All That She Can Be

It’s a little past eight in the morning, and Katharine T. Waterman ’09 is doing the high knee crawl across the floor of the gym, a fake M-16 cradled in her arms. It’s a drill she does over and over. Wait for the signal, race forward, drop to the ground. She drags herself ahead with her elbows, knees scraping against the floor. The hard rubber M-16 is heavier than it looks.

Waterman woke up two hours ago to catch the 6:20 a.m. shuttle to MIT. She didn’t eat breakfast, just put on her camouflage uniform and combat boots and headed out the door. Harvard’s seven-minute rule doesn’t apply to ROTC. When you’re in the Reserve Officer Training Corps, there are no excuses for being late.

Waterman starts every Wednesday much like this, dressed in her BDUs (army slang for battle dress uniform), studying military tactics, and practicing the skills she’ll need as an officer in the U.S. Army. After graduating, she must serve for at least four years, stationed somewhere in the world with a platoon of soldiers under her command.

For now, though, after training, Waterman heads back to her freshman dorm room. It’s spotless and decorated in many shades of pink. There are ruffled pink pillows, a pink bedspread, and pictures of friends in pink floral frames. On top of her bookshelf, above the books for her freshman seminar, “War in American Society,” is a purse-shaped lamp and a plastic tiara. There’s a pink trash can in the corner and a sequin-studded sign reading “Princess” on the wall.

She leaves her combat boots outside the door next to her pack, which is stuffed with a sleeping bag, rations, bulletproof Kevlar helmet, compass, digging tool—everything a solider needs to survive.

Inside her room, Waterman changes for class. She lets down her blonde hair from the tight bun required by army regulations. Since she’s not running late, she puts on pearls and a pink dress. Bronzer, mascara, a delicate sheen of lip gloss, and she’s ready to start her academic day. It’s 9:45 a.m. Most of her classmates are just waking up.



YOU DO WHAT?

When people ask Waterman about her extracurriculars, she tells them that she rows and does ROTC. No, really, they say. They don’t believe her.

“It’s always like, you’re in ROTC? The vast majority of people are surprised,” Waterman says.

This may partly be a response to her love of pink, she says. But the other three Harvard women in Army ROTC often get similar reactions. Many Harvard students seem to have preconceived notions about the army; they do not expect to see Harvard women in uniform. “You don’t fit the stereotype of white male,” says Jessica D. Williams ’08, an African-American who has been in Army ROTC since her freshman fall.

These women deal every day with the complexities of their decision. Classmates don’t understand why they joined a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” institution, or why they’re willing to give up four years of their lives. When the cadets wear their camouflage BDUs around campus, other students ask them why they decided to join ROTC. Often it is simply an exchange of pleasantries. But sometimes inquirers mean something more, though they might not say it out loud. What if they send you to Iraq? Do you like shooting people? Are you just doing it for the money? Isn’t the military really sexist?

Female cadets like Williams and Waterman walk a difficult line. As women in ROTC, they’re a minority within a minority. They may never do as many push-ups as the male cadets, but they want to prove themselves as soldiers. It can feel like a dual life, slipping out of combat boots and into high heels—and back to boots again. These women still want to be part of the band of brothers.



THE SERGEANT MAJOR

On an outdoor track at MIT, the ROTC students, called cadets, stand in a four-row formation. Everyone is dressed identically—camouflage pants, camouflage jackets. One cadet comes forward to start physical training. This is the sergeant major, a senior responsible for the smooth functioning of the whole Paul Revere battalion—about 50 students in all, drawn from seven colleges in the Boston area.

“Battalion, attention!” the sergeant major barks.

“No Fear Paul Revere!” the cadets chant back.

Many of them are tall, broad-shouldered men. They tower over their sergeant major, who wryly describes her height as “five foot nothing.” And they obey her commands without hesitation.

