'Army Wives': "What's more heroic than that?"

The most important thing Army Wives did this week didn't take place on the show itself. In advance of the July 4th holiday, cast and crew members from the show visited Walter Reed Army Medical Center in order to say thanks to soldiers and their families, treat them to an advance screening of this episode, and promote a postcard drive asking fans to show their appreciation for servicemen and women and their families.

Regardless of how you feel about the relative merits of the series itself as purely a television show, it's really admirable to know that this is a show in which the cast and crew have a real reverence for the subject matter, namely, real-life Army members and families. It's not just a premise for them; they really seem to love and appreciate these people, and want to get things right as a result. (By comparison, I also quite enjoy this show's timeslot competitor In Plain Sight, but the one frustrating drawback of that series is that it seems to have a pretty flippant attitude toward its subject material, and the show is constantly doing things that seem implausible and by extension disrespectful of the real-life witness protection program.)

To that end, it's notable that the real hero of Army Wives isn't actually a character anywhere on the show. The heroes are the soldiers, soldiers whose names we'll never know. And so it is fitting that the episode that airs over July 4th weekend is an episode centered not around any of the characters, but rather on a soldier whose name had long been forgotten. This is the story of Ernie Flowers, a man who has been dead for decades, but still deserves a hero story.

General Holden's job doesn't just deal with the present and the future. When you're post commander, that means you are automatically the person to turn to when it comes to things that happened in the past as well. The remains of a long-MIA soldier from the Vietnam War are found in that country, and it falls on Michael to notify the soldier's family and deal with the disposition of the body. While Michael asks Claudia Joy and the FRG to help stage a memorial service for soldier Ernie Flowers, Michael's main priority is notify the next of kin, a young soldier named Beverly. Beverly is Ernie's biological daughter, but the two never actually knew one another, and the girl doesn't really want to acquire a new father only after the man is dead.

So Michael ends up tracking down Ernie's best friend from back in the day instead. The friend, James, wants to honor his friend the right way. He's always felt guilty that he made it out alive and Ernie didn't. James explains that Beverly's mother got pregnant just before Ernie went off to Vietnam, and Ernie was planning on marrying the mother when he got back from the war, but tragically that never was able to happen. Doing things right, in James's mind, constitutes a posthumous reunion of father and the daughter he never got a chance to meet.

Meanwhile, Trevor returns home. After a successful surgery, there shouldn't be any long-term physical problems at all. A little bit of physical therapy, and he'll be good as new. When that happens, he's going to want to immediately go back and rejoin his men. Roxy no doubt will be stressed out when that time comes, but for now, all she can think about is getting her hands on her man.

Her hands, and various other body parts. Roxy tries to give Trevor a happy welcoming in the hospital behind a curtain. This is a family site, so I can't talk about what she does exactly. In any case, it doesn't work, with a nurse immediately interrupting them. So it's off to a motel room instead, where they proceed to do more things that I can't talk about on a family site.

Trevor's happy to see Roxy, but he really wishes he was still back with his men. He feels guilty not being able to stand beside them. And he feels even more guilty when he starts to be feted as a hero, since he believes that what he did was simply an instinctive reaction and he's certainly no more heroic than the rest of his fellow soldiers still over in Iraq. Nevertheless, people still want to make a hero out of him. His face is on the front page of the Army newspaper, Pamela wants to have him come on the radio show, and an Army public relations officer tells him that they'd like for Trevor to do a full round of radio, TV and print interviews.

Trevor's deeply uncomfortable with all of this, so he tries to seek guidance from somebody he believes is a real hero. Having learned about Ernie Flowers, Trevor pays James a visit. Trevor talks to James about how awful he feels not being able to be with his unit right now. James was temporarily hospitalized when Ernie died, and James will always feel bad about that. But James adds that at least being able to have this closure of memorializing Ernie means so much to him.

After the talk with James, Trevor is able to go on Pamela's radio show. But when he takes to the microphone, he says he doesn't want to talk about himself. He instead commandeers his own interview and decides to talk about Ernie Flowers instead. He provides some expositional education for us in the viewing audience, telling us about the work done by JPAC, the military organization whose mission is to find missing soldiers around the world. "No one's ever gonna give 'em a medal. No one's ever gonna throw 'em a parade," Trevor says, but those people are heroes. After Trevor's remarks on the heroism of JPAC and of Ernie, the episode concludes with a strong showing at Ernie's memorial service, including daughter Beverly.

The episode's other main plotline deals with Denise and her bike. Denise is starting to get close to Getti, the motorcycle-loving doctor, though Denise does a good job at first of keeping him at bay when Getti seems awfully adamant about wanting to go out riding together. Frank may be halfway around the world, but it's as if he can sense that things might be amiss, and he tries to preempt things from heading down a dangerous direction.

Frank talks with a fellow soldier, and it just so happens that this fellow soldier's marriage fell apart while he was overseas and his wife started finding new things to be interested in and grew apart from him. The next thing we know, Denise's bike has magically shown up in online classifieds as being for sale. Denise puts a stop to that, and then she and Frank have an argument over the phone.

"Why is this damn bike so important to you?" Frank demands. "This isn't you." But after that initially aggressive opening salvo, Frank lets his guard down and talks honestly. He admits that the idea of Denise changing while he's gone "scares the hell out of me." He worries that if she's changing so much, he may show up home one day only to find that Denise no longer feels the same way about him. "It feels like you're changin', baby. It feels like you're changin', and here, I'm just treading water and I can't keep up."

Frank's open and honest sadness convinces Denise that the right thing to do for her marriage is to give the bike up and sell it. Later on, when she shows up for work in her car, Getti is horrified. Denise just says she's tired of it. Getti doesn't buy that, but Denise blows him off and says she's selling the bike. But she's not going to get out that easily. When she takes the bike out for a final ride, she runs into Getti, and a series of events leads to Denise ending up riding on the back of Getti's bike. They're spotted by a fellow nurse at the hospital, and that's bound to get the rumor mill spinning.

What else is going on at Fort Marshall?

• In the beginning of the episode, when Denise and Getti work together on an emergency surgery, it's the most serious medical drama this show has ever done. It's probably not surprising that this show would figure out a way to squeeze in some serious medical drama at some point, considering how they make a big deal out of how the show comes from the same production company as Grey's Anatomy.
• While we're talking about Army Wives in juxtaposition with In Plain Sight, it's a noteworthy coincidence that both shows have key characters walking around with their right arm in a sling -- Marshall on IPS, Trevor here.
• Joan meets her temporary replacement while she'll be on leave, a soldier named Evan. Joan immediately distrusts Evan, convinced that this guy wants to steal her job out from under her, in a plotline that's just beginning.
• While the Ernie Flowers plotline is a touching one-off story, the main long-term consequences for the show probably reside with Michael. Michael dealing with a soldier killed in Vietnam is a crafty way of letting us viewers know that Michael is responsible for things that happened in the past that relate in any way to the post. That could be important to keep in the back pocket for the future.

In much the way that the July 4th weekend episode of Army Wives is turned over to the story of a soldier, I'm hoping to turn over this week's comments section to as many of the real-life Army families who watch this show as possible. I'd really appreciate your input. What specifically does the show get right? Is there anything that the show gets wrong? Is there a subject area that the show has thus far failed to address that you're hoping to see talked about? What kind of impact does the show have on you? Have at it ...

E-mail

• Digg
• Facebook
• Fark
• Yahoo Buzz
• Stumbleupon