An American Story (16 page)

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?”

It baffled me. Not that he was a horrible human being, but that such a smart, capable woman had made such foolish choices. Worse, other women disapproved more of her giving her husband custody of the child when she finally left him than they did his public cruelty toward her. I allowed my boyfriend to be very mean to me—but do his laundry, take his slaps, let him control my life on such a mundane and overt level?

Nothing did more to make me rethink feminism and female low self-esteem than the two-track personalities I saw then. Women who ran their sections like Patton would turn into kindergartners in the presence of their boyfriends. Women took dives on their language exams so as not to outdo their boyfriends; women refused to test for promotion early, though they'd earned it, for fear of their men's reactions. I saw women not only downplay their accomplishments but also swear others to silence so their men wouldn't have to deal with their prowess. Later, with some of my male office mates, I literally couldn't tell whether they were talking to their wives or their small children on the phone. These women would deploy to Pakistan on twenty-four hours' notice with nothing but a lipstick and their ID card, but disagree publicly with their man? Not on a bet.

My nascent feminism was not a rebellion against my traditional upbringing; it was the logical conclusion of it. True, women in my world back home took a back seat to men, but they did so stridently; their strength and talent was never questioned and rarely held in abeyance. It's our love for our children and desire for familial stability that keeps us in check, not our men.

My mother was never anything but a tower of strength—my father never made her crawl, nor could he have if he'd tried. She never feared him and she never hated him; she pitied him and mourned the happiness they could have had. She backed him up and never spoke ill of him or tolerated those who did, but only because she chose to, because that was the kind of family she wanted to live in. She was always a rock. She never wavered about anything.

My aunts, my female cousins—not a weakling in the bunch. At the very least, the man who berated one of them for taking her job too seriously or for being too decisive would be ridiculed. He still wouldn't have to cook, clean, or tend children, but he would keep his paws off her psyche. Few men voluntarily ran afoul of the sharp-tongued females in my family. Women in my world fulfilled traditional roles for their children's sake, but they did it standing up. No cringing, no apologizing, no swooning. No schizophrenia. Very early on, I realized that being female in the military was going to be much more difficult than being black.

HOW THE AIR FORCE MADE ME A CONSCIOUS CONSERVATIVE

While the military takes a radical, “sky's the limit” approach to its human capital, it couldn't be more hidebound about politics if it forced its members to deny that the earth revolves around the sun. The institution is conservative because its members are, and vice versa; there aren't a lot of Upper West Side paleoliberals keen to take the oath of military office. Professionalism, competitiveness, and presumed success are in the air in the military; slackers are summarily dealt with. The good thing about such an atmosphere is that it fosters high expectations and pulls forth the best from its people; the bad is that it fosters an unsympathetic, “blame the victim” ethos.

In uniform, someone is always at fault, no matter how complicated the situation. In Korea in 1982, I knew an exemplary airman who, while drunk, accidentally dropped and killed his baby—forty years at hard labor. When I was an officer in Texas in 1986, we had an airman of whom we all thought highly. She tested positive for trace amounts of marijuana; her court-martial panel believed our character references, believed she'd only tried it once—six months' confinement, reduction in grade, forfeiture of pay, and a bad-conduct discharge. Had I been on the panel, I would have to had to concur given the structure of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Imagine how little patience we had for the complaints of the unemployed, the poorly educated, the structurally disadvantaged: they just need to work harder, they just need to tighten their belts, and most of all, they need to stop expecting something for nothing. The fact that such comments often came from fat, unfireable master sergeants with their feet up on a desk reading the newspaper all day was lost on me.

Most of us enlisted were intimately associated with the unemployed, the poorly educated, the structurally disadvantaged: unlike the bleeding hearts, we knew who cleaned up their messes, and it wasn't the Brahmins in D.C. or the ivory-tower patricians. We knew who'd disrupted our high school classes with their disrespectful behavior, we knew who'd been experimenting with drugs and irresponsible sex when we'd been experimenting with after-school jobs and trade schools. We knew who'd made fun of us for working hard and we knew who it was who now expected us to save them from themselves. No one's harder on the poor than the poor.

I was in Korea during our invasion of Grenada. We cheered Reagan and got drunk in his honor, but I couldn't have explained why it was necessary to pulverize Club Med. What I could have done, though, was describe having watched President Carter's ill-fated Iranian hostage rescue attempt on TV with a group of senior NCOs and officers the previous year. Many of them had served during Viet Nam and they were sick with grief and rage. Doors slammed, phones got thrown, and chairs toppled all that day as GIs, overcome with emotion, flung themselves about trying to find some way to be useful. Winning was better. I was still in Korea for the 1982 elections and tried desperately to register so I could vote for Reagan's minions. Thank God the antidemocratic voter registration regime he presided over made it impossible for me to do so.