An American Story (33 page)

How hard could it be?

I was asking for a separation date six months off, mid to late 1989. By then I'd be safely ensconced in a Ph.D. program somewhere studying political economy, or in law school, or running for local government, or substitute teaching at a ghetto high school while selling homemade pies door to door at night to fund my school board campaign. I was open to anything, as long as doing it made me happy, left me largely in charge of myself, and kept me engaged with other forward-thinking people. My big plan was substitute teaching. I could decide day by day, school by school, whether or not to work, and earn just as much as I needed to get by.

My separation paperwork burning a hole in my briefcase, I set the following Monday as the day of submission. Tingling with nervous excitement, still, I felt at peace for the first time in years. It was such a relief to not be going round and round in open-ended circles. I didn't know exactly what I was going to do. I just knew I would do something—my commitment to my mother alone would ensure that.

I wandered down to the cafeteria and who should I encounter but the captain who'd kept me a prisoner at Kelly by refusing to work an assignment for me. I was so serene and resigned to stepping off the cliff of my own future, I spoke warmly to her and inquired about her family. It was hard for me to even remember the hostility I'd harbored for her. She was so surprised her eyes widened like saucers. We chatted amiably. When I got back to my desk, my phone was ringing.

“You'll never beat out all the fighter jocks for the intel chief job in Iceland. Still want to go to Turkey?” she asked.

I took the discharge paperwork out of my drawer and tore it up. I knew I was still going to get out, but just not until I'd had my last overseas hurrah. I was ready to take my destiny in my own hands. But first, an adventure!

JUST FOR THE HELL OF IT

My fifteen months from June 1989 to October 1990 assigned as chief of intelligence, Ankara Air Station, Turkey, were the best of my career. I'd done no research about the country apart from its military significance, yet I was still hearing voices. My instinct told me it was the right move.

With a small band of other young officers, I traveled all over the region and saw sights thousands of years old. I drank from St. Paul's local well in Tarsus and visited the protoconvent where Mary lived after Jesus' crucifixion. I saw places like Spain, Egypt, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Syria, and the medieval walled city of Dubrovnik. With my friends, I saw the whirling dervishes (they're slow and mesmerizing, not high-speed and manic). I watched the sun come up over Nem Ru mountain with its ancient stone heads lying about like a giant child's discarded toys and wondered about the peasants who must have died by the thousands dragging them up the mountainside. On a train platform in Budapest, a young Gypsy man threw me a devilish kiss and led his troupe in serenading me (much to my boyfriend's disapproval)—they looked right out of
National Geographic
and yet they thought me exotic! Wherever my (white) boyfriend Erik and I went, there was so much gawking, he used to joke that he was going to get a T-shirt that read “Yes! She's That Color All Over.” There are supposed to be lots of Africans in eastern Europe, but we encountered very few (and virtually no women). When we did, it was clear how mongrelized African-Americans have become after three hundred and fifty years in America. The Africans stared at me, too.

We drank Turkish beer and bought lots of gold and handwoven carpets (even though I knew that women and children slaved making them, often involuntarily). We lived like kings on our military pay and thanks to Turkey's ever-worsening inflation—for twelve dollars a month, I had a cleaning lady. For a few bucks more, she'd have cooked too, but I was rarely home.

But all this was a sidelight to my military job, by far the most satisfying of my twelve years in uniform. Our air station was there to support and defend our commitment to the southern region of NATO. I was assigned to DO, the Directorate of Operations, as chief of intelligence. I wrote the intel annex to the war plan for our region and developed plans for supporting and directing troops that would have to deploy to the region in a contingency. We expected our enemy to come from the Soviet Union, but it was deteriorating at such a rapid pace, we began to wonder if there'd be much for us to do at all.

The highlight of my job was the weekly intelligence briefings I delivered to General Grove and his almost entirely male and middle-aged staff. It took me a couple of weeks to get my legs under me, but in very short order my briefings were standing room only. I enjoyed them tremendously. It was exactly the type of challenge I relished. There was a piss-and-vinegar full-bird colonel who loved to play “stump the dummy” with me, asking questions he thought I wouldn't, but should, be able to answer. He cut me no slack, and trying to anticipate his demands—it was a point of honor with me to have no questions asked at the end of my presentation—kept my briefings razor sharp.

