I Follow Her Between War and Not War

by Gail Hosking

I always begin telling anyone who asks about my mother with the images I have memorized. She is wearing her favorite cork sandals that she bought in an open-air Italian market while on vacation with my father, a life-long soldier. She stands under a sign for Milan and Genoa, and later near a rock wall with grapevines behind her as my father takes her picture. The Mediterranean Sea air blows gently across her face, and on this sun-drenched day, the camera reveals her loveliness—legs shapely and lean and a head of rich, brown curls. I use the word innocent to describe my mother because that was who she was in so many ways—“the most innocent young woman I had ever laid my eyes on,” an old family friend once said. My mother had no idea what life would be for a soldier’s wife. She wanted only adventure and love.

My mother, daughter of a farmer, a coalminer and a preacher, slips her sexy naked feet into cork sandals as she stands on the Riviera with my father in towns like San Remo, Nice or La Spezia, or sips espresso with him at outdoor cafes as the moon rises over the Apennines. In another picture she wears these same sandals to a picnic in a Bavarian field on the edge of a hill with other army families. The summer grass is dotted with olive drab wool blankets—army style—and occasionally someone brings a silk camouflaged bedspread made from an old military parachute. Campbells Soup cardboard boxes from the Commissary and coolers of food sit in the background. I am a five-year-old blur wearing a Davy Crockett sweatshirt as I run toward a fellow army brat with a stick for roasting marshmallows. There isn’t a sign of this Meisbach location, nor does the photograph reveal that a war was fought on this soil ten years before. The Cold War surrounds the air my mother breathes here, so palpable with the tension of imminent fighting as I run freely across the grass behind her. 

My father stands off to the right with a bottle of beer in one hand while the other hand tugs to pull down his civilian shirt. His crew cut and tattooed arms give him away as a soldier even though he isn’t in uniform. He stares at my mother and looks like he is ready to call out her name. She holds a jar of iced tea in one hand and a glass in another. She wears her favorite striped shorts. Her hair is cut short, her nails are painted, and she looks happy. The only shadow of any poverty on this luxurious summer afternoon is my mother’s childhood scar on her left leg, caused by boils that came from malnutrition during the Depression. I can almost feel its smooth indent, the way it tucks like a secret into the middle of her slender white leg. Something about that look between my parents reminds me that she will do anything for him, follow him anywhere. 

I tell anyone who asks that if my mother wanted to be an army wife, then she had to pose with her three blond little girls for a passport, wear dog tags, and carry an identity card. These were her tickets from one country to another, one base to another, one life to another, though it was much further between these places than she ever said. My father is not inside her passport. He has his own, which is to say the army separates him from his family.

The music of Brenda Lee from one of the many 45s that my mother collects folds into these familiar images. I’m Sorry or All Alone Am I play repeatedly while my mother changes my brother’s diapers or makes meatloaf for dinner. When this music is over, she puts on the records of Elvis Presley—her favorite—and then Chubby Checker’s twist, and we dance together in our enlisted men’s housing until my father comes home from the base across the street where he teaches everything there is to know about heavy weapons, whatever that means. 

While he spends his days with other soldiers, my mother lingers around a kitchen table with other women, listening to the details of someone else’s life, even if it takes all afternoon. When we are stationed outside Fort Bragg in North Carolina, and she sits in Doris Ladacini’s trailer near other military nomads. My mother and Doris smoke cigarettes, sip sweet iced tea and give each other a Tony perm or paint their nails red. There is always talk of their men, the ones they do not wholly understand, the ones who are often gone on maneuvers or preparing for the next possible war. 

She will tell you that she just wants to have some fun and forget that the world is falling apart, so she pulls taffy with us when my father is away, shows us how to make banana pudding, or sleds down the hill between identical military apartments at midnight in Germany. She gets her ears pierced so she can wear earrings and look beautiful. Beauty is all she has to offer. That and her loyalty, along with her capacity for accommodation, something she will pass on to her daughters.

