For Rachel Starnes, falling in love with Ross means falling in love with a man whose lifelong dream is to fly Navy fighter jets, specifically, F/A-18 Super Hornets. As this dream may only be fulfilled by enlisting in the Navy, falling in love with Ross means becoming a Navy wife.
Welcome to The War at Home. Blazingly honest, at times almost dizzying, Starnes’ memoir is an uncompromising look at a life few civilians experience. An existence of constant upheavals, classified work, and arcane cultural mores, the military is a peculiarly isolated place even as it runs parallel to civilian life. If you live near a military base, a Navy wife might be pushing a shopping cart alongside yours or sitting beside you in that college writing course. Her children might attend the same nursery school. But her concerns — where her husband is, when he’ll be back, whether he’s safe — are light years from your worries.
Any memoir about the American military can teeter into the political. Starnes gracefully sidesteps this pitfall, avoiding discussion of politics or the couple’s sociopolitical leanings. All the reader knows is Ross longs to fly F/A-18 Super Hornets. He enlists, and is sent to Officer Candidate School (OCS) in Pensacola, Florida.
The couple arrives in Pensacola as the city mops up from Hurricane Ivan. After months of hurricane-related delays, Ross begins a training regimen few mortals could survive: he’s strapped into helicopter cabins then dropped into swimming pools and turned upside down to mimic crashing. In Alabama he is taught a “parachute landing fall”, a move involving running with an open parachute while being strapped to a pickup truck. This must be taught in Alabama, as it’s illegal in Florida. He’s systematically deprived of oxygen. He must memorize, memorize, and memorize some more.
Starnes does her best to make friends, unwittingly blundering into the wrong wives group, where she finds herself set straight with “Oh,, you’re a student’s wife!” Other friendships founder when pregnancy and childbirth distance new mothers from the childless. Finding work also proves challenging, with employers hesitating to hire a Navy spouse: this is one employee who’s certain to depart.
Completion of OCS sends the couple to Lemoore, California, near meth-ravaged Fresno. Here Ross is taught to fly the F/A-18 Super Hornet. First he enrolls SERE training: Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Starnes describes SERE as “a grim crash course in what to expect as a downed pilot in hostile territory.” My spouse is a military history buff. I asked if he knew about SERE. “Oh, yeah. That’s where Bush got the idea to waterboard Iraquis. They waterboard SERE guys.”
Ross is gone for two weeks, returning 15 pounds thinner, his back yellowed with bruises. He can’t tell Starnes where the bruises came from or why he’s lost weight. Driving to dinner, Starnes notices her husband cringing in the passenger seat. “It’s all so open out here.” He says. She turns the car around. Dinner out becomes pizza at home. When they go hiking, Ross begins pointing out useful hiding spots and edible plants. Starnes is horrified. “What had I signed up for?”
This modern military, the more I got to know it, felt like a separate, and largely invisible, society all its own. My life as a Navy spouse rested on paradigms that shifted even as I was building them. ‘You know what you signed up for’ was a phrase I often heard, and it infuriated me.
A job search lands Starnes both a secretarial position and a spot in California State University’s Creative Nonfiction MFA program. Here Starnes makes friends and earns a little money of her own. She also makes a good friend on base, an ex-dancer nicknamed “Bendy Jessie”. Jessie becomes Starnes’ first object lesson in military friendships — intense, fleeting, the duration of a shared posting:
The reality of close friendships among military wives is that they have a half-life, often one both members of the friendship calculate at the beginning — how long are you here for and where are you likely headed next?
Just as performing neurosurgery or free back walkovers on the balance beam fall far outside the spectrum of daily human behaviors, landing F/A-18 Super Hornets on aircraft carriers requires near-inhuman skill. Just landing the plane is a mind-boggling act: Southwest Airlines touching down at LAX this is not.
In one of The War At Home’s finest passages Starnes, sitting beside Ross, watches on YouTube as another pilot lands a jet. Landing, she writes, is akin to somebody driving a flaming 18-wheeler through a garden gate and pulling into a space surrounded by other flaming 18-wheelers. It’s a gripping moment that only escalates as she describes the physical tolls flying fighter jets takes on the body.
F/A-18 Super Hornets are launched using below-decks catapults. The planes vault upward at enormous velocities, disorienting the brain, which informs the body that it’s flat on its back. Pilots respond viscerally to this information, orienting the nose of the jet downward, that is, straight into the water. Training to ignore the brain’s desperate, screaming signal means allowing the jet to fly itself for a few moments. Landing is no less fraught, a phenomenally dangerous act not only for pilots, but for carrier ground personnel. Margin for error is truly zero.
Ross’s first deployment, six months at sea, begins with Starnes injuring her foot, fainting in a coffeeshop, and realizing that living across the street from a meth dealer isn’t, perhaps, the best arrangement for a woman alone. She manages, largely due to friendships with other Navy wives and an internal resourcefulness. But the couple’s relationship, shrunken to social media and the occasional phone call, suffers terribly from distance. A romantic rendezvous in Singapore is instead disastrous. “With an open mess between us, Ross and I agreed to call a truce.”
Three months later, Ross is home. Starnes cannot help noticing their next-door neighbors, happily taking morning coffee together on their porch. Meanwhile, “He (Ross) was suddenly everywhere, it seemed, and it was unnerving.” The couple slowly become used to living together again. Soon afterward, Starnes learns she is pregnant. The couple is transferred to Fallon, Nevada, for Ross to get additional training.
After giving birth to a healthy son, Starnes, a depressive since her teens, experiences a harrowing postnatal depressive episode that leaves her huddled on the floor, clawing at her forearm with her fingernails. She seeks, and receives, help.
At this juncture, The War At Home founders, and never recovers its rhythm.
As a MFA graduate in Creative Nonfiction, Starnes leans heavily on her writing training, employing “braided structure” and “flashback” to flesh out a lean narrative. Starnes interweaves the story of her marriage with flashbacks to her family life, specifically, her father’s employment-related absences from the home. Starnes also dwells on her brief but traumatic time as a rebellious, drug-using teenager.
While not wishing to seem insensitive, this reader found Starnes’ deep feelings of shame over her teenaged behaviors disproportionate to the act. She dropped acid. She got caught. She was expelled. Many of us did far worse things in high school and beyond.
The flashbacks are intended to illuminate Starnes’ deep-seated feelings of loneliness, abandonment fears, and depressive tendencies. We’re to understand these feelings have their underpinnings in her difficult past. That’s fine, but what should be a few introductory paragraphs are instead used to shore up an entire book. Instead, they point to The War at Home’s inherent problem: a dearth of book-length material. I mean Starnes no harsh criticism; she isn’t yet 40 years old. Few of us have lived enough material to fill a book-length memoir before 40. A few extraordinary essays? Absolutely.
There are some marvelous moments here, illuminated by Starnes’ descriptive gifts. Yet this doesn’t make for a complete book. The War at Home has a beginning, but that’s all. Perhaps this is because Starnes herself is just beginning, in which case, there’s time for more, later on.