Good, bad, ugly, and all that.... NCO style.

A friend said something really funny the other day. Literally, it made me laugh! She said, "Well, I'm sure the Army is a lot better at higher ranks." Her husband has exactly half Thak's rank, just to give you some idea. Her comment was very innocent, but it was still funny. I told her that it isn't bad, and from my side, honestly, life has been amazing ever since he made E6 (which came crashing down very abruptly when he got out... Something about building a life together, only to watch it go straight down the drain in the space of a few months... but anyway....) BUT even so, all that comes at a price. She was really surprised to hear that. I find that it's common that lower-enlisted wives do not think of the fact that with the privileges that rank brings, there are some costs as well. You want to know what they are? I'll tell you, good and bad. Granted, my take on what it's like to be a lower-enlisted wife is only through observation. I have been a lower-enlisted soldier, but as a wife, my only first hand experience is being married to an NCO. Yup, I'm one of those.

Anyhow, without further ado, let's talk about the good!! I'll be honest, being an NCO wife is awesome. I even own discontinued and banned books about it. I love the NCO Corps of my beloved Army, and I always knew if I married a soldier, he could only be an NCO. This is, and has always been, my favorite part of the Army. I have so much respect for the NCO's I worked with as a soldier (including Thak), and I just think they're great. So yes, I LOVE being an NCO wife, even if it's only in the Reserves now. I love that he's earned so much trust and respect from subordinates, peers, and superiors alike, and that he has access to real information when it counts. When he's Active Duty, I love that he got paid enough that we lived really comfortably. I loved that he had the influence to do what our family needed him to do a lot of the time. I love that when I am at a place that requires the use of my ID, and they see his rank on it, people treat me really well (I have seen some lower-enlisted wives treated horribly at the same places. This sort of thing exists, although it isn't right.) I love being in the NCO Wives' Club. I love the way his rank looks on his uniform, how in Class A's, it covers such a large portion of his sleeve. It looks so.... proportionate. I love the knowledge that soldiers respect him just as much as I respected him when he was a soldier. (I still do respect him, but it's different now.) When he was Active Duty, I loved the security of knowing that he really was uncommonly good at his job.

That's a lot of good, but with anything, it balances out. There are a few things that kind of suck about being an NCO wife. If you live on post, you'll probably get totally screwed, because at a lot of posts, you'll end up paying more than anyone else on your street for exactly the same house. I could go on all day about post housing stuff, but I'll leave it at that for now.

Otherwise, you put up with a little bit of random BS. If you so much as mention your husband's rank, some insecure Private's wife will accuse you of trying to "wear" that rank yourself, when in reality, all you said was something like, "My husband is SFC M." or "My husband had to make 798 points to be promoted to E6." Our hands have been tied in recent years just as much as our husbands' have. The Army is run by lower-enlisteds these days. They get crazy, rude, and out of line, and our husbands cannot do much about it anymore. We are on the receiving end of the wives of those crazy, rude, out of line soldiers. They are in your face. They want to lead. They think they should, if for no other reason than to stick it to you. After all, what do your ten years, four duty stations, and three deployments' worth of experience mean? Nothing if you ask them. There is a lot of, for lack of a better term, "class warfare" in the military these days, and as NCO wives, we are smack in the middle. It can be awkward at times.

Holidays get interesting, too. When your husband is a leader, he has people who answer to him. Most of those people will be young single soldiers. It is expected that young single soldiers will spend most every holiday completely wasted. That's what I did when I was a young single soldier, too. However, in today's Army, where NCO's cannot punish soldiers for doing stupid stuff anymore, these soldiers don't do what soldiers of my generation did, and keep it to the barracks. No, they go out and do it, so every holiday, some idiot PFC goes to jail, and guess who gets to bail him out? Yup... Squad Leader, Platoon Daddy, or Top. What do you suppose that's like for the families of those NCO's? You can ask Erin. She remembers very well the year that daddy had to leave every single holiday to go bail a soldier out of jail. Sure, the entire unit hears about it on Monday, but that's because somebody was dealing with it all weekend. As an NCO wife, your husband is that somebody.

