About the book
Married to a Special Forces soldier
during the height of the Vietnam War, Polly Davis was a soldier’s wife
with a difference: she often led, always followed, and sometimes fought
alongside her Green Beret. Whether leaping out of airplanes, SCUBA diving
off the coast of Massachusetts, hauling her family and their dogs over two
continents, or battling a life-threatening disease, Davis’ life story is
superbly rich with courage, compassion, and a sly humor that overcomes all
obstacles. Failure is not an option with this warm and enticing tale.
Polly Brown Davis’s warm and wonderful
Stumbling Toward Enlightenment reads like a charm. It is first a love
story, full of energy and accomplishment, a rare combination of
experiences: parachuting, mothering, going to graduate school while her
husband goes off to Vietnam, confronting realities of health. Polly Brown
Davis is a survivor, a beautiful one, as this memoir
attests.
Shelby Stephenson, North Carolina Poet Laureate
An independent southern girl who copes,
challenges, survives, and thrives as a career soldier’s wife (and much
more), Polly Davis writes with grace, wry humor, poignant honesty —I was
with her all the way.
Celia Miles, Author/Editor
The most common comment from readers after
reading my memoir, The
Most Fun I Ever Had With My Clothes On: A March from Private to Colonel,
was "You really went through some tough times, but the real question
is how the hell did Polly manage and kept going through all that
time!?" Well, now you can read how Polly managed and the problems she
conquered while I ran around having the most fun I ever had with my
clothes on!
COL Tom Davis, Polly's husband:-)
Readers Comments:
I bought the book and am well into it. This book is a very good read
from the wife's perspective. Its a series of life's stories where a person
feels they are looking over her shoulder watching events and her life
unfold. Very well done! Darrell H.
I finished Polly's book last night and found it absolutely delightful.
It had never occurred to me just how much the wives have to deal with
while their husbands are serving our country. She did a masterful job of
describing the challenges and victories from her perspective. There is no
doubt she deserved that Green Beret. Neil J
I just finished reading this fascinating story. This is the story of a
strong woman who took what life gave her and created a fulfilling life. In
a day when people are ready to jump ship when the going gets rough, Polly
Davis used the challenges of life to her
advantage. Dwight R
I finished "Stumbling" a few days ago, and I am still thinking
about it. That's how much I enjoyed it and for a multitude of reasons! I
am sincerely glad that I read your book after reading Tom's memoirs. I had
a great frame of reference after reading his book, but where his was
relatively clinical in nature, I particularly enjoyed the more
introspective portions of your book. I guess that is the Venus versus Mars
aspect of things, but taken together, the books recount the lives of two
incredibly exceptional individuals. I consider myself extremely fortunate
to have met you both and come to know you as closely as I do. Both of you
are inspirational, and I hope that as my years progress, I will continue
to attain a greater measure of "Enlightenment" as suggested in
your text.
David S
Excerpts:
I REACHED OUT the door. Mind numb, fist in my chest, I clutched the
strut, but the thundering gusts outside the plane quickly blew me into a
split second of chaos, a terrible spinning and sputtering, and then I
heard it: a smooth popping sound, a snap, a rough jerk, and my chute
floated open above me. I was alive, and all was calm. No sound, no sense
of movement, aquamarine heavens, and billowing groves of green below me, I
floated, savoring the absolute ecstasy of the moment.
VIETNAM LOOMED LIKE a forest fire edging past the break. Tom went to
war, and I went to graduate school. No longer the crazy coed, I saw Athens
as the stay for young men who piled degrees upon degrees to stay in
college. I’d catch myself avoiding windows, the look-out for those olive
drab cars that pulled up in front of homes, shadowy figures forcing their
feet to move to doorways bearing the awful message a loved one had been
killed.. Tom and I were lucky.
R&R HAWAII: I could feel his eyes taking in those of us left
huddled there as if trying to decide how to approach. Shuffling forward,
he asked for a young woman by her husband’s name. The one standing next
to me leaned into him and slumped. Like the one with the message was The
Devil himself, the rest of us backed off. Arms around her shoulders, he
led her off to a building nearby. Sure enough, her husband had been one of
the unlucky ones. She’d be left to deal with it. I swallowed back tears.
