Generally Speaking (3 page)

Although I joined the Kappa Delta sorority, I was hardly a leader: My most memorable responsibility was keeping the Coke machine filled; somebody else even emptied the dimes and delivered them to the vendor. I eventually opted for a philosophy major because it was interesting and permitted the most electives. And my father was dubious: “Just exactly what kind of job do you plan to
do
with that degree, Claudia?” That was hard to answer, but I had come to enjoy acquiring and synthesizing diverse knowledge for its own sake, valuable traits for a future Army intelligence officer. My big treat each month was taking myself to McDonald's, where I could afford two out of three items: a small burger, small fries, or a small Coke.

I was not interested in marching in campus demonstrations or in going to rock concerts. But I was starting to consider what kind of job I would get to fill the years between graduation and the apparent inevitability of marriage and motherhood. Real estate came naturally to mind because my grandmother Kennedy had run her own office for years, and I would always remember coveting her shiny Burroughs adding machine when I was a little girl of five. And my godmother, Meredith Moorehead, had worked her whole life in an office. She had her own lovely apartment in Memphis that I can remember as one of the most sophisticated and appealing places I visited as a child. As I read Socrates and struggled through economics and French literature, I considered the possibility of my own independence after college, not the mounting tensions on campus.

My father's next assignment brought the war home to me, however. He went off to command the port of Saigon at the height of the American military buildup in Vietnam. And now the steadily mounting draft calls for the war meant that many of the boys who were my friends were forced to consider how to navigate among the competing demands of college, graduate school, and the draft. The antiwar protests became more vocal.

Although I was personally troubled by our government's disregard of the public's legitimate concerns about Vietnam and South Vietnamese suppression of opposition groups, including Buddhist monks burning themselves alive on Saigon sidewalks, I did not believe national policy should be set by people's individual acts of civil disobedience during wartime. It was all well and good for college students enjoying their deferments to loudly debate the war. But the Iowa farm boy or inner-city black kid didn't have that option. They were over there in Vietnam. Just like my father. I felt they deserved our support, no matter what we thought of the war itself.

In the spring of my junior year, Southwestern hosted a seminar as part of the annual week-long Dilemma series on ethical issues in which a civilian speaker defended American policy in Vietnam. The lecture hall was packed with opponents to the war, students, faculty, and people from town. But the speaker handled himself well, even when the questions and audience responses to his answers got heated.

At the end of the program, as we stood outside the auditorium in an informal continuation of the discussion, I addressed him. “Despite all this controversy about the war, sir,” I said, my voice a little uncertain, “there are Americans dying every day in Vietnam. What can we do about
them?
”

He looked around the lobby, then at me. “You can live every day of your life in honor of their sacrifice.”

The people around me were silent. There were none of the groans or boos that had greeted his earlier statements. His words have stayed with me over three decades as a professional soldier, and have sustained me through the losses of a growing number of fellow soldiers.

A few weeks later, the postman found a copy of
Cosmopolitan
with a missing mailing label in his bag. He knew a college girl lived at my grandmother's house, so he put the magazine in the box. I read about the hot fashions and rather innocent dating advice, then happened to spot a full-page advertisement showing a photo of a dancing couple. They wore Army green uniforms. “Be an Intelligence Analyst,” the caption read. The ad sought enlisted applicants for the Women's Army Corps. Intrigued, I sent in a postcard and received information about the WAC summer program for college juniors considering becoming officers after graduation. Suddenly I remembered the WACs I had seen near the gate of Fort Hamilton when I was on the way to high school. They had looked sharp and purposeful in their summer cord uniforms.

The WAC College Junior Program, I learned, was a four-week orientation held each summer at Fort McClellan, Alabama, for 150 college women between their junior and senior years. From this group, the WACs hoped to select about ninety potential officers who would be paid $200 a month as Army corporals during their senior college year, then be commissioned second lieutenants and return to Fort McClellan to begin the four-month Officer Basic Course the next summer. Once commissioned, they would have a minimum two-year service obligation. Looking at the brochures, I saw photos of women officers leading formations of WACs and doing staff work in offices. To a young person raised near Army posts, it seemed natural that women officers were the counterparts of their male colleagues: leaders. For the first time in my life, I recognized the possibility that I might enjoy being a leader.

But I was still just twenty years old, and I didn't want to take the plunge alone. So I approached one of my friends and a sorority sister in Kappa Delta, Marilyn Gates.

“What are you going to do this summer, Marilyn?”

“I guess I'll work at TG&Y,” she said unenthusiastically, naming a local drugstore, “just like always.”

I showed her the WAC College Junior Program brochure. “If you'll do it, I'll do it.”

“I think that would be neat,” she said.

Now I was committed.

I had to obtain faculty references to complete my application. When I approached one of my science professors, he wasn't very receptive. “I don't approve of the military,” he honestly admitted. “But I do believe it's important for women to work. Have you read Betty Friedan's book
The Feminine Mystique?
”

“I've never even heard of her.”

“I think you ought to read the book.”

I did, and found it very courageous for Betty Friedan to say out loud what many thought but were unable to put into words, that it simply was not enough for a woman to devote her life to being a wife and a mother. Every argument she made was not only rational, but captured the sense of what is the essential struggle in our lives, the two competing demands of family and work. I grasped her viewpoint instinctively—as did countless millions of other young American women over the coming decades. We were not inherently less capable or ambitious than the boys and young men we had grown up with. But until Betty Friedan spoke out, women as a group were simply expected to truncate their lives due to their gender, not fulfill their individual talents or aspirations.

I did not join feminist demonstrations after reading
The Feminine Mystique,
but the book did open my eyes to much wider perspectives, and I was glad to discover a description for my political viewpoint.