My mother teaches my sisters and me how a day could be filled with talk and other women and still be worthwhile. The smallest events mattered, and the longest conversations weren’t about wasting time, but were instead what life was about. A good story took time, people you cared about took time, and time was something she had. As a child I took her pace for granted, thought that the whole world lived this way, and at the same time wanted life to be something else. Something more. When her sister Lorraine turned my hand over and contemplated my future while she brushed her nails along my palm lines, my mother might think for hours afterwards what it was that Aunt Lorraine meant by a divided lifeline. She’d get up for more iced tea, pull the curtains back to let in more light, and then return to the subject knowing it demanded serious attention.

Eventually the images of my mother shift, no matter how hard I try to freeze time. As though from another lifetime, I see my mother and me, many years later, by the kitchen window, eating lunch in a housing project. My father is gone to war again—this one in Viet Nam—and though neither of us know it yet, he will not return. I am sixteen and my mother thirty-two. The Illinois sunlight comes through the window and reveals a stack of unwashed dishes at the sink. My mother is drunk when she leans forward on her elbow and slurps her soup. I have come to depend on politeness and manners to cover over a multitude of failings; but here is my mother in the afternoon stillness after another long drink, and nothing can hide that fact. I want to take the spoon from her, want to throw it against the wall. “Stop drinking!” I want to say. “Stop looking so helpless. Be someone else!” But instead, I swallow my words and mimic the way she moves the spoon to her lips. I roll my eyes with disgust. Tears well up in her eyes like a child who has been reprimanded. She blows her nose and looks over at me. 

This is who I am, Gail, she says. Leave me alone.

Stories that jump back and forth between these two worlds are caught in my throat just like my mother was caught between the world of the military and the world of the family she wanted. Between war and not war. Between love and its loss. Clutched between the way things were and the way things were supposed to be sits the public and the private, her ability to say yes and her desire to say no. The material of my mother’s life insists on claiming me even though I have wanted to forget it all. But I cannot put these pictures away, and like the army in war, I cannot leave her body behind.

---

“I’ve been working on a memoir about my mother off and on for twenty years because a mentor insisted, because a wife of a VN vet said she really wanted to know about ‘that woman,’ and because it seemed natural to write the other half after publishing a memoir about my father, a recipient of The Medal of Honor. I finally finished it just as the pandemic was coming to a close and my cancer treatments were finished. It’s traveling out there in the world now looking for a home. This essay comes out of that work.” —Gail Hosking

Gail Hosking is the author of the memoir Snake’s Daughter: The Roads in and out of War (University of Iowa Press) and a book of poems, Retrieval (Main Street Rag Press). She has an MFA from Bennington College, and her essays and poems have been published in such places as Timberline, Post Road, Iowa Review, Reed Magazine, Chattahoochee Review and Consequence Magazine. Several of Hosking’s pieces have been anthologized, the latest in Proud To Be: Writing By American Warriors (Southeast Missouri State University Press). She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Countdown to Peace

by Caroline Igra

10

Riots on the Temple Mount. I’ve been there. Once. Before I was Israeli. My memories are hazy, blurred by the dust and glitter of that sparkly dome. There was a huge rock deep underground from which Muhammad was said to have leapt straight to heaven. Now my vision is clearer, but I can only see what’s broadcast: violent clashes between extremists determined to ruin any chance for coexistence and a police force doomed to overreact. The thousands who come to pray in the mosque are barely mentioned as politics supersede peace. 

9

The conflict over Sheikh Jarrah has moved front and center. Israelis are discouraged from visiting this neighborhood of Jerusalem as it has become symbolic of the never-ending struggle between Israelis and Palestinians, our chicken and egg. I wonder if it will ever be possible to live together, sharing the same space without contests and claims. Everyone populating this land has a hearth and a family. The shouting faces, red and swollen with emotion, prove that’s not enough. 

