Image courtesy of Victor Juhasz, artist
When I was twenty-eight, younger than my daughter is today, I was facing the likelihood of a court-martial.
I followed a Marine sergeant down a polished corridor, past the clacking of typewriters and murmurs behind the closed doors of Military Police Headquarters, and pretended to be unafraid, as if I had nothing to hide, as if on the way there that morning I hadn’t seriously mapped out a plan for desertion. Inhaling and exhaling in the same forced rhythm of a runner pacing through a psychological wall, I was committed to a marathon of sorts, and so I was breathing in and breathing out, matching foot speed and cadence with the young Marine ahead of me: a machinated force, we were, matching left foot and right, left arm and right, until he pulled up short in front of a closed door. My toe stubbed against the heel of his boot. Acting politely unaware, he pushed open the door and stepped aside for me to enter. He wore well his role of consummate Marine, refusing the eye contact I was desperate to interpret.
“The captain will be with you shortly, Ma‘am,” he said.
I forced a smile. “Thank you, Sergeant.” After he disappeared behind the closed door, I heard those machine-like limbs working their way back down the corridor.
This was March 1987. The year Prozac made its debut. Gasoline was eighty-nine cents a gallon; the cost to mail a letter, just twenty-four cents. Televangelist Jim Bakker had self-destructed, much the same way I had, by way of sex-scandal.
~
The interrogation room at Military Police Headquarters was battleship gray and the size of a child’s bedroom. Under the single window, someone with a utilitarian mindset had shoved a gray metal desk; under the desk were two gray metal chairs so that interrogator and suspect were compelled to sit on the same side of the desk facing each other, or face out the window together. Which position, I wondered, would my interrogator choose?
The walls were devoid of the usual framed photographs that displayed various weaponry and aircraft, were even missing the typical reenlistment posters with their Stay Marine! messages. After ten years in the Marines, I seldom noticed the posters anymore, their propaganda blending into the environment like the green and tan camouflage uniforms we wore on field combat exercises. But, in this tiny interrogation room, the absence of reenlistment posters, the missing option of Stay Marine!, felt conspicuous.
I was leaning over the metal desk, watching Marines pick up litter, when the door of the interrogation room finally opened. A woman captain, wearing trousers and shiny oxfords the size of my husband’s, entered. I straightened to attention, feeling ridiculously feminine and outmatched in my uniform choice of a skirt and high heels.
I knew this captain. Well, not knew her in the sense that we had shared anything other than salutes when passing each other in various parking lots around the air station. But I knew the woman who towered toward the dim fluorescent light on the ceiling in that interrogation room, the woman with slicked-back, white-blond hair, face Aryan cool and sharp, as the officer-in-charge of Military Police. “At ease, Warrant Officer,” she said in a tone offering nothing for interpretation, her eye contact brief and hesitant. I placed my hands against the small of my back, and waited while she juggled from one hand to the other a legal-sized yellow pad, a pen, and a tape recorder, placing each on the metal desk, and each object, the way everything has of occupying space, further reducing the already too small room.
After closing the door, she motioned for me to take a chair. I pulled from under the desk the closer of the two chairs. I don’t know why; either the decision seemed obvious or I was too intimidated to break her sphere of personal space. The padding of the seat I had chosen was ripped. I sat, and when I raised my right leg to cross it over my left knee, the upturned tear of fabric jabbed into a muscle and tugged at my stocking so that I had no choice but to lower my foot back to the floor.
The captain pulled out the second chair. The seat was not ripped. “Good morning, Warrant Officer,” she said, sitting.
“Good morning, Ma’am.”
She popped open the compartment of the cassette recorder. Apparently satisfied to find a tape, she closed the compartment, and then sliding the machine across the desk, she seemingly divided the room into her half and my half. “So, how are you holding up, Tracy?”
The sound of my first name reverberated throughout the room. I could count on both hands the number of times in ten years a military officer had spoken my first name. Each time had been a deliberate attempt at intimacy. Something like hope was beginning to course through my veins. “I’m okay, Ma’am…given the circumstances.”
She had been scribbling across the top of the legal pad the way you do when your pen seems out of ink, but suddenly stopped to look up. She smiled with the ease of an ally. Then reaching across her half of the desk to turn on the tape recorder, she said, in a voice louder than I thought necessary, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you. Do you understand?”
I nodded, forgetting the tape recorder. She pointed to the machine.
I leaned closer. “Yes, Ma’am.”
And just like that, while outside, Marines collected litter from around the parking lot of Military Police Headquarters, while two blocks away at my own office my Public Affairs staff – my former staff – debated, even argued, over the front-page photograph for the upcoming newspaper, while my husband, Tom, half-heartedly inspected ammunition bunkers as a distraction until my phone call, while our six-year-old daughter, Morgan, warmly tucked inside an overly bright and cheerful first-grade classroom practiced simple addition or finger painted, the interrogation procedure regarding charges against me for conduct unbecoming an officer with General John I. Hopkins III, was finally underway.
