In this deeply personal collection of stories, 48 wives share their total embarrassments, tragic experiences, and tender emotions as they tackle the daily dramas of military life. By turns touching and hilarious, "Household Baggage Handlers" opens the door on an often overlooked world, one which requires the independence and survival skills to: Move overseas while six months pregnant; Manage labor, delivery, and a newborn.without a spouse; Nurse a critically injured husband back to health; Confront the sight of someone in uniform at the front door; Shelter five children alone during a tornado; Cope with bats, blizzards, and broken cars during deployments. Read all about it in their own words. With anecdotes from WWII to the present, these compelling stories capture a sisterhood forged by extraordinary circumstances.

Reviews the life and battles of General "Black Jack" Pershing, who had more than thirty years of field experience when he was tapped to lead the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I.

“Absolutely extraordinary...A landmark in the contemporary literature of the diaspora.” —Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror “If Concepcion were only about Samaha’s mother, it would already be wholly worthwhile. But she was one of eight children in the Concepcion family, whose ancestry Samaha traces in this. . . powerful book.” –The New York Times A journalist's powerful and incisive account reframes how we comprehend the immigrant experience Nearing the age at which his mother had migrated to the US, part of the wave of non-Europeans who arrived after immigration quotas were relaxed in 1965, Albert Samaha began to question the ironclad belief in a better future that had inspired her family to uproot themselves from their birthplace. As she, her brother Spanky—a rising pop star back in Manila, now working as a luggage handler at San Francisco airport—and others of their generation struggled with setbacks amid mounting instability that seemed to keep prosperity ever out of reach, he wondered whether their decision to abandon a middle-class existence in the Philippines had been worth the cost. Tracing his family’s history through the region’s unique geopolitical roots in Spanish colonialism, American intervention, and Japanese occupation, Samaha fits their arc into the wider story of global migration as determined by chess moves among superpowers. Ambitious, intimate, and incisive, Concepcion explores what it might mean to reckon with the unjust legacy of imperialism, to live with contradiction and hope, to fight for the unrealized ideals of an inherited homeland.

"Collection of first-person essays written by military family members about marriage, parenting, moving, deployment, grief, careers, faith, friendship, and more in military life"--Provided by publisher.