In the evenings, Karen loved to listen to her dad hold court in the living room. His stories might be prompted by events in the news, visits by old war buddies, or questions from Karen and her siblings, who sat on the floor doing their homework or playing board games. He told them about the Tuskegee Airmen and how the Army had changed since the segregated days, when he’d enlisted. He talked about how the North Vietnamese had tried to get in his head, sending messages over the radio like “Hey, black soldier, what are you fighting for? America doesn’t care about you.”
She’d crawl up in his lap, smelling that sanitized hospital scent that always stuck with him at the end of the day. But even that meant the Army to Karen. She’d ask about his job as a combat medic, and he’d tell her how the red crosses on their helmets had made them targets for the enemy. He told her how he’d gotten shot through the shoulder. And he talked about the nonnegotiable priority of never leaving a fallen soldier in the field. Even if all that was left was his dog tags.
Karen would sit riveted, and now that he was retired, she could listen unafraid. He taught her that that was simply the way a family operated. He’d known that if anything happened to him, the Army would take care of his family. And being in the Army was the life he had wanted. It gave him a chance to serve his country. It meant meeting people from all over the world, learning about where they were from and picking up bits of their language. He was a people person, like Karen, and a soft touch around the house. Discipline was Mattie’s job, and when she was too tired to mess with it, she’d tell Bill to do the spanking. If Karen had it coming, he’d take her to her room, shut the door, then slap the bed a couple times while she pretended to cry. She adored him. And she was every bit as fascinated by his uniform as Mattie had been.
She finally got to put on one of her own when she enrolled at Judson High School, where she joined the junior ROTC. She was no longer anybody’s Peanut, having sprouted to five-nine, with a long sprinter’s body. She ran the first leg on the girls’ sprint relays and played basketball as well. She’d become a cutup, like her dad, and if one of the other girls’ bras turned up in the hotel ice maker at an out-of-town track meet, everybody knew who’d done it. If a teammate needed a tampon, Karen would yell, “Stick!” like she did when passing the relay baton, and hold one out with a stiff right arm. But during practice, she was all business, the go-between for the girls and their coach. Still, ROTC was her focus. By the time she graduated, in 1979, she had given up her track and basketball dreams. Her goal was to be an Army officer.
On Valentine's Day 1984, Karen married George Hardison, a week before accepting her commission as a second lieutenant. The two of them could have passed for a mismatched couple on a sitcom. She was two inches taller, more if she wore heels, and always beamed a mile-wide smile, backed by the confident, commanding air she’d inherited from Mattie. George’s face was serious, but that masked a get-rich dreamer with a strong streak of goofiness. They’d met at the rec center at San Angelo’s Goodfellow Air Force Base, in March 1980, when she was a freshman at Angelo State and he was an Air Force sergeant. He’d left the service shortly thereafter and moved to Las Vegas, prompting her to transfer to UNLV.
When her commission came through, Karen opted to do like her dad and entered the Army medical branch, but with a focus on the administrative side. She did her basic training at Fort Sam and then went to Fort Benjamin Harrison, in Indiana, for her technical training. An unemployed George went with her, staying at sister Kim’s house in nearby Fort Wayne while Karen trained on the base during the week.
It was Kim’s first extended exposure to her new brother-in-law, an experience occasioned by much arching of eyebrows and shaking of the head. To earn his keep, George offered to spruce up her lawn, then trimmed her four-foot-tall hedges down to under one foot. He announced that his second career would be as a chef, put a soufflé in the oven, and set it on self-clean. Kim went out to get burgers.
But when her sister was around, Kim saw why she had fallen so hard. George and Karen laughed together the same way Bill and Mattie did. When Kim’s husband met George for the first time, George insisted the sisters let him pretend he was blind. He put on a pair of sunglasses and rolled his head from side to side like Stevie Wonder. He thrust out his arm to shake hands in the exact wrong direction. He’d have kept it up all night if Karen could have controlled herself.
On February 22, 1987, Karen’s twenty-sixth birthday, she gave birth to their daughter, Saundra, at Fort Lee, Virginia, shortly before being transferred back to Army med headquarters at Fort Sam. It was exactly where the young family needed to be. Saundra was special. She was born with hydrocephalus and spina bifida. She was blind, and she had to be fed through a tube. The Army docs warned that she wouldn’t live long, but for Karen, having Saundra in the town she’d grown up in, with all the Army medical resources available, felt like a blessing. “This is my baby, and she needs me to care for her,” Karen told Kim. “That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to lean into this and trust the grace of God.”
Karen and George learned