As You Are Page 2

  I was happy for them. I expected to feel that drop-out of happiness that twists into self-pity once one of your dearest friends pairs up with the person they’ll be life partners with, but I didn’t feel that way about Alex and Luke. I was delighted for them. If anything, it made me more interested in creating a life where I was open to possibilities to find someone. I was satisfied with my accomplishments in terms of my education, but I had some pretty serious professional goals and a lot of questions about my future. I wanted to be a mother, I wanted to publish a book, I wanted to run a marathon, and I wanted to find my partner, the one who’d be with me. I wanted the great love, the decades and decades together piling up memories and grandchildren and greatgrandchildren.

  But I was also a pragmatist.

  I knew love was a fickle, slithering thing. It was hard to grasp, it was hard to hold on to, and my first two boyfriends had taught me it was not a guarantee. They’d loved me, and I think I’d loved them in a way, but not in the way I wanted. Not like the great loves in books, the romances I could devour in a sitting. And I knew that wasn’t all real, but seeing Luke and Alex, and to some degree even my perfectly practical but entirely devoted parents, made me sure it existed, at least for some.

  I wasn’t jealous or sad, but I felt… ready. Like I was standing at the start of a race, waiting for the gun to go off and let me run.

  Alex rang the doorbell and a woman answered the door. Her carrot-colored hair was curled to just under her chin, red lipstick bright on her lips. “Welcome, y’all!” She said and immediately pulled Alex into a hug.

  “Mrs. Jenny Wilson, this is Dr. Elizabeth Kent. Ellie’s my best friend, and she just moved here from New York.” Alex patted my shoulder again, and I extended my hand to shake the woman’s.

  “I’m Jenny. So nice to meet you Elizabeth. Are you settling in ok?” Her hands were soft and warm and her whole demeanor was friendly and open. It was a relief, for some reason, to find this first new woman to be so easy going. I’d heard only good things about Army wives from Alex, but I wasn’t sure if her exposure was tinted by who Luke was or her determination to see the best in people because she was planning to join their ranks in the near future.

  “Thank you, I am. Just finding my way around but I like my apartment, and I’m looking forward to getting to work next week and getting my project started.” We talked for another minute or two as she escorted us into the living room.

  “I thought I heard my Italian stallion! Come here!” a voice said from the couch, and then a little ball of blonde-haired energy barreled toward us. She hugged Alex, her perfectly wavy shoulder-length hair glinting under the living room’s track lighting. “You must be Ellie. Alex has raved about you. I’m Megan.”

  I took her outstretched hand. “So nice to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you as well.”

  “You are the prettiest doctor I’ve ever seen. I know that’s un-PC and I should be ashamed of myself, but can I say that I know you’re a genius so the fact that you look like this” she gestured up and down my body, “is almost offensive. But I already like you and know you’re good people, so… welcome to Fort Campbell.” She gave me a perfectly white-toothed smile, a pat on the shoulder, and then sauntered off in her high-heels. I stood looking after, not sure what to say and looked to Alex.

  Alex had spotted Luke through the sliding glass doors leading outside, and even though it was a chilly January afternoon, we went out to greet him since we hadn’t taken our jackets off. Before we reached them, Alex whispered, “Don’t be freaked by Megan. She’s like that. She has no filter, is borderline offensive, and I’m pretty sure she just adopted you, so go with it.”

  Megan was being generous. I was pretty—I could admit that. But I was squarely in the realm of normal—not someone who’d cause such an outburst. I had medium brown hair (though it was very long), medium brown eyes, pale skin, medium height for a woman, athletic but an eater… it was all very medium of me. At least outwardly. I could admit that my brain was exceptional, as was my taste in friends, but Megan couldn’t know about that yet since we’d only just met.

  I laughed nervously as we stepped up to Luke, just outside a small circle of men talking.

  “I wanna get you doing more for us, Harrison. I wanna see some of the younger soldiers certifying and moving up in skill level so we have a good rep by the end of this next year. They need something to focus on,” a grizzled looking man with a slash through one cheek and bushy eyebrows said in a sandpaper voice.

