Devastation

I remember a day in my graduate program that I called my mom to pick me up and take me to lunch, and I cried all through lunch and all the way back to school...over some insult I can't remember. It was devastating at the time, and I remember thinking I could never face my colleagues or professors after whatever it was. Of course, I did, and, of course, it was probably nothing.

I couldn't have imagined the years that would follow of incessant abuse for no obvious reason. When I joined the army, I imagined that the training would be physically hard and that every effort would have an obvious reason to the army's benefit. But what I found was a population of war-weary, embittered individuals looking to humble the civilians given to them for training. I endured what can only be called abuse for the sole reason of stilting the egos of humans that had been too far degraded themselves.

Living the cliche II

One of the first days I was at the unit, one of the stranger females (and they were all strange let me tell you) looked at me closely and leaned in to impart some wisdom she had gained from a previous unit: "You know, I was told that you just meet the same people over and over again in each band you go to...and it is SO true! You are just like this girl I knew at Stewart." And she turned away without even looking for a response from me with a satisfied look on her face that she had now found my slot and that I could now be essentially ignored. It might have been paranoia on my part, but I had the feeling that her casual intimacy when talking to me after that was simply because she imagined she was literally talking to someone else. Someone I might as well have been in her opinion. Isolated, this would only be the description of a rather misled individual, but as a systemic flaw, it is rather frightening.

Tom and I were forced to move on base for some time in the middle of my service period, and so we were exposed to the subculture of military children. We were just driving into the garage with our first load when I looked into the rearview mirror and saw a veritable swarm of little people. Barely waiting for me to open the door, the first wave was on me: "You moving in? How many kids you got? Not any?!" And then, with only a brief reawakening of interest when they saw the cats, they left and only returned in the following months when their schools were doing fundraisers. I watched these children after that first day however, and was disturbed to see the fluidity of relationships and near panic to establish immediate cliques and bonds. Certainly, every child looks for the comfort of friends, but these little ones in the midst of the war machine depended on assimilating similar friends and patterns to whatever ones they had known at the previous post. It is the rule that each soldier is moved to a different station every one to three years, so the children have so little time to outline their comfort zone and the friendships that define it.

All that jazz...

The first day at work was graced with yet another audition. The schoolhouse had certified me as an army pianist, but everyone knows that that doesn't mean a whole lot. The sweat was trickling down my back and beading on my forehead before I even sat at the keyboard. There was really no question what the outcome of this would be. My music training did nothing for my actual jazz abilities, but it certainly was enough for me to know without doubt that I was terrible. To make it even worse, the combo leader pulled up a chart that I had actually played before: "Autumn Leaves". I now know that it doesn't really get any easier or more straight ahead than this tune, but at that moment I felt an increase in anxiety as I couldn't at least say, "Well, I've never played this song before." And sure enough, we weren't even through the head before SSG Cryer stopped everything and the pain really began. "So what did they teach you up there?" No preamble. No pretense. Just utter contempt.

The first gig was a week later. Welcome to the unit, here's your blues, now go play for five-hundred officers what you don't even feel good playing in the practice room. The drummer and I went early to set up, taking the big, white cargo van to carry all our gear. This also went on the growing list of things I was not comfortable with. The biggest thing I had ever driven was my parents' minivan, and here I was driving government property at least twice that size and exponentially more awkward. It was, apparently, the band's habit to drive right up to the back doors of the ballroom we performed in, which required maneuvering through a rather small lane between a pool house and a large flower planter. No little voice visited me and recommend a ground guide; the nerves were jangling way too loud for something so helpful. It wasn't until I heard the scraping and felt the resistance on the passenger's side that I realized that my life was most likely over. You can rest assured that I thought of hiding the van or maybe pushing it off Geronimo's jump down the road, but there were witnesses and the gash could not be hidden. Calling the bandleader to tell him was the second hardest thing I did that night; going on to play my premiere jazz gig as if I had any right to was and perhaps still is the hardest thing by far.

