Harris smoked in the darkness behind me. He was always the first TI there, too. He never spoke to me until the duty day had officially begun after this formation, but he didn’t have to. As both his peers and mine straggled in to take their places, the places behind us, we both stood tall.
Standing at parade rest in the pitch black of a humid Texas predawn, uniform “strack” (not just militarily perfect but also with a dash of panache), wide awake and alert, the first person to report for duty, I couldn’t help feeling a sense of accomplishment. I was winning. I didn’t know what I was winning, but that was enough.
It was just reveille, but nonetheless I started each day with a victory. For the first time, I wasn’t overthinking, I wasn’t worrying myself to death. The Air Force kept me busy all day, made me too tired not to sleep at night, and gave me no time to worry about the future. It had big plans for me and I just let myself fall headfirst into them.
Eddie-like, I found it impossible to ask for help, so though I could have ordered them to, I never required my flight mates to police my area for me during my headlong flight downstairs. Soon, though, we were all caught up in the competitive atmosphere and the rush we got from winning. I’d sprint to remake my bed, realign my shoes, and check my wall locker—five trainees would be hard at work on them, shouting, “Go, go! Get down there before that cow!” Flight mates would shadow me to the door, picking lint out of my hair, stray strings off my uniform. My four squad leaders would be getting the rest of the flight moving. They honored me by chipping in unbidden; I honored them by ceasing to check that they’d done so. As long as I did my job, they’d do theirs. Somehow, I had learned to lead by example.
One day, just a few short of graduation, as I marched the flight somewhere, someone or something marched with me. I knew I wasn’t alone. It told me in plain English that the hard times were over. “Everything’s going to be all right now,” it said clearly, a fortifying whisper in my ear. Some think this was a religious experience. I think it was me. For the first time, I let my own voice come through loud and clear. No second-guessing. No fraud syndrome. No self-effacement. No smart-ass quips. No feigned ennui. I couldn’t identify it then because I had never really heard it before; I was simply unfamiliar with the unvarnished Debra Jean Dickerson. I didn’t recognize her voice then, but I do now. Since then, I’ve been unsure about what I should do, but never about what I could do.
So much came into focus for me in my first few years in the military. Having always been a shrinking violet physically, I discovered that I was athletic. Though I’d dreaded the muck and physical torture of the obstacle course, I found myself perversely enjoying the madness of it. After twenty-one years of enforced ladylike behavior, I reveled in the brute physicality of swearing, sweating, and heaving myself from one torture to the next. Everyone did better than she’d thought she would.
TIs were stationed along the confidence course screaming themselves hoarse to keep us moving. I thought them sadists. Low-crawling beneath strands of low-slung barbed wire while a simulated firefight took place over our heads, I simply ran out of steam. I couldn’t help feeling like an escaping slave, slithering through long rows of cotton with the “paddy-roller’s” bloodhounds at my heels, my elbows and knees all scratched and gory. I lay with my face in the dirt, trying to clear my mind of that draining mental image, praying for a second wind. From nowhere, a TI was in my face screaming bloody murder.
I was covered with dirt. Ants were crawling down my T-shirt and I had a thousand nicks and scrapes. The person behind me was hissing curses and pushing at my feet to get me moving. I wanted to cry. But more than anything, I wanted to smack this TI. Then I noticed he was faking it. Round with concern, his eyes flicked over me from head to foot to see if I was injured. He couldn’t motivate me in any other way except through fear and disapproval; a firefight is no time for a pep talk. I couldn’t say I was tired—that would be whining. I couldn’t say it was freaking me out—that would be worse than whining. What could I do? What would my father have done? Laugh, I guessed, so that’s what I did.
“Airman! What is so goddamn funny?” The bewilderment on his face made me laugh again. I found my second wind.
Scrabbling forward with renewed vigor, I yelled at the top of my lungs, “JUST HAPPY TO BE HERE, SIR!”
