‘Army Wives’

Behind the Scene

By Jacqueline Quattrocchi | Photography By David Strohl

Based out of her home in Fort Stewart, Ga., ‘Army Wives’ author Tanya Biank juggles roles as a military spouse, writer and mother to her son, Jack.

Pamela Moran, the headstrong, butt-kicking, supermom of the Lifetime series, “Army Wives,” is the character Tanya Biank, real life Army wife and author of the book behind the show, best relates to. “Like Pamela I’m only a half step ahead of chaos,” says Biank as she references an interview she conducted with Sally Pressman (“Army Wives’” Roxy LeBlanc) with spaghetti in her hair and down her shirt. “My son had a tantrum moments before,” says Biank, adding that it’s funny now, but wasn’t at the time.

Inside an abandoned warehouse in Charleston, S.C., the set of the usually disheveled Moran house is currently impeccable, lacking the strewn toys and the rowdy children seen in the show every Sunday night. The warehouse is dark, except for the beaming lights aimed at the cast. The directors, writers and Biank sit near the stage in collapsible chairs that read “Army Wives” across their backs, all with headphones over their ears and eyes glued on two tiny monitors. A red light flashes and somewhere overhead, an obnoxious bell rings shrilly, signaling live tape. Brigid Brannagh, or Pamela, sits with Jeremy Davidson, who plays her on-screen husband Chase, at the dinner table and laughs with the two Moran children, Katie and Lucas (Chloe Taylor and Jake Johnson). Someone yells “Action!” and Brannagh takes her umpteenth bite of spaghetti as young Johnson burps and blames the garlic bread. Taylor laughs freely, while Brigid and Davidson play the reprimanding parents. The scene lasts 20 seconds, yet it takes over two hours to film.

“Like a lot of military spouses my life is a juggling act. … It can get quite comical,” Biank says. She says she tried to visit the set at least once per season, but it’s her first time at the Oakridge Stage, one of the many in Charleston, where the show is filmed. It’s also her first time meeting Davidson.

Despite the spaghetti incident, Biank, 39, is graceful and charming. Color-coordinated from her headband down to her necklace, purse and heels, her casual elegance is inviting, warm and relaxing to those nearby. With poise and confidence Biank represents a superwoman of sorts. While pursing her own career as a journalist, she’s balanced Army life—as an Army brat, wife and mother—authored a book that’s whirled into a TV series, regularly gives speeches and serves as a leader of Family Readiness Group, an organization designed to help families conquer the challenges of military life. She’s lived all around the world, including Germany, Korea, Fort Knox in Kentucky, Buffalo, N.Y., and even here in Northern Virginia’s own backyard: Alexandria and Reston, although the Army has most recently sent the Bianks to Georgia.

The seeds for her book, and consequently the show, were rooted in a string of tragic domestic murders back in 2002 at Fort Bragg, an Army base located in Fayetteville, N.C. Five Army wives were murdered in one summer, and Biank, working for The Fayetteville Observer as a military reporter at the time, broke the story. Being an Army wife herself had its benefits, as she was able to gain access to Fort Bragg that other reporters were not. “I ended up getting interviewed by major [TV] networks, and so what happened was I was on ‘Good Morning America’ for the second time, and a literary agent saw that interview and asked me if I was interested in doing a book about military life,” Biank says. “I said yes, but I didn’t want [the book] to focus on these murders because there’s so much more to military life than this horrific thing.”

Biank began working on a book proposal in 2003, which was soon tracked down by a film agent. “And then, Touchstone TV and the Mark Gordon Company were interested in buying the rights to the book,” Biank says. “I hadn’t even written [it] yet. Talk about pressure. There were high expectations!”

The book, “Under The Sabers: The Unwritten Code of Army Wives,” came out in February 2006. The first season of Lifetime’s show aired in the summer of 2007, which, Biank explains, was “pretty quick when you think about having to do a screenplay, hire actors and find a location.”

Biank says that she was “very reserved” and “grounded” throughout the piloting process, as most pilots don’t ever make it to television. But now that the show and book have been successful, “it’s been exciting,” she says. “It’s certainly something that I never even thought could happen. I wanted to publish a book; I never thought of anything beyond that. A TV show, and a hit one at that, was never even a goal or a dream. But now it’s happened, and it’s been a really wonderful experience, and I’m very proud of the show and proud to be a part of it.”

And the show isn’t just a success in the U.S. “Army Wives” has fans around the world in places such as South Africa, Singapore, Scotland and Ireland, to name a few. “It’s touched people,” Biank says. “It’s really fascinating. ‘Addicted,’ that’s the word people use, that’s the phrase.”

Although Biank has finished her book, she continues to work closely with the show and consult with the writers, who recently finished the third season. While the book and the show differ in many aspects, Biank says they share some common themes of love of country, family and friendship. “The writers on the show might take some things from the book and run with it, use their creativity and imaginations, because when you have a weekly series there’s no way you can follow a book that way. But the themes are very real, and many of the experiences can really hit home with a lot of military folks.”

Although Biank spent several years in the Northern Virginia area, her book is set in Fort Bragg. “All the places in the book are real places, real roads and restaurants and bars,” she says. “But one thing I wanted to do with this book was make it universal, so even if you’ve never lived in Fayetteville or Fort Bragg, you’d recognize some things because a lot of military installations have similar things.” The show, on the other hand, is set in Charleston at a fictional Army base, Fort Marshall, named after one of the show’s producers.

