Soldier Girls

by Helen Thorpe

  Halfway through basic training, Ellen Ann wrote to say that her grandparents were mean. Debbie phoned home. It seemed that once Debbie’s parents had assumed full responsibility, they had forbidden Ellen Ann to go to parties, or to go out with a boy, or to go to movies.

  “I told her, ‘Mom always let me do that!’ ” said Ellen Ann. “When are you coming home?”

  Debbie could only stay on the telephone for three minutes. She asked Ellen Ann to put her grandmother on the phone.

  “It’s okay for her to go to the movies, Mom,” Debbie said. “And I don’t mind if she goes to parties with her friends.”

  “Well, I just wasn’t sure,” said Debbie’s mom. “Your father and I just weren’t certain.”

  Debbie figured that of all the things that could go wrong, this was not the worst—her daughter would survive a little overprotection. Years later, however, Ellen Ann revealed that while her mother was gone she had snuck out of her bedroom window and had run wild, getting into the kind of trouble a mother would have wanted to shield her fourteen-year-old from experiencing. But Debbie knew nothing of this, and envisioned Ellen Ann leading an especially quiet life. When Debbie returned home for Christmas, her father told her, “I am so proud of you. I knew you could do it the whole time.” Even Tony seemed impressed. Ellen Ann looked taller and curvier and more mature; the difference caught Debbie by surprise.

  In January, Debbie reported to Aberdeen Proving Ground, in Maryland, to study the army’s big guns. At Aberdeen, Debbie learned the mechanics of scopes, gun tubes, and what to do about parallax. She worked on howitzers, mortars, and the large guns up in the rotating turrets of tanks. Debbie found the big guns romantic. Leveling a howitzer made her feel important in a way that she had never felt at the beauty salon.

  Back in Indiana, Debbie resumed parenting Ellen Ann full-time, and joined the 113th Support Battalion’s Bravo Company, which drilled in Bedford. The previously all-male unit had just opened to women. At various times in US history, women had taken up positions on the battlefield—during the Revolutionary War, Mary Hays McCauley famously picked up the rifle of her fallen husband at Monmouth and began firing at the British. Generally speaking, however, the armed forces had operated on the principle that women could serve their country but only men should be asked to experience combat. During World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, every branch had restricted the types of jobs that women could hold in battle zones with the aim of preventing women from seeing war firsthand in any role other than that of nurse. After Vietnam, however, the military’s attitude had shifted. The women’s rights movement had transformed ideas about the roles of women generally, and Vietnam had made the idea of conscription intensely unpopular. The US government declared it would now field an all-volunteer military, and began recruiting women for jobs that had previously been reserved for men. The army continued to prohibit women from certain jobs that were considered to be at the very heart of combat, but opened up many jobs on its periphery.

  Four years before Debbie had enlisted, the US Army had adopted the Direct Combat Probability Coding System, specifically to address this question. “Each position is then coded on a scale of P1 to P7, based on the probability of engaging in direct combat,” wrote Victoria Shaw in Women in the Military. “P1 represents the highest probability and P7 the lowest. Women are excluded from positions that are coded P1.” The army coded the job of infantry soldier as P1, because during a war the infantry soldier was the most likely person of all to experience combat. As it happened, most soldiers of the Indiana Army National Guard belonged to the 38th Infantry Division, but infantry soldiers needed other people to cook their meals, do their laundry, order their supplies, drive their trucks, fix their guns, and bury their dead. Around the time that Debbie enlisted, many of those support positions had just opened up to women for the first time. Commanders found the transition from all-male to mixed-gender units to be bumpy. The 113th Support Battalion had tried admitting women previously but had run into difficulties and reverted to an all-male status. Bravo Company reopened to women in 1987—the year in which Debbie enlisted.