As I ran along, I distracted myself thinking about why the name had been changed from the obstacle course to the confidence course. The point was not to needlessly burden us; it was to show us how to tap into those reserves of drive and competence we’d never learned the way to. Under no other set of circumstances would I have attempted such public humiliation; I was the girl in school who’d watched the baseball land at her feet instead of trying to catch it and failing. At Wade and Southwest, there were no repercussions for a girl not trying in gym; in the Air Force, it meant expulsion. But they didn’t want us to fail. They wanted us to soar.
I’d never run before, yet I found that I was a natural. I aced the physical portions of the training and reveled in it. I was disgusted by the weakness of some of my flight mates. They would beg and mule for permission to go to the airmen’s club, where they’d dance all night like whirling dervishes. But a simple half-mile jog would have a third of them faking convulsions. This caused problems for the whole flight because the institutional response was to slow the flight down to accommodate them. But we had to accomplish the run in the time allotted or we wouldn’t graduate; it mattered not at all how fast we could run it as individuals. Also, it negatively affected our standing in the squadron competition for Honor Flight. So many were dropping out and fleeing to sick call with “exercise-induced” this and that, that Harris told me to handle it.
With the slackers, I was merciless. I gave onerous duties to people I considered to be faking or punking out. Also, a midnight conversation with Waters (who turned out to be a lovely person desperately trying to escape the ghetto) helped even the laziest tap into reserves of athleticism she never knew she’d had. Most, though, were like me and just needed a push to find out what they were made of. Those of us who ran well helped them one on one. We became Honor Flight. And just as had my father, I became a warrior who didn’t know when to quit.
HOW THE AIR FORCE MADE ME A HUMORLESS FEMINIST
I became a 20834G: Korean linguist. Nobody knew me, so I reinvented myself as the carefree “D.J.” and embarked on my new incarnation. D.J. smoked. D.J. cursed. D.J. said what she was thinking, even if what she was thinking was cruel, because D.J. was funny. D.J. threw herself at mean men who were just like her father. D.J. overcompensated.
Learning another language was glorious, especially one so exotic. I sailed through the program. I wouldn’t even have taken my books home from the classroom except that it was against regulations to leave them there. After a week of doing so, I was officially counseled by an Army classmate who, having served a prior hitch, was our designated classroom leader. Rather than say “Don’t leave your books here,” he actually read the applicable reg to me in its entirety while I thought about how much he epitomized the weak-chinned, thinning-haired prototypical nerdy white guys I was now surrounded by. The kind of men who wore a huge tangle of keys on their belt and wore their military patent leather shoes with civvies. Guys like him thronged to the military because it was the one place where nerds ruled.
He was so nondescript I could barely remember his name. I used to snap my fingers in his face as I searched my memory, finally just settling for a bitchy “Uh, Sergeant Whoever.” Then one day he wore the Army’s soon-to-be-phased-out khaki uniform to class and I was smitten senseless. Out of Army polyester-puke green, he was an Adonis; broad shoulders, narrow waist, and a piercing need to humiliate any woman he couldn’t terrorize into leaving him. But I had a high threshold for terror. Like me, he was a working-class refugee whose intellect was too big for his station in life but too untamed to lead him farther away from it than military transport could take him. It would take me four years to get this disturbed, desperate (an
d, underneath it all, wonderful) man out of my system. Another fifteen to trust myself to fall in love again.
After a year of language school in Monterey, there were six months of technical training in San Angelo, Texas. Both segments had very high washout rates; our language program was the equivalent of a four-year course crammed into one fast-paced year of constant testing and milestones. The tech training called for us fuzzy liberal-arts types to master sensitive monitoring and satellite equipment. It was a combination of skills that remain in short supply, especially given that it was nearly two years before we got to our first duty assignments. But it was so easy, so much fun for me, I had no sympathy for those who couldn’t cut it. I wouldn’t associate with anyone who was struggling because I was sure they just weren’t working hard enough.
There was a girl in our class who’d already been set back once from the previous class. She wept quietly in the back of the room while the rest of us battled joyfully for the top spot. Within two weeks—she could barely even pronounce the Korean name we’d all been given—she was gone and I was glad. She’d been deflating our class average. Without her, our class was known as the Gang of 4.4—the highest score on the Department of Defense’s language qualifying exam.