Biank has been “in” the Army her entire life, growing up with a father who was an officer, and later a colonel, and marrying an Army major (now lieutenant colonel) in 2004. In 10th grade she moved from Yorktown to Reston where she graduated from Herndon High School in 1989. “It was a tough transition for me,” Biank says. “Herndon was two to three times the size of my other high school, and it was really hard for me to just let go.” Following high school, she went off to Penn State University and graduated in 1993 with a bachelor’s in journalism. Then she lived in Korea for a year, studying language, culture and teaching English as a second language at an all-girls school. Biank compares her experience to something like the Peace Corps and says she lived with a Korean family on a little island. “I loved it, it was an amazing experience, a really special time,” she says.

In 2005, she moved to Alexandria with her husband, Michael Marti, who was stationed at the Pentagon. This time, her attitude leading up to the move was more welcoming. “I looked forward to the move,” she explains. “I was interested in how my perceptions of the area would change, [and] our son was born there.” In 2008 the Army assigned Tanya’s husband to the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stuart, Ga., and the family packed up and headed south, where they’ve been ever since.

Biank says she misses Virginia. “I love how you have all these people from different cultures and backgrounds who are all there together,” she says. “My dentist was Iranian, my hairdresser was Afghani. … I love that, I love meeting people from other countries—and I always asked people where [they’re] from. I think that’s what makes America special, and what makes Northern Virginia a special place. You just have interesting people in that area, and they all have a story to tell,” she says. She also draws attention to the great schools available. “Schools are so important to military families who have kids and unfortunately, in a lot of military installations they may not be so great, so that’s one great thing about Northern Virginia. You have great public schools. That’s a big plus.”

While she jokes that the lack of sweet tea in the region was a major con, any Northern Virginian can easily predict that traffic topped her list of negatives. “I’m not the best driver,” Biank says. She has a story in which she was going to visit a friend and had to drive from Kingstown to Arlington. “By the grace of God, somehow I made it,” she says. “And of course, when I got there, I couldn’t find parking, and I said, ‘I’m never doing this ever again unless you come get me or I can take the Metro.’ It’s crazy! The Metro was my friend.”

Growing up as a child of the Army, and later marrying back into it, has given Biank a chance to view military life from two different perspectives. She knows the acronyms, rank structure and overall culture. “I didn’t go into it with my eyes shut,” she says. “But it’s certainly different [as an Army wife] because you’re an adult, and you have adult responsibilities you’re dealing with that you don’t when you’re a child or teenager.”

Oftentimes military wives are left alone to run the household. They raise children, fix leaky pipes and broken vehicles, manage bills, mow the lawns and drive kids to school and after-school activities while their husbands are called away for duty for months at a time. Sharing these common experiences, it’s been said that military wives share a unique bond, sometimes referred to as a sisterhood. “The spouses I’ve met are a strong group of women, and I’ve learned a lot from them,” Biank says, citing such character traits as resiliency, selflessness and volunteerism. “They make things happen, they keep the Army rolling along, they truly are the backbone.”

In some aspects, the wives in Northern Virginia aren’t so different from their sisters in the Midwest or along the West Coast. “Wives move frequently, every two, three or four years, and so the military wives stationed in Northern Virginia have been stationed other places. They have been all over the world, most likely,” Biank says. “And lots of the active duty wives in Northern Virginia have probably been military wives for a while because a lot of the jobs at the Pentagon are more senior-level positions.”

However, in the spectrum of U.S. regions, Northern Virginia is in a category of its own, and it has its own unique differences and opportunities, good and bad, that the military wives stationed here can experience. “[Northern Virginia] is so large, and there’s so much going on, most of the military wives don’t live on a military base or post, they live out in the civilian community, and that’s a big difference,” Biank says, adding that she never lived on post as an Army wife until her husband’s current station, in Savannah, Ga. “You’re not with a battalion or company or squadron, so it can be more of a challenge to be a tight-knit community.”

According to Biank, another plus to living in Northern Virginia is the abundance of job offerings here that give Army wives a chance to work outside the home. Citing her own mother, who back in the ‘80s worked in Northern Virginia at Kaiser Permanente as a nursing administrator, Biank says, “[That was] certainly an opportunity she would not have had in some other locations. So yes, the military spouse experience is much different, like night and day, in Northern Virginia and other places; in some ways good and some ways not.”

Biank’s book was re-released in 2008 with a new title, “Army Wives: The Unwritten Code of Military Marriage,” and a different cover to match the TV series. “I hope that for civilians, who know little to nothing about the military, that it will open their eyes to the sacrifices not only our service members make, but their spouses and families make on behalf of our nation,” Biank says. “And for military people who read the book, they look at [it] in a different way, I want them to be able to say, ‘Yeah, she got it right; she put in print the experience of the military, she was able to capture military life, the good and the bad.’”

Biank continues to write for several publications, both print and online, including Operation Homefront, Military Spouse Magazine and Military Officer Magazine, and is a guest blogger for www.LifetimeTV.com. She travels a lot, often to Northern Virginia, for military conventions, Department of Defense events and to give speeches. She had planned to return to Northern Virginia to give a speech last October, but declined due to her husband’s deployment, the first since Jack, the Bianks’ first child, has been born. “My concern is on Jack this time, not myself at all,” Biank says. “I think with kids, no matter what their age is, there’s a challenge with lengthy deployments, and it’s real hard.”

In the meantime, to all those fellow sisters out there, Biank says the most important thing they can do is to get involved. “You can’t change your experience, you can’t change where you’re going to be stationed or where you’re going to be living, but make the most of it,” she says. “Get to know people because I have found if you take too long to get to know people, you’ll be moving on to the next duty station and you’ll be saying, ‘But we just met!’, so make the most of your opportunities. … Look at it as an adventure.”

As for a second book, Biank believes she will write again, when the time is right. “You take a chance when you write a book, especially when you cover something like a treasured institution like the military. But life’s about taking a leap, taking a chance, and I’m just thankful that my giant leap has worked out.”

(January 2010)