My first days were a battle of logistics and bureaucracy. The rotation of brigades and regiments was rusty. Phone booths, mess refrigerators, shower pipes, protective barriers, concertina wire—everything needed fixing, cells had to be organized, jobs assigned. TFS and PRT commanders briefed the FOB commanding officer, Paggiarin briefed the officers, and the officers briefed the platoon NCOs. Even though special forces had been at Bala Bayak until just recently, Tenth Alpini Regiment wasn’t on a combat mission. Our mission was routine: convoy escorts, guards, roadblocks, arms requisitioning, outreach, identification and neutralization of threats and hostile elements. It could all be summed up in three words: security, reconstruction, governability. The Ninth Company’s operation name was a good omen: Reawakening.
Captain Paggiarin briefly recapped the situation. “We have to support the reconstruction of a province that is forty-eight thousand square kilometers—the size of the Veneto, Friuli, and Lombardy combined—population almost half a million, with less than two thousand men. We started pretty much at zero, after thirty years of anarchy: no public services—no water, no light, no sewers—no schools, no courts, no army, no police, no institutions. We’ve made remarkable progress. But it takes time. There’s an Afghan proverb that says, ‘a frog that leaps on a clod of earth thinks he can see Kashmir.’ We have to humbly imagine that we’re that frog, all the while knowing we’ll never see Kashmir. But we still have to leap on that clod.” The concept was crystal clear.
Headquarters wanted us to demonstrate flexibility and movement in order to testify to our presence even in the remotest villages. Interaction with the locals was essential, but we always had to be conscious of the risks. We were advised to be patient, take it one step at a time, keep in mind that it takes only one stone to destroy a glass house. Respect for the local population and private property meant we had to be extremely diplomatic. Ninth Company had approximately ten weeks to get oriented. Winter operations were usually not particularly complex. But spring was coming, and when the snow in the mountains melted and the roads, now impassable, reopened, and especially after the opium poppy was harvested, an increase in hostile activities was expected. Men, drugs, and arms would start moving in April, attacks would intensify, casualties would increase. Insurgents would undoubtedly engage us in armed conflict, which meant we had to train rigorously every day. But I knew all this already, and while the captain spoke, my gaze wandered outside the shed. Sand as fine as powder, kicked up by the wind, whirled among the tents. All that mattered to me was that I had been assigned to S3—operations—and was responsible for thirty men.
Pegasus platoon expressed surprise at having a female commander. Everyone feels insecure when faced with something they’re not used to. The men greeted me with curiosity, but I had learned to look inside people, and knew how to decipher the language of their evasive eyes, even the skepticism in their voices when they said, “Yes, ma’am.” Without even knowing me, they’d already judged me. I could guess what they were saying. Little Miss Graduate, fresh out of school, unsuited to such a delicate operative role, unfairly promoted by the army general staff, protected by some bigwig at the ministry, or the lover of some high-ranking officer. I was determined to ignore their resentment, which in any case I understood. But I would win them over. I would treat my subordinates as I wanted my superiors to treat me. I would lead without coercion and instruct with behavior rather than with words. I would be firm and consistent; I would delegate so that my subordinates felt involved: I merely had to identify my most capable men. I would face problems calmly, and with the utmost self-control. More than anything, I wanted to appear sure of myself. But I knew I had to earn their respect. That’s how it always is when you’re a woman. You have to work three times as hard to prove you’re worth half as much as a man.
