Emma Comery is a writer and the assistant director of communications for one of the largest veteran services organizations in Texas. Her work has appeared in The Bend Magazine, Military Families Magazine, Reserve and National Guard Magazine, Arts and Letters Journal, Line of Advance, and Poets.org. Her book, Have You Landed?: Military Love Stories in Essays (Potomac Books, 2026), was published this month.

This past February, I was scooping a slippery, gelatinous mixture of my teething baby’s drool and boogers out of my belly button when my husband named three friends who were being activated for the war. 

“What war?” I asked, tugging my shirt back down over my belly so the baby couldn’t access my skin directly anymore. The raspberries were adorable but also disgusting.  

My husband stared at me. “Do you really not know?”  

“Know what?” I said. I was barely listening to him. I was too busy playing defense against our one-hundreth percentile offspring who now had me in an affectionate half guard and was working on choking me out. 

“We attacked Iran. Like, this morning.” 

I was a working mom who hadn’t slept in over a year and yes, I was trying to stay off my phone, but you’d think I would have known about an impending war. When did Congress declare war? (Plot twist: It didn’t.) And what could we possibly need to declare war over? (Oh, right—capitalist and imperialist gain for the billionaire class. My bad.)  

My husband left active duty a few years ago, but I’d spent the last five years writing and rewriting an essay collection about the experiences of some of the folks most immediately impacted by such non-declarations of war—military spouses. I suddenly felt the collective dread of an entire people in my body. I thought of the packed bags, the partners who suddenly find themselves solo-parenting, the families taking a pay cut when their reservist has to leave their civilian job, the empty seats at the dinner table, the dogs sent to live with family or a neighbor for six, nine, twelve months. I thought of the many people who would kiss their loved one goodbye and pray it’s not for the last time. I knew that for some it would be. 

Months later and the baby is teething again, and we are still at war. His molars are rising through his tender gums, bone breaking through flesh, and across the world another child’s father is being shot down over the Arabian Sea.  

This is how war goes, isn’t it? Troops deploy thousands of miles away, and life continues on the homefront. Someone drives a tank through the desert, and someone drives to work in the city. Someone straps into a safety harness, and someone straps the kids into the stroller. Someone doesn’t make it back, and someone has to carry on. 

When I started doing research for Have You Landed?, it was with the intent of creating a piece of art that might be of some comfort to the many significant others of the military community who would come after me. I wanted to write the book I needed ten years ago as a young woman suddenly adrift in the unfamiliar world of military life. Something that didn’t profess to have answers, but rather said, You’re not alone. But as I started conducting interviews with spouses, exes, and widows stationed around the country and the world, and as I turned their interviews into essays, the project started taking a different shape than I’d envisioned. The words seemed to fall on the page like watercolors, hitting in one spot but spreading and dripping and running beyond where I initially intended. Because as I wrote and revised, it became evident that my audience wasn’t solely my fellow military spouse, but anyone navigating questions of love and loyalty. It is not only the military spouses who ask themselves what it truly means to commit yourself to someone whose biggest commitment is not, in return, to you, but to the mission. And all of us are touched by war. 

I would be remiss not to acknowledge that Have You Landed? was written in a time of peace and is being published in a time of war. I didn’t foresee that I’d be doing galley edits for this book while reservists were being activated to attack a foreign country, or that it would hit the shelves the same summer our service members are being ordered to hit a foreign country with fatal airstrikes. I wanted to write a book that pulled back the curtain on the often overlooked, over-romanticized reality of loving someone in the military. I did not think I’d be doing that in a time when our nation’s leaders are treating the lives of those service members with such unashamed disregard.  

Have You Landed? is a nonfiction essay collection, but it is also a collection of love stories. Real stories of love that grows and wilts and endures throughout the military’s (and life’s) most challenging missions. Because the baby is teething, and we are at war, and still there is love. Still there is love.