by Tom Kratman
Franco asked, “Do you suppose that the Zionis do it this way at least partly to make sure that old maids of eighteen or nineteen have all the opportunity possible to meet a great many eligible young men so they’ll get married soon thereafter…to start working on the next generation of—male—cannon fodder?”
“I’m sure I don’t understand the workings of that kind of mind, Pro…Centurion Franco.”
I saw Franco shrug as if he didn’t understand it, either. “Well, it’s just a hunch, of course. But, if not, why not conscript young married women who are not pregnant? It surely doesn’t seem fair to me either. Do they have any other reasons?”
“Maybe one. It is believed,” Torres said, “that there are some cultures—and Arabic culture in particular—in which it would be an unpardonable shame for men to surrender to or run from women.”
It occurred to me that my own culture wasn’t too far from that.
She admitted, “The Zionis claim that when they put women in combat units, Arab units that otherwise would have given up or run away would stay and fight, driving up everybody’s casualties, if they even suspected there were women opposing them. But that’s old news. In the Federated States’ first war against Sumer, some decades ago, the Sumeri prisoners were glad to be guarded by military policewomen.”
Franco commented, “That’s vastly different from actually surrendering to women, of course. But there must have been some such surrenders since some of the Sumeris were equally glad to surrender to civilian camera crews. I have heard that some large numbers tried to surrender to passing aircraft. Still, I’m not sure that this proves anything…except maybe that beating an army that’s been pounded from the air for six weeks, and was rotten to start with, is not something on which to base a generally applicable theory. Still, it is an improvement, Professor, I agree.”
Torres continued on with a discussion about the apparently remarkable ability of armed forces to change character. That part of her discussion was in the same general vein, or at least had the same philosophical underpinnings: that the sheer raw power of armed forces was such that all they had to do was order their people to become something and they would become that thing. She said, “Armies do it all the time. This one should be able to do the same with you and men as easily.”
The last thing she spoke on at any length was concerning our unmitigated, inalienable right, as women, to get pregnant and have babies any time we wanted, at our sole discretion. She really didn’t like the idea of our being administered mandatory implanted contraceptives. Centurion Franco didn’t say a word about that.
* * *
The next morning, however, we had to do another road march, a fifteen mile hump.
Franco stood in front of the platoon and asked, rather blandly, who among us had agreed with the feminist speaker about our right to get pregnant. At first no one admitted it. He, promised us, Scout’s Honor, that there would be no retaliation, no personal punishment, against any who might express their honest view.
At that Gloria said, “I agree. You men have no right to tell us when we can, can’t, should, shouldn’t, or must have a baby.”
“Well, we have one honest woman in the group. Have we no more? Surely we must.” He coaxed us and cajoled us until he had fifteen women, about a quarter of what we had left by then, who would state that they believed that Torres had been right, that men had no right to tell us when we could and couldn’t, or should, or must, have a baby.
Franco agreed with them, said so plainly, even enthusiastically. Then he told them to drop their packs, rifles, load carrying equipment and helmets. He ordered them, very gently, out of the formation. He told them not to worry, they wouldn’t be punished, but just to stand by. At that time a couple of the corporals brought out fifteen or twenty long, thick poles.
Then Garcia came out, grinning broadly. You really had to know him at the time to know just how creepy a thing that was.
“Ladies,” he said, “it seems I’m going to be a daddy. Who would have believed it? Me?” he rhetorically asked of the women Franco had called out of formation. “For, you see, you are all now, for this day only, officially ‘pregnant.’ As such, in deference to your delicate condition, and out of concern for the health of your babies, you cannot be expected to—and I, as a mere man, will not ask you to—engage in any strenuous physical labor.”
The creepy grin changed to a frown. He tapped a finger against his own cheek, as if he had just realized the existence of an insoluble problem. “Still, we do have a range to go to. My, my. And we don’t have any buses or trucks scheduled. Hmmm, pity. So, sorry to say, you will have to walk to the range with the rest of us. But you needn’t worry about how your gear will get to training. Your fellow recruits have volunteered to carry it for you.”
Then he ordered the rest of us to string their gear on the poles, shoulder the poles, and, “Forward march.” We formed in three long columns with the “pregnant” women and the instructors marching in the center, Garcia up front and Franco walking the center and rear.
I cannot even begin to tell you how much that hurt. I was—we all were—already carrying as much as we uncomfortably could. Between the poles and the other girls’ gear we had maybe thirty pounds more than that. It was just too much.
Not that Garcia or Franco seemed to care. Their faces remained impassive as we stumbled along, tears mostly hidden by sweat, for fifteen miles. The poles probably weren’t the worst possible way of carrying that extra gear. But they did cut into our shoulders, scrape our necks, throw us off center so that our backs hurt. It was torture. It was intended to be.
The “pregnant” women, all of them—even Gloria, who surprised me by it—begged to be allowed to carry their packs for themselves. Franco, marching next to our squad, was having none of it. When one of the girls tried to help us with the poles he rapped her knuckles with his centurion’s stick, hard, for her trouble.
