Soldier Girls by Helen Thorpe Page B

then she did get to work on the instruments inside of tanks—once, after she finished leveling the main gun in the rotating turret, a sergeant even allowed her to drive the tank out into a remote area and shoot the main gun to see if it was actually working properly. After they returned, exhilarated, he admonished, “You didn’t shoot that, right?” That was as close as Debbie ever got to actual tank warfare.
    And then the army overhauled its fire control systems. The new tanks came equipped with digital instruments—laser range finders, thermal tank sights, computerized ballistic systems. After Debbie had been in the Guard for about a decade, her job literally vanished. One day, her superior informed Debbie that the slot of 41C no longer existed, and she was now a 45G (“forty-five Golf”)—she had been reclassified as a person who did “systems repair” on the digital tools. In truth, however, Debbie never received additional training and did not know how to repair the computerized systems. For reasons that never became clear to Debbie, but might have involved her gender, she was also passed over for promotions. She remained an E4, the lowest rank of specialist, even as she got the responsibilities of an acting E5. It rankled, doing a job that should have earned her more pay, without actually being given the money.
    When other members of Bravo Company’s retention team approached her about joining, after one of the team’s members retired, Debbie decided to make the switch. Nothing was going to change over in armament, she figured, and she was already friendly with Gretchen Flood, another member of the retention team; later, Debbie’s good friend Will Hargreaves would join the team as well. When it was time for somebody to reenlist, the retention team discussed the decision with the soldier. “Since I knew everybody in the unit, a lot of those guys felt comfortable talking to me, and they could say anything they wanted,” Debbie said later. “If they had issues with somebody in their section, they could tell me, and know it was not going to travel somewhere else. Or if it was something that I could see that I could fix, then I would talk to the proper person. And some of them wanted out, they didn’t want to extend—and of course the purpose of retention was obviously to retain the soldier. So I just felt the need was greater there.” Because her timein armament had proved disappointing, she figured what the heck. “I thought, you know, I’ve only got a few years left. I think that’s the perfect place to ride out my time.”
    What Debbie really did was run the hot dog wagon. That’s what everybody called the PX truck, out of which she sold pop, Gatorade, French fries, nachos, baked potatoes, and hot dogs every summer, during their two weeks of annual training. During the rest of the year, on drill weekends, she sold a more limited fare—pop, water, Gatorade, chips, candy bars. From the outside, the hot dog wagon looked just like any other army truck—camouflage paint job—but through big double doors at the back people could step inside and order food. Shelves lined the interior of the trailer, and on the counters stood Crock-Pots, a microwave, and a freezer. The hot dog wagon doubled as the place where the retention team met with every member of the unit on an annual basis, to discuss how to keep them in the military, but after retention expanded the offerings, it became a favored hangout, too. Debbie and her colleagues chatted with every single person who came by, turning the retention center into a hub of social activity. Soon the hot dog wagon actually started making money, to the consternation of the brass. Previously the retention center had always operated at a loss, and profits perplexed the company’s leadership. Supervisors argued about whether to require the hot dog wagon to stop making money or whether