Vicki Cody - Fly Safe: Letters from the Gulf War and Reflections From Back Home

Praise for Fly Safe

Cody has an uncanny way of giving us a vulnerable look behind the curtain of a commander in theater and the woman who loves him back on post. Her intimate details of deployed love are honest and heartfelt with a level of candor Ive never before seen.

Heidi Collins, former CNN news anchor and proud wife of USAF fighter/attack pilot Capt. Matt Collins

With unparalleled grace and humility, Vicki Cody pours her soul out on the page for all to experience. In bearing her soul, she captures our hearts. Fly Safe is a must read for all Americans.

Jimmy Blackmon, author of Pale Horse and Cowboys Over Iraq

Fly Safe

Copyright 2021 Vicki Cody

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

Print ISBN: 978-1-64742-144-1

E-ISBN: 978-1-64742-145-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021906587

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To Dick, Clint, and Tylermy inspiration.

To the members of 1-101st Aviation Regiment, Expect No Mercy, during Desert Stormheroes, each and every one of you.

To the Army spouses and kids who wait for letters and phone calls and live with the stress and the worryyou are every bit as courageous as those in uniform.

F or years, the decorative hatbox sat in a closet or under the bed, at times all but forgotten. It is overflowing with memorabilia from a very significant time in my life. There are the journals I kept, the yellow ribbons that we tied around a tree in the front yard to signify that someone in our family was deployed, and the engraved metal wristbands that my sons and I wore in honor of their father, my husband, bearing the inscription LTC Dick CodyApache PilotOperation Desert Storm.

Also in the box, and most important, are the letters my husband wrote to me while he was deployed. Tied in bundles with red, white, and blue ribbon, they survived the next thirty years and another nine moves. When Dick retired from the Army and we settled into our forever home, I found the perfect place for my hatbox, in the sitting room off our bedroom. Every time I clean, I have to vacuum around it, so its not as if I dont know of its existence, but I rarely take the time to look at the contents.

In 2016, while writing my first memoir, Army Wife, I sorted through some of the letters for reference and dates but didnt have the time then to really look at everything. I mentioned the letters in my memoir, but because that story encompassed more than thirty years of Army life and covered so much material, I couldnt spend as much time on that era as I wanted to. I always felt there was more to say about that particular year, 199091such an important time in our lives.

Now that my memoir is published and out in the world, I have more time on my hands. I recently stumbled upon the box while vacuuming, and something made me stop what I was doing and go through its contents. Hours passed while I read letters. Like a good song that transports you to another place and time, so too did the letters from my husband. Even after forty-five years of marriage, looking at his handwriting, rubbing and sniffing the paper, and reading his expressions of love and pride for me made my heart beat just a little faster, and I couldnt help but smile.

But it is not just his love that I feel from the letters; they also fill in a nine-month gap in our marriage and serve as a window into his life then, as well as into world events as they were unfolding: the stifling summer heat in the desert of Saudi Arabia, the soldiers abysmal living conditions, the stress and responsibility of command, and eventually the moral dilemma of picking the flight crews that would go into battle alongside him. All of that was set against a backdrop of impending war.

The year 1990 would prove to be monumental for me in terms of growth and self-discovery as a wife and as a mother. My husband would make military history that would chart the course of the rest of his Army career. At the same time, it was a coming of age for our two young sons, putting dreams in their heads of one day following in their dads footsteps.

Dick and I were fifteen years into our marriage at that point, and he was about halfway through what would turn out to be a thirty-six-year Army career. As a career officer and helicopter pilot, Dick lived on an exciting edge, doing exactly what he had dreamed of doing since he was a young boy. He had been part of deployments, missions, training exercises, and operations that had taken him all over the world, for varying lengths of time. We had even postponed our wedding because of a deployment, so I was no stranger to the realities and challenges of Army life. But when he left, quite unexpectedly, in August 1990 for Saudi Arabia, I could feel in my gut that that deployment was different. Dick was a lieutenant colonel (LTC) and the commander of an elite attack helicopter battalion in the storied 101st Airborne Division, and the events leading up to his departure made me pretty sure that he was heading into combat. While he was living his dream, I prepared myself for what I could only guess would be a very challenging and stressful time. Before he left, I began writing in a journal, and when his letters finally began to arrive, I kept every single oneall ninety-four of them.

It was a historic time for the United States and certainly for our military. It was the first time the Army deployed its all-volunteer force to fight what would later become that generations protracted war on terrorism. It was the first time I had heard of a dictator named Saddam Hussein. It was also a time of patriotism in our country.

With all that serving as the backdrop, let me take you back to a time when we still corresponded by mail, few of us had personal computers, and there was no internet, no email, no iPhone, no texting, no tweeting, and no Facebook. I didnt even have an answering machine yet! When my husband deployed, it was weeks before they even had phone service. When they did get phones, he and his soldiers waited in long lines at phone banks to call home. Phone calls were expensive and few and far between.

It was a time when our written letters to each other were our only communication, our only connection. Knowing the risks and dangers in what he was doing, and unable to tell him in person, I ended every letter with the words I had been saying to him since his very first flight: Fly safe.

T he call came when I least expected it. I had just walked in the door of our quarters at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. My mom was with me, visiting for a week while my husband was on a four-month training exercise at Fort Hunter Liggett, in the California desert. We were busy unloading packages and talking excitedly about the yarn we had found for our knitting projects, when my neighbor suddenly appeared at the open front door. She had a frantic look in her eyes and her voice shook as she told me that Colonel (COL) Loftin, Dicks brigade commander, had been trying to get in touch with me.