Stumbling Toward Enlightenment: A Wife's Thirty-year Journey with Her Green Beret, by Polly B Davis
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Stumbling Toward Enlightenment: A Wife's Thirty-year Journey with Her Green Beret, by Polly B Davis
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Married to a Special Forces soldier during the height of the Vietnam War, Polly Davis was a soldier’s wife with a difference: she often led, always followed, and sometimes fought alongside her Green Beret. Whether leaping out of airplanes, SCUBA diving off the cost of Massachusetts, hauling her family and their dogs over two continents, or battling a life-threatening disease, Davis’ life story is superbly rich with courage, compassion, and a sly humor that overcomes all obstacles. Failure is not an option with this warm and enticing tale. Polly started out as a military wife with a BS Degree from the University of Georgia and over the next thirty years raised two children, numerous dogs and cats, and attained a Masters and a Doctorate. All while tramping the world with her soldier husband. Often alone in strange and uncertain circumstances, she not only rose to the occasion, she excelled in everything she ever did. She has taught at every level from pre-school to college, served as the head of the English Department and Director of Research and Planning for Fayetteville Technical Community College, and served in numerous leadership positions within the various communities in which she has lived. You are invited to march along with her through these pages as she travels the world often standing alone with her children waving good-by to her husband as he flies off to combat zones and on numerous classified and unclassified missions. Always the trooper regardless of the challenges she faces. Polly Brown Davis’s warm and wonderful Stumbling Toward Enlightenment reads like a charm. It is first a love story, full of energy and accomplishment, a rare combination of experiences: parachuting, mothering, going to graduate school while her husband goes off to Vietnam, confronting realities of health. Polly Brown Davis is a survivor, a beautiful one, as this memoir attests. Shelby Stephenson, North Carolina Poet Laureate An independent southern girl who copes, challenges, survives, and thrives as a career soldier’s wife (and much more), Polly Davis writes with grace, wry humor, poignant honesty —I was with her all the way. Celia Miles, Author EXCERPTS I reached out the door. Mind numb, fist in my chest, I clutched the strut, but the thundering gusts outside the plane quickly blew me into a split second of chaos, a terrible spinning and sputtering, and then I heard it: a smooth popping sound, a snap, a rough jerk, and my chute floated open above me. I was alive, and all was calm. No sound, no sense of movement, aquamarine heavens, and billowing groves of green below me, I floated, savoring the absolute ecstasy of the moment. *** Vietnam loomed like a forest fire edging past the break. Tom went to war, and I went to graduate school. No longer the crazy coed, I saw Athens as the stay for young men who piled degrees upon degrees to stay in college. I’d catch myself avoiding windows, the look-out for those olive drab cars that pulled up in front of homes, shadowy figures forcing their feet to move to doorways bearing the awful message a loved one had been killed.. Tom and I were lucky. *** By then my eyesight had begun fading, and I could no longer read, so my doctor sent me to an ophthalmologist who diagnosed one problem as optic neuritis, whatever that was. Then a visit to a neurologist forced me to face what I had shoved into the far corners of my psyche for the past eight years. As Mama and I sat shoulder to shoulder in the waiting room, we felt the silence, only broken by one patient’s walker sliding from the wall, where it had been propped, to the floor. Looking over the patients slumped in their chairs was ominous. Surely I had nothing close to what these people were dealing with. *** About 3:00 a.m. on a Tuesday in the fall of 1988, Tom got a call from one of his men: a helicopter was down in Arizona, all aboard presumed dead. The helicopter was on a training exercise when it apparently burst i
Stumbling Toward Enlightenment: A Wife's Thirty-year Journey with Her Green Beret, by Polly B Davis- Amazon Sales Rank: #1163456 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-10-14
- Released on: 2015-10-14
- Format: Kindle eBook
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Inspiring, to say the least! By A Customer It has been a pleasure to read this book, especially since I grew up in the town where Polly's Tom lived. I knew his family and knew of Tom's childhood antics. What I didn't know was where he had been and what he had done. From this book I learned this but more importantly I learned about his stabilizing force, Polly. Her description of life as a military wife was descriptive in a way that almost made me wish I had experienced some of it. But the fact that she achieved so much while living a life of constant change made me realize how little I had accomplished in my life. It also inspired me to continue to keep on working on getting the most I could out of this life while I still can. The fact that she could achieve each of her goals while dealing with a disease as debilitating as MS can be and never giving up is the underlying story. While Tom did his job, which was to keep us safe, Polly did her job which included showing the world how a woman, against all odds, can do so much. I hope one day to meet Polly and shake hands with this incredible woman.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. A wonderful story By D. L. Roth This book is a fascinating story of a strong woman who decided being an army wife was not enough. In a time when couples give up and divorce when things get difficult, she resolutely moved forward from one challenge to another with a strength and courage rarely seen. She took what life threw at her and made it work. Not only did she stay married to Col. Tom Davis, she raised two children, earned a doctorate degree, and faced the physical challenges that came into her life. I loved the story and would highly recommend it.