Guest post written by Daughters of Bronze co-authors Ashlee Cowles and Danielle Stinson (A. D. Rhine)
A. D. Rhine is the pseudonym of Ashlee Cowles and Danielle Stinson. The authors are united by their military “brat” upbringing, childhood friendship spanning two decades, and love of classical literature. Ashlee holds graduate degrees in medieval history from the University of St. Andrews and theological studies from Duke University. Danielle holds a master of arts in law and diplomacy from Tufts University. Their adult debut Horses of Fire & Daughters of Bronze, an epic duology of the Trojan War, is the story they have always dreamt of writing together.
About Daughters of Bronze: From the highest tower to the most humble alley, the bloody beaches to the dusty plain, Daughters of Bronze is the thrilling conclusion to the duology that began with Horses of Fire, andbreathes life into the Troy of myth and history. It is an epic of a thousand invisible actions leading to a single moment, adding a refrain of unexpected light to the legend of Troy.
Danielle: It’s Christmas 1990. Dad gives me a painted music box. The dancing ballerina is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. The next day we say goodbye. I’m only in first grade, but I know he’s going to a place called Iraq and that I might not see him for a long time. My mother’s teeth are bright white against her red lipstick. I wonder how she can smile at us like that when her eyes are so sad. I play that music box every day. Until the ballerina stops twirling.
Ashlee: I am not even six-years-old, but I already know I must be brave, so I’m trying hard not to cry. My father’s camo duffle bag sits by the front door, and my parents tell us he could be headed to the (first) Gulf War any day. That night while I’m lying in bed, I remind myself that Dad is a medevac pilot, meaning his helicopter is marked with a giant red cross. No one is supposed to shoot at anything with a red cross because they’re the ones who help people. So if my dad has to go to war, he’ll stay safe…right?
A decade later—on a sunny September morning in 2001—we are both seniors in high school preparing to say goodbye again. This time, we understand what is in store for our families as we sit in stunned silence in classrooms on opposite sides of the country, watching replays of the planes crashing into the towers.
But this time, if war comes calling, we also know we have each other. The difference that makes can be hard to describe to those who haven’t grown up to the ever-present threat of the war drum. When news of a third plane comes in, Ashlee skips Economics to call Danielle, anxious to know if her dad, who had meetings scheduled at the Pentagon, is okay. He is, thank God, but we still cry…and by now, we’ve both seen enough to know that tears can be brave.
They say write what you know. Which is why it may seem strange that two women who are not classicists felt the thing they “knew” best was the story of the Iliad, an epic poem written (supposedly) by a blind Greek poet named Homer about a war that (supposedly) occurred three thousand years ago. And yet, even as fifteen-year-olds who met on a U.S. Army post in Germany, we knew this was the story we were meant to write together.
We knew it the moment we read one of the Iliad’s most iconic scenes, in which Prince Hector, the commander of Troy’s army, says goodbye to his loyal wife, Andromache, and their new baby from the ramparts of the doomed city. The stakes for Hector could not be higher—he is fighting in the Trojan War not for glory or for riches, but to protect his wife from slavery and his infant son from a brutal execution at the hands of the Greeks, should these enemies breach Troy’s walls.
This famous farewell was one we both lived as children, and it was one Danielle experienced when her husband deployed to Afghanistan just weeks after their “wartime wedding.” It’s a scene thousands of military families have endured across the ages, though its implications are not always fully appreciated by the larger society. Unlike in times past, when war was a burden borne by everyone, in our modern culture with its “warrior class,” the military makes up less than one-percent of the population. Typically, it is the children of servicemen and women who go on to enlist or marry someone who does, carrying on the tradition of defending their nation through a way of life that often remains unseen by those outside of it.
