The “gotcha!” expressions on their faces broke my heart. I felt such a surge of affection for them and of gratitude for getting to be a part of something so firmly grounded, so believed in. My simply having read their capitalist apologia aloud was deemed a victory. To them, the words themselves were incontrovertible proof of the inalienable rightness of “the system.” Even a child should be able to see it.
I couldn’t steal their moment.
Unimpressed, I thought, Very pithy, very Churchillian, very empty. I’m not arguing for communism, just Christian fairness and kindness.
“Well said,” I said aloud.
Crowing forgivingly, they scattered, satisfied with their staunch defense of the status quo. (When Uncle Sam started forcing GIs out to balance the budget a few years later, well . . . that was a different story. They sang a different tune then.) I loved those guys and would have done anything for them because they would have done anything for me, politics be damned. I would have trusted them with my life, but I rarely cut them the kind of rhetorical slack I did in that special Kodak moment. They’d have been disappointed if I had. They didn’t hold my tirades against me. Rather, they enjoyed our jousts because they reinforced their bedrock belief in 1950s press-release America.
We argued like cats and dogs most days. When the dust settled, nobody changed his mind and nobody questioned anybody else’s patriotism or sanity. We’d fight off and on all day after I threw out some incendiary quote from the Bible or the Constitution (which I carried everywhere with me after I read that Thurgood Marshall had) that I knew they weren’t aware of. I’d try to force them to concede the plain, subversive meaning of a passage in Luke or a founding document. They’d patiently explain why the words didn’t mean what they obviously meant. Then we’d go off to chow en masse or to give each other rides somewhere. We all knew and socialized with each other’s families. We all covered for each other when one of us needed to be out of the office and unreachable for some undisclosed reason. Nobody called in the thought police, nobody ever started a whispering campaign against me (liberals later would, though, when I questioned the party line). Nobody ever mentioned my politics in a performance appraisal (it didn’t occur to them to). Nothing slopped over into our duty performance. Because I was Air Force through and through, my politics weren’t held against me. They knew I was thinking of leaving, but until then I made no bones about my commitment to the Air Force, so they made no bones about their commitment to me.
Though it may seem counterintuitive, there’s a greater tolerance for eccentrics in the military than elsewhere. I knew an Army guy at the NSA who built a sandbag enclosure around his bunk in the barracks, shaved his head bald, growled, ate MREs morning, noon, and night, and generally acted like a deranged commando. We chuckled at his antics because he was, in the performance of his duties, the consummate office-based soldier. If you wanted something done, you asked him to do it, freak or not. In the same way, my extreme politics and my open disappointment with my assignment (I wanted to be overseas working with flight crews—being office-bound gave me too much time to think dangerous thoughts) were affectionately tolerated because I made it clear that they would in no way affect my attitude toward my duty. My thoughts were my own as long as my attitude and behavior conformed.
The true test of the military’s tolerance for individuality came when the Supreme Court heard the case of the Texas protester who’d burned the U.S. flag. We had a nearly daylong office debate about that, including a visiting colonel. Everybody counseled me not to repeat my opinion (of course the First Amendment covered his actions, however reprehensible) outside our group. But the subject came up when the visiting colonel was there and I spoke up, respectfully. He was momentarily taken aback, then just nodded—at my right to respectful dissent on an abstract issue, not at my opinion—and engaged me. I began every volley with, “With all due respect, sir. . . .” My politics never affected my career because I never let it affect my professionalism. I’d have cut out my own tongue before I disparaged a military operation, a military policy, or a military leader. Aloud, that is.
——
I had nothing but time to think. My chairborne, far-from-the-action job took up half my time at best. Even that half-time was filled with mind-numbing paperwork and meetings with contractors focused on bleeding us dry.
Also, as my existential anger and confusion waned, I lost another outlet for blowing off my excess energy as my workouts began taking up less and less of my time and concentration. Now, I was just working out like a woman who wanted to look good in her clothes, not feel good in her skin. Finally, once I graduated from my master’s program in August 1988, my conscious thoughts were no longer occupied with grand, universal themes. That intellectual, footnote-happy edge was off, though my political focus, built now on the proper educational foundation, was keener than ever. I needed new challenges.
Desperate for adventure and to prove myself on the front lines, I stalked the captain in charge of assignments. Again and again, she told me that we were in another cyclic drawdown and everyone was being forced to do three to four years on station. PCSs (permanent change of stations) are very expensive because of the generous allowances; it was one of the biggest sinkholes in the military budget and therefore a prime cutback target. No way could I leave with less than three years on station. When I pointed out that my office buddy Lindsay, a second lieutenant, had been at Kelly a year less than me, a first lieutenant, but had an assignment to Berlin, the captain’s face hardened. Only she could have worked that assignment; only a stiff-necked Girl Scout like me would have rubbed her face in what was either favoritism or incompetence. There was no chance of my getting out of Kelly now. Stonily, she intoned, “Air Force needs come first,” and sent me away. I knew she had all sorts of leeway and was just refusing to use it on my behalf since I’d put no effort into courting her.
