the women in combat thing
May. 25th, 2016 12:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1WSMBta:
bomberqueen17:
My dad joined the Army when he was 22. He wanted to fight in Vietnam. He joined the Rangers, but after an injury forced him to drop out of Ranger school, he went into the Infantry instead. As a 1st Lieutenant, he commanded a platoon in Vietnam.
My sisters and I grew up very patriotic; Dad was active in the National Guard starting when I was about 2, and I remember a lot of his camouflage-clad legs, remember wrapping very small fingers through the buttons of the BDU uniform blouse. Some of my earliest memories are fiddling with the captain’s rank insignia on his uniform cap. (Two bars. It’s a sideways equals sign. I knew that before I could read.)
My older sister Katy, a gifted athlete and track star, always the dutiful eldest child, forever herding her younger siblings, wanted to join the Army. She went to college on a ROTC scholarship. She is a tall woman, the tallest of us at 5'10", and has always been determined, always been resourceful, always been brave, always had an insanely high pain tolerance. (She would throw up before she would cry, from pain; if she cried, it was anger, just like the rest of us.) She ran hurdles in college, even though she often finished races bloody since our poor rural high school had a gravel track. She chose her senior prom dress because the slit was on the side exposing the leg where her hurdling scars were less noticeable. In college she had a chance to learn to parachute with the Army, so she took it; she sustained a stress fracture to her leg halfway through the course, but concealed the injury so that she could finish because God damn it, she was going to get those paratroop wings. And she did.
She wanted to be in the Infantry, like dad. The rifle, on the blue background, with the stars around it. But that was closed to women.
She debated it, she wrote papers on it, and mostly, she dealt with the bullshit in her ROTC battalion about it. She was forever under scrutiny. Many of the women didn’t hold themselves to the same physical standards as the men, and felt that they didn’t have to try. Not unreasonable. But not Katy. No. Every PT test, she competed against everyone, and she and Dad would compare their scores. By her junior year, she could max almost every PT test. She occasionally did better than Dad, who was in his 50s and asthmatic and had been doing PT tests since 1967.
My father is six feet, 145 pounds. He still fits into his uniform from Vietnam, still wears a 30 inch waist. In Vietnam, he had trouble because the equipment belt had to be at least 32 inches around to fit all the equipment he had to carry on it– his sidearm, his canteen, his gas mask, etc. The belt had to sit on his hips; he was too small to wear it around his waist.
My sister is five feet ten, and hovered around 155 for most of her time in college. She has a solid frame, well-muscled. She could consistently run two miles in twelve minutes, and the second mile is always faster than the first. She was the anchor of her 4x400 meter hurdles relay team in high school, and the record she set in 1994 remained on the gym wall at least until my baby sister graduated a decade later.
Could she do it? Could she serve in combat? She dedicated most of her training to proving that she could. She could wear the body armor. She could carry the pack, she could shoot the rifle, she could do it better and faster, she was stronger. She could give the orders, and she could take them.
But it wasn’t an option. In the end, she went into Ordnance. She managed a machine shop in Darmstadt. She managed logistics for the 3rd Infantry Division’s deployment to Iraq. She went twice, in the end. And she carried a sidearm and wore the body armor and got a horrible goggle tan and got shot at. (Shot near, she insisted. Maybe shot toward. Not shot at.) She cleaned out the wreckage of the HMMVs that hit roadside bombs and collected body parts to put into baggies to send home. She lost friends and lived through month-long sandstorms and was bored out of her mind sometimes. She did her job, she did her duty, and she came home.
She took me to the walkway at Ft. Stewart where the Army has planted redbud trees. Each one has a plaque at the bottom, bearing the name and rank of a soldier who died in Operation Enduring Freedom or Operation Iraqi Freedom. She showed me the ones who were her friends, explained the mementos people left.
And I asked her, as one does, about the politics of the moment, especially the controversy then broiling about the wars. And she shrugged, and said, a little tightly, “I’m just tired of people claiming to speak for the troops, when they haven’t asked us what we thought.”
So I don’t have a summarized point to this, I’m just putting it there. I’ll ask her, and she’ll probably say about half a sentence, and then her husband will talk for half an hour, and she’ll chase the baby around and maybe, finally, laugh, and if I press her, she’ll set her jaw and astonish me with something. I never really could predict her.
