Then there were the slides. Before almost every lecture or classroom presentation, our instructors felt it necessary to flash an “attention-getting slide,” actually a viewgraph image from an overhead projector. They were always sexually explicit, the mildest being centerfold nudes from
Playboy.
But as often as not the slides were truly crude, pornographic spreads from
Hustler
or cartoons involving women and barnyard animals. I guess the purpose of this allegedly innocent mirth was to snap the male officer out of his habitual stupor to a heightened degree of mental receptivity, so that he could be ready for fifty enlightening minutes on the Table of Organization and Equipment of a Military Intelligence Battalion. Well, I thought, it doesn't say much for the quality of this course if it takes these kinds of pictures to get the guys' attention.
I originally thought the obscene slides were some type of one-time initiation prank aimed at women. But when the slides continued, it occurred to me that the instructors did not even realize that a pornographic cartoon bothered us. Nor did they understand that many men in the course were offended by this as well. My male classmates told me that they'd seen such slides in other Army courses, and my husband confirmed that their use had become widespread in military lecture halls. I believe some of our religious classmates did ask the instructors to tone down the slides, but nothing ever came of their complaints.
And when I repeatedly wrote about my objections to the bizarre and offensive practice in my class critiques, I never got a reply. That was interesting because my instructors always took the time to answer my other written critiques. I guess I touched a sensitive spot by describing the obscene slides as “not relevant to the class, having a deadening rather than an ‘attention-getting’ effect, and in very poor taste.”
Eventually I brought up the matter with a field-grade officer in the School Brigade.
“Sir,” I said, “I've repeatedly raised the issue of the slides with my instructors. But none of them will reply. I don't think this material has any place in an Army classroom.”
He smiled condescendingly. “Captain, you just don't have a sense of humor.”
The slides continued throughout the course.
In the years since then, I've often thought about that situation. Such raw sexual exploitation of women was widespread in the American military in the mid-1970s. Today, it has virtually vanished from our military installations. But twenty-five years ago, nudity and pornography were confined to the fringes of popular culture. Today, however, popular fiction and broadcast and cable television have become increasingly sleazy. I think it is interesting to reflect that we now rarely find this vulgarity in the workplace, while popular entertainment overflows with crude images and language. We have choices in entertainment, but working is seldom optional.
Although the other women officers in my course certainly did not like the slides either, we all had bigger issues to consider: our professional development and our contributions to the Army. Our instructors continually told the class, “Tactical is the only way for a young, hard-charging MI officer to go.” By that, they meant a male captain should seek out an assignment as an S-2, the intelligence officer in an Infantry, Armor, or Artillery battalion, then become the G-2, the senior intelligence officer of a division as a lieutenant colonel one day. It was from this tactical side of MI, the instructors all said, that the branch's future leaders would be chosen. That was great for the men. But in the mid-1970s, all those assignments were closed to women.
Today, by the way, the situation has changed: There are women intelligence officers serving as S-2s of battalions and brigades as captains and majors, and G-2s of divisions as lieutenant colonels. Women colonels have commanded tactical MI brigades supporting a corps commander. Wherever women are assigned, they perform their duties admirably.
One day that winter after lunch, I sat alone in my car before class watching the sun and shadow high on the surrounding high desert mountains. Even though the future of women in Military Intelligence seemed truncated at this point, I knew our situation would become clearer later, that things would improve, that the Army was in transition. As an institution, the Army was then like the rest of the country. American women had made a strong entry into the workplace as the 1960s ended, and were now going to seek full membership in the ranks of middle management and, to a lesser extent, in senior leadership in a variety of industries. I did not see this revolution as destructive, certainly not of the Army, which I had come to love, despite its shortcomings. Rather, I saw increasingly greater inclusion of women in the Army as a natural evolution of American democracy, an extension of the impulse I had felt on my college campus in 1968. Thousands of women who had demanded their full share as citizens had shouldered their responsibility and were now serving throughout the military, no longer in separate women's units and branches like the WAC. Traditionalists might not like the fact that we were there, but they couldn't deny the enormous contributions of women and the fact that in a time of recruiting shortfalls, the Army depended on the increasing inclusion of women.
Toward the end of the Advance Course, all students had interviews with a branch career counselor to discuss future assignments, standard practice throughout the Army. And I hoped to have this conversation in the context of how to navigate through the next three assignments. My counselor was definitely of the old school and believed that women should not be in the Army.
I laid my cards on the table. “Sir, I want to think about the next several assignments in MI. I'm having a hard time understanding what the general outline should look like with the prohibition of women in so many assignments.”
As I spoke, he nodded complacently. “Your career path is very circumscribed, Captain,” he said. “You women will never get anywhere in the Army until the male chauvinist pigs like me are out.”
What kind of career counseling is this?
I thought. “Yes, sir,” I said aloud. I decided he had so little support for women in the Army, it would be counterproductive to argue with him. (He outranked me and one does not argue with one's assignment officer.) I managed to extract a few usable details about possible assignments and we concluded that I would probably go to Korea next. I looked the officer in the eye and thanked him for his time.
You can't run me out of the Army,
I thought.
I'll be here long after you are gone.
There were a lot of hard cases like that officer. But there were also more enlightened leaders. Lieutenant Colonel Mike Pheneger, one of our class faculty advisors, who became the G-2 of the 2nd Infantry Division in Korea while I was there, was impressed by the dedication and competence of the women officers in the course. “You listen to these women,” he told our men colleagues, “because one day you'll be working for them.”
I was both pleased and concerned by his comment. One thing the six women in the course did not need was any divisive prodding that would separate us from our supportive peers. But it was a tremendous vote of confidence that forced me to think about why I would want to retreat from such praise.
