by Nancy Stroer
Consider me, the young lieutenant, hands wrapped around the sweating can of Jolt Cola with its lightning bolt and jaunty reminder that it contains “All the sugar and twice the caffeine!” I’m tonight’s staff duty officer, tasked with sitting watch in a plain, blonde office in the headquarters building of Aberdeen Proving Ground and I need all the caffeine I can get. The runner, an enlisted kid, is here to fetch any commander required in an emergency, but emergencies are pretty scarce in this rural corner of Maryland, so I’ve told him he can sleep tonight. The fall sunlight is only just fading through the somewhat grimy upstairs windows, but enlisted kids are a notoriously sleepy bunch and I’m looking forward to having the softness of the night to myself. I ease off the pop top and the can hisses, but the runner doesn’t stir on the cot in the interior office.
It’s not that I haven’t been enjoying the four-month leadership course. I’m reveling in it, as a matter of fact. But all the fun and partying also wears out the newly commissioned. I feel the need to wallow in the dirty-windowed glow of the government beige office alone. Not that I’m in a particularly introspective phase of life, but my cells crave solitude and the Army is so relentlessly focused on togetherness. Battle buddies. Unit cohesion. The low-grade but pervasive belief that a married solider is more stable than a single one. In a few months, my first platoon sergeant will say these exact words to me, right after he says, “We got to get you married, ma’am. An unmarried female lieutenant is going to cause problems.”
I’ve never been much of a follower, though. I am a fun girl. But I am also a good girl, or like to think of myself that way, so dutifully, I tear a sheet of paper from a nearby notepad.
FROM THE DESK OF THE POST COMMANDER, it blares.
Dear Aviator, I write. My handwriting is friendly. Forward-leaning but not curly. I do not dot the “i” with a heart.
Sitting staff duty and looking forward to NOT drinking with everyone around the pool tonight. The carousing is fun but it’ll be nice to be quiet for a while. To decompress. I’m planning to turn on the ball game in a minute.
This week we’re rebuilding jeep engines. First, we’re tearing them down and we only pass the task if they start up after the rebuild. I’m in a team of four female lieutenants and I think we’ll finish first since we’re the only ones actually reading and following the instructions and asking questions. This skill set, not turning wrenches, might be what ultimately makes us good maintenance officers. The guys are mostly clowning around and breaking things, and acting like none of it matters. Which I guess it doesn’t really, since it’s not work we’ll have to do when we get to our units. The instructors must love watching a bunch of recent history and psychology majors try to use the humanities to outsmart internal combustion engines.
I pause, tapping the end of my Skilcraft pen against my lower lip, to consider a particular history major, the one with the sleepy brown eyes and Southern drawl to match. The one who calls me “Buddy” and worships the ground I stomp in my shiny jump boots. I used to adore the Aviator, but lately I’m growing tired of being talked down to, and the not-so-subtle digs about my appearance. The look of disgust on his face when he’d pointed out my cellulite, and my last birthday when he’d bought me a ladylike gold wristwatch to replace the punk-y red plastic one I preferred. I’ve begun to feel a bit like Eliza Doolittle. No one asked her if she tired of Professor Higgins’ improvement projects, and just as it took Eliza a while to retrieve the self-confidence she’d probably buried during adolescence, I have only just begun to feel smothered. Maybe it’s necessary to enjoy being the object of someone’s affection before you can begin to resent them. It’s only later, when the reserves of my belief in myself have been recovered, that I can tell the Aviator to step off. It will take a few more years but eventually my friend Robbie, a Navy chief, and I will hold a bonfire to destroy all the gifts we’ve been given that came entangled with strings. I will first smash, and then burn the gold wristwatch—Eliza resurrecting her mojo.
Now, though, I’m keeping time with the Historian. I don’t yet know as I write to the Aviator on that Klimt-like autumn evening, that in a few years I’ll destroy the golden time piece. I only know that I feel slightly resentful and a bit impatient to get through this letter. I tell the Aviator about the trips down to the Inner Harbor and up to Gettysburg. I write about the trip to Rehoboth my whole maintenance officer class took after a field exercise, unfurling the sleeping bags still in the trunks of our newly purchased cars right onto the beach. I don’t mention that my sleeping bag was next to the Historian’s.