* * *
And besides, I’d already been through it. I’d spent twelve months in the rank and file. At eighteen, I survived it. At twenty-seven, I considered myself strong enough to deal with Afghanistan and my platoon’s prejudices at the same time. In a Sollum perennially enveloped in a cloud of sand and smoke, I sought the joy and enthusiasm I’d felt during my first months in the armed forces, and which I thought I’d lost. I was nostalgic for those ten weeks of basic training in Ascoli Piceno, in a barracks reserved for women. We slept in a dorm, six beds to a room, like at summer camp. My bed creaked and my locker was small, but it didn’t bother me, because I really didn’t have much. Apart from my underwear, gym socks, rubber insoles for my boots, seal fat to keep them soft, apart from my sweatsuit, flashlight, padlocks, toothbrush, shower shoes, toilet paper, multi-outlet for charging my cell phone, gel Band-Aids for the blisters on my feet, and a hairnet to hold my hair in a bun, all I had was one change of clothes for when I was off duty: a pair of jeans. The prohibition on colored nail polish—which upset my fellow soldiers, who considered it an offense to their femininity—left me indifferent: I’d never used it.
Life followed an elementary, repetitive rhythm. Reveille at 0630 hours, fall in, flag-raising, marching, military theory, push-ups, training, guard duty, firing range, fall out, lights out at eleven thirty, like when we were kids. The other women were done in by the marches in the rain, the training runs where we had to follow the instructor all around the barracks and then along dirt roads, but I enjoyed them. (I was a cross-country champion when I was young, and I might have kept at it if I hadn’t found out that my father had been a good runner. I didn’t want to have anything to do with that worm.) The overnight field training exercises—three days in the woods with a tent, a sleeping bag, and a pack—thrilled me (I’d always dreamed of going camping). Being away from home, which for many was the cause of tears and sobbing, turned out to be good for me, because my family was made up of rancorous, unhappy, and confused individuals who unloaded their frustrations on one another, punishing each other for imagined wrongs. The only one I missed was Vanessa. We’d grown up together: her voice and her laugh had been the soundtrack of the first eighteen years of my life. But Vanessa—even though she was pregnant and for some reason I can’t remember anymore wasn’t supposed to drive—would take the car and come see me on Saturdays. And a few hours of her talking nonstop—she’s a real motormouth—was more than enough. Communal living, which the other women considered agreeable at first but increasingly trying as the weeks wore on, was for me a pleasant surprise: I’d felt very alone growing up. The discipline didn’t seem oppressive to me, as it did to more than half my companions, who dropped out; on the contrary, it relaxed me, because for the first time in my life someone was telling me what to do, and I had no choice but to obey. I had to accept the rules or be punished or excluded; I had to zip it, even if I was convinced I was right. In short, it was as if I was always wrong, no matter what: a total demolition, from the bottom up, of everything I’d ever been. Up till then, I’d always made my own decisions, and the more someone tried to force me to do something, the more I’d resist. I’d never made my bed before; at most I’d pull the covers up over the pillow, and by morning the crumpled sheets would have left zebra stripes on my skin. I had never cleaned up my room, never cared what condition my clothes were in. But in the barracks—after three savage scoldings—I complied. My bunk was perfect, my uniform pressed, my boots polished. When I went home months later, my mother said I was so changed she hardly recognized me.
Loyalty and sacrifice, the watchwords that became the cornerstones of my new existence, reminded me of my grandfather’s lectures, and they rang true. Lies and subterfuge, which I had resorted to many times, were now repugnant to me. As for sacrifice, I already knew that nobody gives you anything for free, neither respect nor affection. To sacrifice myself for something more noble—my country, as my instructors kept telling me, even though I didn’t think I had one—made me feel important: me, a complete zero, a grub, a gnat, a provincial girl born into a dysfunctional family that couldn’t offer any kind of future.
