Generally Speaking (31 page)

Sometimes phone calls would begin normally and quickly escalate to sharp debates. That was the way a lot of days went during those months. Hence Colonel Malcor's emphasis on the need to relieve stress. He did not want people dying at their desks from cardiac arrest.

I was the only woman officer among my peers and seniors in the office. Army officers and enlisted soldiers then wore either the Class B uniform consisting of a black cardigan and green slacks (or skirt) or the Class A uniform with the skirt or slacks and jacket with name tag and insignia indicating branch and rank, as well as decorations. Men officers had a wide black stripe on the outer seam of their trousers; enlisted men did not. Women's skirts had no black stripe to distinguish officers from enlisted; a woman wearing the cardigan and skirt might be any rank from private through general officer. I therefore made a practice of always wearing my jacket outside the office so that my peers immediately saw I was one of them.

I had adopted this habit after years of men soldiers and women civilians misunderstanding that I actually was an Army officer. As a lieutenant, I might telephone a person, saying, “This is Lieutenant Kennedy.” “
Louise
Kennedy?” “No,
Lieutenant
Kennedy.” Or, “This is Captain Kennedy.” “
Kathleen
Kennedy?” They just didn't expect to be talking to a woman Army officer. I had learned early that the symbols of authority are important in a hierarchical culture like the Army.

Most of the men I worked with had never worked with a woman as a colleague. I believed that my credibility in their eyes would be best built on some objective measure of competence. And since Military Intelligence was not appreciated by those outside the discipline, I had an added hurdle to cross before bonding with my colleagues, most of whom came from the Combat Arms. Physical fitness would be one such easily observable measure of competence.

I decided the best way to meet Colonel Malcor's PT requirement was to reach the office, work until lunch, then head over to the Pentagon Officers Athletic Club (POAC), a grungy facility located near the North Parking Lot. After PT, I'd return to the office and work straight through until 6:30 or 7:00
p.m
.

I became quite familiar with the POAC. In the locker room, you could smell decades of stale sweat that had seeped into the splayed wood of the benches and chipped concrete floor. One day after performing sets of push-ups and sit-ups in the gym, I went outside to the wall to stretch before taking off on a two-mile run. Glancing down, I saw a dead rat. Two days later, the rat was still there. And the next time I returned, some wag had placed a shoe box over the rodent's corpse with the epitaph “RIP” emblazoned in black Magic Marker.

To me, the practical advantage of these workouts was that I got to practice three days each week for the semiannual Army Physical Fitness Test. The payoff came the first time the action officers in the directorate assembled near the POAC to take the test. I knew the men in my office were watching to see how well I'd do. The officers put a high premium on physical performance. So I was determined to do my best.

The test was comprised of three components: push-ups, sit-ups, and the two-mile run. When I joined the Army in 1968, no one over the age of forty was required to take the PT test. By 1982, however, every soldier in the Army had to pass it, but the minimum requirements were adjusted for age and gender. Even so, I wanted to show that I was not merely scraping by in meeting the standards adjusted for women's physiology.

It was a crisp northern Virginia fall morning when we all assembled in our T-shirts and shorts. In the push-up component, each officer took his turn on the gym floor and competed against a stopwatch. I came close to my maximum number of push-ups in the two minutes allowed and caught my breath for the sit-ups.

We all had partners to hold our ankles as we went to work, trying to complete the maximum number of sit-ups in a two-minute period. But if your form was bad, the graders standing above you would keep repeating the number you were stuck at until you got the form right.

I heard somebody chanting “… sixteen, sixteen, sixteen…” to some poor soul who was flagging.

This only increased my resolve. Over the years, critics have complained that women have it easier when taking the Army Physical Fitness Test, that they are held to lower standards than their men peers. This is an argument based on a lack of understanding of what the test measures. The test measures levels of effort and scientifically reflects the physiological differences between men and women and between old and young. A man's weight is high on his frame, in the chest and shoulders. And his upper body muscles are more adapted to push-ups. But women have an advantage over men in sit-ups. A woman's center of gravity is lower, in her hips, and her abdominal muscles are better suited to sit-ups. The Army PT test is normative, not comparative.

