Waiting Wives

Description

Waiting Wives:  The Story of Schilling Manor

In 1964, as the first B-52s took flight in what would become America’s longest combat mission, an old Air Force base on the plains of Kansas became Schilling Manor — the only base ever to be set aside for the wives and children of soldiers assigned to Vietnam. Author Donna Moreau was the daughter of one such waiting wife, and here she writes of growing up at a time when The Flintstones were interrupted with news of firefights, fraggings, and protests, when the evening news announced death tolls along with the weather forecasts. The women and children of Schilling Manor fought on the emotional front of the war. It was not a front composed of battle plans and bullets. Their enemies were fear, loneliness, lack of information, and the slow tick of time.

Waiting Wives: The Story of Schilling Manor, Home Front to the Vietnam War tells the story of the last generation of hat-and-glove military wives called upon by their country to pack without question, to follow without comment, and to wait quietly with a smile. A heartfelt book that focuses on this other, hidden side of war, Waiting Wives is a narrative investigation of an extraordinary group of women. A compelling memoir and domestic drama, Waiting Wives is also the story of a country in the midst of change, of a country at war with a war.

Review

“So much of what we know about women during wartime comes from contrived, one-dimensional images of dutiful wives left behind, making do, while their husbands are off performing the brave, important work of war. In the stories of her own mother and the other wives of Schilling Manor, Donna Moreau erases those stock characters, replacing them with surprising portraits of women and their children finding ways to live for years and even decades through an often-ignored kind of hell of war. Waiting Wives gives voice to the struggles, heroism and transformations just below the surface, as these American women endure the minute-by-minute, day-by-day slow torment of waiting, hoping and not knowing, during the Vietnam War.”– Emily Yellin, author of Our Mothers’ War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II