COB ADDER, Iraq – A thousand words will never serve as well to tell the story of any couple, of what makes them work, as a few moments of them together. For all the explanations and declarations of friendships at the core of successful marriages, the true essence of it is not so easily categorized.
Staff Sgt. Mike and Sgt. 1st Class Melanie McCracken never use the words “best friend” or even “friend” during hours spent with them. Yet, in that time, it is difficult to miss the vibrance of something those words would fail to define.
For most of the 2009 deployment of Task Force Diablo, Melanie was the maintenance platoon sergeant for “D” Company, 2nd Regiment,104th General Support Aviation Battalion. For the last weeks of her tour, she was the assistant unit movement officer.
Mike is the sergeant in charge of quality control for the same company. Their offices are 30 feet apart in a row of containers outside the maintenance hangar she ran from May to October.
On a 120-degree afternoon on Tallil Ali Air Base, Iraq, the two sat together in her office. The small space was cluttered with a half-dozen foam-filled cases that house sensitive, calibrated test equipment.
The tagged and color-coded wires and instruments were in the wrong spaces, some even the wrong cases.
“The mechanics use them then put them back screwed up. Then I have to unscrew them up,” said Melanie. “Sometimes I go and unscrew the mechanic.” Mike and Melanie are helicopter maintenance professionals. Sloppy work habits drive them crazy. While they put away the equipment, they made jokes about who last used the instruments and if there was any hope that the Soldier would eventually develop good work habits.
Mike and Melanie are one of several married couples in their 600-Soldier battalion who live with their spouses in Iraq.
Like any two other sergeants, the McCrackens live in a two-person room in a Containerized Housing Unit (CHU). The big difference in the McCracken CHU is the set of single beds pushed together in the middle of the room.
Other than that, they each have a beige metal locker and matching end table. They work together from 7am to 6pm and eat dinner together in the chow hall; they go back to the CHU, tramp over 100 yards of gravel to their respective shower trailers, and spend the evening together watching TV and getting online. They have one computer they pass back and forth in the bed for email and Skype calls.
The McCrackens come from Jonestown, Pa. where they both have full-time technician jobs. Their two children are staying with Melanie’s older sister, Valery Fuhrman, on her farm in Iowa.
Mike and Melanie agreed before the deployment started they would not take a mid-tour leave. Instead, they are saving their leave to spend time with ten-year-old Anthony and eight-year-old Emalee when they get home. This is to avoid the disruption showing up and leaving again two weeks later might cause.
They should know. This is their second deployment together.
In 2004, the couple went to Afghanistan. Valery also cared for Anthony and Emalee during that deployment.
“They like being on Valery’s farm,” Melanie said. “But my daughter is having some trouble with this deployment.”
Melanie struggles with whether she and Mike have made the right choice, but speaks resolutely about the dilemma she faced.
“I decided I want to be there if something happens to Mike and he feels the same way,” she said.
“I come from close family,” she added, “The kids love Valery and they get to live on a real working farm for a year.”
Mike and Melanie are aware that their choice is not the one every couple would make.
“It works for us. We are more fortunate than most Soldiers,” she said. “During both deployments we had each other.”
Ask other sergeants deployed here and many say, “I would like to have my spouse in country,” but those same soldiers cannot imagine sharing a 180-square-foot space with their spouse, especially if they have to see their spouse all day at work.
Can lovers be friends? CS Lewis in his book The Four Loves says, “Shared activity is the soil in which friendship grows. When there is no shared activity, there can be no real friendship.” In certain circles it is almost required that a couple say, “My spouse is my best friend” when they spend almost no time together, share no interests and disagree on money, kids, jobs, and in-laws.
Mike says their relationship is “Nothing special.” Melanie agreed, saying she and Mike are just an ordinary couple.
If the definition of ordinary includes working together in heat and sandstorms in an open-ended hangar on combat aircraft, leading troops in months of combat training, carrying an assault rifle to every meal and living in a 180-square-foot space together while their kids and home are 7,000 miles and eight time zones away, then yes the McCrackens are just like everybody else.
