An American Story (20 page)

But what could I do? I couldn't change jobs, I couldn't move; all I could do was brazen it out. I just put one foot in front of the other. I was the eye of the storm. It was quiet there, but all around me, conversations would stop when I entered a room. People would leave tables I joined. At the same time, a well-liked guy in our unit was being prosecuted for killing his baby while drunk. He was the unit darling. Everyone visited him, sent him cards and gifts, and filled the benches at his trial. His name was on their lips every day. Even Davis supported him, visiting and mentioning him at commander's call. I was a pariah.

It is customary for commanders to attend any court proceedings involving their subordinates; their presence communicates support both for the accused and for the military process. The commander usually acts as the accused's family's source of information and as their advocate. As in the case of my coworker accused of killing his child, Davis did so, as did others from the chain of command. I, on the other hand, went to court alone (except for one kind major who wasn't even in my chain of command). Women wept openly when my coworker was found guilty; those same bitches wouldn't speak to me. I received no encouragement or support from my command structure. I even had to beg the prosecutor to make sure the trial didn't conflict with my work schedule; the powers that be hemmed and hawed when I alerted them to the possible conflict, reminding me that if “we let one person off . . .” Buggerers. I would miss my own trial before I'd ask Davis for time off.

Since the loser confessed, there wasn't much of a trial. The defense had been planning to argue that I consented to sex and only claimed rape afterward to hide it from my boyfriend. That made me laugh for the first time since the rape. My boyfriend did exactly what I'd known he would when I told him; he flinched but said nothing.

The Worm had opted for a bench trial, so the court reporter, the two lawyers, and I waited for the judge's decision together in a small antechamber. Worm's lawyer bummed cigarettes from me and bemoaned his client's having confessed, a course to which he'd strenuously objected. The three then placed desultory lunch bets on the number of months Worm would probably get. They compared rape cases: never more than six without “violence,” probably only four because she'd been drinking, maybe as few as two because he'd conf— . . . Finally, the prosecutor looked at me, turned red, and changed the subject. The stenographer, who never looked directly at me, said lazily, “I guess you think we're heartless, huh?”

No. Not at all.

The Worm read a statement apologizing to the court and to the Air Force. I suppose I was covered by his “any other person or persons who may have been hurt, if any” clause. He lost his clearance and was sentenced to six months in military prison in Denver. I've since seen the place; sad-faced airmen play volleyball in the cold and shine shoes a lot. If he'd falsified an expense voucher and stolen a few hundred bucks from the government, if he'd boosted tools from the flight line, if he'd smoked a single joint in a stellar fifteen-year career, he'd have gotten years, not months, and in a real prison. But raping a fellow soldier's not so bad. Still good enough for the uniform of the United States of America. It's not like he hit me or anything.

But even that, six months' confinement, was not to be. He only served two. Good behavior and all that. He was at a new duty assignment before I was. As late as 1989, he was still on active duty in Alaska, bragging that his family never even knew what had happened. He's married now and has children. Daughters?

Yes, I'm bitter, but I never blamed the Air Force. I blame Davis. I shared an elevator with him at the National Security Agency the next year and he wouldn't even acknowledge my presence.

Every now and then, someone would mention the rape, like the guy I asked to a function. “No thanks,” he said politely. “I don't want to end up in jail.” Another time, a new flight commander introduced himself to me this way: “Hello. I'm Lieutenant Big Fat Stupid Idiot. I hear you were raped.” I came to understand that Worm's confession meant nothing to anyone but me.

There was no unit education on acquaintance rape or irresponsible drinking or sexual harassment. At one point, we'd had a rash of people getting bad sunburns that kept them from working—next commander's call, we got lectured on sunburns. The fair-skinned who got more than one work-preventing sunburn were punished. A couple of women got pregnant, and so had to return stateside; boom, we got lectured on not getting pregnant. If promotion rates dropped a percentage point, if people were making too much noise in the barracks—major lecture. But rape? Not a word. I got the message loud and clear.

You are on your own, Debra. No one is going to help you, Debra. Pull yourself together, Debra. You aint dead yet, Debra, so this shit can't kill you.

