Book Review, By Joyce Faulkner
Contact me: JoyceKFaulkner@gmail.com
Wing Wife:How to Be Married to a Marine Fighter Pilot (Kindle Edition) by Marcia Sargent
A fun book that is also thoughtful and thought provoking!
Reviewed by Joyce Faulkner
It’s a wet, windy day here in Pittsburgh. I’ve just finished Marcia Sargent’s award-winning memoir, “Wing Wife.” I proces her work and ponder her question, how do we deal with life when we feel death’s shadow every morning?
It’s an issue I first faced at thirteen when my grandfather was murdered. Because his loss was the result of another person’s choices and I didn’t have the power to stop it, I thought it was especially frightening. When I grew up, I realized that death is ALWAYS the result of things outside anyone’s control - war, mistakes, murder, disease, accidents, executions. When I volunteered for the rape crises center, I learned that even though it was natural to reach out to a victim saying, “It’s not your fault,” for certain frames of mind, this was an additional cruelty. Bolts out of the blue are so terrifying that it’s preferable to say, it MUST have been something that I did - If I’d turned left rather than right, if I’d worn the blue dress rather than the red one, if I’d stopped at Wendy’s rather than McDonald’s - if, if, if! But in the long run, as Marcia implies, there’s no solace in a litany of possibilities that didn’t happen. There’s only the horror that did.
In my thirties, I read Ernest Becker, an American Philosopher, who was fascinated with this subject. In a more academic approach, he posits that there is one thing that all people throughout time and across geography share - and that’s the knowledge of our own impending death (and that of our loved ones) - and we are universally distressed by this idea. How we live is a measure of how we’ve come to deal with that knowledge. Some find comfort in religion - the notion that the soul never dies, only the body. There’s some physical support to this attractive idea - energy is neither created nor destroyed, it only changes form. However, the believer is still left to deal with the harsh realities of the transition. Others focus on the quality of the lives they lead - however short that joy might be. They want to go out in a “blaze of glory” and have their names inscribed on a wall somewhere - forever remembered for their derring do and bravery. Then there are those who build things that live on after them - pyramids, airplanes, businesses - pieces of art, libraries — books.
Marcia tackles the subject in a much more personal way. As a young wife of a Marine Corps Fighter Pilot and the sister of another, she smells danger every day. At first, she comforts herself with facts that she accepts without question. The young men are excellent pilots. They fly high performance, well-designed aircraft. They are supported by excellent crews. They have wives and families - they are serving their country. They stare catastrophe in the face in the morning, and moon it at drunken parties that same evening. Accidents might happen, but they happen to other people - to the unwary and to the careless. Her guys are savvy and careful. Ergo, it won’t happen to them - to her.
For all Marcia’s youthful surety and resilience, a series of distressingly common tragedies blasts holes into her life. In a fighter pilot’s dangerous world, people die from the smallest miscalculations — their own and anyone else’s. At a time of life when women are naturally “nesting,” Marcia lives in a world controlled totally by others. Where she lives, who she knows, what she does all depend on the military. She cannot be sure that the man she sends off to work each morning will return to her for lunch. And if he doesn’t, there’s no room for her in their little community any more.
With a rising rock ‘n roll beat, tragedy scars the families around her. Marcia’s grief-fueled stress rises - because she can’t do anything about it, because it comes with the territory, because there’s no donut without the dough - and he’s the dough. Still, until her beloved brother is killed, she never asks her husband to change.
Most women under those circumstances would seek another life - another man. There are a vast array of sexy, healthy, intelligent men out there who DON’T risk their lives and “the nest” every day. There are families who live in the towns THEY choose in homes that they want. But at the lowest point in her emotional life, Marcia reacts with something more fundamental. Love. Too often, women’s definitions of the marital bargain are narrow — ending at sexual exclusivity. Marcia evaluates marriage at its most primeval level — a partnership. When she realizes that there is nothing she could change that she would change, she commits the rest of the way and becomes a “Wing Wife.” She is the person her husband can count on — for support, for help, for growth. She takes care of the things that she can so he can focus on the things that he must. She doesn’t forget about her fears, she just uses that energy to back him up and ensure that during those dangerous runs, he is in the moment doing what he was built to do. She ensures that if their time together is to be short, it will also be joyous.
I wonder if my strategy or my neighbor’s will be as effective as Marcia’s. Perhaps the tremulous nature of life is what makes it so very precious!
Wing Wife is available on Amazon.com
Joyce Faulkner, Author
Windshift
USERNAME
Chance … and other horrors
In the Shadow of Suribachi
Losing Patience
Coauthor of:
Role Call: Women’s Voices
Sunchon Tunnel Massacre Survivors
PO Box 264, Bridgeville, PA 15017
412.496.5034
