Author Guest Post with Nancy Stroer: Playing Army

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.

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Author Guest Post

In the World of Playing Army – Fort Stewart, Georgia, circa 1995

Fort Stewart is a military reservation of about a quarter million acres, forty miles inland from Savannah. It’s the largest Army post east of the Mississippi River—flat and hot and mostly forested, primarily scrub oak and pines. The soil is a mix of Georgia red clay and sand and tends to hold water—hence its nickname, Camp Swampy, which you might remember is where the comic character Beetle Bailey spent his enlistment under the aggravated scrutiny of Sarge.

Fort Stewart’s training area is full of tank and gunnery ranges, and most of the soldiers are the kind of grunts who need to practice shooting things. Hinesville, outside the front gate, is in many ways a typical GI town—strip malls, strip bars, fast food restaurants, rent-to-own furniture, pop-up churches of every denomination, and neighborhoods where the rents fall precisely within the military housing allowance. But it wasn’t always this way. Liberty County derives its name from the four signers of the Declaration of Independence who hail from the area, the most famous (for being the most obscure) of whom was Button Gwinnett. There are a number of structures remaining from the Civil War era all the way through the early Civil Rights movement. For example, Dorchester Academy was a freed Black school during the Reconstruction period and a hub of civil rights activity in the 1960s and 70s. The town of Sunbury, where the character of First Sergeant St. John comes from, was once a port town where Savannah’s elite kept summer homes until the port silted up and the town “died.” I sort of made up a history of Sunbury as a community of descendants of enslaved people, but it is true that there are Black residents among those live oaks and pockets of swamp. The last time I drove around there, though, it looked like the land was getting bought up and gentrified, which makes me feel uncomfortable, like we’re losing something important. I hope the people who are giving up their land and homes are making fair money out of the deal, at least.

Because development is not without precedent in the area. In the run-up to World War II, the US government bought a number of small townships out from under the residents to create then-Camp Stewart, a training post for soldiers preparing for front-line combat. The government proffered rock-bottom prices to the inhabitants of small farms and towns, with a non-negotiable mandate to get out. There are still a few ruins out in the training area, and a number of cemeteries that relatives of the dispossessed are allowed to visit (as long as the tank ranges aren’t “hot,” obviously).

And obviously, lots of people have been dispossessed from the land currently called Georgia way before that, another uncomfortable fact to sit with. Something like 90% of the five tribes that originated in Geogia died as a result of European settlement, but their place-names survive in the rivers and creeks around Fort Stewart: the Canoochee and Ogeechee. The area contains a lot of unhappy ghosts.

And in 1995 the US Army was preparing to intervene on behalf of peace efforts in the Balkan conflict, after the massacre at Srebrenica made it clear that the population on the ground needed some real muscle to stop the genocide in the former Yugoslavian countries. The US hadn’t done much to stop the massacres in Rwanda the year before, and they had a vast military budget to justify. I also invented a community of Vietnamese Americans who moved to the humid, rice-growing area around Fort Stewart. In the story, they’re the families of pilots from the South Vietnamese military who came to Hunter Army Airfield in the 1970s for helicopter flight training (that part is true), to escape retribution after the fall of Saigon in 1975. In 1995, when Playing Army is set, the US and Vietnam were just beginning to restore full diplomatic relations. All of this together makes Fort Stewart a pretty perfect setting for Playing Army, a story about a woman trying to find her place in a supposedly peacetime world, with a legacy steeped in conflict.

About the Book

Playing Army
by Nancy Stroer

Publishing 25 June 2024
Koehler Books

Genre: UpLit / Domestic War
Page Count: 292
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!

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

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.

About the Author

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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