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Polly's Enlightenment By Amazon Customer This review previously appeared in vvabooks.wordpress.com Polly Brown married Tom Davis the day after he finished the Army's Officer Candidate School in 1969. For Polly, "marrying a soldier seemed surreal": She did not hold the profession in high regard, but she was "committed to her beau" and had "made up her mind to follow him wherever he chose to go." After a three-day honeymoon, Tom began parachute training. Almost instantly, Polly looked into "the soul of the military machine" and saw that "the mission came first, before family, before anything." She asked herself, "What? Me, second?" but tagged along while Tom finished jump school and then Special Forces training. Believing husbands and wives should share everything, Polly made two parachute jumps— the first frightening, and the second enlightening and final because she had nothing more to prove. With Tom's encouragement, she became a high school sociology teacher and embarked on a parallel life of her own, which she describes in Stumbling Toward Enlightenment: A Wife's Thirty-year Journey with Her Green Beret. They had been married slightly over a year when Tom went to Vietnam. While he was overseas, Polly earned a master's degree at the University of Georgia. Initially, Polly talks mostly about raising children—Thomas IV and Pollyanna, moving from post to post, curing illnesses, raising dogs and cats, and keeping house while Tom pursued adventures around the world. From a three-year tour in Germany, she recalls picturesque travels across Europe. Back in the states, Polly developed an ever-increasing independence as a college English teacher and department head. She received a doctoral degree from North Carolina State University. Volunteering for profit and non-profit companies earned her jobs at director levels of administration, which brought her greater authority and recognition. At one time, she simultaneously chaired Networth, the North Carolina Community College English Association, and Kiwanis. Throughout her career, she battled and repeatedly neutralized multiple sclerosis. Polly examines topics beyond travels and her teaching and leadership skills. Her strongest message concerns the difficulty of the role filled by a military wife with children and her relationship with her husband. When I entered the Air Force in the mid-1950s, young men with family problems often were told: "If the military wanted you to have a family, they would have issued you one." In other words: "A real soldier didn't need a family." This attitude still prevailed throughout Polly Davis' life with a soldier from 1969 to 2000. Tom attended every school available to him: Special Forces, Mountaineering, SCUBA, Infantry Officer Advanced Course, Ranger, HALO, and Command and General Staff College. He plied his Special Forces skills among allies in England, Germany, Denmark, France, Korea, Zaire, Turkey, Tunis, Italy, Iraq, and Bosnia. These assignments required him to be away from home for prolonged periods, leaving Polly entirely burdened with their family problems. Their situation provided a crux for what I gleaned from Polly's memoir. Separations from husbands became a way of life for Polly and other Army wives. When the men returned, she says, "What should have been relaxed, joyful homecomings often ended up as several tense days of adjustment." "Reunions weren't easy. A pretty standard habit, we wives agreed, was for our men to arrive after a long or even a short deployment and immediately take over. Or make an attempt," she says. The men immediately sought "to repair what they considered damage done in their absence, whether it was disciplining the children or the dogs or balancing the checkbook," she says. "First they would question our latest purchase, even groceries, then the reason for the purchase, then criticize it. The unfounded guilt that arose from their misplaced criticism confounded me," Polly says. In the best of times, according to her, marriage was one great compromise, reached mainly by wives' surrendering. Difficulties were compounded by the fact that, as Polly says, "We wives considered those long periods as sole parents tedious and difficult." "In the seventies, military wives were incidental, part of the casualties of the War," Polly says and argues that nobody recognized the possibility of an affliction such as PTSD. "We wives were nothing but confused, guiltily wondering what we'd done wrong," she says. Soldiers grew introverted and found solace among their peers rather than within their marriages. Polly says, "Sometimes I felt like I'd lost [Tom] to Ron and those guys on the [SCUBA] team." Needs of Tom's men—even the most impractical demands— took precedence over needs of his family, she says, and she did as told because she thought it was the norm. Yet when husbands deployed, they expected wives to manage everything single-handedly. As further evidence of men's domination, Polly cites Tom's accusations of her "lack of attention to detail" regarding small mishaps. His military mind sought the same degree of perfection from her that it expected from his men. He failed to realize that he was absent more often than not when family problems arose, and consequently he seldom provided timely solutions. To overcome the "still dependent wife" syndrome, Polly encouraged soldiers' wives to build identities of their own, but she had limited success in altering their ingrained behavior. She says, "I'd always found it difficult to perpetuate an outmoded tradition that squelched individual growth." Nevertheless, a growing concern among men that wives were "getting uppity" and a "batch of divorces in the battalion" provided her with a modicum of grim satisfaction. Otherwise, she felt that women were merely their husband's shadows. All husbands might benefit from reading Polly's book, particularly men in high stress jobs or who spend long periods away from home. It is important to understand that Polly is not a whiner. She talks about stumbling to enlightenment without belaboring situations that challenged her along the way. Her criticisms are factual and brief. For example, describing a time when MS immobilized her for two months, she says: "Tom did the best he could. However, the tension was often so thick I could feel myself chocking. Tom couldn't do it all." Following her description of one confrontational dinner, she explains how the children formulated a solution for the conflict, and then she changes the subject. Enlightenment has taught Polly Davis how to move ahead regardless of what gets in her way.Henry Zeybel, Lt. Col., USAF (Ret.)
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