Camp Followers
Daniella Mestyanek Young
Fort Campbell, Kentucky, 2011
The man with the thick Texas drawl, wearing the army symbols former combat arms guys stitch to their ball caps to display their army résumé, addressed a gaggle of soldiers. I pulled Lieutenant Tiffany Taylor down onto the concrete floor next to me as bodies crowded around for instruction on how to wear our combat vests. It hadn’t taken us long to become friends, both of us realizing the only other female lieutenant on the team would be an important companion to have during a year deployed to Afghanistan. Tiffany folded the long legs of her six-foot, one-inch frame under herself and arranged the rest of the gear we’d both collected as a pile of support behind us.
“I wonder how we’ll fit all this new stuff into the two duffels we’re allowed to bring with us,” I murmured.
“Just leave some of your makeup behind, Miss Thing.” She laughed
“I’m impressed they actually issued us sports bras for war,” I added. “Remember how in Basic Training they gave the men free underwear but we had to buy four sports bras for the equipment lay-out with our own money?
She shook her head.
“Oh, I forgot you went to West Point and didn’t do Basic Training,” I said. “How will I ever forgive myself . . .” I trailed off, feigning a worshipful bow, my hands raised, paying homage to the intense rivalry between West Point and Officer Candidate School graduates, and kissing the ring. Like most West Pointers, she was used to being mocked by officers from the “lesser” commissioning sources, and responded as they all do, with the confident smile of those who know their worth.
“All right, all right, guys,” the instructor started, “This is a twenty-minute block of instruction on how to wear your new armored vest and carrier. Please lay the combat vest in front of you . . .”
Leaning some of my weight on Tiffany, I zoned in and out, knowing that the first several times I put the equipment on would be a disaster. Later a sergeant would step up and “square away” the poor lost second lieutenants. Sweating through layers of winter gear, my eyes started to droop closed as the stuffiness of the old warehouse set in. Scared of falling asleep in front of everyone,
I shook myself and tuned back into the speaker.
“So, the thing is,” he said, holding up a heavy square plate the size of a laptop computer, rotating it lengthwise in front of his chest and then pulling it snugly against himself. “When you put your vest on, and this is mounted correctly, y’all’ll want to make sure that this piece of Kevlar is sitting no more than half an inch away from your center of mass. In a firefight, ya gotta protect yer vital organs, and that’s how. When you lose weight—which you will, because the food in the sandbox is shit—y’all need to make sure you get a new vest from Damage Exchange. This is the most important thing any of y’all will hear today.”
He paused briefly and stamped his foot, the universal army gesture to command special attention. “If there’s too much space in between the plate that stops the bullet and your big old bellies, then the impact of the bullet hitting this here Kevlar can concuss your insides and they’ll be sending those Purple Hearts home to your families instead of pinning ‘em on you. Y’all hearing me? The fit makes a big difference in whether you get killed by a f*cking terrorist over there or not.”
Everyone sat up a little straighter, holding their own vests tighter, examining the distance. I didn’t need to hold mine up to realize I had a problem. So did Tiffany.
“Excuse me, Sir.” I raised my hand even though I didn’t want to, knowing how this conversation would probably go. “Can you explain to me how this is supposed to work for the females?”
He blinked two rounded eyes at me.
“Come again, El Tee?” He drew out the letters. “This here is armor, doll, it has nothing to do with your gender. You are gonna want it to stop bullets, not buy you dinner.”
“Yes, I understand the whole not wanting to get shot part,” I said as I rose. “But can I demonstrate one issue?”
I shed my fuzzy green overcoat and army combat uniform jacket and turned to face him.
“Even for a girl like me, no curves at all,” I said, ignoring the tightening feeling inside my chest as I drew attention to my bust, “a plate like this . . . ,” I pulled it tighter, “. . . is gonna give a pretty wide gap between my vital organs and the Kevlar. I’ve got boobs, a bit of blocking system built in here.”
I pivoted to the right, showing him the gap of nearly three inches between the plate and my midsection. The contractor scratched his head. “I see what you’re saying, El Tee, but I don’t know what to tell you. I’ve never had a soldier whip out their boobs during a briefing, you know?” He laughed, his eyes darting around the eighteen men in my group, and they all chuckled with him.
“But in all seriousness, darling, I don’t think you really have to worry about it. You ladies are not going to be in combat getting shot at, now are ya?”
I eyed Tiffany, and we didn’t need words to exchange the same questions: Why even bother lugging around a thirty-pound weight if it wasn’t even guaranteed to keep us alive? Did anyone even care? After a year and a half in the army, I knew that women were an afterthought, always.
Everything was designed for men, and women were considered scaled-down men, when we were considered at all. The attitude, no matter what part of the army it came from, was: You ladies asked to be here, so don’t complain about anything. Ever. If a man has an issue, he can raise it, but a girl? Come on, doll. You knew what you were signing up for.
