Sitting on the airplane with a book in my bag that I knew I should read. But it is about a deployment experience. And I’m unsure if I should dive in or just ignore it a little longer. Sometimes reading books about people’s deployment experiences can be difficult. Instead, I try to watch a few shows on the screen in front of me in my seat. After a few minutes of attempting to get the screen to work, I realized it was not going to happen. Thankful for that book I had been avoiding. I decide to read until I got bored and then try to figure out the screen again. Maybe it would work by magic.

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I can’t tell you if the screen ever worked. Because after my failed attempt and choice to open up Calmed: Growth After Trauma. I didn’t stop reading until we taxied up to the gate and I read the last few pages on the ground. Okay, I did stop reading a few times because it wouldn’t be an airline flight with kids if there were not at least a few interruptions. But after each break in reading as I helped my boys with whatever they needed, I went back to reading more of Jennifer and her husband’s story.

I couldn’t put it down

It is hard to say what I loved most about this book or why I could not put it down. I guess the real reason is how invested I was in the story. How I wanted to know what happened next. Not just through the deployment experience. The challenge, the tragedy. But I wanted to know what happened to the two main characters, Jennifer and her husband XXX. I knew from the back cover they would become husband and wife. But the story had so many twists and turns. Even while reading it, even while knowing the outcome, I still couldn’t believe how the story would end.

Maybe I should tell you I am a hopeless romantic. So, to read a love story combined with a deployment experience told from both the husband’s and wife’s perspective. I guess it isn’t surprising to see why I was drawn in to see what happened next.

Deployment memoirs

But as I’m working on my own memoir, having a good story is not enough to draw in the reader. And to that end, Jennifer gets credit for crafting a book that draws in the reader. Invests you in the characters and tells the true story of what her and her husband’s experience leading up to war, deploying, and coming home was like.

And the fact that Jennifer was able to capture her husband’s voice in the story is impressive. You can hear the change in how events that happened to them are seen from different perspectives. I think so often when you read a memoir you can only hear the story of the one who served. And while that does not mean the experience isn’t valid hearing more than one point of view on the same experience helps give the reader a clearer picture of what the deployment experience is like.

Hearing more than one perspective

One of the challenges of deployment is that even though you are all going through the same experience how you see it or react to it can be very different. It can make the whole experience so different and I think this book captures how that happens.

Next week’s podcast interview is with the author, Jennifer Hobbs. She talks more about her experience in the military and we dive deeper into some of the stories she shared in the book and how the book came to be. But until then, I highly recommend you check out her book, Calmed, and get your copy today.