You train and you train, you train some more, and the stock of the M-16 gets to be like a part of your body. Even today, years after I last fired a rifle, I remember the feel of it, the weight----and how I could tell without checking the serial number that the weapon I held was not mine. All I had to do was try and line up a target.
There's no substitute for experience. The training takes over, and the relief you feel at knowing what to do
It starts with the simplest of things. At Basic, my company's three drills made us stand at port arms for long periods of time, in the hot sun of South Carolina, to build up the strength in our arms. It was painful in the beginning. It was still the early Nineties, and while there was lip service, real strength in any form was threatening in women. A woman who knew she could efficiently handle and strip weapons and march punishing distances carrying loads that would cause civilians to collapse was a hard woman---or girl----to rattle.
And yet the most valuable lessons were the most subtle.
I don't remember her name. I suppose I could dig out the diaries I kept at the time----what some people now call 'journals', but I'm still poor white trash, and we don't do journals.
I was 27, the second oldest woman in a platoon full of very young girls. We were roused from exhausted sleep at four or five, given enough time to brush our teeth, then directed out to the PT ground, where we discovered after a lifetime of being told that women were weak that indeed we had untold reservoirs of strength to use. I'd never run more than a block or two before, and that was when I was either chasing a shoplifter or trying to catch a bus. Now I ran two miles with increasing ease, added to my pushup count day by day, and endured physical and mental challenges that made those in my civilian life seem beyond trivial. Even today, in pain from back and shoulder injuries that have gone untreated for years, I am very strong in a way that is still casually insulted in women. "Strong like OX," I joked with a best friend, but the real strength was the way the Army taught me to value that strength----for myself. I am strong. I am female. Therefore, my strength is feminine because it is performed by a woman. Society defines femininity the other way, from the outside in, according to its own needs, and strength in women is threatening.
She was eighteen and very pretty, very pale blond, tanned, perky and all the things I was not. I was dead white, scrawny from dancing ballet, with curly hair that frizzed in the South Carolina humidity, and whose color was neither red nor blonde and thus unsatisfactory. I look.....weird. She looked pretty. Familiar.
We hated one another.
As Basic went on, the challenges got more and more difficult, till we were marching untold distances in heat and humidity so bad that the drills made us stop every fifteen minutes and drink a whole canteen, then rest for twice that period before they roused us to march again. After more than a decade of dancing, I knew how to deal with blisters on my feet. I smuggled huge amounts of table salt from the chow hall, filled one of the sinks with the hottest water I could stand, dumped the salt in, and then immersed my bloody feet. Day by day, more and more girls tried the method, where once they would have rejected it out of concerns about pain or unattractive results.
We got to the point of training with rifles, which scared me more than I could say.
As a woman, I had grown up with the bargains society offered or enforced upon women: We will ask less of you, in some ways, than we ask of men. We will also offer you pretense and lower standards in other ways. And if you dare usurp male roles and male privileges, you will be punished severely. Womens' work in raising children and keeping house was therefore unpaid and given only the sop of respect, with one day per year devoted to frivolous rewards like, say, dinner out and a bouquet. Real respect lies in trusting a person's judgement, not making the decision for them.
The Army was different. The Army offered me a decision that left me poised on the edge of a cliff: You will find things in yourself that you never knew existed, yet you will have to surrender the pretenses of society. No makeup. No dresses. No equivocating, none of the tics demanded so often of women: "It's just my opinion/I don't want to interrupt/do you think?/it's just me/is it just me?/what do you think?/in my humble opinion...". In the Army, you did the same job as the guys, and you had to find things in your personality that mirrored the new found physical ability to run for miles, to sweat and find it an accomplishment, to get dirty in the mud and realize it washed off, to come to the painful realization that for some people, such revelations could never be undone or unseen. Once some dude had seen you sweat soaked, gasping for breath, and panting for air, he could never again regard you as potential girlfriend material. Scoff all you want, but at the time it was painful. Your only identity was female, and there were rules about that.
Firing range training was a new phase that everyone had to pass, and the drills were tense. They 'smoked' girls at the drop of a hat, which involved both humiliation and exhaustion, as the offending troop was dropped to do pushups in front of the whole platoon for her transgression. Previously, as women, your punishments were more subtle. Here it was sweat and aching muscles and thirty other women looking down on you. Yet it was gender neutral, and with that came a notion that was hard to define: If I worked my ass off, I could achieve things, openly, and without owing any man, free and clear.
