Ray and Bill both raised their families a half mile from each other in Snyder, Texas. They knew of each other, as families in small towns do, and some of their children attended school together. Bill started out as a telephone lineman, which was how he met my grandmother Rosa, who was working as a switchboard operator and helping to support her chaotic and embattled family of eleven. Bill and Rosa had three kids—my father, Royce, was the middle son who never felt like he fit in anywhere. My dad played baseball in high school, drank, and got into trouble until the drama coach, Jerry Worsham, took him under his wing and convinced him to try acting. My dad had finally found his niche, a place big enough to allow him to embrace his contradictory nature, the unabashed lover of poetry and literature mixed in with what I’ve always considered the slightly thuggish streak that later allowed him to blend in with oilfield roughnecks.
After his plan to get an engineering degree on the GI Bill failed, Ray joined his father in starting up a brick plant. He’d met my grandmother Mary during the war while he was stationed near Syracuse, New York, and transplanted her, after a long campaign of fictions and embellishments, to west Texas. My mother, Kathy, was number three of six children born to them, two years behind my father in school, and often felt lost in the shuffle, overshadowed by the drama of Mary and Ray’s tumultuous union in a house full of children and yelling. She grew to be six feet tall, a shy outcast and striking beauty with dark, expressive eyes who blossomed, like my father before her, under Jerry Worsham’s tutelage. Cast as romantic leads in a play the summer after my mom finished high school, my parents fell in love learning the lines of Lord Bothwell and Mary, Queen of Scots.
The path that led to their marriage four years later in Aberdeen, Scotland, was anything but straightforward. My dad was looking for a way out—out of Snyder, out of Texas, out of everything that seemed to lie ahead of him, including Vietnam, where his low draft number threatened to send him immediately upon graduation. In those four years, he managed to pack in a breakup with my mom; a preemptive enlistment in the Navy for Officer Candidate School to avoid being drafted into the Army; a failed engagement to another woman; a failed physical, for bee sting allergies, which then excluded him from all military service and nullified his OCS application; a brief stint in law school, from which he dropped out and moved back home with his parents; and jobs as both a plumber’s apprentice and a ditch digger. In the summer of 1972, he needed a win, badly, and he got two. First, he and my mom got back together, and second, a successful interview with an oil company looking for liberal arts graduates (teachable, they reasoned, and likely looking for work) meant he was soon leaving the country for oil rig work offshore in the North Sea near Scotland. “Halfheartedly,” as my mother remembers (“humbly,” if you hear it from my dad), he asked her to come with him.
By the time I found myself sketching out the first tentative lines of what life would be like married to a man in the Navy, I had all of these stories in the back of my head, along with a lifetime of being raised in the liberal stronghold of Austin, Texas, and a brief and deeply unsettling interlude of living in Saudi Arabia as an oil company dependent. Military service, in my family history, had started out as something my grandfathers took on because they were physically able and of age, and they did it during a war the country considered a shared effort for a noble cause, one for which everyone sacrificed something, even if it was just rubber or silk or sugar. For their children, my parents, being a soldier was a fate dealt out by lottery, and war, its causes and its course, was a topic of passionate debate and even riot. My understanding of the underlying principles of military service, and of the costs it exacted, was contradictory, full of silence, nightmares, embellishments, and changes of course.
Ross came from a similar history but somehow felt clearer about the issues on the table when he signed up for service. He pledged an oath to an ostensibly all-volunteer force, and our war turned into wars that kept spreading past the next promised “drawing down.” 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 knew what you signed up for” was a phrase I heard often and it infuriated me. It was a callous denial of empathy, a distancing move that drew a clear line between the people who made up the majority of the country and the people who did its fighting.
More than that, it was a jab in a tender place, the place where I had signed up for something when I made a promise to support Ross as his wife, but how could I—how could anyone—know exactly what challenges were going to be thrown our way? Sometimes it seemed like two different tasks whose interests were not necessarily aligned, supporting him in the microcosm of our marriage and supporting him in the larger world where he was a military pilot. Ross and I didn’t always agree—in either of these worlds—and where he saw things in a more black-and-white way, I remained confused, certain only that the harder I looked, the more gray I saw.
CHAPTER 6