“Sorry, chica, you can’t have a miscarriage on my watch. Garcia wouldn’t like it, caring and sensitive soul that he is.”
And even though they carried no loads, the day was still hot. They had to drink from the water the rest of us were carrying for them. They apologized, embarrassingly, sincerely and continuously, until Franco told them to, “Shut up! Stop bitching! You claimed the unlimited right. This is what it means; that someone else has to carry your load. Live with it.”
Gloria walked along miserably between Inez and Marta, myself and Cat. Inez and Marta took turns berating her.
“Oh, my,” said little Inez, straining more than most under the load. “Poor, poor Gloria. She’s so smart, she’s so big and strong and tough. She can figure out anything. Why, she’s even figured out how to have someone else carry her equipment.”
“And she didn’t have to flutter her eyelashes or look cute,” continued Marta. “All she had to do was get herself pregnant. We sure are the superior sex, with Gloria as our leader, showing us the way to the top.”
I confess, their verbal abuse of Gloria was becoming annoying. Cat finally got sick enough of it to tell them to shut up and leave her alone. Inez listened, though Marta still grumbled.
That march would normally have taken maybe six hours. It actually took just under ten. And each one of those was several times worse than any hour of marching with a normal load would have been. We tripped; we slipped; we fell. From the awkward walk, the extra weight, most of our feet were bleeding by the end of the day. I never before quite understood how bad Christ’s march up Golgotha must have been. (Though that wasn’t the worst march we ever did.)
We never even tried the old stand-by of, “Won’t one of you big strong men help poor little ol’ me?” It never worked with our instructors anyway.
When we’d reached the range, Centurion Garcia announced, “From this day forward any member of this platoon who goes on sick call will have her gear carried in this way by the others. To support this, each squad will carry two of these poles to all training sites, and in addition to their
other gear.”
Three more recruits resigned that night. Two of them were from those whom Garcia had made “pregnant.” They were allowed to go to one of the non-combat positions for women in their home town tercios. I don’t know if any of them took that option.
We took to calling going on sick call, “getting knocked up.” The poles we called, for reasons both obvious and subtle, “pricks.”
* * *
Not everything they told us or did to us was antifemale, or even antifeminist. I learned a lot about the military history of my sex. Maybe more importantly, I learned to think a lot more about the military history of my sex. Centurion Franco did most of that lecturing.
One thing Franco told us, more or less off the record, I’d like to repeat here. Of course, in training now we do tell the recruits that the Amazons might have existed but couldn’t be proved. It’s better that they not be disillusioned if someone ever really disproves their existence.
But Franco thought it fairly likely they had existed in some form. His reasons were partly technical, partly philosophical. Basically, Franco said, the Amazons, if they had existed, were horse archers at a time when horses could transport men only in clumsy chariots. The early horses were too weak in the back to support a man’s weight. Supporting a woman would have been possible centuries before horses were bred that were strong enough for a man but centuries after horses had been domesticated. This also corresponded, roughly, to the invention or introduction of the composite bow, which was—in legend—the Amazons’ weapon of choice.
Moreover, said Franco, the people who recorded the legends—the ancient Greeks—were simply not horse oriented, the area being a poor place to raise horses. They would be fairly unlikely to even have thought of putting women on horseback unless there was some crumb of fact or fact-based rumor to support it.
Lastly, he said that the legends were quite accurate in principle about what would be required to make female warriors, especially that voluntary giving up of their right breasts, an important part of a woman’s appearance and the symbolic reduction of their ability to nurture.
I’m still not sure if I buy it.
Franco told us, too, of some criticisms of military women that, he thought, were patently unfair. It seems there was an instance, thirty or forty years before the Tercio Amazona was formed, when women in the Federated States Army stationed in one of the hot spots around the planet had deserted their posts in overwhelming numbers because there was a chance that war might break out soon. Worse, much worse, men took off in droves to see to their wives and girlfriends.
“No wonder they did,” said Franco. “They’d never been trained for combat. Why, women at that time, in that army, didn’t even fire weapons in basic training. It’s perfectly understandable that they ran, though the men should have been shot.”
That was, obviously, not going to be a problem for us.
Naturally, at some point in time the question came up of our being raped if captured. Franco had a pretty good one liner for that: “Don’t surrender.” He didn’t let it go at that, though.
“Look,” he said, “young men have been having their bodies violated in battle for uncounted millennia. You tell me. In what way is it worse for you to be raped—in a place that’s reasonably suited for a somewhat similar purpose—than it is for a young man to have a sword, spear or bayonet driven through his belly? How is it worse for you to be raped than it is to be disemboweled by a shell fragment? How many women prefer death to submission to rape? Your own sex has already voted on the question and their answer has been that rape is preferable.”
I thought of lying under Piedras and tried not to weep. It hurt more that it had been true.
* * *
Don’t get the wrong idea; we didn’t have these short lectures in any neat, antiseptic classrooms. There weren’t any outside of the camp. Mostly they weren’t even formal lectures, but just little bits of food for thought Franco would throw to us from time to time. Usually, they tended to come just before or just after we had to do something really miserable, painful, or dangerous.