By spring 1976, I had committed to a one-year unaccompanied tour of duty in Korea. My husband planned to return to New England and find a job. And we planned to spend six weeks together before my departure to Korea. Neither of us was pleased with the prospect of separation. But I was not ready to leave the Army. After completing the Advance Course at Fort Huachuca, I took some brief training at Fort Devens in cryptology—popularly known as code-breaking, but which actually involves far greater technical complexity. Then I packed my bags, my husband and I said goodbye, and I caught my flight halfway around the world to South Korea.
Seoul was a gritty mixture of ramshackle squatter towns and gleaming new buildings. But the prosperous South Korean capital was precariously near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), across which the North Korean People's Army had arrayed one of the world's larger military forces. The noncommunist Republic of Korea (ROK) Army occupied in-depth defensive positions south of the DMZ, which split the Korean peninsula along the curved track of the 1953 armistice line. The United Nations Command (UNC), whose principal ground American combat element was the U.S. Army's 2nd Infantry Division, supported the ROK with over half a million personnel, many in Transportation, Signal, and Intelligence units like mine.
I was assigned to Camp Red Cloud north of Seoul as the operations officer to a signal security detachment that had the mission of protecting U.S. and ROK forces from hostile intelligence services. Our responsibility was to make sure American and ROK forces maintained the highest degree of communications security possible, so that their fixed positions and mobile operations could not be tracked by hostile SIGINT.
This was more than a routine assignment in the summer of 1976. For months, tensions had been mounting along the DMZ. One of the first things I learned on arriving in Korea was that the North Koreans had forward-deployed scores of new divisions, together with their armor and artillery, in the previous two years. ROK forces had also discovered an elaborate system of tunnels, many wide enough to accommodate columns of troops and artillery pieces, dug beneath the mountains of the DMZ. North Korean defectors had confirmed that these were intended as invasion tunnels.
The impression this increased tension had on a newly minted Military Intelligence captain like me was profound and immediate. My unit was on a permanent state of alert. I wasn't even over jet lag when I found myself working sixteen-and eighteen-hour days, often jolting along rough gravel roads in a Jeep, shuttling through the dark hills from one camp to another. Everywhere I went with the officer I was replacing, we noted the serious demeanor of the American and South Korean troops. They knew the situation was precarious. When the soldiers in our section found signal security problems, which they often did, that simply meant we had to spend additional hours discussing the findings and recommending solutions with the leaders of the military organizations involved. When I looked up the steep green hills toward the rugged mountains of the DMZ, I could picture the tens of thousands of North Koreans dug into their reinforced concrete bunkers just a few miles to the north. We were doing soldiers' jobs in support of our fellow soldiers, American and South Korean.
But that didn't make the days any shorter. One night I got back to camp long after the mess hall had closed and went to the officers club to grab a bowl of chili before hitting my bunk. The room was dim, almost empty, but booming with rock music, as always, from a monster tape machine. As I sat over my chili bowl, mechanically spooning in the clotted mixture of beans and ham-burger, I felt the long table shaking.
Why do I have to hold on to this bowl?
I thought wearily. Then a bare leg jerked past on the table. I looked up. A bored, naked Korean go-go girl with a flat expression and dead eyes was listlessly bouncing along the top of the tables. The few people remaining in the room hardly glanced at her. This scene was depressing testimony to the poverty of the Korean people who had to take such degrading work and to the Americans who found no more imaginative use of their very limited off-duty time.
Some of the most aggravating North Korean provocations in the previous year had occurred in the Joint Security Area (JSA) that straddled the Military Demarcation Line that snaked through the middle of the four-kilometer-wide DMZ at its western end near the village of Panmunjom. This neutral zone consisted of conference rooms where the Military Armistice Commission met, a camp for neutral Swiss and Swedish military observers, as well as UNC and North Korean Army guard posts and observation towers, set up on their respective sides of the DMZ.
North Korean guards would often hurl insults at their South Korean and American counterparts, who, like the North Koreans, had full access rights to the JSA under the terms of the 1953 armistice. But by the summer of 1976, the North Koreans seemed intent on pushing verbal harassment toward physical confrontations: The American security guards resisted responding to these provocations, but did not relinquish access rights of the UNC to the Joint Security Area.
One of the problems with maintaining good security in the southern portion of the JSA was a lack of visibility caused by foliage growing between UNC observation posts and checkpoints. When American and South Korean security guards accompanied by South Korean workers arrived to cut down a tall poplar in early August, the North Koreans reacted aggressively, demanding that the UNC leave the tree standing. The United Nations unit complied in order to prevent another confrontation.
But this North Korean order was unacceptable. Unless the UNC observation posts and checkpoints could see each other, they were vulnerable to the increasingly hostile North Koreans. The local American Army commander, Lieutenant Colonel Victor S. Vierra, determined that he could achieve visibility between the posts by trimming branches from the poplar rather than felling the tree itself. His plan was approved by the UNC, and on August 18, a security force of ten U.S. soldiers accompanying five Korean workers left on two trucks to carry out the tree trimming. The unit's commander was Captain Arthur G. Bonifas, with First Lieutenant Mark T. Barrett as deputy. There were five American enlisted men and a ROK Army interpreter.
By about 10:30 that morning, the South Korean workers began cutting branches. Soon, North Koreans, led by a notoriously aggressive officer, Senior Lieutenant Pak Chol, arrived and demanded to know what the workers were doing. When he was told they were only trimming branches, he proclaimed, “That is as it should be.”
But within a few minutes, Lieutenant Pak demanded that the work stop and the UNC contingent leave immediately. Then North Korean reinforcements surrounded the smaller UNC unit. Suddenly, Lieutenant Pak yelled,
“Chookyo!”
(Kill!). He delivered a martial art kick, toppling Captain Bonifas.