Soldier Girls (6 page)

Debbie started running to get in shape. Right after the July Fourth holiday—one week before her birthday—she went to the closest processing station, in downtown Indianapolis, and said she was ready to sign up. A nurse took down her vital statistics. “You don't weigh enough,” the nurse pronounced. The scale said that Debbie had dropped to 110 pounds. At five feet eight inches she was supposed to weigh at least 113 pounds, according to the height and weight chart. The nurse said to come back after she gained some weight. “I have to sign up before July eleventh or they won't let me in!” cried Debbie. The nurse mentioned an old army trick: go home and eat bananas. Debbie returned the following week and stepped back onto the scales.

“Tell me it's a hundred and thirteen,” she begged.

“It's a hundred and thirteen,” the nurse said.

Debbie borrowed her parents' car to visit the National Guard armory in Bedford, Indiana. She learned that the jobs that were open to women in the 113th were office work, cooking, or fire control. She chose fire control, because she had always liked guns. In the fall of 1987, after Ellen Ann had started eighth grade, Debbie shipped off to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where her father had done his basic training. There were forty women in her dorm, and she was the oldest. A few were as young as eighteen or nineteen; most were in their twenties. Debbie fell into the category expected to perform the fewest exercises; to graduate, she only had to complete nine push-ups and thirty-four sit-ups, and run two miles in twenty-three minutes and six seconds. But she kept up with the others out of pride. And when it came to shooting, nobody could touch Debbie. “I can see you've done this before,” one of the instructors said after her first day on the range. She had to get twenty-three out of forty to pass; she had scored in the high thirties. The instructor said he thought she still had room to improve and taught her how to coordinate her shooting and her breath. Then Debbie got a perfect score, forty out of forty. She was the only woman to make “expert”; the rest were ranked “marksman” or “sharpshooter.” When the drill sergeants couldn't find
fault with Debbie's performance, they hazed her about her age. “What's wrong with you?!” a drill sergeant yelled at a young woman who could not keep up with Debbie. “You're nineteen years old, you're going to let her pass you? She's thirty-five! She's a granny here!” After that, they called her Granny Helton.

Back in school, the other kids had called her Two-by-Four, Rail, Olive Oyl. Well, I am skinny, she had told herself. Now she said, Well, I am old. Debbie found basic training harsh physically but not mentally. She never crossed the drill sergeants; it only resulted in extra push-ups. Instead she tried to fit herself seamlessly into the whole. Debbie watched the younger recruits squander energy in rebellion; she found the time went easier when she aligned herself with the commander's overarching goals. When punishments befell Debbie, it was generally for wrongs enacted by her bunkmate, Kathy, a perpetually disorganized young woman who jumbled her tasks and could not figure out how to reassemble her weapon. Kathy made her bed sloppily, and both of their beds got ripped up. The girl eventually confessed to Debbie that she came from a home that had involved battering. She may have had a learning disability, Debbie thought; Debbie showed Kathy how to make a bed with tight corners, how to organize the parts of her weapon as she broke it down. “Get yourself a pattern,” Debbie coached. “Don't scatter the pieces; you're more likely to make a mistake. Lay it out in a certain order.”

Halfway through basic training, Ellen Ann wrote to say that her grandparents were mean. Debbie phoned home. It seemed that once Debbie's parents had assumed full responsibility, they had forbidden Ellen Ann to go to parties, or to go out with a boy, or to go to movies.

“I told her, ‘Mom always let me do that!' ” said Ellen Ann. “When are you coming home?”

Debbie could only stay on the telephone for three minutes. She asked Ellen Ann to put her grandmother on the phone.

“It's okay for her to go to the movies, Mom,” Debbie said. “And I don't mind if she goes to parties with her friends.”

“Well, I just wasn't sure,” said Debbie's mom. “Your father and I just weren't certain.”

Debbie figured that of all the things that could go wrong, this was not the worst—her daughter would survive a little overprotection. Years
later, however, Ellen Ann revealed that while her mother was gone she had snuck out of her bedroom window and had run wild, getting into the kind of trouble a mother would have wanted to shield her fourteen-year-old from experiencing. But Debbie knew nothing of this, and envisioned Ellen Ann leading an especially quiet life. When Debbie returned home for Christmas, her father told her, “I am so proud of you. I knew you could do it the whole time.” Even Tony seemed impressed. Ellen Ann looked taller and curvier and more mature; the difference caught Debbie by surprise.

In January, Debbie reported to Aberdeen Proving Ground, in Maryland, to study the army's big guns. At Aberdeen, Debbie learned the mechanics of scopes, gun tubes, and what to do about parallax. She worked on howitzers, mortars, and the large guns up in the rotating turrets of tanks. Debbie found the big guns romantic. Leveling a howitzer made her feel important in a way that she had never felt at the beauty salon.

Back in Indiana, Debbie resumed parenting Ellen Ann full-time, and joined the 113th Support Battalion's Bravo Company, which drilled in Bedford. The previously all-male unit had just opened to women. At various times in US history, women had taken up positions on the battlefield—during the Revolutionary War, Mary Hays McCauley famously picked up the rifle of her fallen husband at Monmouth and began firing at the British. Generally speaking, however, the armed forces had operated on the principle that women could serve their country but only men should be asked to experience combat. During World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, every branch had restricted the types of jobs that women could hold in battle zones with the aim of preventing women from seeing war firsthand in any role other than that of nurse. After Vietnam, however, the military's attitude had shifted. The women's rights movement had transformed ideas about the roles of women generally, and Vietnam had made the idea of conscription intensely unpopular. The US government declared it would now field an all-volunteer military, and began recruiting women for jobs that had previously been reserved for men. The army continued to prohibit women from certain jobs that were considered to be at the very heart of combat, but opened up many jobs on its periphery.

Four years before Debbie had enlisted, the US Army had adopted the
Direct Combat Probability Coding System, specifically to address this question. “Each position is then coded on a scale of P1 to P7, based on the probability of engaging in direct combat,” wrote Victoria Shaw in
Women in the Military
. “P1 represents the highest probability and P7 the lowest. Women are excluded from positions that are coded P1.” The army coded the job of infantry soldier as P1, because during a war the infantry soldier was the most likely person of all to experience combat. As it happened, most soldiers of the Indiana Army National Guard belonged to the 38th Infantry Division, but infantry soldiers needed other people to cook their meals, do their laundry, order their supplies, drive their trucks, fix their guns, and bury their dead. Around the time that Debbie enlisted, many of those support positions had just opened up to women for the first time. Commanders found the transition from all-male to mixed-gender units to be bumpy. The 113th Support Battalion had tried admitting women previously but had run into difficulties and reverted to an all-male status. Bravo Company reopened to women in 1987—the year in which Debbie enlisted.

In the spring of 1988, when Debbie began drilling 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 for
howitzers 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 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 time
in 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.”