The sergeant major this semester is Harvard senior Rachel R. Sarvis ’06. She is used to challenging first impressions. “It’s not like I’m some huge guy walking in,” she says. But she has discovered that doesn’t really matter. She has seen “big, buff-looking guys” fail as leaders because they reveal their nervousness with words like “well”, “um”, or “yeah.”

Sarvis, though, didn’t always have this confidence. When she joined ROTC, she expected that the male cadets would resent her. “What helped me get over it was realizing that the guys didn’t care,” she says. “It wasn’t a huge deal to them.”

The decorations on Sarvis’ formal dress uniform show how far she has come. She has four ribbons on her jacket, evidence of her athletic and academic achievement. On her shoulder is a braided rope, signifying her membership in Pershing Rifles, a military honors fraternity at MIT. The selection process is so intense that the majority of the pledges usually drop out. Sarvis, one of two women in the 12-cadet group, leads the fraternity as its commanding officer.

All this prepares her for the move she will soon make from commanding other ROTC cadets to commanding enlisted soldiers, most of whom will be men. Sarvis has chosen to be in the Corps of Engineers and hopes to be stationed in Germany. Wherever she ends up, she will be responsible for 40 soldiers in her platoon, some of whom may be older than she. They will likely have more military experience, too. “It’s pretty daunting. I’m a 21-year-old college student, and next year I’m supposed to go out and lead these people,” she says.

But she knows what she needs to do. “Caring about your soldiers, realizing that they have families, making sure you put them before yourself—I understand that sounds like an army commercial, but it really is a huge deal,” she adds.



AT THE HEAD OF THE PACK

It’s not easy to run in combat boots, but the cadets do. “If you get hotspots in your boots, you can stop,” a male cadet calls out. As the cadets circle around the track, Williams is one of the front runners. She’s on the track team and has no trouble keeping up with her male counterparts.

The female cadets say that the only time they are held to different standards is during the periodic physical fitness test, which scholarship cadets must pass in order to stay in the program. The number of sit-ups men and women must complete in two minutes is the same, but men have to complete the two-mile run faster, and they must do more push-ups in a two-minute period. The female cadets say that this policy is only recognizing the biological differences between men and women, not setting the bar any lower.

In fact, in the last physical fitness test, Williams scored 292 points out of a possible 300. Only three male cadets in the entire battalion scored higher. Two cadets scored 300: one man and one woman. When an officer awarded certificates to these cadets in recognition of their achievement, he gave a short speech in praise of each of them. He made no reference to gender.

During one combat PT session last week, there is a rare reference to gender. Inspired by the motto, “Leave no fallen comrade behind,” the cadets practice carrying each other. In one technique, a cadet is supposed to grab another under the arms and wrap his hands around his chest. “If you are carrying a female, you will obviously not do that,” says the male cadet in charge of the drill, and the other cadets laugh.

Roxanne E. Bras ’09, who just transferred to the Army from Navy ROTC, decides to work with two other female cadets. But Williams is comfortable practicing with a male cadet. The exercise requires the cadets to run back and forth with a fellow cadet piggy-backed or in a fireman’s hold over their shoulder.

One female cadet struggles to reach the finish line, and the waiting men cheer encouragement. There’s plenty of laughter, but, considering how the cadets are holding each other, none of it is especially awkward. Only one female cadet grins self-consciously as her male partner cradles her against his chest with competent arms.



A DUAL LIFE

One thing conspicuously missing from these male-female interactions is flirtation. This is not a formal rule, says Captain Eric McKinney, one of the adult officers who runs the ROTC program. Cadets are allowed to date, as long as they do not date between ranks. But the women say that flirting just does not happen.

All of the cadets call each other by their last names, on and off the training fields. The last names set a different tone.

“Even outside [of ROTC], they kind of identify me on this same level playing field,” Waterman says. “It would be very rare for anyone to ever transcend that playing field into a romantic relationship.”

