These are American Soldiers

Second Lt. Marie C. Marcum sparkles.

But it’s not the early morning sun, which highlights her shimmery eye shadow and bejeweled butterfly necklace and lingers on her diamond ring and the rhinestones adorning the drawstrings on her skirt. It’s her eyes — a clear green, not at all like the dingy olive and tan camouflage uniform that she signed much of her adult life away to 14 years ago.

These eyes have looked down in humiliation and away from harassment. They have watched in horror and with an intimate understanding of what would happen next as the Twin Towers fell. These eyes have squinted under the scorching sky of Taji, Iraq, felt the searing heat of an improvised explosive device, and been the source of many, many tears.

But the tears were no match for Marcum, who not only survived Operation Iraqi Freedom II with no long-term health problems, hearing loss, or fallen comrades, but came back to the states, joined IU’s ROTC, and was commissioned as a second lieutenant this past December. She is unabashedly outspoken about her tenure in the United States Army — one that began at age 17 and now that she’s 30 years old, is only beginning to wind down, until or unless her number is called up once more.

That’s a day Marcum isn’t looking forward to. While deployed in 2004, the global war on terror wasn’t the only battle she fought. There was a battle within herself and with her peers, one that no amount of training could prepare her for.

“It’s a man’s Army, it is,” she says. “And I hate to say that because I’m pretty optimistic when it comes to things, but they are not going to change it because of females.”

The numbers certainly seem to agree. Women make up 14 percent of the active Army and work in 91 percent of all Army occupations. That’s six men to every one woman, not counting the divisions where women are prohibited from participating. The Army Reserves and the Army National Guard are made up of 23.2 percent and 13.3 percent women, respectively. And as of 2007, women had served about 170,000 tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But these numbers reveal little about the struggles Marcum and so many female soldiers like her face day-to-day on base, in the barracks, and in the shadows of their male counterparts.

Just because women aren’t technically allowed in direct combat didn’t stop Marcum from getting caught in life-threatening situations with each mission. Front lines are a thing of the past. In this pre-2009 Iraq, there were miles of dirt roads littered with IEDs waiting to detonate. Mortared buildings, suicide bombers aplenty, and perfectly timed ambushes were the new face of war. Marcum’s job in transportation seemed easy enough: hauling fuel back and forth in giant tankers. But over there, Marcum says, it wasn’t a question of getting hit — that was inevitable — but a matter of who would be next.

“We changed up our routes, or we’d change up what time we went, just to not establish a pattern. But they still got us. ... You’re just like, ‘One of us is going to get hit. Who is it today?’ You can almost take bets. You can almost predict,” she says. “You were like ‘OK, now is it the middle they want to hit, or is it the end? It’s probably the middle so they can break up the convoy. Maybe it’s the end, because then that person can get kidnapped or get taken because they’re at the end and nobody realizes it. Or is it the beginning, because they want to stop the whole convoy?’” 

One night, Marcum turned to her co-worker and said she knew they were going to be struck by a roadside bomb. And they were. Be it a woman’s intuition or just bad luck, an IED went off on the driver’s side of the tanker. Marcum was in the driver’s seat. As the name implies, improvised explosive devices are crafted of leftover munitions from three decades of internal and external conflict. They vary immensely in size and damage, but fortunately for Marcum, her tanker could still operate, and she was able to keep driving to the convoy’s destination after the panic had passed.

“I freaked out for like five minutes,” says Marcum, who completed the mission with a severely cracked windshield and no injuries. “I was crying and screaming. ... Then I just calmed down. It was really fast — it was probably two or three minutes. And then everybody went back to their vehicles ... I was fine. I was just shaken, and I couldn’t hear for 30 seconds.”

Those minutes of freak-out were a dangerous sacrifice. Remaining composed and stoic is doubly important for women in the military. Tears, emotions, and depression are all signs of vulnerability — as if being physically weaker weren’t enough. Of the 21 women in Marcum’s 170-person unit, two were sent home for battle fatigue, which Marcum describes as post-traumatic stress disorder at its absolute worst.

The women, who were housed in a section of an old converted jail, sought solace in each other. “Being a female over there, you just toughen up a lot. You did not let the guys see you down. If you cried or anything, you stayed in your room and cleaned up as best you could before you came out so no one knew,” Marcum says. “You bottle a lot of stuff up. You could share it with the other girls if you trusted them enough.”

