Fallon's loosely connected short stories all take place at Fort Hood, the Texas military base, and paint an impressionistic portrait of the homes and lives left behind when the soldiers are gone. This slim volume moved me, exposing the experiences of military families as so much more than than the stereotype of stoic and dutiful.
Yes, I admit, it was the comparisons to Tim O’Brien, Raymond Carver, and Jhumpa Lahiri that caused me to place You Know When the Men Are Gone
into my TBR pile, but it was reading the first page that led me swiftly
to the last. As an anti-war, anti-
jingoism liberal from the far reaches of New England, I’d never given
much conscious thought to the quotidian lives of military families.
Vague sympathy and obligatory gratitude, perhaps, but my disdain for the
policies that led us to the last several military
conflicts has always interfered with any deeper compassion. Siobhan
Fallon’s stories, however, like a door left ajar or the thin walls of
army housing, gave me access to the private worlds of these very real
people and disarmed me of my bias. I found myself
reading with the same interest with which I approach more exotic
material, and learned that the wounds of an unjust war extend to the
soldiers’ loved ones every bit as unfairly as they did when my
grandfathers served so honorably in WWII.