Going back through old posts, I wrote this just as they were discussing opening combat positions to women, so. In light of recent posts about military stuff, here’s a personal anecdote about one of my heroes.
bomberqueen17:
My dad joined the Army when he was 22. He wanted to fight in Vietnam. He joined the Rangers, but after an injury forced him to drop out of Ranger school, he went into the Infantry instead. As a 1st Lieutenant, he commanded a platoon in Vietnam.
My sisters and I grew up very patriotic; Dad was active in the National Guard starting when I was about 2, and I remember a lot of his camouflage-clad legs, remember wrapping very small fingers through the buttons of the BDU uniform blouse. Some of my earliest memories are fiddling with the captain’s rank insignia on his uniform cap. (Two bars. It’s a sideways equals sign. I knew that before I could read.)
My older sister Katy, a gifted athlete and track star, always the dutiful eldest child, forever herding her younger siblings, wanted to join the Army. She went to college on a ROTC scholarship. She is a tall woman, the tallest of us at 5'10", and has always been determined, always been resourceful, always been brave, always had an insanely high pain tolerance. (She would throw up before she would cry, from pain; if she cried, it was anger, just like the rest of us.) She ran hurdles in college, even though she often finished races bloody since our poor rural high school had a gravel track. She chose her senior prom dress because the slit was on the side exposing the leg where her hurdling scars were less noticeable. In college she had a chance to learn to parachute with the Army, so she took it; she sustained a stress fracture to her leg halfway through the course, but concealed the injury so that she could finish because God damn it, she was going to get those paratroop wings. And she did.
She wanted to be in the Infantry, like dad. The rifle, on the blue background, with the stars around it. But that was closed to women.
She debated it, she wrote papers on it, and mostly, she dealt with the bullshit in her ROTC battalion about it. She was forever under scrutiny. Many of the women didn’t hold themselves to the same physical standards as the men, and felt that they didn’t have to try. Not unreasonable. But not Katy. No. Every PT test, she competed against everyone, and she and Dad would compare their scores. By her junior year, she could max almost every PT test. She occasionally did better than Dad, who was in his 50s and asthmatic and had been doing PT tests since 1967.
My father is six feet, 145 pounds. He still fits into his uniform from Vietnam, still wears a 30 inch waist. In Vietnam, he had trouble because the equipment belt had to be at least 32 inches around to fit all the equipment he had to carry on it– his sidearm, his canteen, his gas mask, etc. The belt had to sit on his hips; he was too small to wear it around his waist.
My sister is five feet ten, and hovered around 155 for most of her time in college. She has a solid frame, well-muscled. She could consistently run two miles in twelve minutes, and the second mile is always faster than the first. She was the anchor of her 4x400 meter hurdles relay team in high school, and the record she set in 1994 remained on the gym wall at least until my baby sister graduated a decade later.
Could she do it? Could she serve in combat? She dedicated most of her training to proving that she could. She could wear the body armor. She could carry the pack, she could shoot the rifle, she could do it better and faster, she was stronger. She could give the orders, and she could take them.
But it wasn’t an option. In the end, she went into Ordnance. She managed a machine shop in Darmstadt. She managed logistics for the 3rd Infantry Division’s deployment to Iraq. She went twice, in the end. And she carried a sidearm and wore the body armor and got a horrible goggle tan and got shot at. (Shot near, she insisted. Maybe shot toward. Not shot at.) She cleaned out the wreckage of the HMMVs that hit roadside bombs and collected body parts to put into baggies to send home. She lost friends and lived through month-long sandstorms and was bored out of her mind sometimes. She did her job, she did her duty, and she came home.
She took me to the walkway at Ft. Stewart where the Army has planted redbud trees. Each one has a plaque at the bottom, bearing the name and rank of a soldier who died in Operation Enduring Freedom or Operation Iraqi Freedom. She showed me the ones who were her friends, explained the mementos people left.
And I asked her, as one does, about the politics of the moment, especially the controversy then broiling about the wars. And she shrugged, and said, a little tightly, “I’m just tired of people claiming to speak for the troops, when they haven’t asked us what we thought.”
So I don’t have a summarized point to this, I’m just putting it there. I’ll ask her, and she’ll probably say about half a sentence, and then her husband will talk for half an hour, and she’ll chase the baby around and maybe, finally, laugh, and if I press her, she’ll set her jaw and astonish me with something. I never really could predict her.
Going back through old posts, I wrote this just as they were discussing opening combat positions to women, so. In light of recent posts about military stuff, here’s a personal anecdote about one of my heroes.