But Waterman, who is dating another Harvard freshman, is still surprised by how thoroughly ROTC reconfigures interactions between men and women. During one weekend training exercise, Waterman expected that male and female cadets would be told to sleep in different rooms. Instead, all the cadets unrolled their sleeping bags next to each other and, still in uniform, went to sleep. In any other setting, the situation might have brought some sexual tension. But with the battalion, it felt natural.

One contributing factor may be that the army simply does not give women the opportunity to express femininity. For example, the women’s formal uniforms are modeled after the men’s, although women have the option to wear a skirt. The mint and olive green outfit is undeniably dowdy.

“We joke a lot about the army female class-A uniform,” Williams says. “It’s so ugly.”

And though attempts have been made to adapt the formal pants to suit the female form, none has quite succeeded. The cadets complain that the pants ride up far above their belly buttons. “Men look good in uniform,” Waterman says. “We don’t look good in ours.”

While women do not have to keep their hair cut short like the men, if it is long enough to touch their collars it must be put up in a bun. They cannot wear earrings, even studs, or makeup, or nail polish. On the shuttle one morning on the way to ROTC Williams discovers some traces of polish on her fingernails. “Does anyone have any nail polish remover?” she asks dryly.

“Ooooh, busted!” a male cadet replies.

These are not major concerns for the women. They understand the rationale behind the regulations: professionalism in dress is important, and all soldiers are supposed to look the same.

But they can sometimes feel that they are living a dual life, going back and forth between camouflage and pearls. Sarvis, who likes to wear glittering chandelier earrings, thinks she has become much more consciously feminine when out of uniform since joining ROTC.

Waterman tries to resist that separation. She purposefully takes a pink sports bag to ROTC rather than a generic backpack, and when she wears her BDUs to class, she brings her laptop in a hot pink bag.

But Bras and Waterman agree that it can also be a relief to be in uniform; they are judged only by their performance, not their gender. “It’s an equalizing factor to not be allowed to be girly,” says Waterman.



MILITARY DISCIPLINE

It’s a weekday night in Thayer, and Bras is arguing with her friend Catherine Buzney ’09. Buzney thinks the rule that women’s hairstyles must always be tidy is unreasonable. At its core, this is a conversation about military discipline.

“What if you can’t help it if your hair doesn’t stay up?” Buzney says.

“Well, you should have,” Bras says firmly. “Can’t help it” is not in her military vocabulary.

“Well, what if you have a kind of hair that just can’t stay up?”

“Shave it off,” Bras says instantly. She’s joking—sort of.

Bras’ parents met at a military base in Texas. Her mother was an Air Force nurse, her father a Dutch pilot serving in the US through a NATO exchange. Discipline, especially on her father’s side, was an important part of Bras’ upbringing.

If something went wrong with the car when her family was on a road trip, her father would recite aloud the steps he had been taught for dealing with an airborne crisis. “Assess situation,” he would say. “Alert commanding officer.” And during her high school tennis matches, he would shout traditional military encouragements to her in Dutch. “Pain is good! Bleed more!” he would say.

Sarvis feels that too many outsiders misinterpret military discipline. The army makes them think of drill sergeants and mindless marching. “It’s not just blindly following orders, and it’s not having someone else make up your mind for you,” she says.



NEW OPPORTUNITIES, NEW DANGERS

There is one order, though, the women must follow.

Women in the military are barred from direct combat positions. Retired Major General Kathryn G. Frost—who, at the time of her retirement, was the highest ranking woman in the U.S. Army—explains that the reasons are varied.

The relative strength and endurance of women is one concern. So is personal hygiene—in a combat situation, women who are menstruating may not have access to appropriate sanitation

Accommodating women on the front lines would also require significant infrastructure investments, like creating separate toilet and sleeping facilities for women.

Finally, Frost says, some people outside the military worry that if combat units are integrated, men and women may focus on each other—not on their mission. Although people in the military know this would not be an issue, Frost says, societal biases still have to be dealt with.

