“I can’t do the deployments,” I said. “Ten months plus all the work-ups beforehand? That’s more than a year of the boys’ lives you’d be missing. You can’t get that back.”
Just when it seemed we were deadlocked, we discovered a third option, one that initially looked like it was closed to us: full-time support, or FTS, in the Navy Reserve. The Reserve exists, ostensibly, to support and augment the active-duty community in terms of “troop readiness,” but in reality the two are funded and run very differently. The transition from active duty to FTS is not one that’s heavily advertised or promoted, and it involves a terrifying leap over the chasm of unemployment because you have to completely resign from one community to even apply to the other.
For us, FTS could look like this: Ross could train F/A-18 squadrons by flying as their “red air,” or pretend enemy, in a dedicated adversary squadron. We could start out in one of four locations—Fallon, Virginia Beach, Key West, or New Orleans. He’d have a similar salary and continue to make rank and work toward his pension, but he would not deploy. It seemed like such a perfect compromise for us, honoring both the love of flying jets and the desire for a more stable home life. I wanted to leave it that way and focus on the next hurdle, the application period and hoping we could avoid a gap between the time Ross was honorably discharged from active duty and the time he started flying again with FTS. I think Ross wanted this too, but again, life is more complicated than that.
Given his preference of flying real estate, Ross would put Fallon as his first choice. The desert canyons, the salt flats, the mountains—all of it makes for some thrilling flying. But I can’t see myself going back. A house there legally belongs to us, the only place in the world that does, and when I imagine crossing its threshold again, or facing myself in its bathroom mirrors, when I imagine parking my car under those garage door tracks every day and lifting my kids out beneath them, I get a knot in my stomach.
For his part, Ross clearly has his reservations about giving up active duty. Coming back from a brief boat detachment to keep his carrier landing qualifications current, Ross said, “God, I’m going to miss it. That feeling when you first launch out? There’s nothing like it. I was up there above the water and looking down on the boat . . . It’s all I’ve ever wanted.” He looked straight at me and shook his head, saying it again: “It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
I nodded and gave him a sad smile, but it stung, standing there in front of him in the kitchen with our sons giggling and making faces at each other over the breakfast table behind us. Really? That’s all you’ve ever wanted? All I’ve ever wanted is right here in this room. But I didn’t say it. I told myself that was not what he meant. “He’ll need to grieve,” his mother told me later over the phone, and I hung on to this as my shield, knowing I might need to raise it again. The occasion presented itself one night as we were remembering the days of flight school. We were laughing together about the miserable and aggressive Dobermans who had lived on the other side of the chain-link fence in our backyard, and how I’d lost my temper with them one day and unwittingly stumbled on the way to win them over: spraying them in their faces with my garden hose. “You would have been so much happier as a helo wife,” he said, without a trace of malice. He meant it as an apology for the desolate places we’d lived, but I also couldn’t help seeing the wistful flash of an Alternate Ross, one who hadn’t asked me to come with him when he went to OCS.
Even more complicated are the ways our boys weigh in without even meaning to. Sam has grown into a blond, fair-skinned version of his father, and one of his favorite pastimes is cobbling together imitation flight gear—a bicycle helmet, swim goggles, and a surgical mask with an orange accordion tube sticking out of it doubled as a flight helmet and breathing mask for a long time. At his recent preschool graduation, Sam’s answer to what he wanted to be when he grew up was, “A pilot just like my dad.” His questions about everything seem to have no end, and recently he’s begun to ask about wars, about the gates we drive through every day, about the armed guards who check my ID. One night he asked, “Will they shoot me if I don’t eat my broccoli?” Horrified, I told him no, never, and thereafter encouraged him to unroll his window as we passed through and wave at the guards. He looks forward to it now and often shouts some random question to them as we pull up.