10 things for Thursday

This is a popular topic of conversation, so I'm taking it in my own direction. Today, I'm going to give the top 10 things I wish the recruiter had told me. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying recruiters lie, or that they're shady. In fact, my recruiter was very honest. There were some things he was wrong about (relatively minor things, like the fact that I had 15 roommates in AIT, rather than the 3 he said I'd have... but many places DO have 4 people to a room. He just didn't know that Ft. Leonard Wood still used Vietnam Era accommodations.), but he never lied to me. No recruiter knows everything, and a male recruiter especially does not know everything that a female soldier is going to need to know, so there will always be things you wish the recruiter could have let you in on before you had to find out the hard way. Here are my Top 10:

10) Forget about the Drill Sergeant who resembles The Rock. Be scared of the one who might just be Napoleon's long lost twin brother. The big Drill Sergeant gets off on physical intimidation, and you'll be over it within a week. The short one is 90% guaranteed to be the most sadistic bastard will ever meet. This is the one who will pull you out of the barracks at 0100 hrs, to run laps around the brigade area in full chemical gear. In the absence of a really short male Drill Sergeant, beware the female Drill Sergeant. She's not as bad as DS Napoleon. In fact, she'll be your best friend... AFTER she makes you walk through hell. Twice.

9) Your unit will not have the regard for your job that you do. In AIT, they hype you up for your specific part of the mission so much that you think you are THE quintessential soldier. If you have an "intelligent" MOS (like, oh, I don't know... land surveying) your instructors will tell you all about how well your type is treated, and how you are so important and valuable. Then you'll get to your unit, and be treated like absolute garbage. In fact, for a while, you may spend more days picking up garbage than you ever will doing the job you spent your entire enlistment up to that point learning. You also may be tasked away from your job for a solid year if the unit wants to do that. Yes, this means that despite all the late nights and hard days you put in to graduate from the Engineer School with honors, you can still be made your First Sergeant's driver. Even the brainy (ESPECIALLY the brainy, in my unit) can be tasked to the most brainless garbage.

8) As a female soldier, your motives will ALWAYS be questioned. Most people will think you had some shady reason for enlisting in the first place. Should you decide to live a normal life that someone your age might live, including dating, eventually getting married to someone worth marrying, and even having kids, there is a significant percentage of your coworkers who will find fault in that, and use it to call your character into question. Army Times even published a letter a few months ago from a Staff Sergeant who said female soldiers get pregnant to get time off work and free maternity uniforms. First off, have you ever SEEN a maternity uniform?? It is the ugliest thing ever made. Secondly, how dare he. Female soldiers get pregnant for the same reasons anyone else does. Maybe, just maybe, in most cases, that's because they want kids. Crazy idea, I know... The fact is, the Army is used to male soldiers dating, marrying, and reproducing. If some PFC in your squad knocks up his girlfriend and needs to take her to the courthouse to marry her over lunch break, he'll get nothing but high-fives and ass-pats from everyone. Let's just say a female soldier who gets married (if it's to someone of higher rank than her, which it almost always is, as it should be) or announces her pregnancy gets QUITE the opposite reaction.

7) You are going to meet some real idiots. Brush it off. Better yet, learn that there's more to intelligence than academics. That old Sergeant who couldn't form a grammatically correct sentence if the fate of the free world depended on it, might be a genius when it comes to tactics, and if that's the case, you need him to pass that knowledge on to you. There are limits to your own understanding, and sometimes it's the most unlikely people who will be able to fill in the blanks.

6) About half of your coworkers are married. Unlike in the real world, this will actually affect you because their wives feel perfectly justified in arriving at your workplace unannounced, going to your boss about anything (if they think you looked at them wrong... or asked why they were hanging out in the motorpool during duty hours), and a great many will feel totally justified in the belief that you have no business working with their husbands (even if you're way better at the job than he could dream of being!) In the civilian world, everyone knows and accepts that the vast majority of work places are very co-ed. In the Army, the wives have not gotten this memo at all, and you as a female soldier, are going to bear the brunt of that. You're going to get blamed for a lot of things you didn't do because your coworkers' wives will do anything to screw you over. You will be talked down to, threatened, insulted, questioned incessantly, and your commander will NOT do anything about it (unless you happen to have a single female commander who knows the deal on this kind of thing. That's incredibly rare.) Avoid the wives of your unit like the plague. It's an impossible task, but try.

5) Read Army Times. Not only does it give you your necessary dose of the ever hilarious and relevant PVT Murphy cartoon and a full page of Beetle Bailey, but it'll also keep you up to date on all kinds of good stuff your command isn't going to tell you right away.

4) If you are single, you will make less money than your married coworkers because they will receive housing and food allowances, and many of them will manage to find a house for cheap and pocket much of their allowance thus giving them substantially more income than you. Therefore, they will live a very normal life while you live like Beetle Bailey in the barracks, and eat in the chow hall. Adding insult to injury, if you are lower-enlisted, you will constantly take up the slack for your married coworkers. (For NCO's, this really isn't the case because they all have to work really hard, married or not, plus they all receive housing and food allowances, none live in the barracks, and most are married anyhow.) Your married coworker has to take his wife to the doctor, pick his kids up from school, go home and dislodge his fat civilian wife's giant ass from the toilet seat where it got stuck... you name it. Your married coworkers will skate out of work a million times a week, and you will be left with it. Yes, you are making less money, dealing with daily room inspections by your First Sergeant (and mine actually strongly resembled Sarge from Beetle Bailey!!), subsisting on Army chow hall slop, AND taking up the slack for your married peers, all while catching hell from their wives because you're female. There's really nothing you can do about this since getting married just to live a better life, while common, is stupid. It's better to know going in, though. Getting blindsided by that reality sucks tremendously.

3) Plan all your dates for at least 50 miles from post. Trust me, the drive is worth not running into your boss. Military towns are small. Everyone frequents the same places. Guaranteed, the funky little diner you discovered last weekend, and the dive bar your buddy told you about, are well known to everyone in the unit. Get at least a couple counties away. This goes double if you're female, and triple if you date above your rank. Trust me, nothing in this world is more awkward than going out on a date to see your friend's band, with someone who has double to triple your rank, and having to duck out the back door of the club because your Commander just walked in. Hide everything about your off-duty life. Do whatever you want off duty as long as you can hide it. Also, try not to date within the unit. This makes it a lot harder to hide. (Says the person who married an NCO from the same unit... haha... good old Army hypocrisy.)

2) The gear they issue you is crap. Plan on blowing at least half your pay for a few months on getting the stuff you actually need.

1) Buddy system! Female soldiers MUST always use buddy system. Bad things happen if you don't, and no, you can't trust the NCO from work who's always mysteriously showing up in your office with no apparent mission there. If you see him at your barracks, don't go out unless you absolutely have to, and if he comes to your door, pretend you're asleep. If you have to go out, make sure you take at least one friend with you. You're not allowed to have pepper spray, but you can have a buddy, as many as you want. Safety is in numbers. I've seen so many girls get into such bad situations because they insisted on going places by themselves, or they trusted people they should be able to trust, but couldn't. It all would have been prevented had they taken a friend or two with them when they went out. I was fortunate to live right next door to my Team Leader, and directly downstairs from one of my best friends. I could yell through the vents for K or bang on the ceiling for S, and either of them would go with me wherever I was going. (Yes, occasionally this cost me a beer, a cheeseburger, or pack of smokes. Small price for safety.) Battle buddies don't just have your back in Basic and AIT. You have to have your battle buddies everywhere you go, and this is especially true for female soldiers. Nobody will ever tell you how important your battle buddies are. They are the most important asset you have, as you are to them.