The higher you go, the more participation is expected, and the more people hate you just for showing up. This sounds awful, and I'll be honest, it was my least favorite part of the whole deal. This was my price of admission, where I really paid for all the things I loved so much. Once you get up to a certain point, people kind of expect you to be a royal bitch, and they don't really plan on liking you. They may not know your name, or what you're like, or your plans for whatever it is that you've been roped into doing this time, but they know that you're the boss' wife, and their husband (the unit screw-up, of course) does not like the boss much, so you must be pretty awful, too. You will work 10x harder than you should ever have to, to win over people whose favor you could not give a rat's teeny tiny little ass about under normal circumstances, even if you tried. You will do this, frankly, because you're doing a job nobody else wants, and somebody's got to do it. Like our husbands, we lead by example. It is totally thankless, and most of us hate it, but we all do it.

There's more stress. When I was a lower-enlisted soldier, I would get off work about 5 pm, go to my barracks room, get out of my uniform, and go hang out with friends. I did this every single day. It was pretty much a carefree life. Lower-enlisted soldiers don't have much on their plates. They show up in the right uniform, at the right time, to the right place, and do what people tell them to do when they get there, and that's really about it. NCO's are a different story. They have to coordinate all that, make sure a bunch of people who are probably still wasted from the night before, show up to the right place, at the right time, in the right uniform. They have to make sure that whatever's supposed to get done there, in fact, gets done. Most of the time, they've got the command breathing hard down their necks the whole time. For the first few months of our marriage, the thing that shocked me most about Thak (other than the fact that the guy who once smoked me for dust on my fan blades, leaves his socks NEAR the hamper) was how much work he brought home. I swear, he did nothing but work on stuff for the flightline, and counseling statements for soldiers, and stuff like that. His soldiers were always at our house for whatever reason. At that time, he had one drunk one he was trying to keep in line by keeping him close at hand, and one fat one he was trying to slim down on my cooking. The rest were there just because. You are along for this ride. He's not doing it to drive you crazy. He's doing it because he is responsible for these people in a way most people are never responsible for another human being.

The higher you go, the more influence you have, and the less you can, or really should, use it. I will never forget when I was pregnant with Orren. Thak and I conceived him over R&R during Thak's 3rd tour in Iraq. There was never a more planned or wanted baby in this entire world than Orren, I swear. Everything was perfect from the first second of his existence, and when it came time for me to pursue care during said pregnancy, I went and found myself the perfect midwives, at the perfect birth center. It was great, and blissful, and the only thing I lacked as we waited for the arrival of our perfect son, was my perfect husband who was in a stupid combat zone for the first four months of it all. That's ok, though. I got through those appointments, and then when he got home, I figured he'd go to all my appointments with me. WRONG! Sure, he had the influence within the unit to be able to get out whenever he needed to. He could have been at every single one. He was Platoon Sergeant at the time, though, and leaving the platoon to its own devices was not really all that feasible all the time. Thak was at enough of my appointments that our midwives knew who he was, and totally adored him, but he definitely wasn't at all of them, not even half. I swear, to this day, that the real reason I had Orren on Christmas Day is because that was the only day we could count on Thak being available, and not on some ridiculous tasking way out of cell phone range. With more influence, comes more responsibility, and you, the wife, pay for that in hours and minutes that your husband is not there with you. I am not complaining. I am stating the fact. You will not complain either. It has been this way since before either of us were even alive. The fact remains, though, while the Privates and Specialists are tending to their families, you will be managing yours alone while your NCO husband puts the Army first, whether either of you likes it or not.

All in all, as I said before, I love being an NCO wife. I love everything about the NCO Corps, and absolutely love being married to someone who is the very picture of everything that is right about it. All of these "bad" things, which I have only expanded upon so that they are easier to understand, are a small price to pay for the far more substantial, if less wordy, good things. The entire purpose of writing this out was not to elicit pity or dread, but to promote understanding. Is it nice to be married to an NCO? Nicer than words can describe. Like everything in life, though, there is a cost, and I want the future NCO wives in my life to understand it so that they're not blindsided by it like most of us are. More important than any of that, though, is to remember that people have gone before you on this same road, and they didn't know what they were doing either, so even though there's a bit of muck to wade through, you'll do fine. If I can do this, anybody can, and trust me, it's SO worth it.