Playing Army
by Nancy Stroer
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GENRE: UpLit / Domestic War
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BOOK BLURB:
It’s 1995 and the Army units of Fort Stewart, Georgia are gearing up to deploy to Bosnia, but Lieutenant Minerva Mills has no intention of going to war-torn eastern Europe. Her father disappeared in Vietnam and, desperate for some kind of connection to him, she’s determined to go on a long-promised tour to Asia. But the Colonel will only release her on two conditions—that she reform the rag-tag Headquarters Company so they’re ready for the peacekeeping mission, and that she get her weight within Army regs, whichever comes second. Min only has one summer to kick everyone’s butts into shape but the harder she plays Army, the more the soldiers—and her body—rebel. If she can’t even get the other women on her side, much less lose those eight lousy pounds, she’ll never have another chance to stand where her father once stood in Vietnam, feeling what he felt. The Colonel may sweep her along to Bosnia or throw her out of the Army altogether. Can you fake it until you make it? Min is about to find out.
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EXCERPT TWO:
My heart raced, not in a good way, as a helicopter thudded overhead toward Hunter Army Airfield twenty miles away. Had my father died in a helicopter assault? The notification only said he’d gone missing in a fire fight, but he’d been assigned to the air cavalry. He hadn’t been a movie star like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, though—just another Air Cav soldier who disappeared in the Mekong Delta in April of 1969. I imagined myself crouched backward over the skids of a Huey. Terrified, with the sound of AK-47s firing below and nothing to connect me to safety but a nylon rope. Nothing but the empty black maw of my ignorance waiting to swallow me whole. You would think, if my father had been liked and respected, the soldiers from his platoon would have responded to the letters I’d written but no one ever had, leaving me only questions so corrosive my insides burned.
It was strange how the absence of a person could occupy so much mental real estate, but the Army—all of America, really—was obsessed with the bodies of the soldiers left behind. The dead were probably at peace—I had to believe that—but those who remained were not. For me, nothing but boots on the ground in Vietnam would satisfy my relentless drive to understand, and Korea was the closest place to Vietnam the Army would send me.
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GUEST POST:
Playing Army – the backstory!
Of the pile of manuscripts I have lying around, Playing Army is not the story that is set chronologically the earliest, but it is the first novel I completed (more than twenty years ago)! We were living in Ankara, Turkey and there wasn’t any paid work for me right away. There were, however, an abundance of cheerful, hardworking and attentive Turkish women more than happy to look after my infant daughter for a few hours a week, and we had a mother-in-law suite at the top of our apartment going unused. I’d always wanted to write, and this was my chance.
So! Baby downstairs with a lovely woman named Sevgi (which means, literally, “love”), I plopped on the little sofa in the upstairs room and waited for the decades of bottled up words to pour forth. I knew I wanted to write about ordinary women in the Army – the cooks, the clerks, the mechanics – not women trying to be fighter pilots or Navy SEALS. All hail those badasses! But I think in a not-so roundabout way those stories still center the male experience. They are about women trying to prove themselves against male standards. Again – so many interesting issues to explore in a story like that! But I wanted to center women’s stories. Women having their own, perfectly legitimate (and absolutely hard enough) military experiences without having to answer the always present and forever tedious question of, does this man or group of men think I’m worthy of being among them? Women have been street-legal in the military for a long time now. I’m super-tired of having to prove the legitimacy of that over and over again, one woman at a time, to each individual man who takes it as his right to be there.
But as I sat there, hand poised over notebook, mostly my ideas stayed locked in my head. It took great effort to squeeze them from my pen. That first summer in Ankara we didn’t have air conditioning and it was about 120F up there. The heat took my fluid thoughts and baked them solid.
Anywho. The actual writing of an ordinary military story was hard, y’all, especially since I had not the first clue of what makes any kind of story “work.” But you have to start somewhere, right? I imagined my way into some scenes and forced them onto the page. I wrote about a young woman watching water boil (a lot of those early scenes were influenced by the temperature in the room!) and two female soldiers in the barracks, getting ready to go out drinking on a Friday night. One of them drank too much and got sick on the First Sergeant’s open-toed sandals (the First Sergeant being another woman). Eventually the scenes started to hang together and I had a story about a character whose father had gone missing in Vietnam, and who had something to prove to him, and to herself, but was struggling in life. Eventually I even had an offer of representation from a literary agent (more about that story HERE), but I was aware on a deep level that I’d written this novel in a kind of overheated, dreamy state without any real awareness of what I wanted to say or how to say it. The story was a mess and the agent would have wanted me to change it and he would have been right to require it but I wouldn’t have known how to fix anything.
Don’t query before you know what the hell you’re doing, y’all.
So I passed on the offer of rep (I KNOW. THIS WOULD BE ABSOLUTELY UNTHINKABLE NOW. IT WAS HOT IN THAT ROOM. But also, I wasn’t wrong).
I put a hard copy of the manuscript in a bag and stashed the bag among the stack of hard-backed notebooks I use for all my early drafting, and left it there for years and years and years. The stack of notebooks grew, and traveled with us to two more continents and a couple of islands and the bag stayed with them, growing dust.
Fast forward a bunch of years and a lot of learning later. I pull out the bag during a time when I’m letting other manuscripts rest, and casting about for a project to distract me. I find that I can look at the old manuscript without curling into a human roly-poly of cringe. I read the dusty pages and they are surprisingly…fresh? Not so terrible? The story needs complete gutting and rebuilding but the bones of it are still there and all those early characters are good. I want to walk around in their heads again, seeing out their eye holes. And that is how this version of Playing Army got its start.
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AUTHOR BIO:
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Nancy Stroer grew up in a very big family in a very small house in Athens, Georgia and served in the beer-soaked trenches of post-Cold War Germany. She holds degrees from Cornell and Boston University, and her work has appeared in the Stars and Stripes, Soldiers magazine, Hallaren Lit Mag, Wrath-Bearing Tree, and Things We Carry Still, an anthology of military writing from Middle West Press.
She’s a teacher and a trainer, and an adjunct faculty member of the Ellyn Satter Institute, a 503(c) not-for-profit that helps individuals and families develop a more joyful relationship to food and their bodies. Playing Army is her first novel.
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GIVEAWAY INFO:
Nancy will award a $25 Amazon OR Barnes and Noble (Winner's Choice!!!) Gift Card to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter during the tour.
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This contest is sponsored by a third party. Fabulous and Brunette is a registered host of Goddess Fish Promotions. Prizes are given away by the sponsors and not Fabulous and Brunette. The featured author and Goddess Fish Promotions are solely responsible for the giveaway prize.
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Sounds like a winner!
ReplyDeleteThank you so much! If you end up reading it, I hope you enjoy it!
DeleteI really like the excerpt and think the book sounds interesting.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Sherry! If you end up reading it, please let me know what you think! best, Nancy
DeleteThis looks fascinating. Thanks for sharing and hosting this tour.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Michael!
ReplyDeleteLooks amazing
ReplyDeleteThank you, Nancy!
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