After graduating, she’d been assigned to the 2nd Infantry Division’s Apache Battalion in South Korea in late 1992, while her husband was attending Johns Hopkins back in the States for graduate schooling. As the only woman in the unit, she’d faced a wall of hostility penetrated only by many of the men’s attempts to get into her flight suit. They hated her, but they wanted to screw her, which in retrospect, Trace found to be an apt commentary on the state of women in the military.
Her new battalion commander. Lieutenant Colonel Warren, had been none too pleased to in brief her. He didn’t want her, but the Department of the Army had cut the orders and there wasn’t anything he could do about it. His comments were succinct and to the point: make one mistake and she would be gone from his unit.
Two weeks after getting in-country, she’d joined the rest of the pilots at the base’s officer club early one Friday evening for a “Hail and Farewell.” It was an Army tradition to greet incoming members of the unit and to bid goodbye to those departing back to the States. Trace sat through the speeches and plaques for the farewells and waited for the hails. The new officers. Trace among them, were lined up to “Do The Lance.”
The Lancers was the battalion’s nickname, and the physical symbol of that nickname was an eight-foot bamboo lance. The long center of the haft had been hollowed out, the tip was now removed, and it was ceremoniously filled with beer. Each new officer was required to take the Lance and empty it in one continuous drink, never removing the end of the haft from their lips. Since it contained six beers, the first two officers, both second lieutenants, failed to the derision of the other officers of the battalion.
When it was Trace’s turn, the volume level in the room in the officer’s club reached new levels as they waited for her to fail. Trace, however, had learned the art of chugging from her plebe classmates in I-One on their lonely Saturday nights in Eisenhower Hall where the only thing they could do was drink as much beer as quickly as possible.
Since the line for the draft beer was always long, they had quickly gotten into the habit of buying several pitchers each and getting swiftly drunk before having to return to their Academy cells at the stroke of midnight.
Trace took the lance from LTC Warren and proceeded to drink it dry to the consternation of the other pilots. When done, she turned it upside down and offered it as evidence “to the disbelievers in the crowd. She thought the whole thing childish, but she knew if she wanted to fit in at all, this was one way she would have to try.
The rest of the evening proceeded with great quantities of beer being imbibed and ever taller tales of flying derring do being told. Trace kept quiet and switched her drinking to coffee and soda. She knew better than to talk about her Bronze Star mission, or any of the other ones she’d flown in the Gulf. Coming from her it wouldn’t command respect but animosity. She also knew better than to get further drunk around aviators, whose sexual reputation around the Army was built upon numerous O-club excursions with women, married or not, in uniform or not, it didn’t matter.
Anything that was female and breathing was considered fair game. And here in this O-club, Trace was the only female around other than the Korean waitresses.
By eleven, over half the officers had left to crawl off to the Korean bars outside the gates and link up with local women who were willing, for hard currency, to give in to the men’s lust.
Trace decided it was time for her to get back to her BOQ room when she was stopped in the dark foyer of the club by LTC Warren.
“Where’d you learn to drink like that?” he demanded, his face bright red and his eyes blinking, trying to focus.
“Proper training, sir,” Trace replied, trying to be diplomatic.
“So can you take it all down like that?” Warren slurred.
Trace had no doubt what he was referring to and tried to slip around him. She’d been in this situation before and knew that discretion was the better part of valor, especially with one’s own battalion commander. She now accepted that it was going to be a very long year.
Warren reached out and grabbed her shoulder, which shocked Trace.
“So do you swallow?” Warren was pressed up against her in the corner formed by a telephone booth and the wall.
“Sir, let go of me,” Trace said, her stomach doing flip flops
Warren let go of her shoulder, but instead of backing off, he reached out with both hands and placed one directly over. her left breast and began squeezing and, with the other, tried to unzip her flight suit from the top.
Trace stopped thinking and reacted. She swung an elbow, catching the colonel on the side of the head, knocking him against the phone booth.
He let go of the breast and groped for her crotch. She grabbed both his shoulders, steadying her target, then exploded her knee upward with all her strength.
Warren gasped and immediately let go of her as he sunk to his knees now holding his own crotch. Trace turned and ran out the club, heading directly for her room where she locked the door and remained there all night, half afraid that someone would show up there pounding and demanding to be let in.
The next day she was shocked when Warren walked by her at morning PT formation, acting as if nothing had happened.
After physical training. Trace approached the battalion executive officer. Major Ford, in his office and told him of the previous evening’s incident. His immediate response was not gratifying as a worried look settled in on his face.
“Colonel Warren has a little drinking problem. Captain Trace.” Ford offered a weak smile.
“I’m sure he doesn’t remember what happened.”
“What are we going to do about what he did, sir?” Trace asked.
“We aren’t going to do anything,” Ford replied.
“The colonel was drunk.”
“That doesn’t excuse what he did! He assaulted me,” Trace said, trying to control her anger.
“What happens if he does it again?”
“Just make sure you aren’t around him when he’s drinking and it won’t happen again,” Ford suggested sharply.
Trace gestured around.
“This post is only slightly bigger than the airfield. Am I supposed to hide in my room when I’m not on duty because the colonel has a drinking problem and likes to grope women?”
“It’s your word against his,” Ford said.
“You just said he had a drinking problem,” Trace protested.
“And if I had to testify, I would say he’s the best battalion commander I’ve ever served under and I have no knowledge of a drinking problem.”
Ford leaned forward.
“Listen, let it go. No one wants you-here anyway. Make waves and they’ll ship your ass out of here in a heartbeat.”
Trace felt curiously calm. She was at one of those life points where you know there’s a fork and once you choose your direction, there’s no going back. She’d put up with the sexual harassment from her first day at West Point until the present. She’d been exposed to some situations at West Point that made Warren’s drunken gropings seem insignificant, but she expected more from a forty-year-old battalion commander, especially one she had to serve under for the next year at an isolated base. In fact, one of the reasons-in bitter retrospect the major reason — she’d married so quickly after graduation was for the protection a wedding band would give her among the wolves waiting in the ranks of the real Army. But it was obvious that her wedding band would be no protection here in Korea, especially with her husband thousands of miles away.
“I want to lodge a formal complaint against Colonel Warren,” she said, her voice totally flat.
Ford looked like he had just swallowed a horse turd.