Remarkably, these stringent conditions, first imposed at the height of World War II, still prevailed in the Women's Army Corps in 1968. A WAC could marry with permission, but not become pregnant and remain in the service.
Nevertheless, I began to think that a few years in the Army would be just the kind of experience I wanted. Still in my early twenties, I expected to be married and a mother eventually, as did many of my peers. But I found the familiar and straightforward military institutions, the comforting certainty of the Army's values, and the unabashed patriotism of such traditions as pausing each afternoon at Retreat to salute the flag as the color guard lowered it for the day, to be more inspiring than the 1960s world of dissidence and negativity. The Army took a lot of guesswork out of life.
And I didn't harbor illusions that the Army was a tranquil refuge. Toward the end of that month, we were bused over to Fort Benning, Georgia, to observe a live-fire exercise at the Infantry School. This famous “Mad Minute” reminded me that the purpose of the Army was fighting and winning battles, and to do so soldiers had to kill the enemy. As we sat in the bleachers behind the sandbagged model battalion defensive position, however, the effect of U.S. Army firepower was overwhelming.
Helmeted soldiers filed into the trenches before us to occupy the bunkers. They began firing with crackling .223 caliber M-16 rifles, first on semiautomatic, then on rippling full-automatic bursts. Then the heavier blast of 7.62mm M-60 machine guns firing slashing orange tracers toward the distant sand hills joined in. Suddenly the cacophony was pounded by the deeper roar of .50 caliber heavy machine guns from the bunkers. Soldiers fired 40mm grenades and 60mm mortars that exploded louder than any Fourth of July fireworks. All the while, the rifle and machine gun fire continued. Then 105mm howitzers cut loose behind us, and the shells ripped by overhead with a metallic groan. Their distant explosions sent out shock waves that struck us like invisible boxing gloves.
Around me the young women were silent, absorbed by the spectacle. I tried to picture what enemy soldiers would experience, advancing against such a heavily defended position. Then my mind shifted to American troops ordered to attack bunkers like these in Vietnam.
The WAC only gave us a few weeks to decide on the student officer program after we left Fort McClellan that summer. Flying into Southport, North Carolina, where my father now commanded the Army ammunition terminal, I was certainly attracted to the idea of becoming an Army officer, but still wasn't sure about accepting a two-year commitment.
And there were other, much deeper principles in weighing this decision. All around me young men were being required to fulfill their military obligations during wartime. I firmly believed that women were due the rights and opportunities of citizenship equal to men. And along with these equal rights came equal responsibilities, including military service. Personally, I considered it important for both men and women to accept the responsibility of military service. The obligations of citizenship should be without reference to gender, just as they are without reference to race.
As I considered whether to join the WAC, I weighed several factors: the length of the obligation after college, the symbolism of serving my country, and the practical advantage of having a record as an Army officer on my résumé. Before making my final decision, I consulted friends and family.
My brother, Andy, certainly had no qualms and gave me the decisive push: “Only two years? Do it.”
In a way two years of service would show a kind of solidarity with the men who were drafted, even though I'd be an officer. Besides, the $200 a month the Army would pay me during my senior year would certainly help my parents a lot, as they had two other children in private college during my senior year. “Well,” I told Andy, “I guess I will.”
But when I discussed this decision with my father, he was quite thoughtful. “Are you
sure
you're interested in this, Claudia?”
My internal debate continued, but I became surer that applying for the student officer program would be a good idea.
“Yes, Daddy, I am.”
I mailed my acceptance letter and called Marilyn. She too had decided to accept.
Back at school, Marilyn and I decided to keep our decision fairly private. We would not bring it up, but would tell anyone who asked. Antiwar sentiment had reached a high point. Now even the faculty at this Southern college were becoming strongly opposed to the war in Vietnam and to the Army. Several of the professors I needed for references harbored antimilitary feelings, but they honored my requests for their support. To any who persisted, I gave the oversimplified answer, “My father's in the Army,” which seemed to satisfy them. Maybe it was a lost opportunity to persuade them, but I didn't feel like getting into long ethical debates about the responsibilities of citizens in a democracy, knowing how entrenched the popular position against the war had become.
When my Army paycheck of $200 a month began, most went for tuition, but I could now make a monthly splurge at McDonald's, feasting on a small burger, small fries,
and
a small Coke.
Most of my friends did not know about my Army plans until just before graduation in June 1969. They were puzzled. The concept of women becoming Army officers at that time seemed utterly alien. I might just as well have announced plans to become an astronaut.
On June 2, at the local congressman's office, my father read the oath commissioning me a second lieutenant in the Women's Army Corps. I swore to “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to obey the orders of the President of the United States and of the officers appointed over me.”
Persistence
I
n August 1969, I began the four-month WAC Officer Basic Course at the WAC School at Fort McClellan. One hundred and twenty women were divided into three platoons in our class. We lived in concrete officers barracks now, two women to a room, two rooms sharing a bathroom. There was air-conditioning indoors, but outside we endured the humid Piedmont summer heat.
The level of discipline was dramatically higher than the previous summer. There were almost none of the early homesick dropouts we had seen then. We were expected to keep the barracks and our uniforms spotless, using vast amounts of Johnson floor wax on the linoleum and Brasso on our insignia. Once more the drawers of our dressers had to be maintained at museum-quality perfection. I quickly learned the expedient of setting up my inspection display, but keeping all of my other possessions in my car. Some women went so far as sleeping on the floor to save time getting ready in the morning.