And wondered if she had children.
THE LOBSTER TRIPS left me with bittersweet memories. We’d travel to
the coast, dine out on seafood, check in at the historic and charmingly
rustic Hawthorne Inn in Gloucester for the night. Before daylight, Tom
would begin preparations: wake me up, hurry me up, and we’d head out to
the car. There our wetsuits waited, along with the other paraphernalia we’d
need for the dive. Generally at sunrise on the Massachusetts coast, the
temperature was biting cold, and the wind never let up. Pulling on my
wetsuit and my booties and gloves took me just about as long as the entire
dive did. That didn’t count walking out over what seemed an endless mile
of rocks.
BY THEN MY eyesight had begun fading, and I could no longer read, so my
doctor sent me to an ophthalmologist who diagnosed one problem as optic
neuritis, whatever that was. Then a visit to a neurologist forced me to
face what I had shoved into the far corners of my psyche for the past
eight years. As Mama and I sat shoulder to shoulder in the waiting room,
we felt the silence, only broken by one patient’s walker sliding from
the wall, where it had been propped, to the floor. Looking over the
patients slumped in their chairs was ominous. Surely I had nothing close
to what these people were dealing with.
ABOUT 3:00 A.M. on a Tuesday in the fall of 1988, Tom got a call from
one of his men: a helicopter was down in Arizona, all aboard presumed
dead. The helicopter was on a training exercise when it apparently burst
into flames. Those aboard included eleven of Tom’s soldiers.
Tom and I spent four of the most difficult days
of our lives driving to the families’ homes, some as far as sixty miles
away. My MS was still fresh, and I’d acquired shingles to boot. The
wives were bewildered and frightened; consoling them was impossible. We
could at least be there. After a few days and no final word, the families
became frustrated, then furious, developing a likeness to an angry mob,
taking it out on those who could not answer their questions. They had
nowhere to turn and limited resources. They were exhausted; we were
exhausted. And we all held the Army responsible for not getting its act
together. Calls were still coming in that families needed toilet paper,
then diapers, then more paper plates. And there seemed no end in sight.
WHILE I WAS feeding the baby, Tee, age two, entertained himself by
decorating the refrigerator with a stick of butter or cracking eggs to
watch as they jelled over the floor. Then he’d spread them with his bare
feet. We ended up being the only family in the neighborhood with a snap
link and rope on the refrigerator door, anything to prevent catastrophes.
Between the diapers and other messes, our home would neither have passed a
white-glove inspection nor a perk test for smell.
“LOOKS LIKE THE decision’s been made; there’s nothing I can do
about it.” Tom opened the refrigerator and pulled out Paulaner.
“Well, somebody needs to tell Col. Martina (the
post commander) what’s going on.”
“Then go tell him.” Tom took a swallow of
beer.
I grabbed the car keys and left, not quite sure
if I was doing the right thing. Surely it couldn’t hurt, but we all knew
the Army didn’t like pushy wives.
About the Author
 POLLY
DAVIS did something she thought she never would do. Marry a soldier. A
Green Beret even! Polly started out as a military wife with a BS Degree
from the University of Georgia and over the next thirty years raised two
children, numerous dogs and cats, and attained a Masters and a Doctorate.
All while tramping the world with her soldier husband. Often alone in
strange and uncertain circumstances, she not only rose to the occasion,
she excelled in everything she ever did. She has taught at every level
from pre-school to college, served as the head of the English Department
and Director of Research and Planning for Fayetteville Technical Community
College. She was the first woman to join and the first woman to be
president of the Kiwanis Club of the Cape Fear, President of the
Cumberland County Library and Information Center, President of the Friends
of the Cumberland County Library and Information Center, and
Program/Speaker chair of the Cumberland County Library and Information
Center for which we drew authors from all over the area and beyond. She
was also the President of the North Carolina Community College Council of
Teachers of English.
You are invited to march along with her through these pages as she
travels the world often standing alone with her children waving good-by to
her husband as he flies off to combat zones and on numerous classified and
unclassified missions. Always the trooper regardless of the challenges she
faces.
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