I detested her with all the Old Testament force I could muster. She was everything I hated about the good-ol’-boy aspect of the service. Whenever I saw her, I gave her my stone face; it heartened me to see her turn away flustered. There was no way around her without strong protectors and I had put no effort into developing those, so sure was I that hard work and devotion to duty were sufficient. I spurned those officers who had built their careers on a superior’s coattails and I refused to call in any chits. It was like my not wearing my decorations at OTS; my record should speak for itself. Only suckers file a dream sheet without having a higher-ranking mentor bat cleanup for them. Suckers, and high achievers, I thought. I was wrong.
But even as I fought to get overseas I was having more and more trouble visualizing an Air Force future for myself. My political maturation had led me to revisit my Cold War “West good, East bad” simplistic mind-set. Our Central America policy made me queasy—the Nicaraguan contras the “moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers”? I already had problems with the Founding Fathers, what on earth was I to think of a bunch of hereditary, oppressive elites whose only claim on our support was their penchant for killing in the name of capitalism?
After I was commissioned, the Humint (human intelligence) branch had tried to recruit me for my language aptitude. When they (rightfully) refused to guarantee that I wouldn’t be trained in Spanish and sent to Central America, I chose not to volunteer. Was any capitalist government really better than any left-leaning one? What about our sponsorship of the repressive El Salvadoran government and their sponsorship of death squads; did they learn any of their techniques from U.S. military trainers, people I served with? How does that comport with our vaunted love of individual liberty, supposedly America’s most valuable export? I was a committed Cold Warrior in the same way that I was a committed meat-eater: I eat sausage but I didn’t want to see it made, and I certainly didn’t want to make it myself. I’d grown up hating and pitying the Soviets and had inherited the USSR. Central America was happening right before my eyes and I was blinking rapidly.
It was difficult to find a side to support
in those quagmire situations, and I couldn’t stop fretting over my own role in history: was it better to have blind faith in our elected leaders and follow any lawful order or to decide on a case-by-case basis? I could quote Thomas Paine, Malcolm X, Descartes, or Clausewitz to prove either proposition. Soon, we’d be fighting strongmen oppressors we’d only recently helped to create, like Noriega and Saddam Hussein. Apoliticism is a requirement for a professional military if it is to remain under civilian control and I was questioning the party line in a very personal way. I was making mental lists of places I had to refuse to go, missions I couldn’t in good conscience support. That’s not acceptable for an officer in an all-volunteer military. The Air Force stayed the same but I was changing.
More selfishly, as the Iron Curtain began to crumble and the military had to cast about for new missions to justify its budget, I recoiled at our growing loss of dignity and lack of high purpose. Defeating communism was a reason to get up in the morning. Was tracking dolphins with Navy sonar equipment? Boot camps for juvenile offenders?
To my horror, I was critiquing the Air Force I’d once unquestioningly revered. I needed more than a nonflying, non-medical-corps female could possibly accomplish there. I needed an institution dedicated to pursuits of the highest order and with which I wholeheartedly agreed. There was no use admitting I could blindly follow any and all orders. I couldn’t anymore. They should never have invested in making me feel so powerful.
I spent three years trying to escape Kelly Air Force Base, each day resenting more and more my inability to make my own decisions about my professional life. I was at the mercy of a captain who hated me. While I might not always be hated, I would always be at the mercy of arbitrary forces when it came to the most important details of my life, like where I could live and what job I could do. Ironically, the Air Force had made me so ambitious and so well educated I couldn’t be content with what it had left to offer me, though God knows I tried.
Feverishly, I redoubled my efforts to find a job that would keep me interested, invested, and unconflicted in the service. I volunteered for every outlandish posting I could find—instructor at the Air Force Academy, diplomatic postings, recruiting, OTS flight commander, a second master’s full-time at the Sorbonne (I still declined to become a Humint officer, though). I lobbied the assignments captain relentlessly for the two assignments I most wanted and had the least chance of getting—Iceland and Turkey. Both were “trip-wire” outfits strategically located to buttress our commitment to NATO. Both were reserved for experienced captains and hotly contested. Both were less than two years; separating was becoming more and more certain in my mind and it needed to be sooner rather than later.
But I had been handpicked and deemed officially “essential” at Kelly, working as I did on an intelligence project ranked in the Air Force’s top ten list. Every week I was getting yelled at by the places I’d applied to for wasting their time once their requests for me were summarily bounced back. My superiors were apologetic but firm. Air Force needs come first.
Like a child singing full-voice to keep herself from hearing the monster in the closet, I threw myself into a whirl of additional duties and extra training to keep from questioning my secure place in the service. But it was all to no avail. I couldn’t keep my fingers in my ears. I wanted a future with no limits. I wanted to create a field of endeavor for myself that incorporated creativity and intellectualism and community concern, though I had no idea what that might mean. So I fought those thoughts. It had taken me all my life to find the Air Force, and the thought of being on my own again, without that strong, societally valued identity, left me weak in the knees. It was the Reagan eighties and America loved me and my uniform and that used to mean everything to me. Yet I was tortured by half-formed thoughts of doing great, unlimited things, things I could only do as a civilian. But a civilian what? I had no idea.