  In the spring of 1988, when Debbie began drilling with the 110 soldiers who composed the Bedford unit, she became the fifth woman to join the company. Soon after, they were joined by a sixth. Military men referred to the newcomers as “females” instead of women; Debbie adopted that language, too. She prided herself on doing the tasks she had been assigned without asking for help. She figured that was how you won over the guys—by carrying your own rucksack, no matter how heavy. In the years that followed, some women left the unit and others took their place, but the total number remained relatively constant for ten years. This meant that for about a decade Debbie found herself operating in an extremely male-oriented culture. She loved it. Once she walked into a late-night game of cards where a bunch of guys who had been discussing the merits of various pairs of tits were suddenly confronted by an individual bearing tits herself and were thrown into a state of confusion. Debbie resolved the awkwardness by saying she considered a certain man to be especially well hung. “They looked like they were about to drop their teeth!” she would recall later. Debbie did not have trouble discerning which men would prove accepting. Some of them didn’t want “females.” Some of them only wanted to talk to her for one reason. Others made a point to come up and shake her hand. “Welcome aboard,” one of these men told her. “You’re going to do just fine. Don’t worry about being a female.”

  When they went out to the range, Debbie shot forty out of forty, a perfect score. She did not even miss any of the three-hundred-yard targets—the ones that other soldiers would sometimes sacrifice. The guys had figured she would do all right, because she had made it through basic training, but they never imagined she would outshoot them all. “Did you see Helton’s score?” she heard one of the guys ask another with wonder in his voice. “She hit every single target!”

  In those days, people viewed annual training as mostly an excuse to drink beer. “It was pretty much all party time,” Debbie said about her early years in the Guard. Debbie joined the crowd that went to Shorty’s Den, a local dive bar—it was an older crowd, mostly male, people who had been in the Guard for years. Open conflict divided the group on the subject of gender after a couple of women objected to hearing what they interpreted as derogatory comments. Debbie sided with the men. “I wondered how you could be that easily offended and come into the military,” she said later. “Are you really that delicate that other people can’t say anything in front of you?” The battalion’s leaders promulgated a series of rules about sexual harassment, including a prohibition on vulgar language. Confusion ensued in Bravo Company. Exactly what was vulgar? Since when had speech turned into the equivalent of a weapon? Men interrupted themselves while telling dirty jokes or avoided women entirely. “It was much more natural and relaxed before the big to-do about how to behave toward women,” said Debbie. It was not that she did not believe in equality, she simply prized belonging more highly. During the particularly fraught years, a few of the men told Debbie explicitly that they considered her “one of the guys.” Debbie treasured the compliment.

  During the same time frame, Debbie discovered that much of her knowledge about howitzers and mortars was becoming obsolete. The howitzer had been designed for static warfare, when grunts dug trenches and created opposing front lines and called the space in between a no-man’s-land. Once you set a howitzer up, it could launch a shell over a mile, but you weren’t going anywhere in a hurry. War rarely called for howitzers anymore, and the Bedford unit did not even have any tanks. A few times, during annual training, Debbie went to Camp Grayling in Michigan, and then she did get to work on the instruments inside of tanks—once, after she finished leveling the main gun in the rotating turret, a sergeant even allowed her to drive the tank out into a remote area and shoot the main gun to see if it was actually working properly. After they returned, exhilarated, he admonished, “You didn’t shoot
that, right?” That was as close as Debbie ever got to actual tank warfare.

  And then the army overhauled its fire control systems. The new tanks came equipped with digital instruments—laser range finders, thermal tank sights, computerized ballistic systems. After Debbie had been in the Guard for about a decade, her job literally vanished. One day, her superior informed Debbie that the slot of 41C no longer existed, and she was now a 45G (“forty-five Golf”)—she had been reclassified as a person who did “systems repair” on the digital tools. In truth, however, Debbie never received additional training and did not know how to repair the computerized systems. For reasons that never became clear to Debbie, but might have involved her gender, she was also passed over for promotions. She remained an E4, the lowest rank of specialist, even as she got the responsibilities of an acting E5. It rankled, doing a job that should have earned her more pay, without actually being given the money.