8

Outbreaks of violence from too many corners to count. Pockets of frustration and anger have boiled over into a conflagration fanned by the Jewish ultra-right and Hamas proxies harvested from the Israeli Arab community. The former, known as La Familia, a lame attempt to adopt the mystique of the Mafia, converges on a gas station ten minutes from my house, the one where my parents met my first baby. Then it was a quiet corner with a little hummus place. Now it’s the site of an angry mob. I pray that the blistering blaze will fizzle out but fear that we’re past that. I live in a land where tempers are high, and emotions are raw, yet the birds greet me peacefully each morning.  

7

Hamas has launched rockets at Jerusalem, a place sacred to both Jews and Muslims. This changes everything. My son comes home midweek. We share a vegan pizza at a local dive and enjoy our privileged lives: his ability to opt for a diet with endless strictures, my right to be annoyed by it. Several bites in, he announces that he has come for his military gear. I freeze, midbite. He looks me straight in the eye and assures me he won’t need it. I don’t trust him. Seven years ago, he told me he was safely tucked into an army base nearby. He wasn’t.

6

The sky is falling. I imagine Chicken Little, hysterically trying to find shelter. It’s worse in the South. I couldn’t live there. Here in the middle of Israel, just a half hour north of Tel Aviv, it’s strangely quiet. My reality is completely different from that of most of the country.

5

My daughter spends a night of shelling in Tel Aviv crouching in her apartment’s stairwell. She is terrified, this experience replacing former horrific ones, like vomiting in front of friends and being groped while drunk. My son sits beside me, watching our world fall apart on TV, awaiting that call. I search for comfort and find it in simply knowing where they are.  

4

Huge buildings in Gaza housing military installations are felled by the Israeli air force. The dramatic video becomes the footage du jour. I can’t look away, so grateful for the pilots. Because of them, there may not be a ground invasion. My son’s gear is poised by the door to his room. I stare at his jittery leg, proof of the nervous energy coiled up inside. He looks like a normal kid, but life has made him different. I want to hug him but restrain myself. It will only add to the tension. 

3

Sirens. Rocket alerts flash across my telephone screen in an endless stream, a tickertape of horror. The news is replete with the damage: buildings punctured with holes, homes destroyed, lives lost. But the threat from outside doesn’t compare with that from within. Those who want to shake things up have resorted to local violence. My favorite restaurant in Akko, the one that serves raw tuna with a dribble of sweet balsamic, is burned down by an angry mob looking to punish. I know that this isn’t how most Israelis feel—Jews or Arabs—that there isn’t that much hatred. But that doesn’t make it less scary or hurt less. 

2

Filled with despair, I call my housekeeper, the woman from the neighboring Arab town who has accompanied decades of my life, watching my children crawling around in diapers, strutting in jeans and army greens. She too is scared. We talk about wanting peace, wanting to enjoy our families, our simple lives. We bemoan the fact that the crazies get to call the shots. Fear segues to sadness.

1

Fewer sirens, less bombing. A new norm squeezes through the cracks of the muck, as welcome as the sunshine. My daughter grabs a meal at her favorite vegetarian restaurant between the rocket blasts, jumping into their shelter when the sirens sound then returning to finish her salad before heading to the beach. My son puts away his army gear and returns to Tel Aviv. There won’t be a ground incursion. But what comes next? The country exhales with relief, hope and weary hesitation. How does this story end when the countdown finishes? 

---

“I wrote ‘Countdown to Peace’ in an effort to capture the personal strain of the periodic flare-ups in my ‘neighborhood.’ I wanted it to reflect the way abject fear is diluted to the mundane by the simple desire for calm and normalcy.” —Caroline Igra

Caroline Goldberg Igra is a freelance writer, an art historian, a triathlete, and a mother. She lives in Tel Aviv, Israel, but maintains close ties with her hometown, Philadelphia. She has published numerous academic art historical articles on 19th century European art, several exhibition catalogs connected with her work as a curator, and a monograph on J.D. Kirszenbaum (Somogy Editions d’art, 2013) chosen as one of Slate Magazine’s Best Books that year. Her nonfiction has been featured in several online journals, including Away Journal, Mothers Always Write, Pandemic Journal, and Another Chicago Magazine. She has published two novels, Count to a Thousand (Mandolin Publishing, Jerusalem, 2018) and From Where I Stand (Koehler Books, Virginia, 2022). She is presently working on her third.

