Let’s Take a Ride.
Written January 2016
A month after being in Iraq with 9th ESB, I was asked if I wanted to participate in the Lioness Program. Always looking for more challenging opportunities, I immediately said yes. I and thirty other women, trained for ten days until we were sent to our assigned units. Myself and another female were sent to Baharia to work with Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines.
Riding in the back of the MRAP is a blurry memory. The tiny windows made it impossible to discern any features that would have made the ride memorable. Sitting back there felt like what I imagine it would be like to ride inside of a tool box on the back of a pickup truck driving down a bumpy dirt road, with every sharp corner a potential injury and every radio a potential brick to the head. I felt the weight of my loaded M16 as I held it in a modified alert carry, muzzle down, buttstock to my right shoulder, right hand on the pistol grip, index finger straight and off the trigger, and my left hand on the hand guards. The pressure on my chest from my flak jacket and SAPI plates made it difficult to breathe, which is what I thought it must feel like to wear a corset; I had gotten used to the feeling all too quickly. The mood in the back of the MRAP was one of routine. The other Marines had done this before many times. I began to second- guess myself -- who was I to intrude on that routine: What was I trying to prove?....But why shouldn’t I be here? I was trained and ready to fight, nothing else should matter. As if to test my resolve, another Marines sitting in the back asked me, “If we get attacked, are you ready to use your weapon?” I’d like to be able to write that I said “Yes” right away, but my answer was more complicated than that, not because I wasn’t ready, but because of that voice in the back of my head, questioning my determination, making me hesitate. I told him that I would never abandon a Marine that was in trouble and would face danger head on. I believed every word I said to him but deep down I hoped my resolve never got tested.
We arrived at our destination as the MRAP came to a halt. I got up, grabbed the handle of the door, and pushed down and away as the door opened. I was greeted by the sight of a long dirt road, with trees and shrubs to my left and farmland to my right. I wondered what the hell I was doing there, in a war I had no idea about, and a country I knew nothing about. My right foot, driven forward by my body weight and full combat load, made an explosive impression as it collided with the ground, so much so that I froze for a second to assess whether I was still fully intact. We had been trained extensively on IED identification and procedures, on how to cordon off the area, and call EOD that in my mind an explosion had gone off as soon as my foot hit the ground. Once I was no longer in the safety bubble of being inside the wire, the whole place seemed like a live IED lane. But as the rest of the Marines got out of the MRAP and brushed past me with what seemed like a skip and a hop, and I too kept moving. Like everything else in the Marine Corps, you brush it aside, you push it down, you suck it up, because we had a job to do no matter how many explosions were going off in my head.
