Married to September 11, 9/11, by Catherine Gstattenbauer

From MemoryArchive

Who: Catherine and Christopher Gstattenbauer
What: Air Force marriage
When: 9/11
Where: Holloman AFB, NM

September 11th affected many people in this country and around the world in many different ways. Some in small town Nebraska didn’t feel it until their high school buddy came up on the Killed in Action list of the Iraq War. Some felt it when they saw the trade center collapse knowing that their husband was on the 92th floor. And then others felt it when they saw the American military sweep through their small Afghan village. I felt it on the morning of September 11th, 2001 on Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico, and the aftershocks have never stopped.

I was a newlywed at the time all of this came to drastically change my life. I had been married on May 22, 2001 to a wonderful man I had barely known for 7 months. He was an Airman First Class when I met him in Charlottesville, Virginia when he was on leave during his change of station from Anderson AFB, Guam to Holloman AFB, NM. I knew his brother from school and he had recruited me to spend some time with his brother who “hadn’t seen a good woman in a LONG time”. It was all a joke until he was the best man at our wedding 7 months later. We were madly in love and as optimistic about the future as any 22 and 23 year old could be living out in the desert and scraping by in a crummy border town.

Living on base gave us a lovely 2-bedroom townhouse and the security of crime-free life that allowed us to leave our keys in our cars and our house unlocked. The exchange and Commissary were close by, and unfortunately so were the 50 Stealth Bombers, F-4 Drones (the loudest by far), T-38s, and German Tornados. I eventually got used to the long pauses in conversation as one took off or landed near by and they simply became a part of your world and a very loud background noise. As the stable manager on base, and a manger at an off base stable as well as being a waitress and student in Alamogordo, I spent a lot of time going off and on base and taking advantage of the benefits of being an Air Force Spouse. Things were pretty slack and it didn’t take long to find out why the Air Force was often called the “Chair Force”. Had I known what was coming, I would have enjoyed it much more.

My husband, Chris, was a Paint and Body mechanic for the MMS Squadron who also was trained as an extra for the Security Forces Squadron if something were to happen and they should need him. His main place of work was Bare Base, which is a separate area on base that is dedicated to being the first on scene of any American military activity that requires a temporary base to be set up. This was going to be a very active area when operations in Afghanistan began. But while he was very good at what he did with the vehicles, he really enjoyed playing war with the cops. Being not such a super fan of the cops, especially military police and their absurdly pompous attitudes about themselves, I was less than thrilled with Chris’ cohesion with the dark side. I still tried to play the supportive wife game because he was happy playing with guns and body armor and explosive devices. My father is an ex-Marine and weapons collector, so it’s not like I didn’t already know how annoying it is to live in an arsenal. This was the start of the problems that September 11th greatly aggravated in our marriage.

Then it happened.

I was on my way to a doctor’s appointment on base and heard on the radio that a plane had struck the one of the towers and they were switching over to a national news station to cover the story. Peter Jennings was the first voice I heard that had a clue what was happening, and even he was lost. At the time I caught it, it seemed like an accident and no one would admit that this was terrorist attack. The point that I knew that something was really wrong was when I went to the door of the doctor’s office building there was a airman asking me for my military ID to get into the building. Clearly, the Air Force was taking this seriously. The television in the waiting room showed the national news station and the picture of the smoking tower. All the doctors and patients were standing around staring in silence. Occasionally you would hear someone say how awful it was or a dismissive comment about it just being an accident. I was only there for a refill on a prescription so the appointment only lasted a minute since we were both eager to get out and find out what the hell was going on.

After leaving the building, I had to go out to the base stables to feed my horse and was able to hear much more on the radio since it was a bit of a drive around the flight line to the barn. G. Gordon Liddy was speaking and he carried on the news about a plane headed toward the White House and it’s turn around away from DC. When I drove up to the barn the wife the Commander of Security Forces was feeding her horse and speaking with another boarder. I rolled down my window and told them what was going on and they dismissed it as though it was a stupid accident.

Around 11 am the base started to mobilize and things started to shut down. I called my boss and told him it was unlikely I would be able to get off base and even more unlikely that I would be able to get back on. I went to a friend’s house and watched television for the rest of the day as the events began to unfold and the real threat became clear. I was unable to get in touch with my husband and figured that he would not be reachable until late that evening. My friend and I just sat on the couch watching the towers fall again and again and shook our heads with the knowledge that nothing would ever be the same again.

Later that evening my husband finally came by our friend’s house to fetch me and we went home together. He had been called that day by Security Forces to serve in their squadron. He was called to meet them that evening for training and begin working 12-hour shifts at night. September 11th was a lonely night. The country had determined the graveness of the situation and the danger that we were all in and here I was sleeping alone on an Air Force Base that was on total lockdown and full of Stealth Fighters and other weapons of strategic importance. It was tough to determine if I should feel safe because of the fact that I was on a heavily fortified base, or terrified because I was on a base that someone might just be interested in destroying. It was still early in the game and no one really knew what we were up against. I just knew that a 12 year old could bring a nuclear weapon on that base and no one would notice. The perimeter was huge and most of it was out in the middle of the desert. I refuse to believe that they can monitor every inch of fence line in that situation. While one had to present 2 ID’s at the gates to base and go through random searches and bomb dogs, the perimeter was truly an unreasonable length to monitor.