Rather than stage fright, my problem was a lack of nervousness. Once I'd done my homework on the region's military situation (which I continually monitored anyway with help from my headquarters at Ramstein AB, Germany), what was there to be nervous about? Had I had to lecture on physics, I'd have died a thousand deaths, but knowing I knew more than my audience did in my area of responsibility—where's the edge going to come from? I found myself leaning on the podium, not standing up straight, my mind wandering from a presentation I'd memorized and practiced to the point where I couldn't listen to it anymore. I wasn't strack because it just came too easily. I ran across an article about Al Pacino. In it, he said that he didn't eat before a performance, that hunger gave him an edge.

To sharpen my own performance, rather than work efficiently on my presentations all week, I'd just file away items I thought I might brief in a special file. As always, I made sure to keep abreast of all developments, keep my map file stocked, my weapons slides up to date and complete. Then, the afternoon and night before a briefing, I whirled into action, knowing I had exactly enough time, but no more, to pull it together. I was a tornado, running around, gathering final up-to-date info, making my presentation slides, orchestrating with the airman who handled the briefing room infrastructure. I'd work till late in the evening, go straight to bed, back up again at five. Lots of black coffee but no breakfast.

Hungry, overcaffeinated, and heading for a line after which I would be dead (0800 sharp), only then would I run through the briefing a few times, keying from the slides I'd made the day before. I allowed myself no margin for error. Since I didn't have time to choose my words carefully and memorize, I'd have to rely on my wits and thorough background knowledge to pull each briefing off. It was a high-wire act and I loved the high. I made the odd mistake here and there (I recall being unable to find Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, on my slide even though I'd placed a huge gold star on the spot). What fun.

Keeping up with the dissolving USSR, Lebanon, the standoff between the Turks and the Kurds, the Turks and the Greeks, the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots—not to mention the likes of Muammar El-Gaddafi, the western Sahara, and the Israeli-Arab conflict—I had more than enough to monitor. It was the perfect job. I got to indulge my love of history, research, international politics, and public speaking every Wednesday morning at 0800 hours. I relied on
The Economist
as much as I did the intel infrastructure at Ramstein.

But reality was never far off and the reminders to remain in control of my own life were everywhere. Since my mother hadn't wanted to move to Turkey, I was maintaining two households. I arranged to share an apartment with a male Air Force nurse in Ankara only to have his boss, the hospital commander, order him not to move in with me because it might look bad to the Turks. There were no single female officers to share with, so I was stuck footing the bills alone. How I longed to be in control of the intimate details of my own life, how I longed to be the idiot in charge. The biggest reminder was yet to come, though.

To keep me operationally ready, my boss sent me to join a stateside unit deployed for a long exercise in the countryside of a NATO ally. That brief experience made me reflect on the murky status of women in the military and on my own personal and feminist evolution. It also steadied my resolve to separate.

During my first few military years, I had consciously eschewed female frippery. I'd completely identified with the down-and-dirty ethic of my new world and felt that acting like a man was the route to the top. I wore fatigues and combat boots, cursed, smoked, drank my beer from the bottle, didn't carry a purse. I was one of the boys.

Then, without consciously having decided to, I made myself over and started wearing makeup, pumps, and all the jewelry allowed by regulation. Skirts, never pants. I tailored my uniforms, painted my nails, wore perfume. I enjoyed seeing eyes widen when I entered those all-male, all-white, all-pilot meetings. In the secret world of electronic combat, those guys seemed to forget that women existed. Somehow, people were always surprised that the Captain Dickerson (I learned not to use “Debra”) who'd written the intelligence annex to the war plan had legs. It was sweet to watch them fight the urge to rise, then give in to the one to pull out my chair and open my doors. At the coffee break, some middle-aged major would always pick up my lipsticked cup and josh in mock flirtation, as if with his daughter's friend, “Now whose could this be?”

