“He went to the wardroom with some JOs. C’mon man, let’s do the same.”
Wilson donned his flight suit and began to lace his boots. Five more months. He took stock of his situation. One thousand miles north kids were getting their legs blown off with IEDs on a daily basis. And that didn’t even take into account the misery of living day-to-day in the 110-degree talcum-sand hell of Anbar Province… for a full year.
Compared to that, putting up with humiliation from known prick “Saint Patrick” is a small sacrifice. The bigger one is being away from Mary and the kids. Combat flying over Iraq would be a relief, and short of that, the routine flight schedule offered an almost daily respite from the XO. Wilson knew if he wanted to be a squadron CO, he would have to take it. All he had to do was take it for the remainder of this cruise. The question was whether or not his pride and vanity would let him.
Maybe I don’t want it, he thought as he pulled tight on the laces.
In her stateroom that evening, Olive wound down from a long day at the duty desk. She forced herself to e-mail her mother a birthday greeting full of the emoticon hearts and flowers her mother loved. The head cheerleader at Vanderbilt in the late 1970’s, her mother was a Knoxville socialite, still stunning at age fifty. The hair, the teeth, the heels — Camille Bennett had it all. She also attended every important community event. Junior League. Democratic Party fundraisers. Garden Club tea parties. With one son in Vanderbilt medical school, and the other as Sigma Nu president at Ole Miss, no one could match her.
Olive’s mother left her father, Ted Teel, when Olive was a small child — probably because she couldn’t stand to hear “Camille Teel!” from her squealing sorority sisters one more day. She didn’t mind Ted’s six-figure salary at the prestigious downtown law firm of Smith, Teel and Martin, but that was adequate only until 50ish investment banker Mike Bennett came into her life with seven figures. Her mother was pregnant within a year, and Olive suddenly had a distant middle-aged stepfather to go along with her absent father.
From the time Olive was born, Camille wanted to use her as a dress-up doll, a role Olive fought for as long as she could remember. Olive could play the piano and had learned about white gloves and party manners at the cotillion. She could even navigate the make-up counter at Lord and Taylor, and her statuesque height and athletic prowess caught everyone’s attention. But Olive knew how to draw boundaries; for example, she eschewed the cheerleader culture.
She liked the guys — but wanted to be around them on her terms, not as an arm piece — or piece of anything. Her mother cried when Olive was accepted into the Naval Academy and rarely visited. When she did visit on the yard, radiant in her navy-colored suit and stilettos, she would scoff under her breath and say, “Kristin, must you wear those mannish Oxfords?” Then she would spy a boy and whisper, “There’s a cute one! Unbutton a few buttons and go up to him. Go on.” Olive shook her head at the thought of it.
Camille cried again when Olive was accepted to flight school. “You marry a pilot, not become one!” Olive was a huge disappointment to her mother, and always had been. The calluses of emotional defense she had developed from childhood were the foundation of the reserved personality she still maintained. Even now, whenever one of her Junior League friends asked about Olive, her mother politely said, “Kristin flies for the Air Force,” and quickly changed the subject. Camille could not have identified an FA-18 Hornet to save her life.
Just as Olive hit “send” on the e-mail, her roommate, “Psycho,” burst through the door.
“Hey, how was duty?” Psycho asked. Without bothering to listen to Olive’s answer, she undid her hair and began peeling off her flight suit.
“Fine. How was midrats?”
“Awesome! Sat with a bunch of Moonshadows. You know Lester and Crunch? They crack me up every time! Smoke was there… Dutch… Sponge…. good time.” Lifting her t-shirt over her head, she added, “You should go up there. They are probably still there.”