  “Roger, Sergeant Major,” I heard a voice mumble.

  “I think Benson would be a killer if he had more training,” someone added as Luke turned to us. He hugged Alex and kissed her cheek and then smiled at me and held out his arm for a side-hug. His bright blue eyes blazed with heat as he looked at her and I couldn’t help the smile on my face as I watched them. I hugged him back and smiled at him to let him know I was happy to be there (well, happy and incredibly uncomfortable, but who was counting?).

  “Guys, let me introduce you. You all know Alex, and this is her friend Elizabeth. She just moved to Clarksville and will be working here on base. Ellie, this is Sergeant Major Trask, Sergeant Jake Harrison, Captain James Ashley, First Sergeant Grant Jones, and Lieutenant Ben Holder.” The six men around the circle nodded at Alex and me, and I opened my hand wide, my arm bent at the elbow, in an ineloquent wave.

  “Don’t let us interrupt, we just wanted to say hi.” Alex smiled at them and moved to walk away.

  “Don’t you think we need to train Luke here to be a combatives expert? You saw what Harrison did to him in the ring.” A man with midnight skin and a glimmer of mischief in his eye smiled at Alex and pointed to Luke.

  “James, are you trying to get him killed? If he gets more training, that just means he’ll last ninety seconds instead of sixty.” Everyone but the man standing directly across from me laughed a bit. I wondered why this guy, who looked so serious from the set of his jaw and the glint of his sunglasses, wasn’t laughing too.

  “What’s combatives?” I asked the group, hearing my voice squeak as I spoke up. It was cold enough that my lips felt a little numb, and I was shifting my weight from one foot to the other trying to keep my blood flowing.

  “It’s what they call the Army’s hand to hand combat. Soldiers train for it a little in basic training, and then occasionally we get a chance to get more instruction so we can progress in skill level. Most bigger Army posts have competitions at least once a year so people can watch and the soldiers can practice,” Luke answered.

  “I guess that doesn’t sound as barbaric as I was imagining.” I smirked at the man Alex had called James, and who I knew was married to Megan. I knew James was a captain who’d been in about a decade like Luke, from what I was learning. The other men smiled at my assertion, but the man across from me was staring at me, and I felt the weight of his stare like a wet blanket.

  I felt the stare and heard the grunt, or something like a grunt, in the wake of my statement. I looked up, and my eyes met a pair of sunglasses. I couldn’t see the eyes behind them, but the face behind them was angular, hard, and the brow furrowed. It might have been an attractive face—I couldn’t tell you—because it was smirking at me, but not a friendly kind of smirk.

  “Well.” I cleared my throat and gave my mind a moment to formulate the right thought. “It seems a little on the barbaric side to pit people against each other for no purpose and have spectators cheer on the violence… right? But if it’s for training purposes, I get that you guys need to be ready when you deploy,” I offered cautiously. I could very well be stepping in it. I’d been in town all of two weeks, and this was my first social event.

  “Training and being prepared is violent? It’s barbaric?” the hard voice asked, one dark eyebrow raised in disbelief above the rim of his opaque sunglasses. The sun was bright behind him, so I still couldn’t make out his face, but his posture was perfect and his shoulders and torso cast shadows at my knees.

  “I don�
��t think training and being prepared is violent. I think parading around a wrestling ring, or whatever you call it, and pummeling fellow soldiers to the cheers of crowds, seems like glorifying violence.” I leveled the speaker with a polite smile. I was used to ruffling feathers in a professional context—I could debate with anyone. But this wasn’t my area of expertise, I didn’t know these people yet, and yet I found myself unable to stop engaging with this person.