With equal measures of spite and affection, I'd enjoyed their befuddlement and played it for all it was worth. I knew they could only stare for just so long and then they'd have to start listening. By the time they did, they'd be eating my dust. I'll always believe that standing out in this way while also being good at my job helped me.

Knowing I was close to the end of my Air Force history, and knowing that my gender was a large part of the reason I'd be leaving, I thought about all these things while on deployment. Life in the field, for even just a few days, was a raw and unusual experience. So relevant were these issues of femininity, sexuality, professionalism, and power in that highly charged environment, I couldn't get them off my mind as I tried to sleep on my cot in our tent at night. Living in a coed environment in the field was an eye-opening, bullshit-free experience. Had my mind not already been made up to leave, those few days would have removed all doubt.

By the time I arrived, the unit had been in the field for a month. There were 383 men, 3 enlisted women, and 2 female officers including me. We lived in a Tent City—it looked just like the
M*A*S*H
set but was actually very comfortable.

The other female officer had a husband stateside whom everyone knew. She was having an affair with one of the pilots, and the whole camp, except for us women, treated her like dirt. Her lover was, of course, exempt from disapproval. I could have told her that there are no secrets in Tent City and that it was a rookie's mistake to get involved with any of those guys. I knew that any problems (like rape) would be deemed her fault, no matter the circumstances. I knew that indulging her sexual urges would brand her a whore and undermine her authority no matter how much whoring they were doing. And they would know about it. People all but spat after saying her name.

I, on the other hand, was treated like a vestal virgin. When we weren't flying, we were partying and each group had a party tent. Many drank to the point of incoherence and physical collapse, which was all perfectly acceptable as long as their work didn't suffer the next shift. I knew better than to drink or dance and spent those evenings fending off advances, chaperoned by my male deputy. He obligingly stayed too close to me to allow for any serious breaches of decorum and, for his pains, was routinely referred to as “bitch,” “pussy whip,” and “the captain's puppy.” He shrugged his tormentors off with all the boredom of Mata Hari being interrogated by the Gestapo. To the others' credit, they never name-called him with any vehemence or disgust. His acquiescence was the price of their grudging acceptance. (His colleagues no doubt knew what I had suspected from the moment we met: I'm sure he was gay, though we never discussed it. Once, while hiding in his tent, he made big moon eyes and bleated, “But, Debra, they neeeeeeeeeed you.” I laughed so hard they found me.)

Every tent we entered would go quiet for a moment, then men would move forward like the palace eunuchs to deposit me in a seat of honor. They'd ply me with beer and then exchange reverent looks when I'd ask delicately for a diet Coke. Men—married, single, engaged, or openly whoring—would ask me pretty directly for sex and then nod approvingly when I'd remind them of my boyfriend in Ankara. (I wouldn't let Erik visit. If I left camp with him for a hotel, if I were sexualized in any way in that bare-bones emotional environment, I'd be just another whore and my authority would be compromised. Worse, my safety might be compromised.) Clearly, I was being tested and rewarded with the gift of approval for being a nice girl.

Once they accepted that none of them was going to get any, I became everyone's big/little sister, mom, daughter, surrogate wife. The blacks especially claimed me. (I was also the only black officer.) I tried on innumerable gift sweaters and jewelry. I edited letters home. I read letters from home for hints of infidelity and gave advice to the lovelorn. I felt foreheads for fevers. I was Woman. I was a natural resource.

From the time I arrived, I spent not one moment alone. You can't knock on a tent flap, so men started yoo-hooing me at first light. By my second lap jogging, I'd have a detachment in tow. An attentive cohort waited for me as I emerged from the shower tent in my robe. If they couldn't find me anywhere else, they'd move down the line of wooden latrines calling my name.

By the second morning, the commander was refereeing the seating arrangements at chow: “You Red Horse guys had her yesterday. Give Supply some time.” Solomonically, he inclined his head, and I reported to the Supply table to bestow the balm of virtuous female presence. (The enlisted women were smart enough to know to ensconce themselves as “one of the guys” in their work units. No one from outside that unit could come near them.)