There were two levels of consequences for accumulating demerits: restriction to post and restriction to barracks. But I found the abject and unreasonable fear of demerits very funny, as I did a lot of the seemingly deadly serious arbitrary discipline. We were, after all, volunteers; they could have turned us into soldiers without so much huffing and puffing. I kept my mouth shut, of course, but inside I was laughing half the time. Nobody was going to scare me into sleeping on a hard linoleum floor. It was much easier to get up ten minutes early and make my bed properly. Anyway, there was always a way to beat the system: It was called teamwork. That was what was impressed upon us. “Cooperate to graduate,” we were told. No one could meet every requirement individually, but we could all do it if we organized both personally and as a group and worked together.
We stood inspection every day, which made sense because it took a few of us a little while to learn the simple fact that wearing a uniform meant that the clothing in question had to look exactly the same day after day. The principle involved was that every woman in the group matched the others' appearance, that we marched in step, stood in formation in equally spaced ranks, spoke when spoken to, in short, that we surrendered something of our individual civilian identity.
But our officers certainly were not trying to transform us into robots. In fact, one of the rituals of the longer, more intense Saturday morning inspections was close individual questioning by senior officers from the WAC Center and School. Often a major, possibly accompanied by the Olympian presence of a lieutenant colonel, would pause before a second lieutenant and quiz her on any of a wide variety of subjects, ranging from current events to American history, the purpose being to measure the young woman's poise under pressure and also to get to know her.
One Saturday morning, the battalion commander strode down the ranks and turned to stop in front of me. “What are you reading these days, Lieutenant Kennedy?”
“Isaac Asimov, ma'am,” I replied, having planned for this contingency.
I think she had heard of him, but wasn't certain about his work. “Enlighten us, Lieutenant.”
I launched into an exposition of Asimov's speculative theories on artificial intelligence that I had read about the previous weekend. But this was only a short while after the Apollo 11 moon landing, and the world's technical frontier seemed virtually limitless. The lieutenant colonel listened for a minute or two, and then nodded in satisfaction. I had passed muster.
In these early weeks, the senior officers focused on the weakest of the trainees, the women who simply seemed unable or unwilling to adjust to military discipline. In each platoon, there were about three such lieutenants who were obviously marginal. But the WAC Center and School's senior officers wanted to know them as well as possible before making the decision on trying to “train them up” to class standards, or to discharge them from the Army.
These senior officers had devoted their lives to the WAC. Many had served overseas in World War II and during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. They loved the Army and were proud of their branch. Although none of us young lieutenants knew at the time, and I would only learn five years later, our senior leadership realized that the U.S. military was on the verge of dramatic change. Under recently elected President Richard Nixon, the conversion from the draft to an All-Volunteer Army would occur more quickly than anyone had anticipated. The WAC would undoubtedly expand, and women officers would be assigned to fill men's jobs in branches and Military Occupational Specialties (MOSs), from which they had been long excluded. This was why the leaders of the Basic Course found it imperative to turn out the best young WAC officers they could.
At the time, however, these changes were still far over the horizon. And we accepted the drudgery of the Basic Course classes. Like so much Army instruction of the period, they were too specific, often utterly boring, and required unimaginative rote learning. In our case, instructors might lecture their required fifty minutes on some obscure piece of personnel that one of our enlisted clerks would one day use, then fill the next hour on the details of a similar personnel form. A few weeks into these classes, I hoped I had not made a mistake in joining the Army.
But I did enjoy meeting other young women from around the country whose backgrounds were completely different from mine. A few had quite exotic backgrounds, having led independent lives that I found fascinating. Anne Heurer, for example, had been a blackjack dealer in Las Vegas. But most had more traditional work experience: One or two had been nuns, and several had been teachers.
As the classes continued, it became apparent that assignments in the Women's Army Corps would be restricted to routine administrative and personnel duties, with the possible exception of securing “permanent detail” status in another Army branch such as Quartermaster Corps, Military Intelligence, Military Police, or Finance. But any interesting job outside the WAC required specialized training, and I couldn't expect that for at least a couple of years after the Basic Course. Once more, my original plan of staying in the Army for only two years seemed to be my most probable option.
Then one cool October morning Colonel Maxene B. Michl, commander of the WAC Center and School, addressed the course on the theme of “becoming comfortable in your uniform.” She meant this both literally and virtually. Colonel Michl, who had served in Saigon at the same time as my father, was a slight, gray-haired woman with thick-rimmed glasses and a quietly precise voice. She was probably the best-informed WAC officer at Fort McClellan about the changes looming in the Army's future. I was expecting the normal discussion of leadership or our performance as a class when Colonel Michl took the rostrum, but her first words signaled a very different theme.
“All of you women are a little bit behind the West Point graduating class of 1969,” she said. “They've had four years to prepare for their futures in the Army. But you can catch up and focus on your careers if you pay attention very carefully in the next few years.”
For the first time since coming to Fort McClellan, I was excited about our future assignments. Colonel Michl had compared us to the Army's elite officers, the graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. She had also suggested that we would have careers that would run parallel to those of our male colleagues, a prospect I had not considered. Here was this veteran, no-nonsense WAC officer telling us to carefully prepare ourselves for a career path that might in fact lead as high as that of our West Point peers, many of whom would no doubt become generals. I was enthralled.
When I meet civilians, I often find they have very little understanding of the rank and branch structure in the U.S. Army. This comes as no surprise at a time when a small and declining minority of our population has had prior military service. So I think it's important at this stage to present a brief primer— “Army 101”—that explains the building blocks of Army life.
The Army manages its people differently than do civilian employers, bringing enlisted soldiers and officers into its ranks only at the entry level (no middle or executive level accessions for those in uniform). Enlisted ranks start as privates, officers as second lieutenants. The Army also manages its officers by “year group,” the year a person is commissioned. Since I was commissioned in 1969, I was in “Year Group 1969” the rest of my career.