  When other members of Bravo Company’s retention team approached her about joining, after one of the team’s members retired, Debbie decided to make the switch. Nothing was going to change over in armament, she figured, and she was already friendly with Gretchen Flood, another member of the retention team; later, Debbie’s good friend Will Hargreaves would join the team as well. When it was time for somebody to reenlist, the retention team discussed the decision with the soldier. “Since I knew everybody in the unit, a lot of those guys felt comfortable talking to me, and they could say anything they wanted,” Debbie said later. “If they had issues with somebody in their section, they could tell me, and know it was not going to travel somewhere else. Or if it was something that I could see that I could fix, then I would talk to the proper person. And some of them wanted out, they didn’t want to extend—and of course the purpose of retention was obviously to retain the soldier. So I just felt the need was greater there.” Because her time in armament had proved disappointing, she figured what the heck. “I thought, you know, I’ve only got a few years left. I think that’s the perfect place to ride out my time.”

  What Debbie really did was run the hot dog wagon. That’s what everybody called the PX truck, out of which she sold pop, Gatorade, French fries, nachos, baked potatoes, and hot dogs every summer, during their two weeks of annual training. During the rest of the year, on drill weekends, she sold a more limited fare—pop, water, Gatorade, chips, candy bars. From the outside, the hot dog wagon looked just like any other army truck—camouflage paint job—but through big double doors at the back people could step inside and order food. Shelves lined the interior of the trailer, and on the counters stood Crock-Pots, a microwave, and a freezer. The hot dog wagon doubled as the place where the retention team met with every member of the unit on an annual basis, to discuss how to keep them in the military, but after retention expanded the offerings, it became a favored hangout, too. Debbie and her colleagues chatted with every single person who came by, turning the retention center into a hub of social activity. Soon the hot dog wagon actually started making money, to the consternation of the brass. Previously the retention center had always operated at a loss, and profits perplexed the company’s leadership. Supervisors argued about whether to require the hot dog wagon to stop making money or whether to give the extra money back to the state of Indiana. Debbie solved the dilemma by starting a fund for members of their Guard unit: If somebody had trouble paying their bills, they got assistance, or if a family member died, the unit sent flowers. She made the math work so that the hot dog trailer neither made nor lost any money, which pleased her superiors.

  After she worked there for a few years, Debbie earned a certain degree of fame, and whenever she walked into a veterans’ organization, people who had once been or were still in the 113th Support Battalion would come up to her and say, Oh, it’s the hot dog lady! But her bosses found the hot dog wagon unmanly and were slow to appreciate the way in which the food truck was boosting morale. Then one of the main skeptics, a man named Captain Hoskins, was promoted to company commander. After he observed firsthand the emotional lift that his soldiers received from chatting with Debbie, he became a convert. In May 2000, when the 113th Support Battalion prepared to go to Louisiana for a joint readiness training exercise—a practice battle in which the soldiers mimicked the roles they would perform if they actually went to war—the commander of Bravo Company made sure the hot dog wagon went, too. Soldiers loaded all of the cooking equipment into the truck. But they could not put the potatoes on the truck without violating weight requirements. Hoskins did not want to try to pull off a field training exercise without Debbie’s baked potatoes, but he couldn’t exceed the weight restrictions, because the trucks were going to be loaded onto barges and floated down the Mississippi. Hoskins ordered every soldier in the company to put five pounds of potatoes into their rucksacks. That was when Debbie knew that she had become beloved.

