This is the pickie of me from my military ID and there are other shots of me in the uniform, but never any from the field. They allowed us to take cameras to the field just once, tho I was still using the 35mm at the time and all the pics were of my colleagues looking fabulously feisty. (I trained with an all girl group as part of a non-friction experiment.)
I served for four years. The first half a year was great - that was the extended basic training for women, 19 weeks plus and it was like a weight-loosing farm meets an adrenaline park. Ridiculous amount of heavy lifting and rolling around, being yelled at and blowing stuff up :D It couldn't have been easy on my instructors, because I am the sort of a person who thoroughly lacks the organ for ambition: I just do stuff cause it's fun. They'd yell:" Pick up your pace Goddamn it! Do you really wanna be the last?!!" and I'd continue hopping around, shrugging:" Well, sir, look at those girls in the front - they are really into all this, they should probably get the glory." Fact was, there was plenty of stuff I was best at, athletics just wasn't one of them. I usually assembled the rifle fastest, I just never announced it. (Got caught once and the whole squad had to do 5o push-ups while I stood attention, being punished). I usually paid the tiny mass-destroyer's focus in class and got top marks on the exams and some of the officers appreciated me for it. The bit that stood out, though, was my marksmanship. I far surpassed my mates and some of the officers and had a natural feel for weapons. There was a time when I couldn't hit anything smaller than a landscape, but that quietly changed and evidently I got the talent from my mother (as dad couldn't hit water falling from a boat.) Be it hand guns or my darling AK, I was good. And it was brilliant, all those terrain exercises. Just image wearing all the field gear, covered in a camouflage poncho, paint on your face, grass in your helmet, at night, in the rain, shooting with old sniper rifles at targets half a click away...
Then of course, because girls aren't supposed to be better at the boom boom bang bang stuff than the boys, I was assigned in an old tank mine storage in the woods outside my home town, sweeping the yard, opening the road ramp if need presented itself, running after my geriatric cunt of a superior asshole, saying 'Yes, sir, no, sir' to him for the next four years. Pay was a joke, I never even saw a rifle after that, I was constantly being demoted, at times to a cleaning lady for the rest of the men and in the end, because I complained about being the only one constantly getting the negative work reviews, the captain asked me to sign a piece of paper saying I agree to being cut down a rank to fit my position and then my work reviews will be positive. I'd be less in rank and pay than from before I enlisted. So I signed a similar piece of paper, quiting, went to the press and unleased PR Dogville on the old farts. Pen mightier than the sword yet again..
But there was a positive side to sitting on guard for twelve hours nightly.. (Besides secretly painting and writing, evidently.) Not a single Zen monk could EVER challenge me to a patience contest again and for a while I had the superb skill of being able to sleep standing up.
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