A NEW ATTITUDE

Korea was a turning point. All the disparate parts of my makeup collided as I consciously tried to make some sense of my life. The rape stripped away the last of the backwoods principles I'd been raised on. I realized then, as I endured the pointless, even impersonal mistreatment routine in daily life outside the cloister of my parents' home, that I had not been ready for the world.

I reviewed it all—my father, my bleak childhood, the constant maltreatment from men that my low self-esteem drove me to expect and accept, the existing social order—and dove headfirst into a boiling, bottomless anger. The world was a shitty, unlovely place filled with people who'd stab you in the back for no reason at all. I was disgusted by my own good-girliness and shrugged it off like a pair of Dr. Denton's.

I lived on black coffee, cigarettes, and alcohol. Sans effort or intent, I lost twenty-five pounds.

Then I became a serious jock. I pounded out hundreds of sit-ups each day, did hours of aerobics. I ran the six miles from Osan to Pyong Taek, the next town, twice, sometimes three times. I ran through rice paddies with local children dogging my heels. I ran through monsoons, snowdrifts, scorching heat. I ferreted out the best hills. I couldn't make things difficult enough for myself. I kept studious track of my times and distances, always trying to outdo myself. Black men called out rude taunts as I ran around base, but I'd have been disappointed had they not.

My makeover also included the beauty-magazine variety. I chose that moment to become a glamour queen. I stopped wearing fatigues and started wearing tailored “blues” (with skirts, not pants) every day. Heels and sheer hose. I stopped biting my nails, and when they grew long began a regimen of manicures and vampish nail polish; I wore every bit of jewelry allowed by regulation. I stopped swigging my beer from the bottle and stopped cursing like a sailor—phrases like “cluster fuck” evaporated from my vocabulary. I stopped carting things around in my fatigue breast pocket and bought a purse. I haunted the cosmetics aisle in the BX. I spent so much time and money there that the saleswoman pulled me close and said, “Don't you think you've spent enough?”

I took a tiny apartment alone in the Korean community and discovered the blues and jazz records at the base hobby shop.

I spent whole days listening to Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Ethel Waters, Nat King Cole, Dinah Washington, Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan, Billy Eckstine, and the queen, Ella Fitzgerald.

At the base library I joined the twentieth century. I discovered Philip Roth, Anne Tyler, Solzhenitsyn, Eudora Welty, Norman Mailer, John Irving. I read Kurt Vonnegut in his loopy entirety. Then I discovered Ayn Rand. I would have carved her name on my forehead if that wouldn't have been a violation of the dress code. I read all her fiction, then special-ordered her nonfiction. Where had she been all my life?

With her as my spiritual guru, I took my reevaluation of myself to the next level. While for the first time in my life I felt powerful and confident through my job, my personal life was a mess. I had an on-again, off-again boyfriend whom I allowed to make me miserable for years. I was intimidated by black people. Rand completed my conversion to far right conservatism and firebrand feminism. No more profligate drinking and smoking, no more unhappy sex, no more loser men, and, most of all, no more fear of blacks and their disapproval. I entered a take-no-prisoners phase that lasted nearly five years. At the time, I thought it was simply a focus phase. It was that, too, but most of all it was about anger.

I wrapped myself in my anger at blacks and lashed out whenever possible. Before Rand, I'd always taken the long way past known trouble spots, like the Red Horse barracks (civil engineering; many black men perform manual labor there). Not anymore. I walked past Red Horse, through the black men's catcalls and requests for dollar blow jobs since I wasn't “nothin but a 'ho anyway.” I was in uniform. Officers came and went through the main doors just below the win-dows where the black men howled at me, yet they said nothing. Had I or one of those men failed to salute them, they'd have taken our heads off.

I didn't falter. I didn't flinch. I wanted them to see how unfazed I was, I wanted to prove to myself that they were too pitiful to fear, and I wanted to store up on their abuse. Just like with Davis, I used them for fuel. They justified my distance from blacks. Just look at how they acted.

The defining moment of my new, confrontational attitude toward blacks and their nonsense came as I stood at a food cart off-base with four white male flight mates to buy greasy fried squid and newspaper-wrapped “yaki man do.” Two black guys ambled over, eyed me. They eyed my friends a few paces away waiting for me to finish the transaction. My mistake was conducting my business with the cart guy in Korean.

