All Things in Moderation

Who knows where life is going to take us when we set out? I certainly never expected, even as I signed up for Basic Training, to become an Army officer or that it would be one of the defining experiences of my life. How I landed there and how it has shaped me, and how I’ve come to understand that why I decided to become an officer—and in the Airborne—is a reflection of who I truly am when it comes to my core beliefs and values, is what I thought that I’d share with you today.

When I left home for college I was your basic Midwestern farm girl, kind of quiet and a bit of a wallflower, although there were bits and pieces that made me stand out from the crowd: I was fairly smart—National Merit Scholar—and an athlete—runner mainly, although also boys’ basketball/girls’ volleyball during the winter months—and my dream in life was to become a large animal veterinarian. . . or even better, the female James Herriot. The first two years at Michigan State were pretty uneventful. I did end up changing my major from pre-vet to pre-med when I discovered that I loved research, but studying, athletics (cross country, volleyball, and track—back in the days when you could be a three-season athlete and a student without killing yourself) and work in a genetics research lab were how I spent my time and pretty much how I planned on spending the rest of my life. Then one day my sophomore year, one of my friends who was in ROTC decided to set me up on a blind date with one of her fellow cadets who was also a member of the Michigan National Guard; it was around Christmas time and every year the MNG has a Military Ball in formal dress to close out the year. We ran around the dorm floor, trying on various dresses and shoes [Note to the men reading this: this is totally normal female behavior—we borrow each others’ clothes all the time, especially when we’re poor college students] and got me all gussied up (yes, she decided ON THE DAY of the Military Ball to set me up) and off we went to meet our dates.

I enjoyed every minute of that night and the people I met (the date not so much), and the ranking Colonel mentioned to me that I should try Basic Training that summer. There is/was a program where college students could go to BT (and get paid significantly more than any other summer job I would be able to find) without having to enlist or even owe the Army time afterwards, but if you were so inclined you could return to college your junior year and sign up for ROTC, complete the last two years, and graduate with a commission. So I shipped off to Ft Knox that summer (much to my boss’s consternation; her comment was “I never saw you as much of a ‘joiner’ before—what happened?”) and set foot on my own personal yellow brick road. Turns out that (1) drill sergeants are some of the world’s best stand-up comedians, (2) laughing at what they say will translate into hundreds of pushups, (3) being athletic most definitely makes Basic Training easier to handle at the beginning, and (4) I was born to be in the military. After spending eight weeks learning to fire a rifle the military way (not to mention strip and re-assemble it in rocket-fast time), having my bunk thrown on the floor almost daily (I have never yet mastered making a bed to a DI’s satisfaction), marching and running while singing, bazillions of pushups and situps, and learning basic small unit fire and maneuver skills I graduated at the top of my battalion—about 200 people if I remember right—with about 10 pounds of new muscle on my upper body thanks to those pushups and an offer of an ROTC scholarship. I elected not to take the scholarship but did join ROTC, which led to two weeks with a Combat Engineer company for Cadet Troop Leadership Training and then Airborne School the next summer.

CTLT was my first experience of being the only woman in the room—I have an androgynous first name and my scores on tests during BT and ROTC Military Studies classes led The Powers That Be to assume that I’m XY rather than XX, so they assigned me to a unit that only men are eligible to serve in. When I reported, I walked into the CO’s office while his head was down reading a piece of paper on his desk, snapped to attention, saluted and stated “Cadet Michigoose reporting for duty, sir!”. Without looking up he said “Well, I can see I’m going to have to change your roommate assignments.” That two weeks with the Engineers taught me that just being myself—and standing up for myself when challenged simply on the basis of my gender—was the first component of being a leader. I’m a very straightforward person (or naïve, take your pick) and don’t tend to notice when people are testing me if they’re subtle about it, and a couple of the NCOs in the unit had decided to prove to me that I didn’t belong there. Hindsight being 20/20 I’m certain that the CO and the platoon leader that I was working with had given this testing their blessing, but they never let on and they backed me up when I needed it—they, after all, had a vested interest in finding out if I had what it took to become an officer, also. The first form of testing came during the unit’s physical training run the first morning. . . foolish, foolish platoon sergeant! At the time, a normal training run for me was 10 miles in under an hour and he asked me to set the pace—first test passed! That was followed by trying to find out if I had physical courage or was afraid of things like heights, confined spaces, hanging upside down while tightening screws (nothing much like that bothers me), strong enough to winch certain things (thanks to that extra 10 pounds of muscle from BT, yes), capable of navigating at night without a compass (Midwestern farm girl—yes), etc., etc., etc.. When I left the unit, SFC Tabone handed me an envelope and told me to open it after I’d gotten on the plane to fly to Ft Benning for Airborne school. In it was a letter that embodied what I now know is the military ethos—if you earn their respect, people will follow you. He had never in his 15 years in the Army so far, ever worked with a woman. But he gave me one of his Ranger tabs and told me that he thought that I could be the first woman to earn one, as well as the fact that he’d be proud to serve under me once I was commissioned if I chose to become an Engineer officer. I still have the letter and the tab.

