I was a solider in the Army for three years and I often don’t realize how some things I take for granted from my time in the military are such weird experiences until I tell the stories to other people. One of those stories starts with the fact that the base I was stationed on had a 75-to-one ratio of men to women, on average. When I first arrived at my unit I was the only female in my entire barracks, which housed around 300 soldiers. NCOs (non-commissioned officers like sergeants) had special single rooms with a private bathroom and the rest of the enlisted soldiers bunked two to a room with communal showers.
Immediately I posed a problem because I couldn’t share a room with a male soldier and I couldn’t share a shower with hundreds of them. The solution was to give me an NCO room.
The first morning I woke up to an entire hallway plastered with pornographic photos of women just outside my door. It was an impressive amount of paper, but I wondered wryly to myself who would try to shock me with photos of vaginas? After all, I happened to have a vagina myself and knew exactly what it looked like.
It did however shock my commanding officer. So much so, that the entire barracks was treated to extra P.T. (physical training) for an entire week and I was treated to a move to a new room that was located just across the hall from the barracks commanding officer so he could “keep an eye on my safety.”
There were no more nude photos, but there was always some sort of shenanigans happening. Because I wasn’t only the sole women in my barracks, I was also surrounded by infantry barracks. And women weren’t allowed in these units which meant that my entire row of barracks (4 buildings, each housing roughly 300 soldiers) and the rows of barracks to my left and right were full of only males.
I once worked out the numbers and I was the only female out of something like 5,000 soldiers living in the vicinity.
When I would go to my dining hall for meals, the table I sat at, as well as every table surrounding me, would fill up in minutes as soldiers that I didn’t know for the most part vied for a seat near me so they could meet me, talk to me. But, it was weird because it wasn’t me exactly that they wanted. It was just feminine company that comforted them, excited them, and provided a breath of change in a sea of the same. This made it so I was very popular, but I never really trusted any of that attraction. How could I know if someone really liked me or just liked that I was a female?
And sometimes, these soldiers were a little too aggressive. Once I was driving back to the base in North Carolina from visiting my family in Florida when another car pulled up next to me on I-95, honking like crazy. I looked over and there was a guy in the passenger seat holding a sign that said, “Tiffany?” And I had no idea who he was.
I was scared so I drove for as long as I could have while they alternatively tailed me and drove next to me. When I finally had to stop for gas, I stopped in a well-lit and busy gas station and tried to ignore the car that pulled in behind me. A feat that was impossible as the passenger came right up to me and said, “Your name is Tiffany, isn’t it?” I nodded warily. He continued, “You don’t know me, but I am in (here he gave his unit) and I see you in the mess hall all the time. I’ve heard your friends say your name, which is how I knew who you were.” He told me his name and other small details while I pumped gas. Then had the audacity to add that he and his friend would like to “see me safely home” if I was okay with it. How do you tell someone they had gotten something so wrong? They wanted to escort me in a protective move. Meanwhile, it was these two that I had been terrified of on the highway. It was weird to be well-known without knowing so many people who knew me.
Another time I was watching a movie in my room with two (male) friends when there was a knock on my door. I opened it to two soldiers I didn’t know. But, they waved and said hello to my friends so I assumed they all knew each other. They asked if they could join us in watching the movie and I said sure. After the movie ended they left and my friends asked who they were and why I didn’t do introductions. It was then that we realized none of us knew the guys and we had just watched a movie with two strangers.
Looking back on these stories I feel strange that I wasn’t more scared of my day-to-day life, but I truly never felt unsafe. There was a hungry desperation to the soldiers for female company. As a country we take children, because that really is what most of the 18-year-old soldiers I encountered were, and we put them in this emotionally hard situation with no support. It’s all about “being a man” and competition and false bravado and really they just want companionship and love and softness sometimes. I don’t know the solution to it, but I do know that we wreck a lot of good people in the Army, or at least in my unit, with how we set up their lives. And it always made me feel a little sad and a lot empathetic to the boys around me. Were some of them terrible and sexist? I’m sure they were, but for the most part they were brothers and sons and friends that were looking for belonging to something and someone, feeling lonely in their journey and clinging to what was available to them, which wasn’t much.