Soldier Girls by Helen Thorpe Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    â€œTell me it’s a hundred and thirteen,” she begged.
    â€œIt’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 findfault 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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œIt’s okay for her to go to the movies, Mom,” Debbie said. “And I don’t mind if she goes to