An American Story (15 page)

Desperate to graduate, I often relied on humor to keep the girls' cooperation. Also, the fact that I was a sharp airman (could Eddie Mack and Johnnie Florence's daughter not be?) won their deference. We were all being made over in the Air Force's hard-charging image, and our previous conceptions of what was cool and what wasn't mutated to the Air Force's version. Peer pressure, yes, but good peer pressure for once. I had to play ghetto girl off and on and talk tough—laughable since that was a role I couldn't play when actually in the ghetto—but they bought it.

The Hispanic girls, all from barrios, most definitely did not buy my badass routine, so I never pulled it on them. They found me amusing, though, and didn't fight me. Most of their hostility was intracommunal—New York Puerto Ricans versus southwestern and West Coast Mexican-Americans (I hadn't known there were other than the latter before basic). Though I was terrified, I was also determined and I let everyone know that beefs beyond a certain level would not be tolerated and that I'd call on Air Force resources to squash them. Not black, not midwestern, but hard-core, polyester blue Air Force backup. Had I relied on the black girls to back me up, I think things would have turned out much differently. I'd have won, since we easily terrified the white girls and knew instinctively to power-share with the Hispanics, but it would have left the white girls feeling like “niggers”: powerless, ill used, and justified in their knee-jerk resentment. Once I let it be known that I'd be doing things by the book, no exceptions, even the black girls felt relieved. We all got to put our baggage down.

It was a heady experience. I could feel myself getting stronger and I liked it. There could be no fraud syndrome in a place which found a way to quantify each and every facet of everyday life. I had to accept that I was actually good at this.

——

The most difficult thing about being dorm chief was the way the TIs competed nonstop. When we marched to chow, there'd be ten formations lined up to eat. TIs would show off fancy march steps and sing out their flight's average test scores and squadron ranking. They'd denigrate the competitor's trainee with the rumpled uniform, slightly too long hair. No elementary school bus ever heard as many insults as were hurled by a gaggle of TIs. Just like us trainees, they were held responsible for the progress and conduct of their charges, however beyond their control. Their promotions and evaluations depended on how well their flights did; just a few marginal flights in a row could get a TI busted back to the job he'd come from. Harris wanted to win, and the only way to do that was through his trainees.

He informed me that I had to beat Sister Flight's dorm chief to the drill pad every morning for 5
A.M.
reveille so he could make Sister Flight's TI squirm. So I slept in socks, bra, panties, and T-shirt. I pinned my hair to regulation at bedtime and slept in my shower cap, which I tore off at the first note of reveille. On the run to the bathroom, I leapt into the uniform I'd prepared the night before. While I was peeing, one hand buttoned my fatigue shirt while the other brushed my teeth with a preloaded-the-night-before toothbrush. I splashed my face at the sinks, raced back to retighten the blanket on the bed whose coverings we all slept atop. I grabbed my hat and raced downstairs. My personal area returned to regulation standards, it never took me more than a few minutes to hit the drill pad. As the race got tighter, I gave up peeing and brushing my teeth beyond one quick swipe. Better kidney disease, better trench mouth than failure. Then I hacked my hair off. Sister Flight's dorm chief never beat me. Not once.

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 (and, 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.