My mother’s sister, Aunt Linda, was the exact opposite. She married into the military but never absorbed its values. She was polished, loud, judgmental, and convinced she knew everything about what made a proper woman, while my mother quietly supported my father through deployments and reassignments. Aunt Linda turned every family gathering into a stage for her opinions. She arrived at my high school graduation in a white pantsuit, sunglasses perched on her head, and spent the entire ceremony commenting on other families’ outfits. When I told her I was joining the Air Force at twenty-two, following my father’s footsteps, she rolled her eyes so hard I thought they might stick.

“You’ll regret that haircut and those boots,” she said, sipping her mimosa at the celebration brunch. “Men don’t like women who try to be men.”

My father said nothing, but his jaw tightened. I learned early that Aunt Linda’s approval wasn’t something you earned through achievement; it was something she dispensed based on whether you fit her narrow definition of femininity and success. Still, I showed up—birthdays, barbecues, Thanksgiving dinners, Christmas mornings. I showed up in my dress blues when protocol allowed, in civilian clothes when it didn’t. I listened to her talk about her book club, her garden, her theories on why modern women were too aggressive. I smiled through her jokes about G.I. Jane and her suggestions that I’d never find a husband if I kept “playing soldier.”

Her husband, Colonel Raymond Moore, was a retired Army officer who’d served thirty years before hanging up his uniform. He was quiet, reserved, the kind of man who measured people in silence and spoke only when his words carried weight. At family functions, he’d sit in the corner with a beer, watching everything, saying almost nothing. I respected him from a distance—the way you respect a mountain you’ve never climbed.