  The man in front of me, a more intense physical presence than I first realized, widened his stance and crossed his arms. His big, strong arms fitted only with a short-sleeved t-shirt. No jacket. So, he was crazy, too. I saw he was an inch or two taller than everyone in the circle, except maybe Luke, who was now standing next to me and Alex. The man in front of me pressed his lips together, and I could see the muscles in his jaw flex as he clenched, even with the glare of the sun behind him. Ok… I’d struck a nerve.

  “It’s hardly barbaric. No one gets hurt,” he said. If I was writing a scene and needed a word to describe this guy’s voice, it’d be implacable. It had incredible authority and self-assurance, and all it made me want to do was leave, but I’d just arrived. I felt a spike of annoyance in my chest as I continued moving side to side like an underachiever at a step class.

  “People do get hurt, though. Harrison, you’re crazy if you think no one gets hurt. Just because you don’t, doesn’t mean others don’t,” the youngest man, who I was fairly sure was Lieutenant Holder, commented, his blond hair, blue eyes, and baby face making him look painfully young compared to his nearest companion, Sergeant Major Trask. The way he spoke to this defensive brute was in a tone of adoration.

  I cleared my throat again, hoping my discomfort wasn’t as blazingly obvious to everyone else as I felt it might be. “Whether anyone gets hurt isn’t the issue. It’s a… um, it’s a matter of anticipating violence, injury, or blood.” I let my eyes sweep over the group, then spoke to friendlier faces. “It’s the excitement over who’ll submit and who won’t. It encourages us to wish for violence, to wish for submission of one to the other, to wish for harm to come to someone else. I think it does something nasty in the hearts of spectators to want that kind of show. It’s the same bloody impulse that has people watching beheadings online or why the colosseum fights with gladiators were ever a thing. It’s a thirst for blood, and when fed, it becomes monstrous. It has real-world implications I’m certainly not comfortable with.” I finished my diatribe and felt the silence roll around me. I felt the disgusted stare of the man in front of me and practically saw the irritation rolling off of his hunched shoulders and crossed arms. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I could imagine they were something fearsome.

  “It’s not a bad point, Ellie. But I think if you ever saw it in person, you’d see it’s pretty different. Different even than Olympic boxing and certainly WWF or televised wrestling. I don’t think it brings people down. It’s usually pretty fun and triumphant for people.” Luke patted my shoulder lightly and looked at Alex while the other people murmured their comments in agreement with Luke’s, all seeming to give me the benefit of the doubt that I misunderstood the whole concept of their tournaments.

  And fine. I didn’t like to be wrong, but it was possible I may not have had a complete view of the military experience just yet. It was possible. I was willing to hold out final judgment until I saw some evidence. I thought most people in the group understood that—my naivety—especially after Alex mentioned I’d just arrived and I was working as a civilian, but the man who’d been so irritated by me, the dude wearing only a short-sleeved t-shirt to a winter barbeque, who couldn’t be bothered to wear a coat because he was apparently too cool—that guy? That guy did not get the new kid on the block memo.

  So, yeah, that guy I judged. He had the look of some hard-edged, rough-and-tumble jock-turned-soldier, and if he was going to get his pretty pretty princess panties in a twist over a few comments from me? Well, good luck buddy, and I had no idea how he’d made it in the Army this long.

  Maybe I’d gone a little over the top. The rest of the time at the barbeque was pleasant, but I had a hard time shaking my frustration and that edgy feeling I got when I butted heads with someone without resolution. I loved nothing more than a hearty debate, but when someone got defensive, it was annoying. It was especially problematic when it wasn’t a professional discussion where the general approach was that sure, we’ll disagree, but then we’ll move on.

  I thought soldiers would be up for a healthy debate over stuff like that, and the times I’d argued with Luke, he’d been all about it. Maybe Luke was unique, or more likely, Sergeant Serious was just narrow-minded. That was fine. I’d never see him again.

  “Hello, I’m Dr. Elizabeth Kent, and I’m so happy to be with you today. Thank you for giving me a few minutes of your time.” I was presenting to a room full of the 101st Airborne Division’s leadership—basically anyone in a leadership role from the company level on up. This was my big moment to get them on board so that if they had soldiers who wanted to participate in my project, they would allow them to take the time to attend the meetings.