There were mandatory practice hours and endless sessions one-on-one with Cryer, and eventually I think everybody simply decided that all had been done that could be done. They just had to deal with another useless army pianist (dime a dozen), and at least she could bring the unit PT average up. Any other job and I would have been fired within the week. No, any other real jazz gig would have never even considered me. But the army had my name on a contract and I would sit at the keyboard for three years and pluck out whatever nonsense I could manage. I would like to say that I pulled myself up by the bootstraps like a great American should do. I would like to say that I practiced hour after hour until it seemed all hope was lost, and then the miraculous discoveries of talent and virtuosity stunning all that beheld. Of course, you've already gathered that it was more a matter of me accepting what everyone else had: it was useless and I must just do my time. That is, until New York.

The plan was for nine of us to go to the International Association of Jazz Educators conference in New York City, and then the post general denied the travel request and the trip seemed doomed. Three days before the conference, some hair crawled up the general's ass and he called his band to say that he would okay two soldiers to go. How they made the decision to let the hopeless case go instead of the tried and true, I will never know, but I think it had something to do with the American Dream. While, I don't know much about that particular dream, the five days I was in The City will live enshrined in my treasured memories always. Seeing performers on the scale of Lee Nash and Winton Marsalis was to jazz what seeing Shakespeare in the Globe Theater was to the Great Bard for me. Before, it all seemed nonsense and vague, and then I saw in crystal faceted wonder what beauty there was to be had. A drumset used like a whole symphony under the sticks of Nash opened the door to unfettered potential in jazz that I had never seen before. The trumpet player (certainly not in the class of hopeless musicians but rather perhaps the best jazzer we had) and I didn't sleep those five days and fell exhausted and blissful into the seats of our thrice delayed plane back home.

I was disappointed to find that inspiration did not translate instantly to the perfection I sought at the keyboard, and it was unfortunately not too long before I let those around me and the voices in my head convince me that greatness was not in my hands. I did enough to get by until the next year's conference in Toronto. What can I say that would be too effusive? It was more and more and I hungered for the twists of whaling blues and the sarcasm of scatty lines. I let it fill me until I thought I would burst from the beauty of it all, but I no longer imagined I would find the inspiration from myself. The previous two years had taught me that I could finally look from a distance, but I would never know what the magic of a perfectly expressed melody and rhythm would feel like.

I would have been safe and secure in these assumptions if it wasn't for a young, hopelessly idealistic sax player showing up at our band at the beginning of my last year of duty. The first rehearsal with him took the placidity out of all our bones and shook the fire into our eyes and fingers. There was no music that he couldn't get excited about and he even ran around to each of our instruments picking out this or that element from the aether that would be perfect here or there. The first gig demanded his versatility as Cryer, the bass player, had a family emergency and the new kid, Winkler, volunteered to fill in. None of us knew quite what to expect, but there was excitement coursing through the combo that I had never felt in all the months I had played with them. This night would be different. It may be disastrous, but this was also our first chance at something worth doing. I wouldn't have believed it if someone had described the evening complete with the Sergeant Major throwing off his jacket and grinding to the groove we laid down or the near orgasmic coordination of all of our statements and designs. It felt like stepping into the skin of the giants I had worshipped in New York and Toronto and feeling for a few moments what it was like to create the universe. We were gods and the crowd paid homage with the writhing perfection of bodies and music.

Perhaps I should leave out the rest of that year, and let us all stand in awe of one unexpected night of borrowed divinity. Wouldn't it be nice to pretend that a new pianist did not come with a dogmatic enforcement that was more than able to snuff out the fragility of the magic we had so recently discovered? I shouldn't let you know that I used her as an excuse to never play jazz again, except for the horrors of the Christmas stage band concert that we "shared". I probably shouldn't even share the melancholoy of the dreams that haunt me at night with soloes winding like serpents over the earth of harmony and syncopation. But that is the story that I have. A lilting reminescence of something so great it required the faith of a child.