Nevertheless, I wanted to show my new colleagues I was not content to meet minimum standards. As I knocked out my sit-ups in quick succession, one of my fellow action officers teased, “You're just hotdogging.” But I didn't let him distract me. At the end of my allotted two minutes, I had racked up over eighty sit-ups, the best score of anyone in our group.

We all went outside the gym and assembled beside the North Parking Lot for the two-mile run. When I crossed the finish line back at the parking lot, I was pleased that my training had paid off, that I'd kept up my optimal pace, and proud to note that I had run faster than many others.

From that day on, I noticed a perceptible change in my colleagues' attitude toward me. I had proven that I could “hack it” in an arena they considered their own. The numbers in the PT test gave them a concrete means to measure my competence in an important part of our profession.

That was when I realized that physical fitness offers a real benefit to women working in a man's world, including civilian workplaces. There is an unfortunate double standard between men and women when it comes to appearance and fitness. In civilian life, a man in power might be obviously overweight and out of shape, but be considered a vital executive in his organization or a respected leader. Women, however, are denigrated as being “dumpy” if their weight and perceived level of fitness do not meet certain expectations. Coupled with that disdain comes the perception that such women are not capable of leadership. Conversely, if a woman in a largely male group is seen as physically fit, she will be perceived to be more competent in other areas as well. That was an important consideration for me in the early 1980s when many of my men peers still saw the women soldiers around them as being in the Army only by fiat, not serving based on their own qualifications.

Armed with that awareness, I made it a point to work hard on my physical fitness while I was on active duty, and I encouraged my women colleagues to do the same. And when I commanded a recruiting battalion and spoke about the Army to young women, I tried to allay their concerns that they would not be up to the rigorous demands of Army physical training.

That self-doubt is unnecessary, since the Army trains soldiers from the most inexperienced stage of physical fitness. Our leadership has carefully studied the fitness level of the young Americans who enter Basic Training. The Army challenges those who arrive in good condition and shapes up the couch potatoes. Eventually the teenage Nintendo wizard might make an excellent operator in a Patriot missile battery, but he will have to become a physically fit soldier first. This process starts with diagnostic tests that measure strength and stamina. Soldiers are then assigned to PT groups according to their ability. The Army believes in progressive and sequential training: As young soldiers improve, the training is geared to keep them working hard. Further improvement is followed by setting higher standards in strength, endurance, and dexterity.

I remember visiting Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, one summer a few years ago and being amazed to see the transformation the young soldiers had undergone after only eight weeks of Basic Training. They had developed from rather soft, often clumsy high school graduates to strong, lean, fit adults. Both men and women looked terrific after less than sixty days of instruction from drill sergeants who had trained them at a speed appropriate to their individual ability and fitness level. Young people who would have had trouble briskly walking a couple miles before entering the Army were running that distance carrying M-16 rifles and wearing Kevlar helmets and web gear on their way to the Infiltration Course. There, they deftly low-crawled under barbed wire while machine guns blasted overhead and dynamite artillery simulators thundered around them. past that obstacle, the trainees vaulted wooden walls and climbed ropes before running on to their next training site.

People who had never seen this kind of metamorphosis often can't believe their eyes. A civilian friend of mine, despairing of losing weight on his own, once asked me, “Does the Army have spas for weight loss?”

“Yes,” I told him. “We call them drill sergeants.”

While at the Pentagon in 1984, I began to enjoy athletic competition. And it was culturally acceptable for me to compete hard because I was seen as nonthreatening since I started from what was widely believed to be a physically disadvantaged position, i.e., women were “weak.” Yet I had stamina, discipline, and the determination to come from the back of the pack when running a race.