Yet in the story of ancient Troy, and especially in the moments with Hector’s family, we felt seen. In the epic battle between Hector and Achilles, we heard the echoes of our fathers and other warriors we knew and loved. More importantly, as the daughters of soldiers who pressed the classics into our hands, we felt powerfully drawn to the lines that were not written. The names that were not sung. What did Andromache do with herself after shedding bitter tears when her husband walked onto the battlefield, knowing her fate and the life of her son were inextricably tied to whether Hector won or lost? Who was the young servant girl who stood at the royal couple’s side during their emotional farewell, cradling the baby they so loved?
We wanted to find out, and so we wrote. We remembered ourselves at five and fifteen, at seventeen and twenty-five, and we wrote to find a purpose between the lines of a classic poem that so starkly reflected our own invisibility. We felt a deep kinship to these ancient Trojans, who had lived, loved, and labored under constant threat of a war they did not choose. We were determined to reclaim the empty space in the epic and fill it with the voices of courageous women like the ones who raised us.
Women like our mothers, who cooked meals and visited hospitals to provide support to other spouses who delivered babies alone while their husbands were deployed overseas. Women like our neighbors on whatever military base we were stationed at temporarily, who circled the wagons to send care packages to war zones, that way no soldier ever felt forgotten.
In our friendship with each other, we took these lessons to heart, finding a lifelong sister who understood the idiosyncrasies of our childhood and what the sacrifices had meant. A friend who knew what it was like to walk home from soccer practice only to pause in the middle of the sidewalk as the flag was lowered and “retreat” was played. A friend who’d had their cars swept for bombs when their family drove onto post and had participated in lockdown drills long before they became the norm in U.S. schools. A friend who understood how hard it was to move every few years and had also spent her adolescence in a foreign country, surrounded by history and structures built during World War II. A friend who also couldn’t get a driver’s license until eighteen, but could order a beer at McDonalds at fifteen and go to junior prom in an honest-to-God castle.
Our unusual upbringing played through our minds as we co-wrote Horses of Fire and Daughters of Bronze—our epic retelling of the Trojan War from the perspective of Troy’s women. Yet there were also more recent scenes that weighed on our hearts when we began our version of this timeless story in 2020. Families huddled behind the walls of their homes as a new plague wreaked global havoc. Desperate mothers in Afghanistan attempting to hand over their babies to U.S. soldiers in the hopes they might be evacuated before the Taliban took over their country again—a country where their daughters would no longer be allowed to attend school and faced a future not all that different from Andromache’s bleak fate. And then in January 2021, we watched with horror and grief as a mob attacked our nation’s capital, threatening the very democracy our loved ones had risked their lives to protect.
These experiences are why we believe “invisible stories,” lived by those behind the scenes, are where some of the greatest acts of courage and humanity occur. Like the Troy in our novels, the military community we were raised in is beautiful, strong, and resilient. It is the most diverse environment we’ve ever been a part of, made up of people of every race, class, and religion—diverse in a way other organizations strive for but often fail to achieve. A community of recent immigrants who earned their citizenship by enlisting, and hopeful kids from disparaged “fly-over states” who get to live abroad, learning to coexist with people who are vastly different from them. People who have seen horrors the average U.S. citizen is spared from having to witness, leaving them capable of viewing complex situations not in political terms, but in human ones.
Finding each other in this community is what sustained us during the deployments of loved ones, as well as during the pandemic when we were writing with our young children crawling (quite literally) all over us. We wanted to show that the women in our novels were empowered through their friendships just like we were, acting behind the scenes of a legendary drama with profound agency, as women in history always have. Women just like the ones who held up the walls of our own worlds while receiving no medals and no accolades. No verses in any songs.
Over the course of history, millions of women have survived the stark reality depicted in our stories, and they continue to endure it around the globe, from Afghanistan to Ukraine. It is in the heroic and often subversive choices that occur between the lines of history that we found our own agency, as well as a path to love, not just rage. A feminism that is about showing up and wielding whatever influence you have to lift those around you. It’s why we are unwavering in our belief that women are interested in stories that go beyond the domestic and that deal in matters men have always claimed as their own—but that women have always lived.