I don’t write about, because I’m only barely aware, how I feel about the peaceful protests happening in Hungary, East Germany, the Baltic states. How two million people sporting crispy perms and last season’s knockoff acid-washed jeans, choking on the secondhand smoke of Soviet cigarettes in the shade of cinderblock architecture joined hands in the world’s longest human chain back in August. How that peaceful chain has somehow unlocked the concertina-covered fence between Hungary and Austria, and guards are looking the other way as eastern Europeans drain through. I should be reflecting on how this might affect my future job in West Germany, which I think will be like putting a finger in the dike of the Fulda Gap to keep the Russians from pouring through, but will in fact be a dismantling of the military presence the U.S. built over four decades of Cold War.
But I’m stateside and blissfully unaware of all that, preoccupied as I am with being on active duty at last, having money in my pocket for the first time, and keys to my new Cutlass jingling in that same BDU pocket. Not to mention, spending all day in the classroom with a load of similarly flush and playful lieutenants, and frolicking all afternoon and evening around the pool at the Holiday Inn. I’m having the time of my life. I’m not thinking about world politics or the fact that I’m a conniving little cheater. I’m feeling unencumbered and the Army is bankrolling it. Why, after all those years in the Ivy League trenches, would I not drink and carouse and bask in the admiring glances of sleepy brown eyes? I wonder if it is more honorable to always engage with the world, or if it does more for a soul to connect with the joy of each moment. Do we flip and flop from one state of being to the other or coexist in all planes simultaneously? I’ve always been the kind of person who eats one thing at a time on my plate. Not a bite of this and a bite of that. First my vegetables and then that leg of chicken. Right now, it’s dessert time, baby.
I was raised with the micro-morality that you shouldn’t sleep with people you’re not married to but don’t believe it’s the real rule, which is that you should be careful with other people’s hearts. I’m convinced that the rule behind the rule of not sleeping around was made by men who weren’t as concerned with hurting other people as they were with being cuckolded. Because four years after Aberdeen when I run into the Aviator on an Alp (not literally) his ski buddies will say with not a small amount of self-righteous indignation, “It really hurt him when you told him about the Historian.” But I’d been with the Aviator long enough to know that the one thing he hated more than being hurt was to lose. His sadness wasn’t over losing me—but at losing to the Historian. I took my verbal lumps from the Aviator’s friends, and he and I met for dinner a few weeks later, had a bunch to drink and I slept with him. Not for closure, but because I wanted to, and it wasn’t that great. I sensed he was getting back at the Historian, even though the Historian was way out of the picture by then. Such are the ways of the conqueror and the conquered, people—soldiers—capable of hurting others while telling themselves they deserve it.
Nowadays law enforcement officers shoot guys for running away from them, and fifty years before that night in Aberdeen soldiers rounded up other people, and if those people made a run for it, and even if they didn’t run, they shot them, too. All perfectly legal. All easy to say, maybe they deserved what they got. Or, I was just doing my job, especially if you’re the kind of person who bends the moral arc of your brain towards rationalizing your behavior. Which most of us are, on micro-levels until gradually we’re up to macro-strength, especially when society casts a halo over our professions.
But I don’t write any of this in my letter to the Aviator because I’m only just waking up as a human being at that point. Barely capable of introspection. I put down my pen and stare out the window at the training post. The light has gone and the night is boring and bleak out on Aberdeen Proving Ground. Nobody gives prime real estate to weapons testers, which is what happens at a proving ground. Weapons and people get tested.
I crack open another Jolt and listen for the rustling of the duty runner on the creaky Army cot next door, but he doesn’t make a peep so I slurp the soda that collects around the rim of the can before folding the letter. I don’t have anything else to say to the Aviator. Probably the less said, the better. I reach over to turn on the TV. I’m not much of a TV person, but this is a time after required college reading lists, but before handheld games, and reclaiming my love of books. I do love baseball, though, and game three of the World Series is about to start, the cross-town rivalry in San Francisco between the Giants and the Oakland As.
