I hope you don't mind if I introduce you to something else for military girlfriends. It's not a song - it's a book.
Homefront is different from other books put out by spouses of deployment...rather than relying on anecdotes of others to fill the pages, and rather than trying to offer guidance or instruct the military spouse as she enters her first deployment, Homefront is, first of all, not about a spouse; it's written from the point of view of a girlfriend whose lover deploys at the start of the war.
It's also an honest and raw, and sometimes amusing, account of one woman's experience with her lover's deployment.
Soldiers have related to it, and also learned about their wives from it, and wives and girlfriends have found comfort in it (by learning what they're experiencing every day during a deployment isn't unique or "crazy").
Others have just enjoyed the read.
Homefront was written to DO something - to introduce civilians to the real people involved in the war, and to offer a "You're not alone" book to those left at home. (I was able to write it because, in addition to having already been a writer, before my husband and I married, he went - with the 101st Airborne - to Iraq at the start of the war.)
Briefly, some blurbs/reviews:
"The sheer accumulation of life detail and the interplay of vivid secondary characters, braided together with the transcribed correspondence of the lovers, force its readers to feel from the inside what the horror and the tedium of the homefront is like over time."--Alan Davis, Senior Editor, New Rivers Press
"Often forgotten amid yellow-ribbon bumper stickers and Welcome Home ceremonies, Kristen Tsetsi's Homefront renders love and the very capacity to love as casualties of war, all in prose glittering with humility, humor, and incisive detail." --Benjamin Buchholz, author of Private Soldiers
"If there's a war on (and, these days, there's usually a war on), I want to be reading about it. I appreciate first person accounts, either fictionalized or not, and Kristen Tsetsi's Homefront, an emotional novel about a young couple's separation when Jake is shipped to Iraq, is a worthy new entry in this category." - Levi Asher, Literary Kicks
"That my thoughts stray from the [military] pilots to the loved ones waiting [at home] is a tribute to Kristen J. Tsetsi's novel Homefront, which is an intensely intimate and affecting story...I was 100 pages into Homefront before I looked up from the book." -- Steven McDermott, Editor, Storyglossia Magazine
"This is a thoughtful and elegant book; the writing immersive, evocative, and polished." -- PODler review
"[Tsetsi's] solid, seamless and detailed writing has the power to bring us into each scene. The result is an engaging, realistic portrait of a lover's life at the homefront." -- Sonia Reppe, BookPleasures.com
5.0 out of 5 stars (Amazon.com)
Unpredictable, and not just for the military wife.By Vara Scott (Dayton, OH United States) -
I started to read "Homefront" late at night, before I slept, and the next morning when I woke I didn't leave my bed until it was finished.
Even though I am nothing like the main character, Mia, I FELT what she was going through. I am a military spouse and spent many hours of my own watching CNN live coverage and chewing the nubs that I called my fingers whenever a convoy was attacked.
Mia's unseen life is fascinating and the people she sort of...finds herself with are about as mismatched as they can be-another frequent reality of military families. Her story is all about the little moments; the events taking place are merely a vehicle to take you to her innermost thoughts. Kristen Tsetsi is an amazing writer, the words in her story placed like the sometimes bold, other times faint and whispering strokes on a painted canvas. Her timing plays havoc with your senses. She doesn't give you what's expected at all. Loved this book!
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Universal theme (Amazon.com review)
By Doris Crabtree "Psychologist" (Miami FL) -
Kristen has written something that is at once female and universal. The book is about a young couple, the boyfriend Jake is in the Army and gets deployed to Iraq, the girlfriend Mia is left to wait for him to complete his tour of duty. They're not kids, they're mid twenties, have been living together a couple years, want to get married.
She's left behind basically, and has to rely on news reports and bulletins to know if he's been killed or not. And I think this is where the universality comes in, how we send our young men into firefights on the other side of the world for the lamest of reasons, then while they are living 24/7 getting shot at, mortared, bombed, strafed, beheaded, tortured, we're here catching maybe thirty minutes a day of reports, mixed in with the news about Brangelina or Brittany or Republicans cruising men's restrooms.
The absurdity is captured perfectly. The characters all through the book are real, they breathe right off the page. And the mood of the times we live in is right there, told from the point of view of someone with 100% sympathy for the troops.
If you'd like more information on the book, or to read more reviews, please feel free to visit my homepage
www.kristentsetsi.com or my MySpace page.
www.myspace.com/kristentsetsi.
Thanks for allowing me to introduce this to you. There simply aren't enough books out there that adequately communicate the experience.