Waiting Wives: The Story of Schilling Manor, Home Front to the Vietnam War by Donna Moreau

In 1964, as the first B-52s took flight in what would become America’s longest combat mission, an old Air Force base on the plains of Kansas became Schilling Manor—the only base in the history of the United States set aside for the wives and children of soldiers assigned to Vietnam. Author Donna Moreau was the daughter of one such waiting wife, and here she writes of growing up at a time when The Flintstones were interrupted with news of firefights, fraggings, protests, and assassinations, when the evening news announced death tolls along with the weather forecasts. The women and children of Schilling Manor fought on the emotional front of the war. It was not a front composed of battle plans and bullets. Their enemies were fear, loneliness, depression, isolation, destitution, lack of information, and the slow tick of time.

Waiting Wives: The Story of Schilling Manor, Home Front of the Vietnam War tells the story of the last generation of hat and glove military wives called upon by their country to pack without question, to follow without comment, and to wait quietly with a smile. The first book to focus on this other, hidden side of war, Waiting Wives is a narrative investigation of an extraordinary group of women living in an incomparable community during America’s most turbulent decade. A compelling memoir and domestic drama, Waiting Wives is also the story of a country in the midst of change, of a country at war with a war.