I entered a number of races at that time, many competing with runners from whom I learned a great deal about the sport. One of the most important lessons I acquired was the art of passing. When I began running, I had been conflicted about passing a man on the trail. In one ten-kilometer cross-country race on a Saturday morning soon after arriving at the Pentagon, I overtook a group of young Marines. They were in bad shape, no doubt having hit the Georgetown bars the night before, and I suspected they were hardly volunteers for this event. Although they had sprinted across the starting line with great determination, they were clearly fading only four kilometers into the race. One husky young man with a white sidewall haircut stumbled onto his knees in the grass and vomited spectacularly. Some of his buddies looked just as sick, but they were blocking the trail, and I needed to get around them.

“Come on, guys,” I called, gasping as I spoke, “you can do it. We're almost halfway through.”

They glanced back, stricken to see an older woman closing the gap to edge past them on the narrow trail. I slowed for a moment, as if to demonstrate empathy, but there was another factor involved. I came from a generation that had been taught not to compete with men. In the Virginia school I had attended in seventh through ninth grades, boys went to the gym and climbed ropes or ran on the track. The girls assembled in the auditorium and were taught the rules of games, but were given little chance to actually play them. With a final word of encouragement, I passed the faltering young Marines and moved on ahead.

But the experience taught me a lesson; by breaking my pace and slowing to speak to them, I had lost my concentration and speed for the rest of the race. As I finished the event, I realized that we were all equal competitors, men and women, and it was better to let the chips fall where they may. That was the last time I gave in to the urge to encourage a competitor.

After that race, I came to view passing opponents as a good thing. I have to admit, I took a great deal of private joy in stealthily running up to the lead runner, matching his stride for a while, marshaling my oxygen and strength, and then choosing the moment for a definitive pass, which I would execute in a “blow-by” sprint, continuing for a sustained distance until he was too far behind to catch me. Of course, there were times when he did catch me, but he always had to work hard at it, and that provided equal entertainment for me. None of these guys wanted to be beaten by a woman. It was as if the natural order of the universe had been upset.

But I was enjoying myself. One of my regular runs led from the POAC, across the Potomac on the Memorial Bridge, around either the Reflecting Pool or the Washington Monument and back, the longer route being just over five miles. Near the Pentagon on the return, there was a choice in approaches, one that offered the hypotenuse (shorter route) of the triangular course, the other the two sides of the triangle (slightly longer route). Some afternoons, I would watch the runners around me approaching the shorter, hypotenuse route at the point of the triangle. Then I would head down the two other sides, pumping hard to beat them. Often they would look across the field and notice what I was up to, then redouble their efforts to stay ahead of me. Sometimes they won, sometimes I won. Of course, when we arrived sweaty and winded back at the POAC, nobody ever acknowledged that a race had been run.

The joy of completing these arduous runs complemented a day in which most of the conflict and friction arose over abstract issues. I was also resolving the personal conflicts my generation had in competing with men. These unofficial races helped me overcome another barrier by which women are excluded. Winning an amateur competition was not very important to me. But discovering my own strength gave me the enduring confidence that I could compete and win on the playing field, whether athletic or professional.

The Army's emphasis on physical fitness might seem draconian to some civilians. After all, soldiers could be removed from the service in mid-career if they did not meet the weight standards established for their age and gender or pass the Army Physical Fitness Test. But this is not merely an arbitrarily demanding requirement.

The Army has a different mission than civilian organizations. Units in most Army branches are deployable, ready to move to distant sites overseas on minimum notice. If you visit the barracks or offices of Army units from the Rangers to a Signal Corps battalion to a Medical Corps evacuation hospital, you will find TA-50 web gear hanging in lockers or on coat hooks—canteens filled, batteries in the flashlights—ready to pull on when the deployment alert is issued. And, as we've seen, America has asked its soldiers to “move out” briskly on a variety of dangerous or demanding missions that took them to East and Central Africa, the Balkans, and the Caribbean in the last ten years.