My year in Monterey, California (officially, the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, or DLI-FLC), was extremely collegiate. Our duty was to attend class daily from 7 or 7:30 to about 3:00. My closest girlfriend, Martha from Nebraska, learned Russian as easily as I learned Korean, so we had our evenings free to trade books and see movies. There were desultory room and uniform inspections, a Monday morning formation, rotating shifts cleaning the barracks, and some PT. But mostly, the Air Force left us alone to learn our languages and to be initiated into the time-honored military traditions of binge drinking and promiscuous heterosexuality. Life was good.
Most of the other young enlisteds were either working class, like myself, or rural. Also like me, most were diamonds in the rough. While I’d only just begun to see it in myself, I was saddened by how many of these bright, inquisitive young people had no idea how smart they were. One woman on my squad was breezing through Serbo-Croatian during the day and teaching herself Polish at night with my roommate’s materials, just for the joy of it. When I complimented her, her eyes went round. Then she burst into tears. No one had ever told her she was talented. I was surrounded by gifted, hardworking, self-sacrificing kids whom society was prepared to squander, but for the services.
Dave, another working-class kid, was so smart he was annoying; things were so easy for him, he drove the rest of us crazy with his excess energy and drive. Every time we smokers lit up, he’d drop to the floor and pound out ten push-ups. To torment him, we’d stagger our light-ups, but he’d just gut them out. We gave him an awesome physique. Not only was he acing our Korean class, he taught himself extra Chinese characters and Japanese to boot. At one of our Monday morning formations, we were presented with an airman who was going off to the Air Force Academy. I found Dave and told him he should do that, too. He was horrified at the suggestion. I had to nag him and search out his hiding places for a few weeks as he tried to avoid me. In short order, though, he was neck deep in the arduous process of winning admission to the United States Air Force Academy from the enlisted corps. Not only was he selected, he graduated with honors, won a graduate fellowship where he met his wife, and is now an F-16 pilot and a major in the United States Air Force. Civilian society would have wasted him because he was a trailer-park kid, just another community college dropout.
The class issues surrounding me were starting to bubble to the surface of my consciousness. Gender issues announced themselves from day one.
I was continually amazed by the contradiction in the women around me. Most were strong, sturdy women who’d been the unsung backbones of their own hardscrabble families before enlisting. Indeed, many enlisted to escape the drudgery and to have a chance to put themselves first. Most exhibited a ferocity and tenacity to gain control of their lives that surprised and nourished us all.
Since we all had to sink or swim together, our ladylike gloves had been off by the end of the first week of basic. Politeness and gentility went out the window as one sweet little eighty-five-pound girl, Huff, from a tiny speck of a little Tennessee town, told the hulking Waters to “move her carcass” out of the way so she could hussle the flight’s garbage out. Waters moved her carcass. If she hadn’t, we wouldn’t have cooperated with her so she could get her own job done. By the end of basic, none of Huff’s declarative sentences ended with rising inflections, as they all had on day one. She didn’t blush when forced to speak. Indeed, she never stopped talking, whereas in the beginning, Harris had had to give her demerits for replying only with wide-eyed nods.
As soon as they cleared basic, though, many of these newly empowered women reverted to off-duty passivity and the learned helplessness I felt sure they’d enlisted to escape. As soon as a man entered the picture, they forgot everything they knew about thinking for themselves.
During my year in Monterey from 1980 to 1981, we had to help recarpet the barracks. Workers were coming to do the actual installation, but we were required to move the ten-foot carpet rolls to their proper locations. As soon as we were told which rolls were ours on the loading dock, my floor mates started planning which guys to ask to carry ours and which of us women would run out for beer and pizza for them. I was appalled. Is that what we were going to do in wartime, wait for a big, strong man to carry our greasy old M-16s?
“Why don’t we see if we can manage it ourselves?” I asked.
There were thirty of us, what was the big deal? My mother, sisters, and I would have starved to death had we waited for men to do things for us. When I was just a little kid, I’d helped move refrigerators, rehung doors, painted whole houses. Whatever needed doing, we women had just done it; it wasn’t feminism, it wasn’t politics, it was just our lot in life to have no help. My mother never put it to us in feminist terms—“The Lord helps those who help themselves” was all she ever said on the subject. We had uncles and male cousins we might have called, but that wasn’t our way. What we couldn’t do ourselves, what some man didn’t just show up and do for us without our asking, we either paid a professional to do or, more often, lived without. What on earth were we waiting for with a few carpet rolls?
