Random Observations

WARNING:  Well-intentioned but potentially sexist commentary follows.  Continue at your own risk.

After eight weeks here at BAF, I’ve made a number of observations on some of the more mundane aspects of life while deployed.  I’ll relate them in this and a couple subsequent posts.

Today, I’m going to talk about women.  I’ll keep it clean, but I suspect I’ll still manage to offend someone.

Women in a combat zone was a tough topic for me for me to get my head around at first.  Yeah, I know, equal opportunity, breaking through the glass ceiling and all that.  But cut me some slack, I’m old school (read “dinosaur”).

In my casual, decidedly non-scientific observations here, and based on superficial physical appearance factors, I’ve sorted the women at BAF into three broad (no pun intended) categories.  This is based purely on appearance, and has nothing whatsoever to do with professional performance.

First are the women who look like men to blend in.  They sport short hair, dress in cargo pants, polo shirts and ball caps, and, for the government folks, tote a 9mm on their hips.  Tough broads.

Group two are the ones who just don’t give a crap about their appearance.  Rumpled clothes, hair that they apparently combed out with a towel, no effort at looking approachable.

Moving on to group three, we find fastidiously-done hair, make-up (applied both with and without a putty knife), jewelry, you name it.  Piercings and tattoos abound.  Judging by badge lanyards, many of the group three women seem to work for Fluor, a company that provides most of the base operations services here.  Judging by the accents, many are of East European origin.  One of our favorites, often spotted at breakfast, wears leather boots which extend above the knee along with skin-tight jeans.  She’s acquired the moniker “Hooker Boots.”  By and large, group three women look slutty.  Cheap.  Trashy.  How the hell do you find time, working in a combat zone where the temperature routinely tops 90°F, to keep yourself all dolled up like that?  Unless it’s part of your employment contract.

There’s a sort of a fourth category, but only in the broadest sense.  That would be the transgender community.  And we’ve got one.  She-who-used-to-be he.  She who, while externally female, retains the genetic code of a rather crude redneck male.  Think of your most stereotypical West Virginia hillbilly, then toss in hormone treatments and a wiener-ectomy, and you’ve got her.  Him.  Whatever.  Now those who know me know that I’m familiar with “alternate sexualities,” I’ve got some very good friends in the DC gay-lesbian-transgender community, and I have nothing at all against folks who do it differently.  Far from it.  This one is personal.  And it pains me so much because, in a supervisory position, I need to keep personalities out of it.  A leader cannot have personality conflicts with those he supervises.  But I find this individual so coarse, so abrasive and caustic, so crude, that at times it’s an effort to keep it civil.

That said, there are a lot of women here, a lot of females, but ladies are rarer than hens’ teeth.  And after all this rambling, all I can say is that I’m counting the days until I can be back in the presence of a lady.