  Over the previous decade, Debbie had seen a steady influx of young women join the unit after the passage of the Montgomery GI Bill. The original GI Bill, of 1944, had provided a range of benefits, including college tuition, to soldiers who were returning home from World War II. By contrast, the Montgomery GI Bill offered tuition benefits as an inducement to enlist. Because the United States had moved to an all-volunteer force, the military was constantly looking for ways to entice young people to sign up, and tuition benefits were being used alongside cash bonuses. The ratio of men to women in the roughly one-hundred-person group that drilled in Bedford had shifted to about three to one, meaning there were now about twenty-five female soldiers. Debbie adopted them all. They turned to her for guidance in every arena—life, love, the military. And yet, running a hot dog wagon was not exactly what she had envisioned, years earlier, when she had signed up to join the National Guard. Where was the glory in making baked potatoes? Somehow her dreams had shrunk. She took fulfillment in her work, but she had envisioned more. She had thought she might stem a flood, secure power, go overseas. But the 113th Support Battalion had stopped sending mechanics to Germany, and during emergencies Debbie was not needed. On March 12, 1991, a freak storm sheathed vast swaths of northern Indiana in several inches of solid ice, and then sent high winds gusting through the frozen, glittering landscape. Tree branches that had started to leaf out cracked down across roads and power lines. Miles of utility poles toppled over, and half a million people lost electrical power. National Guard soldiers rushed to get communities functioning—but only those soldiers who had experience with generators were needed. Other people from her unit received calls to assist in nearby towns that had been hit by tornadoes, but the twisters never touched down close to where Debbie lived. During the entirety of Debbie’s service in the National Guard, the state of Indiana experienced no emergencies that called for expertise in fire control. More than sixty thousand members of the Army National Guard were sent overseas during Operation Desert Storm, but the United States had troops on the ground for only a short time, and the Guard soldiers primarily assisted with tasks such as laundry services and field sanitation. Once again, Debbie’s skills were not required.

  Debbie had not voted for George H. W. Bush—and she would not vote for his son, either—but that was just because Debbie did not vote. It was a secret, and one of which she felt ashamed, but she had never voted in an election in her entire life. Wasn’t even registered. The problem was she never felt certain that she knew enough to make a solid choice. There was just one man in public life Debbie could imagine taking the trouble to cast a vote for, should he ever run, and that was Colin Powell. During the Persian Gulf War, Colin Powell won Debbie over with his cool unflappability and his direct manner. He was a military man, a straight shooter, she decided. Debbie had absolute faith in Powell. Otherwise she remained entirely skeptical of politics.

  By this point she had grown skeptical of romance as well. One night at Shorty’s, Debbie met an auto mechanic named Bill, and they dated for a few years. At one point Bill suggested that they marry, but Debbie said, “Bill, it’s not going to happen. I enjoy
your company, I like being with you, but as far as getting married again, that just isn’t in the books for me.” Instead, they fell into a regular arrangement, where they saw each other most Saturday nights. Usually Bill would drive up to Bloomington and spend the night with Debbie. Or if it was a drill weekend, she might spend the night with him in Bedford. Bill was comforting but not central. It was the crowd at Shorty’s that filled her life. The crowd at Shorty’s, and her beloved dog Maxx. That’s all she needed; no more husbands.

  * * *

  In Bloomington, Debbie often went to the local Moose Lodge on Friday nights. Both of her parents had belonged to the organization, and Debbie herself was a member of Women of the Moose. She and T.J. got in the habit of dropping by on Friday nights, when their friend Diane worked as a waitress. In 1997, Debbie attended a Moose convention, along with T.J. and Diane. Diane’s husband, Jerry, who managed the maintenance shop at E-Z-GO, a company that serviced electronic golf carts, brought his coworker, Jeff Deckard. T.J. and Debbie were out on the dance floor, acting silly.

  Jeff said, “Who are those two girls?”

  Jerry explained, “Oh, they’re friends of ours from the Moose.”

  “You need to ask T.J. out,” Diane told Jeff. “She’s single.”

  “What about that other girl?” Jeff asked.

  “Oh, you don’t want to go out with her,” Diane said. “She’s dating somebody.”

  Jeff was a road mechanic with E-Z-GO. He drove all over Indiana, working on golf carts. He was forty years old, and had been divorced for about five years. A steady, old-fashioned man, he had been raised by a Pentecostal woman, and he would never approach another man’s girlfriend. One evening at the Moose Lodge, Diane came over with some drinks and told Debbie and T.J., “These are from Jeff.”

  She added, “T.J., he said to tell you hi and that he hoped you were doing okay.”