THE WIVES

The reality of marriage to a soldier.

At the age of 28, newly married and working at a publishing house in New York City, Gorrindo was uprooted to Columbus, Georgia, where she assumed a new identity: Army wife. Joining the Army was her husband’s dream. “If I have to choose between you and the Army, it’s the Army,” Andrew told her during a couples therapy session. By then, they had been together for four years; his words, she recalls, “hit me with the force of a physical blow.” Nevertheless, their love prevailed, and in 2012, he began training at Fort Benning to join a rapidly deployable combat unit destined for Afghanistan. With Andrew completely consumed by the Army, Gorrindo was left to find her place in an alien culture. She was shocked that guns were everywhere, “on top of refrigerators, in nightstands, sometimes in every room of the house.” She felt far different from other Army wives: Most were younger, some married out of high school, and many had young children. “We hadn’t shared the cultural experiences that translated to everyday conversation,” Gorrindo reflects about trying to connect with another wife. “Talking to her was a little bit like yelling across the deck of a boat in a windstorm.” Yet the wives were all she had to counter her loneliness when Andrew was away for long stretches at a time—and when, even at home, he felt like a stranger. “The Army was changing him,” she writes, “making the soft parts of him hard, the warm ones cool to the touch.” Of course, there was also the constant fear that he would be killed. Only the other wives understood her anxiety, despondency, and frustration and, Gorrindo realized, “shared something significant: a core philosophy of survival.”

An intimate memoir of sacrifice and devotion.