Even then, more than a month into Basic, I remained unsure of which path to take---the one that was safe and familiar, or the one that promised things I barely hoped for?
In the evenings, in the humid Carolina night, we did laundry and wrote letters home. Some of the troops, the recruits, had a hard time adjusting to new ideas. Some of them tried to wear makeup, to negotiate lower standards in a world where they were accustomed to being held to impossibly high standards. Rule breaking in little ways was how we dealt with our changing world.
In the heat, in the evening, the cicadas drowned out the washing machines across the lower level of the company, and so one evening during range training I came across my blonde rival, her back turned to me. "She's (my name) old, she's fat, she's ugly," she said.
I tapped her on the shoulder. "You're young, you're stupid, and you're out of shape," I said. "One day you will be my age. What will you be like then?"
A few days later she did something wrong, and when the drills dropped her, she sighed, rolled her eyes, exhibited some form of exasperation. The drills clicked their tongues at one another in awe, even while the other soldiers gaped in horror. She'd disrespected them to their faces, in front of the company. She did pushups till she was little better than a limp rag on the ground.
You could leave the firing range to go the latrine, and doing so meant climbing and descending a hill. A day or so later, in heat that was so severe it would later be blamed for the death of one drill sergeant and three recruits, I found myself climbing that hill away from the latrine while she descended it to go to the latrine. We became aware of each other's presence at about the same time.
"Oh, God, ginmar, don't give me shit today, I have had a horrible day," she said.
We were both like wrung out dishrags. "What do you mean?"
She eyed me, but our isolation from all other eyes seemed to free her. She hadn't slept, she'd shot horribly----which meant endless retries-----and she was worn out, tired, and exhausted.
I have no idea why I asked her the question that I did. "Do you need a hug?"
I don't do hugs. I hate hugs. Keep your paws off me, I'm repressed. I don't do easy emotion, or cheap sentiment, or anything. But she was so honest and so deflated.
She stared at me. I was sort of startled myself. Then she hurtled herself at me, and hugged me fiercely, and it came to me in a ball of emotion, not thought, that she and I were going through many of the same things, the same feelings, the same reactions, but had no vocabulary for them. I still have no idea why I offered. It was out of character then, it's even more so now, except that I cannot bear to see anyone in pain, no matter how they are or what they've done.
The sun was setting before I encountered her again. Once more, we were headed in opposite directions. This time, though, she was jubilant, and as soon as she saw me from the hill top, she started yelling. "You gave me good luck! I shot expert! You made the difference!" From then on till graduation, we were fast friends, sharing the same thoughts and emotions, sisters who'd never met before then. We had nothing in common but the hardship of Basic training.
I graduated Basic training from the hospital. At some point I developed a horrible fever, lost my ability to hear or balance, and was discovered. I was an ex ballet dancer when I joined up, so flexible that my drill called me 'Private Gumby over there', and yet in the last few weeks of Basic my temperature rose high above my weight and the hospital made me take a shower in a seat, because they watched me reel from one side of the hallway to the other and knew I could not stand up without help. My fever was higher than my weight, and it got worse.
The drills visited, and assured me I would graduate. Going through the whole ordeal again seemed unbearable. When I was released from the hospital, I was directed to walk back to the company, even though my weight was in the low double digits and I was still a bit uncertain as to balance. After the ordeals of Basic, however, I shrugged it off.
At Basic, they linked a whole bunch of different people together, who ordinarily would have hated one another, and somehow managed-----through stress, incredible exertion, and exhaustion-----made us value one another for basic human qualities we'd never appreciated before. All the things that society had told us gave us our only value were dismissed and rejected, in favor of qualities that all human beings share: discipline, respect, hard work, determination, initiative, and compassion. While we might not be appreciated for these things, we had surely been taught that these things had value whether noted or not.
The drills would have been deeply elementally insulted at the notion that favors could have been traded for passing scores. This illustrates how, when one fights one kind of bigotry, other kinds of discrimination are weakened as well. Even as some of us women wrestled with the responsibility that came with respect, some men tried to dodge confronting the idea that men were subject to lower standards and yet somehow claimed higher rewards.
