We Were Soldiers, And We Were Young...And We Were Girls

I promised an Army memory from one of my basic training buddies and here is what Becky had to say. I think it's a very fitting way to remember that not only do soldiers serve our country, they are also, underneath it all, just people like you and me. Happy Memorial Day!Becky (18) and Me (17) the day before we graduated basic training

Sundays were our day. It was not uncommon to see 10 girls lined up in a bare concrete bathroom communal two women per sink, one leg each in...that's right, one leg each in the sink.

See, Sunday was our 'pampering' day in basic training. There were no salons, pedicures, manicures, tanning beds, etc.But we were high-class, low-maintenance women who appreciated a calf shave with shaving cream and tweezers for plucking our eyebrows, even in a sand-laden, ant-infested sweating-goo of a common dwelling area. We had 10 minutes a night to cleanse ourselves the other 6 days of the week, but Sundays belonged to us.

While some went to churh, or cleaned their rifles and shined their boots, WE took care of the parts that make us strictly female (ahem, as in feminine).

Before you judge us, please picture long, heavy-cotton camouflage sleeves dripping in sweat, cased in dirt, as the hand below it wields a grenade in a tiny fist that never thought it would wield a grenade. Later that night, that tiny fist would have only five minutes to scrub the dirt and dead skin off a tired, sore body that had never worked so hard in it's life. Twelve hours had passed of combat boots and 'yes drill sergeant!!' as we scaled ropes and snickered at male soldiers saying, 'come on! If I can do it, YOU can do it!"Six days a week we worked hard at proving to our much taller, much more masculine, much more testosteroni counterparts that we could, in fact, shoot and understand an M-16A2 rifle or find our ways through a dense forrest using a compass. That final day - SUNDAY - was our [secret] chance to remind ourselves that at least part of us was still, simply, human.

So we enjoyed our Sunday as we plucked the many stray hairs in our brows and lathered lavender lotion on our smooth legs, and uttered words that no 'male' counterpart would dare hear, or that we would ever dare utter in front of them in the days following [seriously, over our DEAD bodies].Because no matter how 'soft' we seemed in that Sunday moment in a cold, concrete bathroom around similar souls sharing a sink between two women, we, as a collective were still Soldiers.