Airborne School (paratrooper training) is at Ft Benning, GA, the base which is the heart and soul of the Army Infantry and a place where a woman is never, ever seen unless she’s a dependent. It became my home for the next three weeks, and a lovely kind of limbo time for me. There were other women in the barracks, but none of them were in my class, and all of them were enlisted. There were two female officers in Airborne School, but they also weren’t in my class, and, as an ROTC cadet I was neither fish nor fowl—not enlisted and not an officer. So I lived in the barracks and had to pull a shift on fire watch, but didn’t have to do KP or other enlisted folk chores, nor was I in charge of anything as the officers all were. As the token woman in the class I was chosen by the Black Hats (instructors) to be the first to do every new training task; both an advantage and a disadvantage, and Airborne School was where I learned to not be afraid to fail—in front of the soldiers I was leading—as long as I’d given it my best shot and then picked myself right back up and tried again until I got it right. Luckily I failed tasks only a couple of times and the rest of the time the Black Hats could use me as their “motivational example”. . . as in “Look here, son, Cadet Michigoose did it. Don’t be a pussy.” Yes, the word was used a lot, but after the first shock wore off I realized that they didn’t mean it personally at all—in fact, sometimes I think the Black Hats didn’t even think about what they’d just said—but that it was just part of the all-male culture that I was going to be operating in (although I didn’t know that bit at the time). In order to graduate from Airborne School you have to exit an aircraft in flight safely five times (each followed, of course, by landing on the ground and walking away from it) and Army parachuting is nothing at all like recreational parachuting—you know those old WWII movies where the paratroopers land like a sack of potatoes? Totally realistic. Your whole aim is to get out of the air and onto the ground as fast as possible, so a lot of testing has gone into the optimum rate of fall for a paratrooper. If you’d like to experience what a parachute landing fall (PLF) feels like for yourself, find something (stable) that is between five and six feet tall, climb on top of it, and jump off, landing on hard-packed soil. Personally, I think the second bravest thing I’ve ever done was jump out of that airplane the second time. The first time was easy. On my fourth jump I asked the Black Hat to put me in the door (i.e., be the first jumper off the airplane); it means that, once the jumpmaster/Black Hat has determined that the plane is at the right altitude, speed, heading, and distance from the drop zone he instructs the lead jumper to “stand in the door”, at which time the paratrooper is half in and half out of the plane, waiting for the exit light to turn green. Usually this is done when the plane is between 10 and 30 seconds from green light, but unknowingly I had just given the Black Hats another test for me: was I fearless and patient enough to stand there for two minutes? If not, I was going to exit early and have a nasty tree landing (not to mention fail Airborne School, probably without a second chance), if yes, well, another skip down that yellow brick road. I passed, and went back to MSU Airborne qualified.

Senior year means branch selection (you tell the Army what you’d like, the Army tells you what you get) and orders to Officer Basic Courses and initial assignments. The year flew by and I got my first choice branch (Chemical Corps), which I wanted both because it was somewhat science-related and because it was one of two chances for me to get to lead troops as a new lieutenant (the other chance being Quartermaster Corps). Most troop leadership chances go to the men, since they’re in the Combat Arms branches (Infantry, Armor, Field and Air Artillery) and I knew that I wanted to find out if I had what it took to be a leader. But I graduated and left for OBC without having that initial assignment, which worried me because about half of the lieutenant positions in the Chemical Corps are places where there aren’t any combat troops and thus no chance to serve in a combat support role, which is what I needed in order to have a shot at getting a platoon leader position. Luckily for me, the Wizard was at work behind that curtain, in the form of a Branch Manager who didn’t take kindly to limiting women’s roles in the military (his wife was a fellow officer and had run into a glass ceiling). Turns out the 82^nd Airborne Division was critically short Chemical Corps lieutenants, and had contacted the Branch Manager to find out who was in OBC and already Airborne qualified; Major Wizard sent the Division personnel officer a list of all of us, and my androgynous first name came to my rescue again: the commanding general had crossed off the female names on the list and said to get the rest of assigned to the 82^nd. Imagine his horror when he ran into me about three months later, taking part in my first Field Training Exercise at Ft Bragg. . . luckily, Major Wizard had told me (after I got safely signed into my unit and it couldn’t be reversed) what he’d done, so I was somewhat prepared for the CG’s reaction, but that was the first time I ran into overt discrimination—and even dislike—simply because I have ovaries. It’s also one of only about half a dozen times I ever ran into that in the military, and every one of those was a senior, older officer. I never ran into that kind of attitude from any of the enlisted men, NCOs, or younger officers that I served with, although there were many that I had to prove myself to.