Illicit

You would be surprised what constitutes normal relationships in the army. Or maybe you wouldn't be, but I certainly was. I didn't notice it so much with the army wives. I mean, the guys I worked with didn't seem too interested in the civilian spouses, although they certainly weren't infinitely dedicated to their own spouses, obviously. It was something about being a female in uniform that seemed to do it for them. Of course, Tom had nearly convinced me in the first year of our marriage that I was wildly attractive, but I always tucked these statements into the "that's because you love me" file. He better find me attractive right? Then I joined the army and found myself virtually lavished in the undeniable attention of a large portion of the men I worked with, especially the married ones. The very first person I met when I walked into my new unit was a guy slightly older than me named George, and from that first moment he made sure he was the one that tried to make me absolutely comfortable in this new place. "Here's the dayroom and watch out for Sergeant SoandSo and don't worry about all that military protocol stuff around me." Well, you get the idea. He invited Tom to play on the softball team, but it turned into an excuse to teach me catch during the team's practices, since the team didn't really practice at all. He insisted that we host a gettoknowyou party for the unit at our house and then was the last person that stayed, falling asleep on our porch. All strange and disturbing moments that I quickly ignored and did not make sense of until later. A couple months after he left, I learned that he was fairly aggressive in his escapades cheating on his wife. Another guy that I became friends with told me that George had brought one of the strippers from Sidewinders, the seedy strip club outside of town, to this friend's apartment and asked if she could live there so he could visit her unbeknownst to his wife (and three kids mind you). He left after a month of me arriving to the unit and so I only got the beginning tidbits, but he e-mailed me about once a year until I got out. "You still in? Congrats on making Sergeant! You should come to Fort WhateverbaseI'mat!" The last e-mail he sent went something like: "Still getting out? You still married? If not, want to be?" I hope it is obvious that this e-mail went unreplied.



But George was essentially harmless...to me anyway. It was the guy that everybody at the unit loved that proved most dangerous. I met him also the first day, and he bought me lunch. Since it was my first day, I decided he was simply giving a nice gesture. This was to be a series of concessions that ended in an event that was inevitable in retrospect. I did not set him aside for special consideration in my psyche until the Christmas Rock Band shows. I was petrified to even go on stage, since this would be the first time I had ever taken a microphone in my hand and sung for an audience. Not just an audience, but an auditorium packed full of basic trainees bursting with the excitement of approaching holidays after the severe repression of basic training. I had considered that I would be the first female they had seen in a while, but rather than embolden me this just made me feel the pressure of the performance to a nearly stifling level. I vaguely remember Sifu giving me a thumbs up from the sound booth just before the performance, but not much was registering other than the quickly filling seats and the deafening noise of hundreds of young males. It wasn't until I was belting some stupid Gwyn Stefani Christmas tune and riding on wave after wave of testosterone directed at me and me alone that I started to enjoy my surprising moment of stardom. Sure, these guys would soon return home and remember that there were bands much better than us and girls much much prettier than me, but for those few moments...I was it. Lust was unbridled in every eye I caught, but the stage provided the boundary I needed to ride it and ride it hard. After the first show, the band went next door for a beer and Sifu met my bright eyes with a look I recognized from the young guys just minutes ago. Surely not I told myself, but I desperately wanted the protection of the stage back suddenly. He launched into a breakdown of the show from back in the sound booth and how all the guys back there had been talking in no uncertain terms about me in very specific ways. "Well, I leaned over to one of them and said, 'That's my wife!." Raucous laughter. The story was a hit. And I was left certain that I was the only who had seen that look come back over him as he hit the punchline and nailed me with his eyes again.

The day before the band's Christmas block leave, I was working late in The Cave (the back supply room), and he came back for the sole purpose of saying goodbye. "Give me a hug," he said, as if we had become great friends and this was what friends did. I mean, of course I would hug someone I considered close, but the connection was not of that sort and I was pretty certain he was closer than he should be already. But being the true pacifist I am, I stood and gave him his awkward hug and gave every impression that I too was sad it would be a couple weeks and how much I hoped he had a good vacation. Soon after Christmas, he bought me lunch again, and I again excused it since we were with a large group of people and he claimed to owe me for some favor that I couldn't remember. It was just easier to let him pay than cause a scene in front of people that would certainly consider it my problem and actually be mad for insinuating something awful of this guy that was considered the coolest person in the unit. He was the guy that had all the barrack's rats over for barbecues. He was the one that ran the sound for the unit because no one else cared enough. He was also the one that came to the rescue whether it be replacing music someone else had misplaced or picking someone up who was too drunk to drive. He was smart and funny and made everyone else feel like what they were doing was worthwhile. So, yeah, I let the man pay, and I still feel the residue of silliness for regretting that so much.

