3:13 a.m. - Saturday, Nov. 16, 2002
More Damn Combat Stuff
Oh, I thought about you the other day in my literature class (hey at least it wasn't entomology) while we were discussing the war poets. Oddly enough, I have enjoyed these poets more than the ones before. These were the guys who wrote before, and if they made it home, after WWI. Leslie, it was really beautiful but terrible poetry as most of it was written while they were in the trenches. Anyway, I asked my teacher about how these guys felt after they got home, started families only to watch as their own children went to WWII. She told me that most of these guys did not do the whole wife and family thing and that a higher than normal amount of them were homosexual. And even they did not have any relationships. Tell me what it is about war that does this.
War makes everything else unimportant. Once a person survives combat, it�s hard to find the meaning or importance of anything else again.
I know that is a naive thing to wonder about but as a woman and one who has not had anyone close fight in a war (my grandfather and great uncle did but one died shortly after WWII and the other died in it) I have no understanding. How did you feel? How did it feel to feel like a woman inside but stuck in this horrible situation? And did any of it contribute to the way you felt?
The U.S. Army M-61 Fragmentation Grenade has a core of high explosive inside many layers of tightly wound coils of steel wire. The whole thing is sealed inside a thin metal jacket which is more or less impervious to outside elements. In a stable environment, or as long as the safety pin is in place, an M-61 grenade is relatively safe. When the pin is pulled and the five second fuse is activated, the grenade will explode, destroying itself and anything else within five meters.
I could not have told you I was female in 1967 when I was in combat. I didn�t flounce limp-wristed into battle and then scream into my hands in wide-eyed horror and shock. Each time was different, and so the feelings were different too. Sometimes it was horrifying. Sometimes it was awesome. Always it was sickening. I did my best in every situation, no matter how fearful or sickening it was. Still, there are two times when I think my best must have not been good enough, for I blanked out and lost my memory of part or all of those events. These are part of what haunts me from day to day, and in the early morning hours. What I remember plays over and over again in my mind. I guess I�m still trying to make sense of it. And rarely, another piece will fall into place. An image, a feeling, or even a smell that fills a void in my memory. Some of them are too disturbing to handle. I try hard to believe that it�s just my imagination, but I know deep down it is not.
I was one of the youngest of combat infantrymen. I was also one of the smallest. I had to work a lot harder to carry my load of gear. I had to step faster and higher, just to keep up. And even though I did keep up, I still existed pretty much on the fringe of my group. I wasn�t looked at as a leader, or even someone who had anything of importance to say. No one hated me or was mean to me. It�s just that I never enjoyed much status in any group of men. Other women who�ve worked with a group of men will probably know how I felt.
In the early 1950s, when I expressed the �wish� that I was a girl, the ridicule and humiliation I received was enough to make me begin winding steel coils around my heart. Those early feelings were among the very first ones to be hidden and yet protected by the hard wire. I never lost the desire to be a girl. I just buried it. I took the attitude that yes, I wished I was a girl, but I was not. I was a boy and I just needed to act like one. I think, by and large, I did a pretty good job of it. There were few clues, and none that anyone else might notice. No one, for instance, ever saw me naked in the bathroom with my penis tucked back between my legs, wistfully imagining that I did not have a penis and that my body was that of a girl. No one ever knew that my first sexual experiences were with boys and men, or that I found those experiences , although more �guilty�, more satisfying. No one knew how I felt when I discovered painful lumps behind my pubescent nipples and was told that it was the beginnings of breasts. I felt for a few brief days that perhaps a mistake was about to be rectified and I would be a girl after all. No one knew, because I knew better than to tell. With every feeling or fantasy, I only wrapped my heart tighter and tighter.
So, by 1967, I didn�t feel like a woman trapped in a man�s body and thrust into a man�s war. I felt like a very scared and inadequate man-child. There was, frankly, no time for examining my feelings or trying to sort out my emotions. There was only time for making the best out of a bad situation. It was difficult getting any rest. The food was awful, and yet we needed to eat a lot. Clean clothes were rare. Mosquito repellent, cigarettes, bullets, chocolate bars. These were the important things. And then in the middle of it all, there were assaults, firefights, rockets, and blood. When it came to my feelings, I only learned to do better what I had done all my life anyway. Just wrap them up. Just survive.
The problem, I guess, with tightly wrapped feelings comes if and when they eventually detonate. Just like that grenade, the feelings can destroy everything around a person, including the person herself. That almost happened to me in late 1995. No, in a way, it DID happen. It didn�t destroy me, but it destroyed the life I had built. And it hurt a lot of people around me. It was bad, but it could have been a lot worse.
Just as it takes a skilled technician to disassemble an M-61 grenade, it takes a skilled technician, I think, to begin unraveling the strands of steel around one�s heart. That�s what I finally started to do when I began therapy in 1998, and it�s resulted in more hurt to those around me, and no small pain to myself. It still hurts, but I think it�s getting better.
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