An author’s journey from a small town newspaper to Hollywood

Tanya Biank is the author of Army Wives, a nonfiction book first published in 2006 with the title Under the Sabers. The book was immediately optioned for television and Army Wives, the hour-long drama, is now in its fourth season and remains the Lifetime channel’s most popular show. Biank now lives at Fort Stewart with her husband, LTC Michael Marti, and 3-year-old son, Jack.

South Magazine: How did your writing career begin?

Tanya Biank: I was a newspaper reporter near Fort Bragg, North Carolina in the 1990s. I had been a Fulbright Scholar and did some traveling around the world after I graduated from Penn State, but I’d always dreamed of being a reporter and covering the military. My father was retired from the Army and my sister was on active duty at Fort Bragg, so when I returned from overseas, I showed up on her doorstep one day, penniless, with no car and no job. I started off by working for free for the Fort Bragg newspaper during the day and waitressing in the evenings and on weekends to support myself. From there I worked at some small papers and after a few years made it to the military bureau at the Fayetteville Observer.

SM: What was your biggest story?

TB: The story that gained international attention was the Fort Bragg Army wife murders in 2002. In the course of six weeks, four soldiers killed their wives and in a fifth case, an Army wife killed her husband. Three of those cases were murder-suicides. This all happened in one summer, in one Army town. Everyone wanted to know if the murders had a link and if the Army played a role in the tragedies. In the end, the Pentagon’s investigation found that the stress from hectic training schedules and lengthy deployments compounded problems in marriages that were already in serious trouble. I did extensive reporting on these issues and was often interviewed by the national media.

For more on how Tanya Biank told her story, check out the latest issue on newsstands now!