Proving myself: due to the timing (late 80s) and the unit (82^nd Airborne Division: 14,000 men, 200 women, and of the 200, 11 of us were female officers) I was the first woman to hold every job I had or play some of the roles I played. And at least one of the jobs I got specifically because I was female—shortly after I got there a weapon was lost during an FTX. This is a major, major scandal in the military and it lead to a massive shake-up within the officers in the unit with commanders being relieved of their command and others sliding into command. . . it ended up with the Division Support Command being short a personnel officer (he had conveniently assigned himself to take over one of those commands), so they looked around, saw a woman standing there, and said, “Ah ha! Personnel officers are kind of like secretaries, so let’s assign the woman to that!” Well, that just meant that I got to do a major’s job while still a 2LT (I got promoted to 1LT while in the job) so I got to prove that I could take on assignments above my pay grade. Then my first Planning and Operations job within the DISCOM S3 shop (women almost never get P&O jobs, but they couldn’t figure out where else to put me when that major came in to take over the S1 [personnel] position). From there to the Division’s Chemical Company where I got my much-longed-for platoon leader position, followed by Company training officer (next P&O job). Then to the Division G3 shop, where I was the Assistant G3 (Training) and then Division Schools Commandant (both P&O jobs). My time in the G3 was when I learned that being a good manager is also being a good leader, and good leaders instill loyalty. I had a couple of fairly senior NCOs (an E6 and E7) working for me in the Schools position; both of them were Infantry guys, and had thus never worked with/for a woman before (BTW, I got called “sir” much more than “ma’am” while in Division—reflex when saluting an officer in that unit. I found it quite amusing). One day, after he’d been working for me for about six months, the E6 came in looking like hell and had quite obviously been in a fist fight; he didn’t say anything so I didn’t want to ask, but I had to find out what had happened to my guy. So I put the word out on the street and found out that my two NCOs had been drinking with some of their buddies from their old Infantry unit when one of the buddies made a sneering remark about them working for a boss who wears fingernail polish (a rank insult, by the way!). The E6 responded that I had bigger balls than the buddies’ CO, which led to more words, which led to my NCOs getting into that fist fight. I knew the CO involved (pretty much all of us at that rank—captain—knew each other) so called him to find out how his guys looked. Mine had kicked their asses. Much gloating on my part. Not to mention that the other CO had to buy me a beer next time we ran into each other at the Officers’ Club, and that the story got around and my guys’ reputations, both for toughness and as good NCOs got enhanced.

I did, eventually, have to rotate out of the 82^nd, and left for my Officer Advanced Course with all of that P&O experience as well as having a front-line leadership position under my belt. When I was assigned to Ft Lewis after OAC I was originally headed to a staff job in a training group. . . but, damn it! I’m Airborne! So I walked into the 1^st Special Forces Group headquarters and asked to speak to the CO. Special Forces Group headquarters are the equivalent of combat unit’s brigade headquarters—and women can serve in them since they aren’t exposed to direct small arms fire (or at least that’s the theory). I also had a newly minted specialty designation as a Plans and Operation officer (now you know why it was so important that I held all those P&O positions)—the first one ever awarded to a woman. I wasn’t the first woman to wear a green beret—and I never went to the Qualification Course, so I’m not actually Special Ops qualified—but I was the only one wearing one while I was there and it turned out to be quite handy in some situations to have a woman in the room wearing that beret. I like to think that my experience in the 1^st SFG opened some doors for other women to play a role in the “softer” side of military operations, and the Marines are using women quite effectively in that type of role in Afghanistan right now. Being a leader can mean talking someone into taking a chance on you doing something new and unconventional, and then making it work so that others can come behind you and make it work better.

I left the Army in 1992 when, after Gulf War I, the first President Bush decided to cash in on that peace dividend and paid people to leave the military. I was going to be headed to a staff job at the Pentagon and probably a long wait before I could get back to a troop assignment, plus I was recently married and my husband was now a civilian and in graduate school. I don’t regret my decision then, but there hasn’t been a day when I don’t dearly miss the men I led and worked with, the chance to be tested both physically and mentally in relatively straightforward ways, and, frankly, the chance to be a leader. I am profoundly grateful that I never had to command in battle; I think I would have been pretty good, but I can only imagine the mental and emotional toll that it takes. The military is a crucible—there is a lot of trial by fire and the learning curve is steep—but it is also a place that welcomes and accepts those that withstand the heat. First blacks, then women, and now gays and lesbians are being taken into the fold fully. My one real regret about not being in right now is that I’ll never have the chance to welcome back some of my comrades that had to leave due to their loving the wrong person.

I learned a lot about myself while I was an officer; I learned that being true to yourself is at the core of making others believe in you. That physical and mental agility will go a long way toward helping you achieve your goals, but that sometimes it’s just gutting it out and getting it done. That failure will not doom you, but not getting up and trying again will. That discrimination exists, but not nearly as much as support and opportunity. That loyalty to those you lead is an essential component of leadership. Maybe the most important thing I learned was that I’m not afraid to take chances, and that taking chances can place your feet onto a road that you can’t see the end of, but the destination is more than worth the journey.

Fair winds and following seas, Brent. Semper fi, McWing.

Airborne!

Filed under: US Army, Veterans Day | Tagged: Women in the military | 20 Comments »