War Fever

by Kathleen Tighe

“War is like love. It always finds a way.” —Bertolt Brecht

One afternoon during a rare visit home, my son Chris sauntered into the kitchen carrying a gas mask encased in a jungle green knapsack.

“I found this upstairs, in the closet,” he said. “Let me show you how it goes.” He deftly snapped straps around his hips and in seconds the knapsack was attached tightly to his left thigh.

“So here’s what you do,” Chris continued. “You’re in imminent danger. You lift the flap, pull out the mask, put it on.” He demonstrated. Chris had just completed months of training as a newly commissioned officer in the U.S. Marines. That experience included exposure to chemical weapons.

His speed impressed me, even as my stomach twisted familiarly at the possibility he might need it. “Is that mask like the one you used at Quantico?” 

“Nah,” the new Marine sneered. “This one’s way old.”

In the safety of my Michigan kitchen, I gazed at the gas mask, remembering that it was already old when I first saw it, over 25 years ago in a far-off land, when I hoped it could save my life.

*

Today, cable TV fills my home with burning buildings, shell-shocked refugees, tank convoys, grieving victims. The images shock, reminiscent as they are of old WWII documentaries, yet horrifyingly immediate. War has engulfed us again. This time it lands in Ukraine, an unprovoked attack by its neighbor, Russia. Nations have unified in opposition but the aggression continues unabated.

*

My earliest childhood memories include scenes on the nightly news of young men clad in jungle camouflage running through rainforests or rice paddies, helicopters whirring overhead, daily tallies of death. In fourth grade, a classmate’s older brother was killed and we were all somber for a day or two, contemplating the unimaginable. By the time I discovered Holocaust-themed novels, Saigon had fallen and the United States had retreated from Southeast Asia.

*

As a young adult, I assumed my place in the world with confidence. Even as I traveled to countries with conflicts, through unsettled regions, I moved with complacency, as though wrapped in a cocoon of protection. Its proof was the blue passport I wielded. That, and the Cold War was ending. We were entering an era of peace. My optimism was based on naiveté. 

The West’s euphoria over the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of the Soviet Union ended abruptly when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, setting the stage for a new hot war. For months the world’s leaders debated responses while Saddam Hussein rattled sabers and promised “rivers of blood.” In the staff lounge of the international school in Saudi Arabia where I taught, colleagues shared news, rumors, fears.

The school year had barely begun yet families were leaving. As students withdrew, the staff grew nervous. A few teaching couples resigned. Others talked of it.

The US Consulate warned of possible terror attacks, so we held drills on campus, amassing the entire student body into the gymnasium, a Quonset hut set far back from the highway. Could a school be targeted? Surely not. Deniz, a Turkish student in my 7th grade class, walked alongside me as we hurried to the gym. “We’ll be fine,” she assured me. “My mother says the Americans would close the school if it wasn’t safe.”

Today’s Twitter feed features the destruction of Ukraine. Heavily-pregnant women are led from a devastated building, a maternity hospital. A theater sheltering frightened families with children is bombed. People lined up for bread are shot. Warmongers know no bounds.

From my classroom window, 30 years ago, I watched as military forces poured into that desert kingdom, C-130s landing on nearby airport runways, unloading, taking off again. As I read aloud from Where the Red Fern Grows, fighter jets flew sorties overhead, so loud I had to stop reading. The buildup was called Operation Desert Shield. We were safe within the shield, our school administration asserted, echoing State Department officials. Staff could leave if they were afraid, but leaving would result in termination. In any case, the school would remain open. It was a symbol of security. Close, and too many people would leave. Oil production would slow down.

