by Patheresa Wells

When I talk about my experiences with the military, which doesn’t happen often anymore, I almost always end up talking about family. My direct experience with the military is as an army wife, a role I fell into when my husband needed some way to provide for us as a young married couple. One of the reasons I rarely discuss my time as an army wife is because once you are out of the military community, it’s hard to know who might understand or care about the life you lived while serving.  

To be honest, I didn’t really know what I was getting into; neither did he. In my family, it was common for someone to join up as a way to provide a steady income or receive opportunities not usually found in our community. My uncles had served, but we were long past the days of the Vietnam War that sent the strong Black boys my grandmother had raised back to us, some more broken than others.