Then he found out he was getting shipped to Korea for a year and Lewis after that. Several months down the road, but I began to feel a goodbye coming that I did not want. Don't get me wrong, it was not that I didn't want to say goodbye. Goodbye was the only way I saw out of this that wouldn't put me on everyone else's shitlist. Just like George, once he was out of the unit, I could ignore even the memory of him and no one would be the wiser for it. It was just that I began to realize that he would see his departure as an event and an opportunity. His efforts had become more explicit the last few months (a special trip to the store to get me cough drops when I was sick; getting angry when I brought Tom to the restaurant he had invited me to for lunch; hanging out with me hour after hour when I had desk duty; etc.), and I had the desperate feeling that I would not be getting out of this madness as easily as I hoped.

The first two years Tom and I were at Fort Sill, we bowed to the compellation to attend unit parties, though we got over this after Sifu's farewell party. I could have easily found an excuse not to attend this fatal gathering, but I was still fearful of what I would project to the rest of the unit. What could be more conspicuous than bailing on the party for the most popular guy in the unit? I feared the questions that this would stimulate and so Tom and I got dressed and got booze and went to Sifu's house. When we got there, I was suprised to find that it was a rather select gathering: just the cool barrack's rats and Sifu's closest of close friends from the unit. It made me so appallingly uncomfortable to be faced with the proof that he considered me part of this selection that I decided immediately to get drunk and fast, the only coping skill the army had pointed the way to. After two quadruple shot Cosmos within a half hour, I began to feel the liberation of blissful apathy. I transformed into a social butterfly, flitting to the several people playing Xbox and then into the kitchen for shots, finally landing on the couch in a heavy stupor. And Sifu was there waiting for me, his arm sliding easily behind me as I collapsed onto the cushions. And his lips were at my ear, brushing the sensitivity of my lobe as he whispered, "It's you I don't want to leave. It's you." I remember patting his knee as I would to indulge the mindless babbling of a child or an incompetent adult, but he seemed to read it as acceptance and tightened his grip around my waist. I remember laughing uncomfortably but not moving. I'm not sure I was capable of moving, having completely lost count of the shots I had delivered to my system, but I don't remember trying. I was frozen and he was leaning on my shoulder now and sighing. My vision was unsteady, but I found sudden focus when I lifted my eyes and saw his wife looking at us. Suddenly all the excuses I had given myself to allow this man every insignificant step towards this vanished. I knew only that this was wrong and that I had not stopped it. I could hear Tom in the kitchen and immediately realized that he was avoiding what Sifu's wife was staring at right now: this spectacle of her husband and this stupid girl that was obviously encouraging him.

I was sick for 24-hours straight after Tom got me home. I couldn't keep water down until the next night and should have gone to the hospital, but I wouldn't allow it. I told Tom I couldn't deal with the people in my chain of command coming down on me if I went to the hospital for alcohol poisoning, which was true. But I also felt I deserved it. How many opportunities had I had to stop this, and here I was with this other man's smell in my hair and sweat. I could see the betrayal in Tom's eyes, and did not know how to explain the feeling of being raped combined with the guilt of contributing to an affair. All this man had needed was my inaction and I had given it without noticable complaint. As soon as I could get out of bed, I went to the computer and wrote an e-mail to Sifu telling him that I did not mean to give him the impression that he could touch me like that and that he was certainly not welcome too. I made Tom read it before I sent it and begged him to believe me that I meant it. How awful it was to need comfort so desperately for something that I must ask forgiveness for first. If I could not explain it to myself sufficiently, how was I to gain Tom's trust again?

I have often wondered how couples recover after the willing betrayal of one of them with another. It was hard enough dealing with me being an unwilling accomplice to an affair that never reached what would be considered fruition. All I can say is that the details of the betrayal are much easier to lay out than the path and manner of healing. I sit here now and know that Tom sees in that night what I understand from it and that we do not doubt each other any longer. I know that I did not allow the series of events that led to that night to replicate, and no longer took it for granted that I was simply "one of the guys". It is impossible to be anything less than one of the guys as one of the very few females in the army, but I kept it with me always after that night that how I saw myself could be infinitely separated from how this or that guy saw me. What had been a thrill at first - the lingering glances, the obvious attractions - carried the edge of reality and memory. The only glance that remained was that of Sifu's wife showing me the betrayal I was capable of and the pain that must follow. Such was my coming of age in the war machine.

