Playing Army by Nancy Stroer

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Welcome to It's Raining Books. What are four things you can’t live without?

Well, my family (including my dog) and all the stuff at the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy (air, water, food, shelter) – does that count? Or do you mean actual, physical objects? In which case it would be an endless stack of blank notebooks, black .88 Stabilo pens, my laptop and an internet connection. I can create my own whole worlds out of those four things! And can I have coffee, too, please?

What is your favorite television show?

Twin Peaks is a series I could watch over and over again. It’s so strange and upsetting, but there’s nothing else like it anywhere. And David Lynch waiting a full twenty-five years to release the third season (because that was what was called for in the original)! That is some artistic foresight and patience. Also, the opening music makes me teary-eyed and I don’t know why. I could think about that show forever.

If you could be any character, from any literary work, who would you choose to be? Why?

Harriet the Spy. I did try to become her when I was ten or so – the utility belt, the notebook, the spy route. I already had the glasses! It’s a great book for a novelist in training, and also a cautionary tale about how to handle one’s observations of other people’s lives and behavior.

What have you got coming soon for us to look out for?

Besides Playing Army, which released on the 25th of June, I don’t know about other work coming soon! I have a day job to work around, and I’m a slow writer to begin with. But in my slow way, I’m working on my next novel. Without jinxing myself by saying too much, it’s a continuation of Playing Army, but based on a year I taught preschool in an all-Black Catholic school in East Baltimore. Kind of like Abbott Elementary, but haunted. Stay tuned!

What books or authors have most influenced your own writing?

If I could wake up, morphed into another writer, I would be ecstatic to find out I’d become Ann Patchett (author of, among many other books, Bel Canto, which is just a heart-wrenching story about love in an impossible situation). It’s not going to happen – even if I worked my butt off to try to write like that, I’d still wake up as a giant cockroach that was trying to be something I’m not. But maybe she’d let me help out in her book store or something. That would also be a dream realized.

I also love and adore and attempt – badly – to emulate Anne Tyler. She writes clean (as in, not overly-ornate prose) but precisely, and her characters are always so true and her stories always have the perfect touch of whimsy and humor to make even awful family drama feel very human.

It’s 1995 and the Army units of Fort Stewart, Georgia are gearing up to deploy to Bosnia, but Lieutenant Minerva Mills has no intention of going to war-torn eastern Europe. Her father disappeared in Vietnam and, desperate for some kind of connection to him, she’s determined to go on a long-promised tour to Asia. But the Colonel will only release her on two conditions—that she reform the rag-tag Headquarters Company so they’re ready for the peacekeeping mission, and that she get her weight within Army regs, whichever comes second. Min only has one summer to kick everyone’s butts into shape but the harder she plays Army, the more the soldiers—and her body—rebel. If she can’t even get the other women on her side, much less lose those eight lousy pounds, she’ll never have another chance to stand where her father once stood in Vietnam, feeling what he felt. The Colonel may sweep her along to Bosnia or throw her out of the Army altogether. Can you fake it until you make it? Min is about to find out.

Read an Excerpt

I turned to look, but before I could see, before I could process what was happening, brakes squealed and treads strained against their forward trajectory. A tracked vehicle did not turn on a dime when hemmed in by trees. Washburn had climbed into the passenger side of my Humvee to get on the radio and his helmet and Reyes’s—awake now and likewise silhouetted against the brightness—were turned toward an armored personnel carrier that burst from between the trees straight at them.

Bright lights made a fuzzy arc in the smoke, then the APC plowed into the vinyl side of the Humvee. There was a sickening crunch, the sound of armor hitting the thin, metal-framed doors. The Humvee lurched forward into the back corner of the deuce, pushed by the much larger vehicle. The deuce moved, too, then halted the Humvee’s momentum.

I froze. It took a full five seconds for the cicadas to recover, to begin screaming into the night, although an engine fan was still running somewhere. Those five seconds were so dense I could hear the Brownian noise of molecules struggling for space. Then someone was screaming in a language I didn’t know. Maybe Reyes? Screaming in Tagalog? Robinson emerged from the cab of the deuce and stumbled toward me on the trail but I motioned her back. “Lay on the horn,” I said. “Fuck light and noise discipline. Turn on the headlights and don’t stop blasting the horn until somebody turns up.”

About the Author

Nancy Stroer grew up in a very big family in a very small house in Athens, Georgia and served in the beer-soaked trenches of post-Cold War Germany. She holds degrees from Cornell and Boston University, and her work has appeared in the Stars and Stripes, Soldiers magazine, Hallaren Lit Mag, Wrath-Bearing Tree, and Things We Carry Still, an anthology of military writing from Middle West Press.

She’s a teacher and a trainer, and an adjunct faculty member of the Ellyn Satter Institute, a 503(c) not-for-profit that helps individuals and families develop a more joyful relationship to food and their bodies. Playing Army is her first novel.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Nancy_Stroer
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/49311942.Nancy_Stroer
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nancy.stroer/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nancy-stroer-86213089/

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