The Captain Her Father Called A Costume

Growing Up Doyle in Caldwell County

Caldwell County is the kind of place where everybody’s business gets discussed at the diner before it gets discussed at home. Route 11 runs through the middle of it, past the feed store, past the Baptist church with the reader board that never gets the punctuation right, past the volunteer fire hall where they still do the Friday fish fry every Lent.

My father, Ralph Doyle, ran the parts counter at the tractor dealership for thirty one years before he retired. He was a deacon. He coached slow pitch softball in the summer league. In Millbrook, Ralph Doyle was a known and respected man, and he liked being that man more than almost anything else in his life.

My mother, Judy, kept the church calendar and organized the potluck sign up sheet with the seriousness of a woman running a small government. She noticed things. She noticed what people wore, what people said, whether people’s kids turned out the way they were supposed to.

I did not turn out the way I was supposed to.

My brother Mitch was the easy one. He stayed in Millbrook, worked construction, married a local girl, gave my parents grandchildren to brag about at church. Mitch never left, never wanted to leave, and my parents never had to explain him to anybody.

I was the one who wanted to leave, from about the age of nine, and the person who made that feel less like a betrayal and more like a plan was my grandfather Walter.

Walter Doyle was my father’s father, and the two of them got along the way a lot of fathers and sons in Caldwell County got along, which is to say they loved each other and could barely stand to be in the same room for longer than a football game. Walter had served two years in the Army himself, a long time before I was born, stationed stateside and never talked about it much, but he kept an old olive drab wool blanket folded at the foot of his bed his whole life, and he was the only person in my family who ever asked me a single question about what I actually wanted.

“You want to see something bigger than this county,” he told me once, the summer I turned eleven, handing me a brass compass that had been his father’s. “Nothing wrong with that. Just always know your way back.”

I still have that compass. I had it in my pocket the day I stood in front of a judge and my parents tried to prove I had thrown that promise away.

The Day I Raised My Right Hand

I enlisted the summer after I turned twenty, against the direct wishes of both of my parents, who had assumed I would go to the community college two counties over, get an associate’s degree in something practical, and settle down close enough to Millbrook that my mother could still see me every Sunday.

My father did not speak to me for six weeks after I told him. When he finally did, it was to tell me I was making a mistake I would regret, that the Army was no place for a Doyle woman, that I was doing it for attention.

I commissioned later, after finishing my nursing degree through the Guard’s tuition assistance, and became an officer, a captain eventually, the rank I still hold. I chose the medical side on purpose. I wanted to be the person soldiers were glad to see, not the reason they were afraid.

My first deployment to Kandahar Province came four years in. My second came eight years in, and it was the one that changed everything, though not in the way my parents would tell it later in that courtroom.

Walter came to both of my deployment send offs. My parents came to neither. My father told people at church I was stationed somewhere safe doing paperwork. It was easier for him to say that than to explain what I actually did, which was work inside a combat support hospital taking care of young men and women who came in on stretchers.