This sort of band of sisters was a support group — a place where they could dig deep down and be the feminine women they had come close to losing touch with after months of poor hygiene, sheared-off hair, and ill-fitting, unisex uniforms.

“You do have to sacrifice your femininity. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it. You sacrifice it,” Marcum says.

And so, in a last-ditch effort to preserve their inner girly-girls, Marcum and the women turned to the ultimate brand-name of American femininity: Victoria’s Secret. When they could find the time and Internet connection, they would order all things frilly, lacy, and pink. It was mostly just soft sleepwear, nothing too sexy, but enough to take them away from the ultra-masculine world of the military — at least while they dreamed. Those sacred moments were often destroyed by a trip to the washroom. The men in their unit, their own co-workers, would stare.

“We’re trying to be girls ... and they would just stare at you. It’s just constant ... They’re not supposed to be professional. They’re grunts, they are,” Marcum says. “Maybe somewhere along their training they were told they were supposed to be (professional), but it just kind of all goes out the tube when you go to war. It’s just survive.”

The harassment didn’t stop there. The crude and crass language was unavoidable, and the temptation was unbearable. Women who were not in a committed relationship back home, such as Marcum, became prey.

“Every one of those guys will cheat. I kid you not. They will all cheat. Every single, last one of them,” Marcum, who was married in May 2007, says.

She was forced to spend much of her time alone just to avoid the feeling of constantly being on parade. “It’s very hard not to break down, not to be vulnerable from guys, because you’re so flipping lonely.” Later, she added, “You have to be aware to manipulation, aware to your own weaknesses, and you need someone to keep you accountable.”

Tensions built far beyond sexual, and it wasn’t pretty. Little everyday things like peeing in a Port-A-Potty became a battle. “Guys can stand up, but us? We have to sit down all the time, and it’s hard to squat if you’re short. You’re always sweaty and hot and all you want to do is sit down, get out, and go. ... We get UTIs because we hurry up out of the bathroom or we hold our pee too long because the guys are like, ‘It takes you so long to go to the bathroom, blah, blah, blah,’” Marcum mimicks. “We have to take so much crap off, and they just unbutton it, button it.”

Getting her period was even worse, until she figured out how to regulate it with birth control. Other times the women had to deal with being called “gay,” because they refused to give in to the men’s propositions for sex. Marcum was also tormented for running slower than the men during their regular PT tests. It never seemed to end.
And then it was over. And she didn’t want to talk about it.

“Everyone was like, ‘So, how was it?’ I’m like, ‘How do you think it was? It was crap. It was war. It’s a place that is unlike the United States. It’s completely backwards. How do you think it went?’”

Specialist Megan Lewis, 25, served in the same war Marcum described, but her experience is unrecognizable in comparison.

Like Marcum, Lewis, who graduated from IU last spring, enlisted after high school. And like Marcum, it was before Sept. 11, before the threat of war. Aside from both owning iPhones, similarities between the two don’t exist. Lewis enlisted in the Indiana National Guard to pay for school and serve her country, but says she gained a lot more than that from her experience. She met her husband, Evan Lewis, in her unit. They married young, she 20 and he 22, and a year later found themselves spending their first wedding anniversary in Al Taqaddum (TQ), Iraq.

Although they were deployed together, it was as if they were no longer married. They weren’t permitted to live with each other or be publicly affectionate, but just having each other was an advantage. Because of Evan, Lewis had more of an “in” with the gang, admitting she was probably the most integrated of all the women.

“Getting accepted into the group is a little difficult, and it took a while because the guys in the unit had to guard themselves so closely about what they said to whom, because they were afraid they would get in trouble for it,” Lewis says. “After a while though, they realized that I was never going to do that.”

She never once felt victimized or harassed by the men in her unit.

“I always felt as an equal, just different,” she says. But she might have found the secret to fitting in by adopting their sense of humor. “We’re very crass. And being a woman, you almost have to be crasser. You have to tell the dirtier jokes, you have to cuss more, you have to do all those things just to keep up. ... When you’re on duty, there kind of is no femininity. You’re a soldier, that’s what you are. There’s no complaining or crying or throwing a fit.”