Once, for example, near the end of Basic, we did a thirty-mile road march with full combat equipment and supplies in twelve hours. It was part of our graduation exercise. We knew that the equivalent march for the men was forty miles in fifteen hours, longer and a little faster. A lot of our training was like that: something less than the men had to do.
I’ve thought about that a lot over the years. Did this “gender-norming” (that’s what they called it) mean we were inferior to men, that we could never be equal?
That depends, in large part, on what you think the purposes of physical training are in an army. Sure, some of it is building strength, stamina, and endurance. But that isn’t its whole purpose, nor even most of it. My sisters who died on Cerro Mina, and—later on—in other places, were equal to, better than, most men in every important way, even if they couldn’t march as fast. And that isn’t just regimental pride speaking.
Think about battle; I have. A terrifying thing, no? But what is terrifying about it? The chance of painful death or mutilation. The fear of failing your friends and yourself.
Think about fear; I have. I have known fear unimaginable when I was just a girl. I overcame it, as my sisters did. How? Discipline, dedication, determination, morale, courage…call it, “character.”
And that is what our physical training was mostly about; building those things—character building—through pain. We suffered on marches, we suffered on runs, our hands bled from digging. And all of this we did, essentially, to ourselves because—beyond a certain point, and corporals’ boots or centurions’ sticks notwithstanding—it just isn’t possible to make someone take one more step, dig one more shovel full of dirt, if that person won’t do it on his or her own. (I read later that the ancient Greeks and Romans almost never used slaves to row their warships because free citizens could and would do a lot more work on their own than a slave would under the lash.)
You see, it wasn’t all that important that we couldn’t march as far as men. It was that they had to march farther, faster, than we did to suffer as much; to build as much character.
Franco told us, after that march, “Sure we created different standards for you than men have. You’re easier to hurt. You don’t need as much effort for the same pain.”
That was true enough, but it wasn’t the whole truth. Moral considerations may be three times more important, but they aren’t all-important. There are some objective factors that go into the equation, as well. It’s a balancing act, I suppose. So far as I know, we are the only army, at least in recent times, that has found something like a proper balance where women are concerned.
I’ve since had a chance to read about some other armies and how they tried, and generally failed, with making real soldiers of women. Naturally, the tercio newsletter, Hippolyta, has articles on just that in almost every issue. You should read some of them.
Although, to be honest, Hippolyta can be pretty damned smug when comparing foreign failures with our success. Still, we do have some reason to be a little smug.
Take Secordia, for example. About thirty years before us, they opened up all branches of their military service, and all organizations, to women, including the infantry. A great blow for women’s rights? Not exactly. You see, Secordia had previously unified their armed forces. There was no separate navy, air force and army. So a woman supply clerk in what had been the Secordian Navy could easily find herself moved to be a supply clerk in an infantry maniple of the Secordian Highlanders, and some did. No big deal, you think? Try to imagine yourself as a plump, comfortable supply clerk on a plump, comfortable ship. Then put yourself out in a Secordian winter in an unheated leaky tent, or maybe no tent. They had some serious morale problems.
And when they tried to put women right into the infantry? Oh, sister, was that a disaster! The Secordian trainers didn’t gender norm anything for those women. One hundred and one women started infantry training. Ninety
-eight failed outright. Of the other three—the ones who had to go through the course twice to pass—only one passed and she—maybe because she was the only woman in her unit—left as soon as her enlistment was up. Frankly, I have a sneaking suspicion that the male Secordian soldiers may have eased up on that one woman who made it to ensure that they wouldn’t be forced to gender norm anything, while discouraging any more women from volunteering. And no, repeat no, women volunteered to become regular enlisted infantry in Secordia after that fiasco for years.
They had a little more apparent success with putting women in artillery and armor. I say “apparent” because the success was more apparent than real. Want to know how many women actually ended up serving guns and tanks in the regular Secordian Armed Forces? Exactly…none. They did fire-direction computing for the artillery—a dead-end job, by the way, in a really modern army, though it still has some future in ours. In the armored corps they drove light armored cars, not real tanks. They did not do the heavy work. And they were mostly despised by the men because of it.
Despised by the men? Maybe not as individuals. But certainly the professionals down south were disgusted enough by having women thrust upon them without any real thought having been put into the very real problems those professionals knew they would have. Complaints were loud and unceasing. So was more than occasional active sabotage of the women in their military.
That wasn’t a problem for us. Since our men didn’t risk having their worlds turned upside down by women warriors, they could help us rather than try to ruin us. And, in retrospect, I must say that they really did help us…if only to help ourselves.
Other armies had been more pragmatic; and more successful. The Cochinese, during the war there, had made considerable use of women, even as infantry. Not being subservient to the politically and socially dogmatic and militarily ignorant, the Cochinese had put the women in their own—all female—companies. They’d done pretty well, too, as long as they lasted. They took casualties, naturally, and women willing to fight are fairly rare, hard to replace. Pregnancy was a big problem, too, one we’ve solved partly by stringent social pressures and partly by requiring that women serving and not on maternity leave have implanted contraceptives.