~
I was eleven the first time I fell in love with a general.
On a Thursday night in 1970, a night when my brother was in the hospital recovering from a hernia operation and my mother staying the night with him, my father took me to see the movie he said everyone was talking about.
Here’s how I remember it. George C. Scott as General Patton in army uniform steps onto the stage. Salutes. In the background, an enormous American flag. We are watching him hold the salute through a trumpet call for reveille. The camera cuts to a pearl-handled pistol, the helmet with four stars, a baton, rows of medals, that pinky ring. My father’s munching popcorn, drinking a Coke.
Patton, or rather Scott as Patton, is addressing a class of recruits who would soon leave to join the fight against the Nazis. We never see the recruits, but sitting there in the dark theater next to my father, I felt strangely like one of them: the good girl who followed the rules to keep from sparking war within her family.
At the beginning of Patton, Scott delivers his famous monologue about sacrifice and bravery. My father was shaking the tub of popcorn at me and as I reached for another buttery handful, on the screen, General Patton began swearing in that voice that reminded me of tires grinding along a gravel driveway, and I pulled my hand back…You win a war by letting some other poor bastard die for his country… When the general finished, I reached for more popcorn and glanced up at my father. Underneath the fragments of moving shadows that played across his face was an odd and unfamiliar expression. I suddenly had the feeling I was sitting next to a stranger, helping myself to his popcorn.
What about war and killing and sacrifice and honor among men did my father wish to share with me? In the dark theater that night watching Patton, my father felt too far away from the life that included my mother, brother, and me. He had locked himself into a private chamber within his mind. What was he learning there? What was he questioning? Under life’s most difficult conditions, would I? Could I? What, retreat? Desert? Hold your ground? Be brave? Jump on the grenade to save the others?
Or, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe all these thoughts were only firing into me.
~
When I met John Hopkins in 1981, he was a colonel with a reputation for chewing up and spitting out Marines the way he did the butt end of his cigar. In his younger years, in 1956, he had been the tall, broad-shouldered football team captain for Navy. In the early Eighties, he commanded the Fifth Marine Regiment, the Corps’ most highly decorated combat unit.
“There’s no way Hopkins will ever allow a woman Marine reporter to cover his regiment,” my Public Affairs officer had said, shaking his head. But I had been relentless. I pleaded until he finally said it couldn’t hurt to make a phone call, and I ran from his office to the telephone on my desk in the press room.
By then, I was twenty-two and a new mother, and Tom and I were at Camp Pendleton. But after only six months I had grown bored with reporting on Officers’ Wives Club teas, Navy Relief Fund Drives, and Pet-of-the-Week features. Here, I hadn’t been allowed to cover infantry training as I had in Okinawa. A couple of years earlier, seven women had sued The New York Times for the same type of discrimination. The bastion of all newspapers had the audacity to advertise for and categorize jobs as male and female until a river of unrest among its savviest women reporters rose up to demand change.
I didn’t know all this back then. I wish I had. I wasn’t savvy enough to stay on top of current events, for had I armed myself with the news that The New York Times had been compelled to change its policy toward women I could have aimed even higher, hoped for even more change within the Marine Corps. I was hungry for an assignment of importance, something with teeth to it, when I made up my mind to be assigned to Fifth Marines as Hopkins’s beat reporter so I could cover the colonel’s upcoming combat exercise in the Mojave Desert at Twentynine Palms. The “colonel’s war” some called it. I was still trying to prove something, although what it was I couldn’t yet name. I wasn’t conscious of anything, other than of not wanting to end my military career unfulfilled, my purpose undetermined or unrealized.
The sergeant major for Fifth Marines had placed me on hold to check the colonel’s schedule. I tried to imagine the colonel’s reaction. On May 15, 1975, Hopkins had been among a company of Marines sent in by President Ford to rescue the U.S. Merchant ship, the Mayaguez from the Khmer Rouge. Before that, he had been on special assignment in Cambodia and had taken part in the evacuation of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. But by 1981, he was a recent widower, having lost his wife suddenly to a brain aneurysm. In the late Seventies, Hopkins had been a lieutenant colonel when he made Newsweek and Time magazine headlines for his off base brawling in the bars around Oceanside. He and another Marine officer had been walking shore patrol when a group of Vietnam war protestors shouted at them, Baby killers! Everyone assumed the negative publicity would wash up John’s chances for bird colonel, but he had earned a Silver Star in Vietnam for bravery, a Bronze Star as well, and so generals whitewashed the “conduct unbecoming an officer” with a letter of reprimand rather than convene a court-martial.
Truth is, John Hopkins had a reputation for doing everything the hard way. He had earned the Silver Star at thirty-one. They said Marines ever decorated with a Medal of Honor or Silver Star who live are really dead inside: half numb from shock, half crazed to prove they deserve to live at all.