And then there were the weapons. The first time the
y put an AR70/90 in my hands and I held it in firing position, I knew we would get along. My drill instructor told me I had to care for it as if it were my child. That seemed somewhat excessive. Besides, I didn’t know how to take care of a child. But he was right. I liked everything about my Beretta assault rifle—its awkward stiffness, its deadly weight, its pointy edges, its oily smell, even the abrasion it left on my neck, the bruise the belt made by pressing for hours against the same spot on my skin, so that my arm swelled like a drug addict’s for three weeks. But the sound it made when I loaded a magazine or chambered a round, the crackle of the volley, thrilled me. In that suspended second when—before pulling the trigger—my eye focused on the target in the crosshairs, I felt I owned the world, could blast anything. Even though the weapons were complicated, and difficult to handle, assemble, and maintain, even though the pineapple-like grenades loaded with deadly compound B were heavy in my hands, and the noise of the mortars absolutely terrifying, I quickly developed a real passion for our squad’s weapons. I learned everything about them, about automatic pistols, calibers, bullets, sights, rounds per second, cartridge capacity, maximum effective range, triggers, and even bullet speed. I spent hours cradling my rifle, disassembling the bolt, polishing, oiling, and lubricating it, and cleaning the bore with a brush. Then I would chamber a round and load the drum. I even talked to it. When I finished basic training and had to return it to the armory, the parting was painful, as if they were cutting off one of my limbs. You never forget your first rifle.
I didn’t know what to do when I was off duty. Civilian life now seemed disappointing. On Saturdays the other women would stroll down Ascoli Piceno’s main street, meet their boyfriends, go window-shopping, do laundry at the coin-op. I usually stayed in the barracks, reading tank magazines. People started saying that Manuela Paris was a fanatic.
I got the second-highest score on the physical and practical tests and on the military science exams. “You would have been first, if Angelica Scianna weren’t so blond,” my roommate Guglielma Ruffilli teased. But I wanted to be friends with Angelica so I didn’t take offense. Besides, they had assigned us to the same unit, same detachment, same regiment, and so we headed off together. She from Sicily, me from Ladispoli, both of us headed north, hundreds of miles from home. It was the first time so far away for both of us. That first night, sleeping in the same dorm room, we wondered what would happen now that we were finally in a real barracks.
A few hours were all it took to disillusion me. The soldiers looked down on newcomers. Merit counts less than seniority, and I was the newest arrival. I’d have the right to take it out on a new bunch of recruits a few months later. Such were the unwritten, unchangeable laws of the group, in place from time immemorial, and I had to accept them. Uphold them, even—along with the pranks, the abuses of power, and the bullying. My superiors were either paternalistic or brutal, nothing in between. But my future depended on their assessments. I was evaluated constantly. I had to have them on my side if I wanted to stay in the army, to reenlist when my twelve months were up. My five female companions were competitive—and one of them, the beautiful and clever Angelica Scianna, in fact, was obsessed with excelling. Each hoped the others would fail so she could be the only one to succeed. I had been raised as a boy in a family of women, and considered myself amphibious: I was comfortable with women, and they often confided in me, especially when they had relationship troubles, but I was comfortable with men, too. Separating people based solely on gender seemed an old-fashioned approach, as arcane as the debates on the sex of angels. I never would have imagined I’d be rejected by the men and considered a rival by the women.
In a co-ed environment, the lack of privacy turned out to be humiliating. Latrines stinking of stale urine and whipped by icy drafts; rusty sinks, dreary showers. Narrow, uncomfortable beds. Senseless discipline. Exhausting physical combat training. It was no longer a question, as it had been in Ascoli, of jogging after an instructor at a modest pace, so as not to humiliate the overweight women who, poor things, were showing such goodwill. And there were quite a few of them. The weight cutoff at enlistment was one hundred and seventy-five pounds—generous enough to include even the obese. But here you had to complete grueling marches on impassible trails, crushed under the weight of your pack and weapons. A rifle alone weighs eight pounds, but with ammunition it comes to seventeen, and that’s not counting grenades and other equipment. Perhaps only Vanessa, swollen out of proportion during her pregnancy, could understand the effort required for someone as slight as me to drag around such ballast. The first time I had to slither through the mud on my elbows and climb a rope to get over a ditch, I was left behind. Incredulous, I hobbled through the rest of the course, coming in last, out of breath and spent. This one’s not going to make it, I read in our trainer’s eyes; give her a month and she’ll quit. She doesn’t have the physique. Or the head. When he bawled me out in public because I was the worst of the platoon on the rifle range—it was like I was cross-eyed, I couldn’t hit the target even once—I cracked. I felt so humiliated, so disappointed with myself that I started to cry. And I didn’t even have a Kleenex.
