Book: Standing By
The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War
More than two million U.S. service members have been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan in the last decade. More and more of these veterans are writing about their wartime experience, but few military spouses have shared the truth about what it’s like when a loved one leaves for battle. Standing By is Alison Buckholtz’s candid account of her family’s struggles during her husband’s eight-month deployment on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf during Operation Iraqi Freedom and a subsequent year-long deployment to Iraq. With insight and humor she describes trying to keep life as normal as possible for the couple’s two young children while transitioning into the unfamiliar – and at times unwelcome –role of military wife. Throughout both deployments, a remarkable and surprising series of events challenges her long-held assumptions about the military, motherhood, and even the nature of American citizenship.
A rare and intimate portrait of a family that represents America’s fast-growing population of service members and veterans, Standing By is a window into what matters for families everywhere.
What people have said about Standing By:
"Military families’ experiences are an important part of our national conversation about America’s responsibilities toward those who serve the country, and Alison Buckholtz’s Standing By makes an original, significant, and lasting contribution to this discussion. By pulling back the curtain on her family’s trials and tribulations during a time of war, readers gain a deeper, more nuanced understanding of military families and how to support those who serve. Standing By is required reading for our time." -- U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, co-chair, Congressional Military Family Caucus
"With grace and candor, Alison Buckholtz lays bare her own life, her own marriage, to tell the story of military wives across the country. Buckholtz is a gifted writer, and so her book is never a lecture, but rather a gentle tutorial on the challenges and heartbreak that fuel the collective narrative of women who are too often invisible. Read this book, and you will want to thank every military wife you are lucky enough to meet. They, too, serve our country." -- Connie Schultz, syndicated columnist and author, . . . and His Lovely Wife: A Memoir from the Woman Beside the Man
"Alison Buckholtz brought the war home for me. As a military wife, she so beautifully evokes what it’s like to wait and wait and worry, to go on with your life even while your life is in a holding pattern. She makes the details count like the best of novelists – from a flag on a neighbor’s porch to a drawing her child brought home. She is warm without being overly sentimental and firm in her opinions without being strident. I will always want Alison’s beautiful voice in my ear reminding me what is actually being sacrificed in such moments." -- Hanna Rosin, contributing editor, The Atlantic
"Alison Buckholtz’s memoir is a universal story of friendship, family, and endurance that reveals the history of the American military spouse from Revolutionary War camp followers to her own experience as a Navy wife in the post-9/11 world. Standing By is sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always a beautiful, honest book about the toil and triumph of modern military life." -- Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know When the Men Are Gone
"Alison Buckholtz's writing about military life offers poignant insights into the experience of a military family at home - a wonderful way for readers to understand the experience of those who serve, in all its nuance. I strongly recommend this book!" -- Kathy Roth-Douquet, Author, "AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes from Military Service and How It Hurts Our Country" and Co-founder and CEO, Blue Star Families