But in Iraq, banning women from combat may be something of a moot point, according to Captain McKinney, who recently returned from Iraq. With insurgents attacking American soldiers on all sides, there is no clear front line in Iraq. McKinney, while traveling in a convoy, noted that a woman was in control of the machine gun on the back of the truck. “Essentially, that was where the front line was,” he says.

Frost called the war in Iraq a “threshold event” for women in the army. “Women are showing by their everyday deeds that they can do any job the nation asks them to do,” she says. Doing these jobs means that women are also facing more risk. As of Feb. 4, 2006, 48 women have been killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom, according to a Department of Defense website.



FACING THE RISK

After attending a young soldier’s funeral this summer, Williams began to think more about the risks she could face. “That’s kind of sobering,” Williams says.

For Sarvis, the realities of combat are much more immediate. Over the next four years, Sarvis faces the possibility of being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. “Nobody wants to get deployed,” she says, “but that’s nothing that would stop me from signing up.”

Through ROTC and Pershing Rifles, Sarvis has studied the skills she would need in a combat zone. She knows how to knock out a bunker. She has studied how to clear a room, set up an ambush, and react to enemy contact. She has practiced these battle drills on paper and during field training exercises. The guns they used were real, but loaded with blanks.

Sarvis can’t know what it would be like to perform these maneuvers in a combat situation, or how she would feel if she had to aim her gun at an enemy soldier and fire. Considering the alternatives is one way she understands how she could decide to pull the trigger. “Are you putting your soldier’s lives in danger by not doing this?” she says. “If you’re in that situation and you don’t shoot, what’s going to happen?”

As a soldier, Sarvis does not think that her personal opinions about a war will make a difference to her in the field. “It doesn’t matter to a great extent whether you agree with the policies behind [the war]. You’re there, you have something to do, that’s the choice you have to make right then,” she says. “Are you going to sit there and do nothing or are you going to take care of these people, and get the mission done?”

To Sarvis, serving in combat does not require believing in the president, the reasons behind the war, or even the military as an institution.

What it means, she says, “is believing that your first responsibility is to your soldiers. It’s believing that despite everything else, despite your fears or your political views, your first loyalty is to those forty guys around you.”



HEARING THE CALL

For Waterman, the constant challenges of ROTC are the best parts. During water combat training, for instance, she had to tread water in her BDUs and combat boots, and was also blindfolded and pushed off the high dive, “a major adrenaline rush.”

In college, she says, the focus is on personal achievements in academics and extracurriculars. She likes spending her mornings absorbed in what she feels is a bigger endeavor.

“There’s a sense of belonging to something that is larger than yourself,” Waterman says.

Bras feels that her service extends beyond her own life as well. Her father is a pilot for American Airlines and his colleagues were among those killed in the Sept. 11 attacks. “That could have been my father, that very easily could have been my father’s life,” Bras says.

She felt a huge sense of anger and wished she could track down the terrorists who had arranged the attack herself. “The audacity of people to take away American life” shocked her, she says.

The military servicemen and women she worked with at her local Republican organization also influenced her. Though she says many ROTC cadets share conservative views, political discussions are rare within the ranks. They might damage the unity of the battalion.

But for some, the politics don’t matter. Williams, whose family has a strong military tradition, found joining the army a natural thing to do. Williams was also inspired when she read Colin Powell’s “My American Journey” in sixth grade. “As a minority, being black and female, I’ve always viewed the army as offering more equality and a better work environment for minorities,” she says.

The immediate financial benefits of joining ROTC, of course, are also significant. As a freshman, Waterman says, she receives a full-tuition scholarship, a $900 book allowance each semester, and a $250 stipend every month. The stipend increases by $50 each year, she says. She appreciates the financial benefits of ROTC, but says they did not play a role in her decision to join.

For the other cadets, the funds offered by ROTC were definitely a consideration.

Bras decided to apply to ROTC when she received her early acceptance letter from Harvard. Her mother, Karen Bras, says that their family does not qualify for Harvard’s financial aid. “The money was part of it, but if she didn’t like it, she wouldn’t have stayed in,” she says.