All these years later, I still feel the uncertainty, that deer-caught-in-the-headlights sense of not knowing what to do. Leave, and lose a job I loved. Stay, and risk being caught in a war’s crossfire. I remember the anger I felt toward those who would use a school as a political pawn. It was a moment of profound disillusionment, one that has shaped my skepticism toward our government ever since.

This morning my email inbox is flooded with pleas for donations, anything to ease the plight of millions of Ukraine’s evacuees fleeing their homes in desperation. It is impossible to imagine, yet the scene is astonishingly familiar. It replays itself, it seems, every few years or so. Only the faces and locations change. I think of the highway I took to campus in Dhahran, its westbound lanes choked with cars, station wagons, minivans, all laden with suitcases, grocery bags, mattresses lashed to rooftops. President Bush’s deadline in the sand was drawing near. In my classroom, dwindling numbers of students awaited me. The Clash played on repeat in my head: Should I stay or should I go now?

My husband and I were awakened one night in January as waves of jets roared overhead, streaming 200 miles north. The dreaded war had begun. I pictured Kuwait’s modern coastline city and the destruction heading its way. 

A few nights later, scud missiles were launched our way.

The first hit as I prepared for bed, brushing my teeth in a second-floor bathroom. Despite the concrete construction of our villa, the percussion rattled walls and windows and all illusion of safety. I took the stairs two at a time, swallowing toothpaste as I leapt, racing for the safe room we’d prepared in a closet beneath the stairs. 

The night sky exploded: Iraqi scuds were lobbed indiscriminately toward Dhahran where the US military controlled the international airport, and Patriot missiles overtook them midflight. As interceptions thudded overhead, I remembered the words of a young soldier reassuring me as he wolfed down Thanksgiving dinner in our dining room a few months earlier. “Don’t you worry, ma’am,” he said earnestly. “We’ll take that scud out before it even leaves Iraqi airspace.”

Rumors of chemical-laden missiles flew rampantly, and we now clutched Vietnam-era gas masks, shipped to us from Dan’s brother, who had found them in an Army Navy surplus shop in Florida. We were glad to have masks, but they offered scant comfort as we huddled under the stairs.

The gods were kind that night. Fragments of exploded missiles fell harmlessly into the desert surrounding our housing compound. The dreaded chemical warfare never materialized.

*

Six weeks later, Iraq abandoned Kuwait. Americans view this as a “success story.” Three days before the war ended, one last scud missile was launched. It hit a US Army barracks, killing 27 soldiers and wounding 98. That barracks, just miles from where we lived, was located behind a toy store where I would later bring my two little boys to shop.

One of those little boys is now in Europe, prepared to defend NATO if the war in Ukraine spreads. I stumbled too close to a war unintentionally; my son has chosen the life of a warrior. Thoroughly perplexed, I once asked him why. He answered simply, “You always told me to find a way to serve others. Not everyone can do this. I can.”

Humanity is stuck in a continuous spiral, despite our best intentions. We grow up learning of evil men – Josef Mengeles, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin – and we admire the heroes who stood against them. We turn the page, close the chapter, assure ourselves that particular horror is behind us. And then it rises again. And again.

In the face of it, it is easy to despair, but I seek out glimmers of hope.

As leaders around the world fail us, others step up. A comedian-turned-politician becomes an inspirational giant; a chef sets up field kitchens to feed the hungry; young men and women willingly shoulder new burdens to once again defend democracy.

In Ukraine, a grandmother fills the pockets of her invaders with sunflower seeds. She tells the Russians when they die on Ukrainian soil, sunflowers will grow where they fall.

---

“As the drums of war began beating again in Eastern Europe, dusty memories from my experience in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War were revived. Those memories, the ongoing war in Ukraine, and my son’s military service resulted in this essay, ‘War Fever.’” —Kathleen Tighe

Kathleen Tighe is a writer and educator based in Michigan. She writes creative nonfiction, flash fiction, and poetry. Her work has appeared in The Write Launch, Dunes Review, Still Life, Qua Literary and Fine Arts Magazine, Writing From the Inside Out, and The Purposeful Mayonnaise. Her lifelong travel influences much of her work.