As a cable and wire systems maintainer and node center operator, Lewis spent most of her time on base in an office. But the threat of an attack always ran thick in the air. When Evan and Megan’s office building was mortared with them inside, the fear gave way to adrenalin. Both went unharmed, but a good friend was injured.

“You’re on damage control at that point. You’re trying to do your job so the emotions don’t really come into it. Later, they certainly do, but not at the time,” she recounts. “I think the most stressful part for me was the woman who was hurt was really upset — she was going into shock. She kept telling me, ‘I don’t want to die.’ How do you explain to someone who’s in shock, ‘You’re not going to die, you’re fine’? It’s really difficult.”

When they weren’t working, Megan and Evan tried to maintain a degree of normalcy by reading science-fiction novels, watching DVDs, and ordering things from Amazon.com. When they reminisce about their year in Iraq, they speak of it as if they are chatting about summer camp. Megan enjoyed the financial pay off, as well as the break from bill-paying and everyday responsibilities. Evan equates his experience to living in the dorms again, Xbox and all.

However, their adventure in Iraq did not come without its lasting effects. Both suffer from self-diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder, mostly induced by loud noises. But always remaining positive, Lewis hopes she’ll be able to deal with fireworks in the near future. Aside from PTSD, they experienced a rift with their old life upon returning to IU, finding a large disconnect between themselves and their peers, but they eventually found companionship with the IU Student Vets. Lewis is no longer serving, but spends much of her time working for the ever-expanding Student Veterans of America organization, a year-old group dedicated to advocating for student veterans, a cause she’s passionate about.

“I made the decision to enlist when I was 17, and I couldn’t have even comprehended the way it would affect my life now,” she says. “It’s who I am. You can’t take that part out of me without destroying who I am.”

That part of Lewis must be the same part Spc. Sarah Robb felt was missing from her life her first few semesters of college, so she followed the footsteps of her older sister and enlisted in the Indiana National Guard without consulting her parents. There’s no need to warn her of the hardships she’ll likely face in Afghanistan when she’s deployed in August. She won’t have it. The 23-year-old IU senior is almost as fiery as her hair, with will and determination far larger than her small frame.

It would seem Robb has never met a challenge she didn’t like, be it finishing two marathons in a year (one with an injured knee), excelling in her international studies major, or deciphering the theories of age-old philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Stuart Mill. So what’s 400 days in Afghanistan?

“It’s almost like we’re seen as not necessarily strong enough, or that we can’t do that, but I don’t want that crutch. I don’t want somebody to say, ‘Oh, you’re a woman, you can’t lift this, you can’t do this.’ If you’re giving me a job and I try it and fail, OK, so I failed. But at least I tried it. I want that opportunity — I want to be able to have it,” she says. “It also feels really good being stronger than men.”

Robb, like Megan Lewis, will work primarily on-base, as an intel analyst, a position requiring top-secret clearance. It’s also a field heavily dominated by men. She is one of a small number of women in her unit, but she’s unconcerned with the matters of sexual tension and admits to not really even noticing when it’s happening. She means business, and she expects the same of her co-workers.

She draws much of her inner strength from her physical strength, and acts as a motivator for friends and fellow soldiers alike — always pushing them to run that extra mile. But what happens when she needs someone to give her a push? It’s a very real concern for Robb, who is extremely close with her family – especially her mother — and relies on them for support on a daily basis.

“I’m most scared about getting in an emotional rut that I can’t get out of without a female companion,” she says. “And by female companion, I mean a woman that I can go and talk to and understand where I’m coming from.”

But there’s no doubt she’ll empower herself and those around her. Her winner’s attitude will keep her going all through her deployment, her service, and even through law school when the time comes around.

“At the end of the day,” she says, “you look back and say, ‘I did that, and that was so cool.’”

Angst, excitement, a sense of duty. All are feelings that Marcum, Lewis, and Robb described, and yet, it seems none of them even consider, or worry about, the sacrifice they’ve signed up for, the one far beyond compromising their femininity: injury or even death. At first glance, these brave women seem like the last people to serve in war. But for them, this is their 9-to-5. There is no GI Jane, one-armed push-up, Hollywood nonsense. They are soldiers first and then women, serving their country but always preserving themselves.

“It’s just” ­­— Marcum says, pausing to pick her words — “very hard to be a female in the military.”