INSIDE THE YARD

The female cadets often highlight the idealism that they see in military service. At Harvard, however, discussion of the military is usually negative, and this frustrates them. Media coverage of ROTC always focuses on the Solomon Amendment and the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, which requires homosexuals in the military to hide their orientation. The women say these controversial policies have nothing to do with their ROTC experience.

ROTC has been banned from the Harvard campus since 1969. The ban originated with Vietnam War-era protests, but it has continued because faculty and students say the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy is discriminatory.

Bras wishes Harvard were more like a state school she visited, where the ROTC office was in the middle of campus, and the cadets trained in front of everyone. “I’ve had some people ask me, ‘Do you have a gun in your room?’ and I’m like, ‘No, do you?’” Bras says.

Williams says she understands the arguments of those who criticize the military because of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. But, she says, “It’s going to be a win-lose situation no matter what.” By banning ROTC from the Harvard campus, “I feel like you’re ostracizing a different type of student, the cadets who are in ROTC,” Williams says.

When they wear their BDUs to class on Tuesdays, the cadets say other students often avoid or ignore them. “Some people walking by see you for the first time in uniform and they don’t say anything. Even if they know you, they’ll just walk by. It’s kind of awkward,” Williams says.

While in uniform, they are rarely targeted by any overtly critical comments, the cadets say. But they have to grapple with implicit attitudes about the military. Waterman thinks Americans who call soldiers “baby killers” or “murderers” are missing the point. What the soldiers are fighting for, she says, are American freedoms, like the freedom of speech that allows citizens to criticize the military. “I think the people who often give the military grief neglect that the army is doing everything for that one person who is condemning it,” she says.

Waterman says that she would consider herself a pacifist. At the same time, she says she believes that war can be necessary as “the price of freedom.” It’s a trite phrase, she says, but she thinks there is truth in it.



IN FULL REGALIA

Waterman’s father flies up from Virginia to accompany her to Friday’s military ball. Waterman and her father have always been very close, but her decision to join ROTC surprised him. It seemed uncharacteristic. “This is the girl that didn’t like going to the beach because it was dirty,” he says in an interview before the ball.

At the ball, held at the Hyatt Regency near MIT, dress uniforms with gleaming buttons and insignia mingle with traditional evening gowns and tuxedoes. Many men and women are dressed alike in uniform. The men in tuxes look almost exotic.

The guests begin to move into the ballroom where dinner will be served. The official beginning of the event is the display of the colors. Everyone remains standing as a line of cadets enters bearing the American flag, and the flags of the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force. The huge room is silent.

As one of the seven cadets in the Color Guard, Waterman holds the Army flag in her white-gloved hands. Waterman walks behind the rifleman, who leads the line, and a cadet holding the American flag. She and the other cadets march slowly, trying to keep in step. When they arrived early to practice, they had a hard time marching exactly together. Now, as they cross the wooden dance floor in front of the podium, the beat of their footsteps is audibly regular.

In the photos of herself in her room, Waterman is usually hugging a friend, and always flashing her wide, white grin. The photographs taken of her tonight will be different. Her face is serious, almost frowning, as she tries to hold her flag steady and perfectly upright.

It wasn’t easy, she says later, because the flag was very heavy, especially for a woman. She was nervous about the technicalities at first: the flag is not supposed to touch the ground or brush the ceiling.

But as she marches those worries disappear, and she contemplates the symbolism of what she is doing. She is carrying the flag to represent not only her own battalion, but the entire army. We’re fighting under this flag, she thinks, and I am holding it, holding it for everyone else to see. Even out of uniform, sitting in her pristine pink room, she feels the same way. She is at her desk working on a paper, a radio broadcast of a basketball game playing in the background. Last year, she wouldn’t have noticed if the “Star Spangled Banner” came on. Now, she stops what she is doing, sits completely still in her chair, and listens. She can’t type while her anthem is playing. It just wouldn’t feel right.