Instead of an infield warm-up, the screen flashes to the Nimitz freeway, levels collapsed on top of each other, pancaking cars between them. There’s been an earthquake, and just like that, a thousand tons of concrete flattens my heart. I cannot quite catch my breath.
My recent inclination to grab momentary pleasure without worrying about the fallout has both surprised and delighted me, but that earthquake shakes me by the shoulders and seems to say, “Get serious, kid. Have fun but don’t waste your life. You were built for bridges, not for creating wreckage and then blaming it on other people.”
But I let the runner sleep while I stayed awake, I argue. I’m a good person, right? Soldiers love me. Even as I think that, I recognize a tremor of truth that soldiers seem to like me because they wonder if they’re the guy I’m going to sleep with. As an unmarried female lieutenant, I’m going to cause problems.
So sudden, this earthquake in the Bay area. So long, the evolution of power from Cold War to peaceful, person-led reclamation of power, holding hands across eastern European borders. Those people, so earnest and uncool to me, live in a world where immensely hard things happened right in their neighborhoods, to people they knew, but they hadn’t let their lungs adapt to the resultant toxic political atmosphere. They took action against the acid rain, the rewriting of history and the repression of the rest of it. The earthquake was right: I was coasting along a path, not choosing it. Nature provides random, catastrophic reminders of the impermanence of all things. I could stop drifting along, reacting, rationalizing, ignoring the consequences. I could choose to actively engage in the world like the eastern Europeans did. On the other hand, it would be so easy to inhabit the Army of the Aviator, where pilots play around in helicopters all week then shower and change into fresh flight suits on Friday afternoons to impress everyone at the O Club. Hell, I already inhabit that world and then some, drinking around the pool with the Historian, while allowing the Aviator to think we’re fine…fine…fine.
I remain in that world for quite some time. It is easy to be a passive dirt bag, to dip a foot into the Holiday Inn pool while others suffer, and rationalize hurting other dirt bags. From there it’s only one more step towards justifying stronger harm excused by the moral requirement to retaliate, to defend, and only a few steps farther until anything is acceptable because the oath of office could be wrapped around all my actions like a cloak. Once you’ve received the message that it’s acceptable to hurt people because they’ve hurt you, even on a micro level, it’s easy to continue to drift on a current of self-righteousness. Soldier-trained women, like me, are capable of this. I am capable of that cheerful indifference to causing pain—following the first general order of the Army, never admit you fucked up.
All I know on that golden night that turns dark in Aberdeen is that I need solitude. I do not have the self-awareness to pinpoint another source for my discomfort. Even California, and those collapsing slabs of concrete, are all the way across the country. I want to say that I turn a moral corner that night, and the earthquake is the jolt that helps me see the corner, but I turn away. I turn off the TV. And though I won’t think about the San Francisco earthquake and its devastating impact on so many people until many years later, the image of the collapsed Nimitz freeway seers itself into my subconscious and, eventually, I’ll find my way off the drifting, easy path. Yet I’ll remain on its sidelines, like a coach who whispers to players as they pass, “Do as I say, not as I did. Or hell—do as I did. Have some fun, but don’t be a dirtbag about it. Life can change in a second.”
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Nancy holds degrees from Cornell and Boston University, and served as an Army maintenance officer in the beer-soaked trenches of post-Cold War Germany. Her work has appeared in Stars and Stripes, Soldiers magazine, Hallaren Lit Mag, the Wrath-Bearing Tree, and Things We Carry Still, an anthology of military writing from Middle West Press. In addition to writing, Nancy is a teacher and trainer, and an adjunct faculty member of the Ellyn Satter Institute, a 503(c) not-for-profit organization that helps individuals and families develop a more joyful relationship to food and their bodies. Playing Army, her first novel, is a 2025 Award Finalist of the Military Writers Society of America.
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