As if anyone can ever know what they are signing up for when it comes to war.
And war was where we were going. I’d arrived at my unit made up of three thousand helicopter pilots, crew, and all the staff who supported them, responsible for troop movements, close air support of troops in combat, and conducting medical evacuations or body retrieval of wounded troops and fallen Heroes.
Not that I knew any of that. I’d be going off to war on a team whose mission I did not completely understand, to do a job I knew I had only the faintest idea how to do. I’d arrived after the unit completed all the pre-deployment training, as the intelligence soldiers and officers were all heading out on leave. While my new unit, trained up and ready, was spending time with loved ones they wouldn’t see for a year, I spent my days trying to prepare myself for what a deployment environment might look like—especially for a woman. I needed to learn all the normal things a second lieutenant did: what to actually bring versus what was on the official packing list, what to do to prepare to leave the real world for a year, and what life was going to look like for twelve whole months over there. Before basic training, officer school, and even the intelligence course, men had helped prepare me for what it might be like—though always from their perspective. I’m sure they’d thought, like everyone else seemed to, that men’s and women’s experiences in uniform were identical, or at least parallel. I was finding out how wrong that was. I needed to know if I would have access to tampons, what our facilities would look like, what security would look like. What did I need to know to keep myself safe? Was there anything I could do to keep the gossips from whispering about me—whispers that could affect my career?
How could I hold up under the mental stress of being one of so few?
I took to Google, hoping to find tips, stories, anything that could teach me what to expect. There wasn’t much, except the suggestion to bring colorful underwear and nail polish to paint the toes—the only color besides variations of brown and tan I’d likely see in a year, self-care items for my eyes only, to help me feel like a girl in the sandbox.
Mostly, I’d found other women expressing the same crushing lack of community that I already felt, and warning how amplified it would become downrange.
I wasn’t prepared for the vitriol. The vetbros who’d served a tour or two spewed words that should have been unspeakable at anyone who dared to suggest women might be capable of serving in combat. Their arguments were always some version of “men are the best, down with all the rest,” that quickly devolved into “somebody should rape you to put you in your place.” Rape threats also came from men still in uniform, their identities conveniently masked by social media handles. I found myself horrified by how many of these men—the ones who were supposed to be my battle-buddies—shared these same heinous beliefs. I wondered which of them were behind usernames just like these.
It wasn’t just the men. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that women who have never been in the military look down on those who serve, but I was. I had always thought we weren’t that different—we were all just women who’d picked one job over another, selected a career we thought would appeal to us. But they expressed how we were overly masculine, traitors to our gender. Some of the military wives, women whose husbands I might be serving alongside, called us hussies, whores, d*ke-bitches. And “camp followers.”
“Just like armies have always had camp followers as they go off to war, the US Army has blond Lieutenants,” read one comment online.
“I’m just lucky my husband’s a combat guy, so he doesn’t have to work with any of those dangerous sluts.”
Buried underneath, were the warnings. Be careful. Be aware. Have a buddy. Don’t walk alone.
Most people are raped by someone they know. But have a buddy anyway. Maybe you’ll get lucky, maybe you’ll choose the right big-tall-scary-looking guy to keep you safe, and maybe he will choose to do so.
And even more blatant: Don’t get raped. Just don’t get raped. As though it was that simple. As though it was something we could control. According to the Department of Defense’s own numbers, my odds of being sexually assaulted were one in four—and those were just the numbers that had been reported. Don’t go anywhere without your rifle, never mind that they’ll have them too and be better trained to use them. Keep your head down. Don’t draw attention to yourself. And whatever you do, do not question the system that makes it this way.
My boss threw a magazine in my lap one day when we sat around the office with everything packed, counting down the days and hours until we got on the aircraft to leave.
“Here, read this,” he said. “Let me know if you have any questions.”
The article was about the sexual assault of women in uniform, how dangerous it was for those deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Words like “rape alley” jumped off the pages, numbers swam in front of my eyes, forming word problems as though there would be a test later: If approximately 150 women have died in Iraq/Afghanistan, but 100 of them were non-combat related, what percentage of deaths were from sudden illness? Murder? Rape? Suicide? Suspicious accident? My hand slowly came up to cover my mouth, as I realized he was trying to prepare me for a hazard of duty that would only apply, amongst those on my team, to me.
Don’t get raped. Don’t get raped. Don’t get yourself raped.
Daniella Mestyanek Young is a scholar of cults, extreme groups, and extremely bad leadership. She served as an Intelligence Officer in the Army for 6 years, with two deployments to Afghanistan, where she was one of the first women to serve on a deliberate ground combat team with the US Army’s Female Engagement Teams. She holds a master’s degree from the Harvard Extension School in Organizational Psychology, and is working on her second book, The Culting of America.
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