"You Know When the Men Are Gone"

Two days ago, I wrote about a memoir of an Army wife. I have now just finished a fictional counterpart to that book, a collection of short stories on the same theme: military families. The book is “You Know When the Men are Gone” (Amy Einhorn, 2011), by Siobhan Fallon, who is herself a military wife whose husband was twice deployed to Iraq. These linked stories tell of the pain felt both by soldiers fighting in terrible conditions and worrying about their families back home and by those families themselves worrying about their soldiers, meanwhile struggling to make semi-normal lives for themselves while their husbands and fathers are far away. And then when there should be a happy ending – when the men come back – there is often new pain as a couple finds themselves strangers who cannot understand each other. One story’s title, “You Survived the War, Now Survive the Homecoming,” encapsulates this sad irony. Let me note here that in this book, the soldiers are all men and the ones waiting and coping (or not) at home are all women; obviously in real life, this is not always the case, but it is the most common situation by far. Fallon’s characters are very well-drawn and believable, and her stories are wrenching but well-told. The stories alternate between the everyday struggles and the harsh and sometimes tragic special circumstances that happen to so many military families. There is a vividness and immediacy to the stories that is impressive. Some of the stories are inventive and surprising; one, for example, tells of a deployed soldier so eaten up with fear that his wife is unfaithful to him that he secretly comes home on his leave and hides in the family basement to spy on her. Most of all, this book, like the Burana memoir I wrote about on 3/13, gives us insight into a world about which most of us have little idea. We know the broad outlines from news reports, but these stories take us behind the scenes to a painful, complicated place that should be more widely known.