~
The sergeant major was back on the phone. “The colonel will see you at 1500.”
I looked at my watch, stunned and unprepared for a meeting in less than hour. And my clothes. I was wearing a short-sleeved khaki shirt, olive-drab skirt, and black pumps. Not the combat boots and camouflage uniform I should be wearing to meet an infantry officer like Colonel Hopkins. But I couldn’t turn the opportunity down for fear there might never be another, so I told the first sergeant I would be delighted to the meet the colonel at 1500.
“Delighted! This ain’t no kind of tea party you’re coming to, Sergeant. You better not pull that kind of crap talk with John Hopkins, you hear me, Marine?”
Click. Silence. The shaking spread from my hands to a fluttering in my gut. I had blown it with the sergeant major and dressed as I was in a froufrou uniform, not boots and cammies as a war hero would expect of someone requesting to be the regiment’s beat reporter, meant I was sure to blow it with the colonel as well.
Best I can remember, the headquarters building of Fifth Marines was a white, board-sided building on a sloping California hillside. It’s gone now, so I’m told, or converted to something altogether different and benign. Inside the paneled waiting room, I looked over the trophies of sports victories, citations of valor, and the rows of grim faces, all previous commanders framed in black and white history. A Pfc. in starched cammies and mirror-like boots stepped into the lobby from behind a door, took my name and disappeared again. As I waited, I followed the chain of faces on the wall to their strongest living link and searched for something like understanding for my skirt and high heels in the eyes of Colonel John Hopkins. His were deep-set eyes, not large, but not small either. And there was the firmness of his face, chiseled along the jaw by a lineage so Caesar, so warring that it seemed set as if just ending a command. On his chest were the medals and, of course, the Silver Star.
A Pfc. led me to the colonel’s office.
Once inside, the figure leaning in the doorway straightened. He walked forward and I recognized the deep-set eyes, the firm square jaw from the photograph in the outer office, the silver wings of a colonel’s rank insignia. His handshake was warm, firm, but tender; mine felt sweaty in comparison.
His voice, the smoothness of an alto sax, was deliberate, confident. “You want to cover the regiment.” Neither a question nor a statement. He leaned overhead now, closer for my answer, and was still slowly shaking my hand. In his creased camouflage of earthy greens and browns, I was placing him among redwoods in ancient forests.
“Yes, Sir.”
He released my hand. “Why?”
“Why?”
“Why!”
I launched into everything I remembered from a half-hour’s worth of research on the regiment, its illustrious battle at Belleau Wood…“Sir, today’s stories about the regiment are important to the public. They demonstrate the Corps’ level of combat readiness to members of Congress, and to the Marines of the Fifth, and to hometowns all across America…” I had taken the tone of a politician on a stumping mission. He appeared to have lost interest, turning away to settle into the leather chair behind the desk. I remained standing, quiet.
“Have you ever fired a weapon, Sergeant?”
“No, Sir.” Surely he had known only women military police fired weapons. It would be four years later before weapons firing would be added to women’s recruit training at Parris Island.
He turned to the sergeant major. “I’m supposed to allow a woman in the field with my Marines, and to make matters worse, a woman who’s never fired a weapon?”
The sergeant major stepped forward, blocking my vision of the colonel and his of me. “Colonel, I don’t like the idea any more than you do, Sir.”
They were reminding me of everything I was not, and I felt exposed, naked, a fraud.
“Colonel,” said the sergeant major, “what if we said she had to be weapons qualified, with the M-16?” The sergeant major turned toward me, possibly searching for a reaction. I felt the flush of embarrassment. All three of us knew I wouldn’t be allowed on a rifle range.
The colonel rose from behind the desk. “I like that idea, Sergeant Major.” And to me, “Sergeant, you have three weeks to get assigned somehow to the rifle range. If you qualify with the M-16, you can accompany us to Twentynine Palms. If you can’t, tell your Public Affairs officer to send us a Marine who can. Roger that?”
“Yes, Sir.”
And, that was that. My first meeting with John Hopkins. He had cracked a door in the rigid exterior of Marine Corps tradition. Whether he meant to do so is doubtful, looking back. I imagine he never thought he would see me again as I thanked him for the audience and made a daring about-face in pumps, marching from his world, wincing at my clicking heels, and hoping against all hope my rear end wasn’t swinging like one of those saloon doors you see in Westerns. But I left thinking he had delivered a challenge, and where there was a challenge, there was hope for a victory. His word that afternoon was final; I could accept that. I could also accept his word would be honored, although the rest was not entirely up to me.
Tracy Crow is an assistant professor of creative writing at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, and the nonfiction editor of Prime Number magazine. Her essays and short stories have appeared in a number of literary journals and been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes. Under the pen name Carver Greene, Crow published the conspiracy thriller An Unlawful Order, the first in a new series to feature a military heroine.
Excerpt reprinted from Eyes Right by Tracy Crow, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright (2012) by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.
