Soldier Girls by Helen Thorpe Page A

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 forhowitzers 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