Untold story

There is a reason that this story has not been written about or made into a feature film. A good one. Simply put, there is not much of the army in the band and not much of the band in the army band. Living the life of an army musician was like watching an angry pitbull chasing its tail for four years straight. And while I may sit here feeling remotely traumatized and more than a little ambivalent about the whole thing, I wonder how I might present the tale in such a way that might deserve the paper its written on. Perhaps I should exxaggerate the moments of sexual harrassment and make a tale of intrigue and deception. Or maybe I should tell you about the "traumas" (quotations only for the general public...was certainly a legitimate use of the word in the actual experience for me) of basic training. And you know what? I will. But first, I will tell you that my story is only that of one person in a strange place at a strange time.

Cycling

Before I joined the Army, I believed myself to be insecure, shy, and fairly weak. I also believed that surviving basic training and an enlistment period would automatically bestow some sense of accomplishment and satisfaction and would certainly make me stronger mentally and physically. I did not expect to have to deal with the trauma of warfare, and these expectations were fortunately true though not well-founded. It would only be the rigors of training and discipline that I would have to face, and I looked forward to the strength I would find in these things. What I never imagined was that I would find myself on my departure from the army nearly crippled from the conditioning of helplessness, pointlessness, and uselessness. The litany runs something like: "You are not good enough and will never be good enough until you have the rank to tell those below you that they are worse." Certainly I was not so naive as to believe that I would receive much positive reinforcement during basic training. I mean, the movies are really not that far off from reality. The recruits are scum (female recruits being the worst and weakest of them all), they cannot do anything right, and there is no correct answer other than a resounding "YES DRILL SERGEANT!". I really started to come apart at advanced training however, when I found the mindless litany in a context that I should have been most proficient and most comfortable in: music. I had always been considered a bright student with my piano instructors and visiting master instructors, maybe even a star student. Yet, at the military school of music, my advanced degree became a badge of shame and a target for the insecure elite in charge of me. My piano lessons were an exercise in proving how little my classical training meant and how little I was prepared to fulfill my job as a pop pianist, rather than actual instruction in dealing with the substantial challenges of jazz piano. My instructor would ask me, "You know this tune?" and begin playing tune after tune that I would admit, and that he had presumed, I did not know. Never did he attempt to guide me through one of the tunes or teach me techniques to tackle them on my own. Just an hour of humiliation and then a threat to remember my practice hour logs or else. Week after week, and what was I to practice? I knew only scales and exercises and written pieces. Where could I access this grand enigma of improvisation? There were no answers for me in those six months to these questions. Every time I pushed for an answer, I was met with either "You just feel it," or "You're a professional army musician, you should know this already." Redundancies and irrelavancies abounding. Alongside this, every student was required to attend daily theory and ear-training classes, which theoretically made sense but was practically a nightmare. The school of music was comprised of musicians from three different branches of the military and of all ages. Many of the army musicians had advanced degrees like myself, but the other two branches tended to have more people straight out of high school and very little formal musical training outside of marching band. Imagine previously teaching college-level piano and theory classes and then enduring six months of militarized (i.e. over-simplified and sometimes completely wrong) music theory training, taught by someone with no qualifications other than performing "well" on his or her instrument. All four of the army personnel in my class with me had higher degrees in music, and it was only the bond of outrage that kept any of us sane. Constantly we had to correct the teacher as he made mistakes that even the flaws of our navy-written text would not allow. We were used as tutors for the poor souls who had never constructed scales on staff paper before and were terrified by the real possibility that they could get kicked out over this foolishness. And, oh how the instructors resented even when we pursued these helpful rather than scornful approaches. Every hint of higher education was despised, and we found rank more and more forcefully thrust in our face as the only proof of competence that was necessary. Certainly I had imagined that rank would be irrelevant once I began the musical part of training, because it is clearly senseless. Even my professors in college never once used their credentials to lay claim to proficiency. It was all performance based. How well do you teach, how well do you play your instrument? These are the only questions that are relevant. Learning that this was not true in the army band was the beginnings of real psychological dissolution for me. I suddenly realized that it would be four years of hierarchical nonsense, in which I must try to find a way to perform in a style that I had no training in while surrounded by the hostilities of superiority complexes and abusive tendencies. You see, it is the people that thrive in these unhealthy structures that are promoted and put in the powerful positions of leader and instructor. I don't know how many times I heard "You are a Soldier first and a musician second!", which seemed grossly redundant. It was perhaps even misleading since the type of musician being "trained" in this place had very little to do with proficient music performance.

