Shona works the home front, along with her friends Dawn Cameron, Laura Robischeau and Jennifer Rowan. They are war wives with 12 children among them, and they gathered one afternoon last week at the Robischeau home, in the Merrimack River valley. A visitor is instructed to look for the 12-foot-wide American flag constructed of red-white-and-blue plastic cups in the front yard. Four vans are parked outside with a dozen yellow ribbons affixed.
Their conversation winds through gales of laughter and chatter before turning to the war. They keep careful track of the New Hampshire men killed in action; their dread is that an official military car might pull up in their driveway. Shona's and Laura's husbands have gone temporarily deaf in one ear from the concussive explosions of roadside bombs.
"Do I get nervous?" asked Jennifer, a former soldier and a realist. "Am I ever not nervous?"
Laura leans forward on her couch. "You wake up in the morning and you pray your husband made it through the night. Is he eating? Is he sleeping? Is my guy okay?"
In a society where income and stock options often rule, these women measure their working-class men by a different standard: They answered their country's call.
Each can recite her husband's unit by heart: HHB 197 Field Artillery. A Company 118 Medical Battalion. 172 Field Artillery. Laura wears her husband's dog tags. Shona, Jennifer and Dawn sleep in their husbands' Army shirts.
"When 9/11 came, I knew he was following his heart," Shona says. "He re-enlisted in the middle of us having two kids."
Says Jennifer: "My husband was born to be a soldier. That's why I fell in love. Love him to death. Obsessed."
The connective tissue of the modern world makes for a curiously intimate war. Shona and Dawn instant-message or e-mail their husbands, sometimes several times a day. Laura talks on the satellite phone. The connection is immediate and intense, and when they hang up no one knows their anxiety. Not the clerk at the Grand Union, not their neighbors, not their aunts and uncles.
"I've got friends who say to me, 'Oh, I know how you feel,' " Shona says. "And I want to scream: 'Oh, no, you don't!' " Laura nods. A few weeks back, the kids were screaming and the microwave was spinning and there was homework to be done and the phone rang and her husband, Dion, was on the line and she knew something was up. Two mortar shells had landed near him -- shrapnel had pierced his shirt, his ears were ringing.
"The first thing he asks me is: 'Baby, how much do you want to know?' " Laura says. "I never know how to answer that."
The Election
One recent Saturday, Shona messaged her husband: "In my eyes, Kerry really blew the debate. Bush is not so articulate but I actually think it brings him more down to earth and makes him more believable."
He wrote back: "Yeah, when he talks, he talks from the heart."
Shona gave a speech when Bush came to New Hampshire and Pease Air National Guard Base this month. Her view of the war's progress is not as sunny as Bush's -- her man takes too much incoming fire to see victory in the offing. But that's okay.