In the end, there were two camps. About a third wiggled their way over to the male barracks to tell them about the dykes they had to live with and to pout prettily for help. Two thirds joined me and we hoisted our own carpets up the stairs. As I led my crew, I couldn’t deny that most of that two thirds were overweight or unattractive girls who probably figured male help would be grudging at best; the third that went for help were the best-looking and the most promiscuous. Regardless, we finished hours ahead of the little girls who had to wait for assistance.
Even so, I was consciously antifeminist then. In the sixth or seventh grade, I’d given a substanceless “I enjoy being a girl” denunciation of feminism in a classroom debate and gotten a standing ovation from the teachers (all female except for the science teacher). They marched me all over the school to repeat it. I used to remember this incident because of all the approval. Now I remember it as a political event. Had I made such unsubstantiated arguments on any other topic, Miss Enright would have stopped me mid-sentence, sent me back to my seat in disgrace, and failed me on the project, but they were all middle-aged women appalled by women’s lib. That same school year, though, when my all-girl team was presenting our science project, they wanted to ask for special permission to wear pants and ties “so we’ll seem serious.”
“Why don’t we seem serious now?” I asked.
They rolled their eyes. Everyone but me dressed like a boy. I didn’t get it. Even so, I was a good girl then and I thought the bra-burners silly because that’s what was said about them at home on the rare occasions when the subject came up. From the very beginning of my service, though, I had to think constantly about gender
.
There were a spate of rapes in our barracks, mostly because the building’s many entrances had no locks. After they began, the Air Force did two things: first, it conducted surprise “health and welfare” inspections to make sure we targets had no weapons. Second, it bought locking doors. But the Language Institute was on Army property and, we were told, the Army wouldn’t allow them to put up the doors. So we sprinted into the building and into our rooms after dark, locked ourselves in our rooms, peed in containers, and came to fear our big communal bathroom where many of the attacks took place.
In addition to the general air of danger, there was the murkiness of our first forays into adult relationships. During my first four years in the military, I couldn’t keep track of all the strong, together, brave women I knew who were getting pushed around by their boyfriends and blaming themselves. Date rape was rampant but rarely reported. When it was, women usually joined in the general denunciation of the victim.
There’s a lot of off-duty drinking in the military; most discipline and personnel problems stem from that. I learned in Texas that what usually happened with GI date rape was, some woman would come tottering back into the dorms at 3 A.M. , dress torn, eyes bloodshot, hysterical. Her friends would bustle her off and hide her away for a few days. Then, if she had a particularly bold friend, that woman would march up to the guy and be very, very rude to him. He’d become indignant. She’d march back to her friend and tell him she’d given him a good talking-to—but . . . why’d you go into his room? You didn’t tell me you’d had three beers. You kissed him. I mean, what was he supposed to think?
In any case, most women had no such bold friends.
These women did their men’s laundry, they shopped for them, they took their orders. Their men told them whom they could and couldn’t befriend, what they could and couldn’t wear, makeup or not. Given the volatility of military life and the mawkish sentimentality and immature notions of romantic love the lower classes are weaned on, GIs, especially young GIs, often marry hastily, to people they barely know. Though we were largely kept under lock and key in basic, by its end, three flight mates were desperately trying to marry male trainees they’d only been able to chat with briefly at chapel or our rare nights at the airmen’s club. Disaster often followed. “Susie,” for example, hurriedly married another linguist one month into their relationship (assignments won’t try to place couples together unless they’re married). To complete the fairy tale, she got pregnant immediately, but by her second trimester she was reporting for duty red-eyed and compulsively chugging Listerine. She hated her new husband, now that she knew him. He was forcing her to send him off to work each morning with a kitchen-table blow job, since her increasing girth “made sex suck and [you] owe me.” He’d come up behind her at chow, grab her head, and push it backward and forward while laughing, “That was you this morning, am I right?”
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