Fear and loathing

It took me a long time to see through my own fear to recognize the widespread panic around me. In fact, I would say it's only come in retrospect and a lot more experience in the "real" army. The truth of the matter was that all those in leadership positions, enlisted and officer alike, were scared shitless by a war they could no more defend than train civilians to fight. They spouted rhetoric that was last used in World War II about "fighting for freedom" and "justice" and "duty and honor", but there was not a single one of them that said those same lines to themselves in the uncomfortableness of dark before sleep. It's taken a couple years for this rhetoric to disappear even from the pomposities of the parade field that claims nothing more than platitudes at best. There was a general a couple months ago who tried to pull the old-fashioned and faux pas lines back for another round, and even the troops on the field for their own deployment ceremony exuded disapproval edging on hostility. Because they've been there. Some more than once. And they've seen for themselves that there is no definable enemy, and no evidence that anyone is being freed or even that we are protecting our own country's freedom. There is only survival until the powers that be say that you can return home to try to pick up the pieces of too much seen for too little reason.

I did not know much if any of this when I was going through training, but I could taste fear beyond my own constant state of panic in the overzealous demeaning of the hajiis ("ragheads") and incessant ranting of impending death for all of us. I confused it at the time for rigorous training since the army is a war machine after all. That and bigotry. What I didn't realize was that those trying to lead us had already seen too much and no longer knew if their souls could survive sending the youths that I trained alongside to their demise, whether it be physical or psychological.

Sticks and stones...

It is interesting what might constitute "the last straw" for someone. It is not so much a matter of a certain level of pain or injustice necessarily. Let's face it, the human body and psyche are designed to adapt to a good deal of abuse. After about two weeks at basic, a certain rhythm was established: no sleep, grueling PT (scheduled smokings), eat, "train" (get smoked again), eat, and repeat until lights out (sometimes with a few extra sessions in the middle of the night). Certainly not something that could be called fun unless one is bent that way, but it was bearable. The constant inner contradictions of the brainwashed system also had their own chaotic rhythms. By halfway through, I had found a certain calm with the certainties of a phone call on Sundays and a letter (or two) every night. There were always threats that these priveleges would be discontinued, but I started to realize that it took energy to hold up these threats and the drill sergeants were generally lazy when it came to these things. So it came as a surprise to me when I found myself crying over something as silly as low-crawling up a gravel road. Sure the rocks cutting into my flesh didn't help things, as well as the fact that I had assumed we were past this phase and had not expected to be making mud with my sweat that day. It was just this: I knew that the only reason we were bloodying ourselves up was because one of the drill sergeants had got bored. As simple as that. One grown human looking at the group of subordinate grown humans neutered of their power engorging his own and seeing only entertainment. Then again, this also was not something new, it was just finally inexcusable to my violated sensibilities. But this only made me mad; the tears didn't start until one of the impertinent bastards towered over my groveling filth and began to critique my technique of the maneuver. As if I could be expected to care about the quality of performance with the blood quickening from my knees and elbows. On top of all of that, to have even one of them see me cry after so many weeks of the well-maintained stoney glare was devastating in the moment. When we were finally allowed off our faces (only due to the arrival of our buses), I could only grasp at my pride in the tiny rebellion of refusing to wipe my face off: mud smeared nastily in tracks from my eyes and nose, flecks of sand edging my lips. Every person who made a motion at their own faces to show me where I should begin cleaning restored just that much more of my dignity as I staunchly disobeyed. I would clean later and maybe even cry a little more into the hot water of a shower, but right now they would all see the ugliness of what I was becoming. Of what they were creating. And the more they wanted me to hide it away, the more the beauty inside cackled with the fire of justice.