During the first week or so after 9/11, the line to get one base could last up to 4 hours in the mornings. This was during TREATCON Delta (I think it is called FPCON now) and the level slowly went to FPCON Beta by the time I left base a year later. To enter any building you had to present 2 ID’s and you had to park at least 50 feet from any building. This wasn’t too bad. I think we could handle a little inconvenience.

Living on a base in the New Mexico desert next to White Sands Missile Range was weird enough as it was. I had lived in northern New Mexico a few years before and was used to the openness of the land and poverty of the towns. It was all the other sketchy things going on that tweaked me out a bit. I am far from a conspiracy theorist, but my father was CIA, DIA and a bunch of other acronyms for his career all after retiring from the Marines after his wounds in Vietnam. I may not have lived on bases my whole life, but I believe that there are quite a few things that the government doesn’t really want the public to know about. I am very comfortable with that. But living in a place where that is right under your nose during a time when the country is at war makes all these underground things a bit sketchier.

There seemed to be a formula for military spouses, especially enlisted spouses, that I could never really become a variable in. Marry young. Make babies. Lots of babies. No college. No career. Solid drinking problem. Lots of extracurricular sex when your spouse is away. Divorce. This was the system. The problem with me in the system is that I am a loud mouth, overbearing, aggressive woman with a nasty problem with authority- especially the frequently incompetent and scatter-brained authority of the military. I despise children and the horrid thought of actually producing any and I will protect my education and right to have one to my dying breath. My husband was not intending on staying in the military, so having a completely mobile career wasn’t an issue.

Living on an Air Force base will drive anyone to alcoholism, and I definitely learned to play hard there. But I would never, ever cheat on the man I loved enough to leave my beautiful Virginia and drag my cat, ferrets, and horse out to the desert for. He may be a fucking prick sometimes, but I never got into the free love idea of many enlisted wives that only got worse in wartime. I also never thought I would divorce him. That was before I knew I could be wrong about something I felt so strongly about.

While we had a little crowd that we partied with, we saw very little of them after September 11th. I didn’t miss them much since I could never figure out how to relate to people who saw childbirth as a sport. Chris worked 12-hour shifts at the main gate or driving around the desert making sure no terrorists were parachuting onto planet Holloman. I worked all day or went to school while he slept so our interactions were few and far between. When we did see each other we were so stressed out and pissed off at how our lives turned to shit so quickly. This made for Extreme Fighting like it was an Olympic sport. Our neighbors talked of the slamming doors and yelling that came to be our normal mode of discourse. We were still at that point of trying to be supportive of one another even though we were watching our marriage disintegrate before our eyes. After talking him into letting me get a dog, we found a common interest to take over our lives.

Since I was unable to make friends on base since they were all drunk, uneducated baby machines and whores, I found solace in our new laptop and the ability to spend hours online looking up international events. We didn’t have cable, so this was my news. Not knowing anything about Afghanistan, I became obsessed and found that my previous aspirations to become a vet had turned to International Relations very quickly. I was taking a class in world politics on base with a professor who had worked for DIA for 20 years and likely worked with my father at some point. His class was somewhat of a lifesaver for me because I truly found my calling and was able to step back from the reality of my now worthless marriage and pay attention to the greater issues in the world.

Chris was tossed back and forth between Bare Base and the Security Forces and rarely had more than a day off at a time. Whenever we met it was stressful. I will admit that our marriage had been through some nasty times before 9/11, but nothing like what happened after. Just like any young couple, we were poor and living off a military salary and the little money I could scrape up from working in town didn’t make us any richer. Everyone fights about money, but people with horses fight more, especially when it was the horse I had had for many years and wasn’t willing to sacrifice just to make us a little less poor. But then you can add the military and the fact that as a spouse I was expected to be that submissive supportive type who never wanted anything other than to be part of that marriage to the military. Being the way I am was frowned upon by everyone Chris worked with and my educational aspirations were seen as a silly hobby. I was suffocating in this place. I eventually left all of my jobs and quit my classes at the college that were barely above high school level. My best friend and neighbor on base was luckily another non-Betty Crocker military wife and we spent much time together towards the end. After quitting all of my jobs and school, Kelly and I spent our days tanning by the pool with sports bottles full of wine so we could check out the far too young lifeguards and talk about how much we hated our lives there. After nearly a year of this, I was given “the talk” by one of his superiors. The sad part if patriotism is the part where non-conformism is seen as unpatriotic. I supported my husband and my country. I just knew that I was not cut out for base life or sitting home to produce spawn to live off of the military budget. So I left. I left 11 months after September 11th. My divorce was final in January.

I cannot blame everything on the military or September 11th, but I know that the difficulty of being married to the military was and is severely compounded by wartime. Of the 3 married couples we were friends with on base, all of us were divorced within 2 years of September 11th. Maybe we were young and stupid, but outside factors made it impossible to stay together. A year after we divorced we started dating again, however, and did so for 9 months before breaking up. It was like a different relationship altogether with 2 very different people. He remains my best friend today.