by Catherine Smart

I didn’t know where to sit. The back rows were too far away to see the ceremony, so I ruled those out. I drove almost an hour in DC Friday traffic for this. Each front seat bore the name of a family member or unit VIP neatly printed in Times New Roman by someone in the personnel section. I wasn’t about to assume one of those seats was for me. I took a seat close to the wall about three quarters of the way back. The room started to fill with the mid-December welcomes of oof, it’s cold out there and man, it’s been a while.

The woman I was there to see was retiring as a colonel. She stood before us in her dress uniform, wrapped in the arms of family and colleagues who’d traveled cross-country to bear witness to a career bursting with achievements: Airborne. Deployments. First female brigade commander of this unit. A pioneer. A long time ago at an Army base that doesn’t exist anymore, I was her instructor.

After the formalities, she spoke. “Thank you all for coming,” she told us. She addressed each group who helped her get to this point. Her family. The soldiers she served with. Bosses. Peers. She laughed and cried. We laughed and cried.

Then she pointed across the room to a section of women. These, she told us, were Army women she served with. Close friends, all.

“You stuck it out,” she told them. “Even when the Army got hard, you didn’t quit.”

I knew she didn’t mean me. But that word—quit—slithered past my now-frozen smile and shook loose the shame and grief I felt since the day I signed out of the Army.

Ten years, eight months, five days. That’s how long I spent as a soldier. Really, though, the Army has been my world my whole life. Before I put on the uniform, I was an Army brat, daughter of an enlisted man whose military career gave him a route out of South Boston poverty. Dad gave the military a good return on their investment. From the eighteen-year-old kid on a U.S. ship off the coast of Vietnam to a noncommissioned officer Czech linguist with multiple tours in Germany, Dad poured everything, including his health, into his job. He was at his happiest in leadership positions, “pushing troops.” He hated desk jobs. The professional world existed on a spectrum: on one end the good troops, on the other, dirtbags.

My dad gave until it hurt. When I was twelve, I came home from school to find out he’d been taken to the hospital. Mom brought my sister and me to visit him. My dad lay there, wrapped in wires and tubes and beeping alarms that told the story of his massive heart attack.

“I gotta get healthy,” he told us from the beeping bed. He had to get back to his troops. We nodded. It’s what you did, right?

That stuff sticks with you.

When I joined ROTC in college, I knew in my bones the imperative to be a good troop. I knew you were supposed to work hard and sacrifice. That you’d be a part of a team.

My husband and I met on our first tour as lieutenants. We got married at the beginning of our second tour. We had our first son during our third tour. It sounds simple, but it wasn’t. As a dual military couple, life events that were usually private business between two spouses became unit readiness issues. Shortly after our first anniversary, I took command of a company. It was a school company, not (in most people’s minds) a “real” company command. During my initial performance counseling, the battalion commander outlined the duty description. Then he mentioned my newlywed status.

“You’re not planning to get pregnant during this command, are you?” he asked.

“Uhhh…no?” I said.

 “Good,” he answered. “I don’t want my unit numbers to reflect a non-deployable commander.” Noel and I hadn’t even talked about when we’d like to have kids. But I’d already had a conversation with my boss about it, in the same way you’d schedule an oil change.

We had the same supervisors for almost all our time in the Army, which made things weird. One boss told me he couldn’t give a top evaluation block to both Smarts, because it would look unfair to other officers he senior rated. He told me, “Go home and talk about it with your husband over dinner and decide which of you will get the top block.”

That stuff sticks with you too.

My first baby was born at West Point when my husband and I were assigned as tactical officers. We worked eighty-hour weeks. Our son was always the first kid in daycare and the last one out. I was always late to pick him up. My husband tried to do the pickup, but some of the officers he worked with made comments that he couldn’t be completely committed to the mission if he was always bailing to get his kid. The daycare started putting notes in our son’s diaper bag. “Your son rolled over today.” “Your son started walking today.”

One weekend night a cadet of mine had a psychotic break. My husband was away at a military school. My boss called. “The kid’s on the barracks roof with a knife and has one of the upperclassmen cornered. You need to go.”

There were no other options, so I took my baby with me.

At the door of the barracks, I handed Ryan off to a sophomore cadet. I squeezed the cadet’s arm. “Please just don’t drop him.”

Hours later, after the cadre cadets convinced the young man to put down the knife, the brigade surgeon told me to bring him to the hospital while we waited for a bed in a psychiatric facility.

“How should we get him there?” I asked.