“Emotions, Paris,” the drill instructor reprimanded me, planting himself in front of me, his legs wide. “A soldier keeps them to himself.” I sniffled and stared at my boots. “Do I have to put in your character report that Corporal Paris is unable to control her emotions? That what Paris knows how to do best is cry?” “It won’t happen again, sir,” I swore. After that, I saved my tears of dejection for the bathroom. I’d lock the door and flush to make noise, crouch down, and have myself a good cry. A soft sob that choked in my throat. Then, as the months went by, I found I couldn’t cry on command anymore. So I stopped.
Only during theory classes did I shine. They thrilled me. Strategy. History. Religions. I had hated school, but in the barracks I discovered I liked to study. I listened openmouthed to the officer lecturing. I took notes. “Write it all down, write it all down,” Corporal Zappalà would tease me, “maybe the sergeant will hire you as his secretary.”
I didn’t socialize with the short-term service guys: twenty-year-olds who ended up in the barracks because they had few other options, Neanderthal braggarts, dumb as rocks, whose only way of speaking to women was to make vulgar jokes. Except for those two or three sentimental soldiers who took themselves too seriously and hid ungrammatical love letters in our bunks, the men viewed us as sexual distractions, there to keep up the morale. If I happened to run into one in some secluded corner of the barracks, he’d try to grab me. Angelica and I would always go to the bathroom together at night; we’d watch each other’s backs. All the women responded in their own ways to the unwanted attention—either by passively putting up with it, crying, or feeling flattered. I returned the insult. Foul language has never intimidated me. “Kiss my ass,” I said to a soldier who pushed me into the mess hall storage room and tried to feel me up. I realized right away that the only thing you shouldn’t do was complain to your superiors: you’d be considered a pain in the ass, a whiner, weak, unable to take care of yourself, and therefore unfit to wear a uniform. They’d tear you apart in your character report, so you couldn’t reenlist. In short, they’d screw you.
The guys divided female soldiers into three categories: lesbians, whores, and trolls. I wondered which was best. The lesbians were picked on and provoked a desire for revenge. The trolls, too ugly to spark pornographic fantasies, were left in peace, but ignored by their comrades and superiors. The whores, who only fucked the instructors and officers because they wanted to get ahead, were badmouthed but feared, because at the end of the day they really did move up the ladder. To Angelica and me, it seemed the lesser of all evils, so that’s the category we chose. We learned to seem flattered and smile at the officers, most of them potbellied older men who courted all of us, even me, though I’d never considered myself attractive, with an old-fashioned and—all things considered—harmless gallantry. In the latrine, unrepeatable epithets accompan
ied my name. But in truth I never did more than offer strategic little smiles and cause a few hearts to flutter. A sergeant with amorous eyes, whom I refused a kiss, told me I wouldn’t get far because I didn’t understand that I needed the protection of a man. “We’ll see” was my insolent reply.
But the most dangerous ones were the male chauvinists, who insisted that the officers favored the women, made things easier for them, and surrounded themselves with cute co-eds like African tribal kings. Women catalyze the attention of the media, make the Italian army appear modern, and help attract funding. But other than that, they’re not worth a damn, all they do is cause problems, because having women live with twenty-year-old guys whose testosterone levels are through the roof is something not even the Americans have been able to figure out, and they’ve had women in their ranks for decades.
They’d make fun of us, calling us officers’ pets. And they’d try to crush us during the physical tests, to show that, even though we held the same rank, we would never really be equal to them. It was all smoke and mirrors, women were nothing more than mannequins for parades who would all end up in the orderly room, the medical corps, or behind a desk. And I began to suspect they were right; when, at the end of training, I was sent to my detachment and assigned to an office, I felt insulted.
Limbo Page 6