“Look at this Oreo bitch,” one said evilly to the other.

“I know, man. Think she the shit.”

I said nothing. The pre-Randian me would have shriveled up and fled. The new me would have liked nothing better than a showdown with these deficients, but not with white folk present. I didn't want them to see how typical blacks acted.

“Bitch think she aint black no mo. Done forgot she a nigger, too.”

“Bitch.”

I never acknowledged them, just kept up a running conversation with the Korean man, knowing that that's what was really infuriating them. The black men kept their voices low, horribly intimate. No one overheard us.

“Bitch might need her ass kicked.”

“Might.”

They never stopped their evil commentary and I wouldn't let myself walk away while it continued. That would be running and that I refused to do. Just for something to do with my hands, I pulled out my Benson & Hedges and we reached a new low in intraracial comedy.

“Look at this bitch, man. She caint even smoke black. She caint smoke Kools or Newports. She got to smoke some goddamn white shit.”

I stopped with my lighter halfway to my lips. My
cigarettes
weren't even black enough? I laughed so hard I dropped the lighter.

“I funny, bitch?” He snarled but I couldn't have been less afraid.

“Oops, careful, genius—lost your verb there.”

It was just like playing the dozens again. I enjoyed their humiliation very, very much.

“By the way, just how low is your IQ?” I asked the first one. “Is it even double digits? Because I know it couldn't possibly be triple.”

Their mouths snapped shut as if hinged but their eyes spoke volumes of violence. Only the power of a court-martial kept them from hitting me.

“Why don't you do yourselves a favor? Instead of harassing people who have what you want, why don't you just work on getting it for yourselves? The words ‘black' and ‘loser' don't have to be synonymous.”

I was very, very proud of myself. Those words may look like tough love in print, but I meant them to crush. I had boiled blacks' problems down to the comments I made to those two men that night. A busy Randian with no time to waste, I used these formulations repeatedly to shrug off blacks' underachievement and self-defeating behaviors. I must have said them a thousand times in those years to bleeding-heart liberals and other assorted black apologists. I had it all figured out. I knew what their secret fear was—I'm a loser by birth—and I rubbed their faces in it.

Content, I walked away to join my oblivious white friends. I could feel the black men's eyes boring into my back, but I knew they wouldn't dare touch me now, not if there was the least chance I might get to speak again before they could choke me into silence.

UP BY MY BOOTSTRAPS

When I rotated home to the National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland, in late 1983, I did so with a plan. I applied for, and won, a Bootstrap fellowship which allowed me to go to school full-time in lieu of work. I desperately wanted to become an officer. That was my big plan. Get a degree, any degree, and become the first Dickerson officer in a long line of cannon fodder. Davis was an aberration that I never held against the Air Force. I saw myself in Air Force blue for the rest of my life, and as a highly decorated officer to boot.

My up-close and personal experiences with officers, after two years in the trenches, had had the same effect on me as had that with my well-educated teachers at Flo Valley: none seemed to me to have accomplished anything that was beyond me. I watched them do their jobs and there was no magic there, just work. As always, negative reinforcement did more for me than positive; it was the sad-sack officers who most motivated me. If they can do it, I damn sure can, I thought.

Far from the timid second-guesser I'd once been, I was calmly sure I could have been a pilot, a commander, an airborne commando—but I didn't want those things. As a woman, I could never have maxed out in those testosteronic fields; I would always have been a bridesmaid, the one left behind to man the phones while the men won medals. I determined never to work in an organization I could never head. I could never lead an operational unit, regardless of what the posters say, but I could be Air Force chief of staff for intelligence someday. So, I wanted to be an intelligence officer working directly with flight crews in a hard-charging operational environment. I wanted to wear camouflage fatigues and combat boots all but a few weeks a year, I wanted to look down on headquarters “day whores,” I wanted to lose track of time and spend years at a stretch overseas, and I was a committed Cold Warrior: I wanted to drop bombs on people who challenged the United States of America. Lots of them. I didn't want a degree. I wanted a commission and a jihad against my formerly meaningless existence.