  “I’m leading the grant-funded Train, Educate, Succeed for Soldiers, which is focused on accumulating data about when and how soldiers take college classes, whether or not they complete the course or a degree, and what their experience with the process has been. It was funded by a few small grants and one large one from an amazing organization called Operation Achieve. This organization funds projects that have to do with improving education opportunities for service members, and that’s exactly what my project, TESS, is attempting to help do. I’ll be located here on Fort Campbell at the Education Center for about six months of research.” I took a breath. I was talking too fast and reminded myself to slow down.

  “What I’m hoping to partner with you all on is to allow the time commitment required of the soldiers who will participate. Participants will need approximately two hours, probably less, over the course of the next two months. When the data collection and review is complete, they’ll each receive a copy of the published study if they request one. But they will need time to come meet with me, to request transcripts from anywhere they’ve attended, and then to interview if they do meet the requirements of the study. I urge you to consider sharing the opportunity with your soldiers and allowing them time to participate. I’ll hang around after this briefing in case anyone has questions. Thank you for your time.”

  I smiled and stepped back from the podium, then found my seat a few rows up the aisle, feeling my heart thumping away in my chest as it always did during public speaking. I wasn’t particularly scared of it, but this room was full of people I hadn’t met and who had no reason to respect me or even listen to me, but their participation, their buy-in on my project, was essential to its success.

  After my presentation, one or two others followed since this was a large briefing for the leadership while they were all together. It dawned on me that I was lucky to get a spot in this meeting, and I silently thanked the director of the education center, Emily Wender. I knew she was behind getting me on the agenda—she’d been thrilled to hear about the project and generous enough to find me an office (which was again, pure luck, since normally there wasn’t any space available in their education center).

  When the meeting ended, I shook hands with a few familiar faces I’d met at the barbeque, including Lieutenant Colonel Wilson. He’d introduced me to Major Flint, the Battalion XO. I thanked God I’d made Luke and Alex give me a lesson in some of the most common acronyms and abbreviations. XO—executive officer: the second in command for a given group—company, battalion, and so on.

  I then saw Captain Jackson, who I’d heard about from Alex.

  “Dr. Kent, I’m Rae Jackson. I’m not sure if you’re interested in officers, but I’ve got a master’s degree I earned while active.”

  “That’s definitely of interest. I’d love for you to consider participating.” A new thrill of energy filled me at the thought of my
first participant—every person mattered in a study that would be fairly small.

  “I thought Alex told me you were a literature professor. How did you end up here?” she asked, and I was surprised to hear she and Alex had discussed me, though I felt an immediate warmth flush through me at the thought that Alex had been chatting with Rae about my project. Alex was easily my biggest champion.

  “In a roundabout way. I was interested in adult learners acquiring their college degrees and interned at a community college in Brooklyn during my master’s degree program years ago. During my Lit PhD, which was focused in composition and rhetoric, I focused much of my dissertation research on acquisition of writing patterns, particularly in non-traditional students. I’ve always been intrigued by people learning, and by extension, earning their bachelor’s degree in a different way and time than I did.”

  “So after your PhD you somehow found the military angle?” Rae asked, her face open and interested. Her blonde hair was pulled neatly into a low bun at the back of her head, her uniform orderly and flattering despite the fact it wasn’t fitted or any different from everyone else’s in the room. I was surprised she asked me a follow up question since most people weren’t even remotely interested in the finer details of my career or why I was doing the study.

  “That was roundabout too. The original project was called TES, Train, Educate, Succeed: Equipping non-traditional students and their instructors for success. I looked at how adult learners were acquiring their writing ability, and I wanted to link with other researchers to find out how the participants in that project had fared in the long term in regard to graduation rates, job placement within their field of major, etc. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the chance because the obligations to my department and the faculty senate became overwhelming on top of my teaching and other publication obligations.”