It was like being schizophrenic, in the grip of those two mutually incompatible urges: stay! go! stay! go! But every day it became increasingly difficult to drag myself into my office at Kelly to shuffle papers after another sleepless night spent trying to read the future. One day, some portentous event would tell me to stay. The next, another portentous event would aim me toward the door.
At the beginning of one month, I attended my language school friend Dave’s graduation from the Air Force Academy. He honored me by asking me to pin his butter bars on, administer the oath of office, and commission him. After the graduation ceremony, he introduced me to the young black honor grad who had been the class’s cadet corps commandant, the equivalent of my OT wing commander (plus a brutal three years and nine months). The training staff was complimenting him in front of his gaggle of exultant relatives—just as Lowery had me in front of mine—while he modestly fidgeted a silent “aw shucks.” He remained politely mute, kept his head discreetly lowered, his body language self-effacing. I looked at him and a GI aphorism sprang to mind: “Save the watch because the boots are already gone” (i.e., buried in bullshit).
——
That kid was bursting to do a victory dance, bursting to scream I BEAT ALL YOU WHITE MOFOS. ALL YOU THIRD-GENERATION GENERALS’ KIDS. ALL YOU LEGACIES WHO DIDN’T NEED THE FREE EDUCATION LIKE I DID. ALL YOU MIDDLE-CLASS PUKES WHO NEVER DOUBTED YOU BELONG HERE. I BEAT YOU!!!!!! I could feel it in my overachieving, gratification-deferring bones. But the good manners his mama and the Air Force had taught him forced him to keep his peace. Four years. How hard that kid must have worked just to graduate, let alone excel.
As we were introduced, he held his hand out politely to shake mine, but I left him hanging. I let a long, awkward moment spin out between us and held his perplexed eyes.
“It’s good to win, isn’t it?” I said wolfishly.
I was thinking of my father surveying the enemy dead on Okinawa. Hell, the friendly dead of which he was not one. He must have felt like Genghis Khan because that’s how I felt every time I snatched something from someone else who had as much right to it as I did. Where but in the Air Force could I ever acquire such opportunities to best a valorous competitor?
He struggled but was unable to keep the triumphant grin off his face. He made a fist with the hand I refused to reduce to a bourgeois shake and pumped it in the air for just a second. YES! Then, that housebroken smile returned and we parted, knowing exactly what had passed between us. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he was a general’s kid. Either way, he had a victory dance coming.
The Air Force was a wonderful place for black people.
At the end of that month, I attended that special meeting for female officers.
The Air Force wasn’t such a wonderful place for women.
I was buried alive in my own life, anesthetized by a fat paycheck and bourgeois trappings. I had to stop muffling what my heart was trying to tell me. It was time to move on.
But that was so much easier said than done. If I left the Air Force, I knew it had to be for something free-form. I imagined myself tied to a desk at some bank like the one I had worked at before Mizzou and shuddered. Yet I still had no idea what I should do. Nearly thirty and there I was trying to figure out what I should be when I grew up: Doctor? No. Nurse? No. Teacher? No. I took personality tests. I researched careers from astrophysics to zoology. Finally, I believed I had the persistence and talent to be whatever I wanted and nothing struck a chord.
I signed on with a few head-hunting firms that specialized in former officers and was inundated with calls and letters, but it all sounded so pointless, so dry. Secure, but meaningless: management consultant. Secure, but repugnant: CIA. More mid-level management positions in industry than I would ever have imagined, but who wants to peddle soap with the Palmolive people or push papers around as a GS-12 government bureaucrat? The Air Force beat any of the things I was offered hands down—at least that was about more than just a paycheck.
I decided to approach the conundrum from the other way around. Since I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I could focus on what I didn’t want. I
could focus on how, generally speaking, I wanted to live since I didn’t like the way I had been living. But what was it exactly that I didn’t like? If I could build my life from a kit, what would be in it? What did I want?
I carried index cards with me and scribbled down every thought or occurrence that annoyed or pleased me, every observation or insight into my own nature. To my surprise, the answers came quite easily: I didn’t want anyone telling me what to do again, ever. As long as my military superiors had been benevolent, I hadn’t resented their intrusion into my life. But when I didn’t get what I wanted (we called this the “Burger King, have-it-your-way mentality”), I could no longer shrug it off. “Air Force needs come first” wasn’t working as my mantra anymore.
I looked in my closets. Full of the exotic South Asian clothing I collected but never wore. I wanted a life where I got to wear them.
I looked in my jewelry box. Funky trinkets that never left my bedroom. I wanted to wear them too. Ankle bracelets whose tinkles announce my presence and toe rings that serve no purpose at all.
What I didn’t want was to wear a uniform ever, ever again.
Or panty hose.
Or anything with a constricting neckline.
No more polyester.
No more alarm clocks.
No more meetings of more than three people.
No more meetings that didn’t result in a firm plan of action, the failure to accomplish which would result in punitive measures against the malfeasor.
The power to reject joint projects and/or the power to mete out punishment (i.e., expulsion from the endeavor, group disapproval).
No more meetings of longer than twenty minutes.
No more commutes of longer than twenty minutes.
No more commuting by automobile.
No more shared office space.
An American Story Page 26
