drowned at first under the rush of expectations.
I do want to make one thing clear: Mrs. Holtz never “wore her husband’s rank” or otherwise usurped authority that was not hers. But she most definitely expected all of use to do our part, and had no qualms about calling us at any hour of the day with a request (which was in effect a command) to go help the family of another member of the unit. There’s the typical “take a casserole over to so-and-so’s house” request, but she’d picked up that I’m an artist, so she didn’t send me a lot of them. My cooking wasn’t bad, but she had enough other women for that job. Instead, I got called on to set up for all the parties. A lot of birthday parties, especially for the younger kids, but we also had parties for the whole squadron’s dependents, especially on holidays.
And she instituted a system of meetings, where we all came over to her house every week to go over things. It wasn’t quite the level of the tea parties and bridge parties I’d read about, with everyone in gloves and those cute little hats you see in the old pictures. We’d dress up a little, but a lot of us wore slacks rather than skirts.
But we were all very definitely aware that we were part of the home front, of the tail that supported our forces on the fighting fronts. It wasn’t just how we’d always start every meeting with the Pledge and the “Star Spangled Banner,” and end them with “God Bless America.” There was an awareness that’s hard to describe, that you really have to experience.
—– Lily Correy, Memories of the Energy Wars, unpublished memoir.