Before I left for the College Junior Program that summer, my father offered advice on what would be expected of me in Army training. He had recently returned from Vietnam, and I think he was both proud of and puzzled by my decision to explore the Army. “Work as a team. Organize your time. Memorize your serial number,” he said.

Marilyn Gates and I arrived at Fort McClellan in my 1962 Ford Fairlane on a steamy July afternoon. Our milling formation of college juniors was greeted by a no-nonsense contingent of steely-eyed WAC sergeants in sharply pressed Army green cord uniforms, skirts exactly one inch below the middle of the knee, nylon stockings despite the wilting heat, and highly polished black, low-heel shoes.

As the group was broken into platoon-size clumps, Marilyn and I were separated. “Don't say ‘ma'am’ to corporals or sergeants,” I advised her. “Don't say much at all.”

But my advice proved unnecessary. She too was a soldier's daughter. Her father had fought in the Philippines early in World War II and had survived the Bataan Death March and almost four years of brutal Japanese captivity as a prisoner of war. Yet meeting Mr. Gates, who was a soft-spoken family man, you never would have guessed his courage. Marilyn had obviously absorbed some of his resilience. She did much better that summer than I did.

I found some of the program, particularly the unbending discipline, to be rather tedious. We lived in cinder block enlisted barracks, three women to a partitioned space, each with her own dresser. Those dresser drawers had to be set up in
exact
order, with shorts and blouses folded a certain number of inches apart, toothbrush and toothpaste tube set in the identical positions as illustrated in the manual we were issued. And another requirement was the girdle display. Every woman had to have her girdle laid out in her drawer for daily inspection. At the time I weighed ninety-nine pounds, less than the skinny British model Twiggy, and I certainly did not wear a girdle. But my girdle was perfectly aligned in my drawer and that made my platoon leader happy.

A few of the homesick young women were miserable and cried for days. They experienced the shouted corrections of the drill instructors as personal insults. Obviously, these girls just were not Army material. After a week or so, senior officers took them aside for counseling, and later culled those from the program who failed to adjust to Army life.

We marched a lot that summer, to and from classes, to the mess hall, back to the barracks, and learned to keep in step. And we all learned the words to the WAC song, “Duty Is Calling You and Me,” set to the tune of the “Colonel Bogey March.”

Classes focused on military organization, customs, traditions, and skills such as map reading and first aid. We learned the proper way to address seniors, how to salute and to stand at attention in the heavy Alabama sun.

For me, the Army held no great mysteries; I'd been raised with an understanding of its values, its traditions, and its expectations of leaders and soldiers. I also understood the Army's structure. A platoon of thirty soldiers was led by a lieutenant. There were four platoons in a company, commanded by a captain, and four companies in a battalion, whose commander was a lieutenant colonel. Traditionally, three or four battalions formed a brigade, commanded by a full colonel. The next largest unit was the division, a formation of three or more brigades. Divisions were composed of Infantry or Armor with their own organic Artillery and Combat Engineer battalions. Combat support branches—Military Intelligence, Signal Corps, and combat service support branches Quartermaster Corps, Transportation Corps, Ordnance, and so on—all had units assigned to these divisions (see Glossary).

In the 1960s, the WAC's 10,000 enlisted women and 1,000 officers serving in the United States and overseas officially performed “essential” duties that freed up men for assignment to combat units, from which women were barred. That had been the purpose of women in the Army since World War II. In 1942, Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers, an early champion for women's equality, introduced a bill for the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, a quasi-military group of volunteers who would fill noncombat Army jobs, mainly clerical and administrative, so that men could be assigned to fighting units. The WAAC was created on May 14, 1942, without official military status. Its members wore Army-style uniforms, but had their own enlisted and commissioned ranks and insignia, and were not governed by Army regulations or the Articles of War.

A year later there were 60,000 enlisted women and officers serving in the U.S. and overseas in a variety of assignments that included military administration, personnel processing, clerical work, vast and complex globe-spanning military post offices, and maintenance jobs in motor pools. WAAC officers were also in charge of huge military payrolls and ultrasensitive code rooms. For these positions, they were trained to use the Army Colt .45 caliber pistol, a fact that was not widely advertised during the war because the concept of armed women in uniform was anathema to many conservative members of Congress and traditional military leaders. I find this rather ironic, considering that Rosie the Riveter and other women defense workers had become collective national heroes by the second year of the war.

Despite the undeniable contribution of the WAAC made, the deep-seated resistance to military women found expression in an ugly and persistent slander campaign that seemed to crop up at many posts. According to those spreading the slander, the women soldiers were disreputable. From the perspective of the late 1960s, I considered such an attitude, especially in wartime, as outrageously untrue as it was grossly unfair. But the history of the Women's Army Corps showed that the pervasive slander campaign that extended into 1944 had a definite negative effect on women volunteering for service.

Nevertheless, in 1943, Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall requested that Congress convert the WAAC from auxiliary status to a full military branch of the Army. The Women's Army Corps was created that year. Enlisted WACs would now have military grades from private through master sergeant, and officers from second lieutenant through lieutenant colonel. The Director of the WAC would be a full colonel. The women of the Corps served under Army regulations and the Articles of War.

During World War II, WACs were assigned to all theaters of operations, from Europe to China, from Australia to the islands of the South Pacific. By the end of the war, over 140,000 women had volunteered for Army duty; some had been wounded in action, and a few decorated for courage under fire.

WACs were allowed to marry if they received proper authorization. But if a WAC serving in the European Theater of Operations married an American military man, one of them was immediately transferred to a distant station. The transfer was meant to discourage romances resulting in pregnancy. In the Far East, a WAC could not marry unless she was pregnant. Any WAC who became pregnant was expected to announce her condition and quickly be processed for discharge on grounds of medical disability.