“In your car,” he said. “He has no physical injuries, so he’s not authorized transport in an ambulance.”

There was no other alternative, so off we drove in the middle of the night: me and the knife-wielding cadet in the front seat of my minivan, my ten-month-old in his car seat behind us. At the hospital, the staff wouldn’t let us in the emergency room because the cadet wasn’t a patient. I debated with them for twenty minutes, bouncing my son on my hip to keep him from crying. Finally, the duty officer relented and let us sit in a broom closet next to the emergency room. At four in the morning, the ambulance arrived. I took my son home, fed him, and brought him straight back to daycare. Then I drove thirty minutes to visit the cadet in the psychiatric hospital, to make sure he was okay.

A few months later, I got pregnant again. We were overjoyed and also heartbroken. I knew I couldn’t sustain this life anymore. I submitted my resignation. It was denied because I still owed a few months on my service contract. Then I miscarried. I resubmitted my resignation paperwork again while I was still bleeding out my baby. This time, the request was approved.

Like my dad, I left the service before I was ready. It’s hard not to see the irony. I didn’t leave because I didn’t care or because I couldn’t do the job. I gave everything I had to every part of my life. I labored for the Army and also for the children I grew in my belly. My body nourished lives both inside and outside itself. 

I wish someone in my leadership had asked me to stay. Told me what my being part of the unit meant to them. Even if they knew that for me, getting out of the Army was the only viable option, I wish someone had asked—if only to show they saw and understood.

I wish one of my bosses had seen the signs earlier, or even at all.  Noticed that I bore a burden that split me in pieces. 

Stolen shards of time straddling a toilet in a filthy bathroom, desperately pumping dribs of milk for a baby I wouldn’t see for another twelve hours—while a major chastised me for taking too long to respond to his email.

The doctor who told me I was killing my unborn son by working so much.

And later that same day, the boss who told me that women don’t belong in the Army because they’re not committed enough. And when I stood silently at attention in front of him, my tears soaking the collar of my uniform with rage and shame and the weight of my own failure, he told me I’d proved his point.

I wish someone had told me that I wasn’t half-assing being a soldier or a mother. That I was not a malingerer or a pussy or weak. That needing to pick up my kid from daycare before it closes doesn’t “demonstrate a lack of commitment.”

When I finally had to choose a different road—when I sat, naked in my new civilian clothes holding a baby I knew mostly from Post-it notes from the babysitter, surrounded by cardboard boxes that held my old life in a living room where I was meant to start my new one—I wish I’d known how to give voice to my loneliness as an ex-soldier.

I want to remember the good stuff, too. The times my soldiers made me so proud my chest hurt. About the new soldier who shat himself because he was too terrified to be excused from PT formation to use the Portajohn. How we made sure the situation was handled respectfully—and then, how, when I was alone, I laughed till I cried. About the squad leader who deftly managed a busload of angry Serbs after a truck carrying a half ton of glass panes overturned on the only route through contested territory. And yes, also about my motherhood—because it’s part of my story.

I know the Army doesn’t owe me anything. I signed up for it. If the Army wanted me to have a family, they would have issued me one, blah blah blah. I get it. And yet even now, I want to know that my service was enough. It’s been two decades and I’m still having that conversation with myself.

Maybe I can reconcile that by offering support to others who might need it. I’d like to tell those after-me women to let go of the guilt for loving both parts of their world—their service and their family. I’d like to ask how they are and listen to the answer.

I’d tell them I see them. See that they’re trying to handle it all themselves. That they did handle it, for months and years and duty stations, long past the point where their families and their hearts paid the cost for their efforts.

I want to tell them this: you have known what it is to lead and to follow. To suffer privation. To know the cordite-smelling satisfaction of cleaning rifles with your unit on a sweaty afternoon. To drive back onto the base through the security gates, grateful and terrified, after a mission. To speak a common language.

You belonged—you still belong—at the table. You’re still a warrior, no matter whether you’re in uniform or at a kid’s dentist appointment or in a new job. And know this: you didn’t quit. You didn’t fail. Allow yourself to let that go. You are a veteran. Your service counts.

We promise to remember you, and we promise to do better with our younger sisters.

Thank you for your service. 

–

–

–

---

Originally from Lowell, Massachusetts, Catherine Smart was an Army brat, an active duty Military Police officer, and an Army spouse. She and her husband live in Northern Virginia and love to visit their (almost) grown sons in college. She is a graduate student in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University.

–

–

–