I detail this to give a glimpse, a hint, at how completely a mere nine weeks can change one's outlook. We were subjected to all manner of things, and several people quit. I myself was driven to the Army after I had a close encounter with a serial killer who might have been a rogue cop. When I finally succeeded in getting the LAPD's attention, they recruited me heavily, only to find out that my eyesight was sub par. The Army, however, gambled that my language abilities might balance it all out.
At Basic, we stood for long periods on time at parade rest, or port arms, simply to accustom one's self to the necessity of self discipline. There was more, but I've forgotten. Always, we were taught discipline. Always, we learned self control.
In the intervening years, the lessons continued. It was almost a gift. Conditions that would demoralize other people became merely a matter of degree. A bed of leaves in December? Well, it's better than no leaves at all, isn't it?!
For me, it was thirteen years. Then came Iraq. The showers were a quarter of a mile away. Going to the latrine at night meant taking one's weapon with, to shoot the packs of dogs that roamed freely. The roads were laden with IEDs. The temperature reached 140 in the shade in the summer. The shifts were long, and one had to stand in line for many things, or walk miles for others. And so on. And so forth. One was resigned to the deprivation. Such is Army life.
And it is all this I think when I look at the Occupy kids, the ones who are now braving cold and rain and brutality and injury to let their government know that we cannot continue being led as we are. We cannot continue to live as we have been living.
Except these kids have no training. They have no orders, no dates, no knowledge of when it will end. They do not have gas masks, as we did. Even if we had them, they have not been trained for hour and hours in their use. They do not have fierce and kind Drills watching over them, carefully making sure they get enough sleep, enough food, enough reinforcement.
In fact, they have received no training at all. They seem to be proceeding on the instinct of people everywhere, the instinct of those who have experienced injustice, and who desire that no one else should suffer as they have.
They have left their homes, or lost them. If the most meagre chance of work presented itself, they would take it.
Again, they have no training in this.
They have been beaten and attacked, gassed and injured.
Ultimately, if they get their way, we shall all have a better life because of it.
They wield no weapons, call for no formation.
They have----at least in the beginning---had no idea the injuries they would face.
And yet, now that they do know they will be injured, arrested, and jailed, they do not surrender.
They wear no flack vests, no helmets. They carry no weapons. They are treated as combatants by police departments who themselves employ those very measures.
By any measure of war, they cannot win, in terms of sheer force.
Yet they continue to fight. One battle ends, another begins over here.
It is one thing to face war with the advantage of training, weapons, approval, rules, regulations, and force of habit. One reacts nearly automatically.
It is quite another to face a war with only the clothes on one's back to protect one.
By now, they know what they face, and yet they continue anyway. That is bravery, to do something doomed to failure, so that other might take up the banner.
In the Army, there are words for bravery when a sensible person would have surrendered. The superior numbers should have won----yet sometimes they did not. We call this valor or gallantry, or above and beyond. These are the words we say to men and women who have trained and planned for the day of battle.
We need new words. We need more words.
These kids, these people----these are the bravest of the brave. Unarmed, they face the armed. Unmasked, they face chemicals. Disrespected, they demand basic human dignity. No one has trained them. No one leads them, except in the sense that so many people are suffering from the same ills.
It doesn't matter, in some battles, whether you win or lose. Sometimes you fight so that the next group coming after you can win the war.
I fought in George Bush's war. These kids, these occupiers----? They are fighting for America, for the idea of America, that has inspired so many others around the world.
With training and weapons, one can fight wars, it's true.
Only with people like this can one win wars.
It's almost easy, frankly, with weapons and body armor, and training, to fight back an enemy.
But doing so naked, in bad weather, in tents, without training and weapons, when one is opposed by armed men with gas and armor?
When you fight bigotry and oppression and hatred bit by bit day by day, you're joining in the same struggle. A battle may last a day. The battle against bigotry goes every day, bit by bit, dripping away.
They give you fancy medals for battle. What do you give for raw courage in the face of an endless struggle, with no clearly defined battles?
There is courage and there is courage. Both are composed of fear and confrontation. Nobody is without fear, but some are trained to deal with it.
Find me words, then, to sum up people who march, unarmed against the multitudes with weapons, in the hope of justice.
Soldiers such as myself, who fought in a war of lies, get praised by civilians, yet the protesters of Occupy get slammed for fighting tyranny at home.
There are all sorts of battles. There are all kinds of gallantry. Make sure you stop and appreciate the examples of these things, being played out under your very noses. And hope that you never need as much courage as these kids have shown.