COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Service: Women
Iraq Looms Close for Private Recruited in Wartime
MONICA DAVEY, New York Times
January 2, 2006
LYNDON,
Kan., Dec. 31 - When she signed up for the Army in 2004, Katherine
Jordan had little to say about war. Asked about Iraq at the time, she
said she was far more concerned about the rigors of basic training and
more focused on the fear that she might wind up here, in her hometown
of 1,000, never amounting to much.
The local recruiter made her parents, Byron and Mary, feel comfortable,
too, they said. They hoped the conflict in Iraq would fade away by the
time their only child finished training, Mr. Jordan said back then, on
the same afternoon that his freckle-faced daughter marched across the
Lyndon High gymnasium in flip-flops to collect her diploma. "We don't
think she is going to be in a battle zone," he said that day.
Eighteen months later, the Jordans are preparing for Pvt. Katherine
Jordan's first deployment, a mission to Iraq. In a time of war, when
the Army has struggled to find willing recruits (and parents) and last
year fell below its recruiting goals, Private Jordan was one of
thousands of Americans who enlisted anyway. In her case, like those of
some other service members, the conflict she gave little thought to
when she signed up has now become a consuming reality.
At 19, she has increased her life insurance to $400,000 in recent
weeks, Private Jordan said. She has also watched her colleagues react
to the news of the deployment. "Some people are freaking out," she
said. "But I don't know what the point of that is." Others bought their
girlfriends engagement rings so they would have someone to come home
to. A few colleagues, she said, got pregnant and are unlikely to go
anywhere.
Private Jordan spent the holidays here, back in her little town some 30
miles south of Topeka, buying a laptop computer for her journey and
toiletries to last for ages, writing a love letter to her boyfriend and
dutifully appearing at one family party after the next, all in her
honor.
Mr. and Mrs. Jordan said they expect their drive to Kansas City
International Airport on Monday - when their daughter returns to her
unit in Friedberg, Germany, before it ships off to Kuwait in the days
ahead - to be the hardest goodbye ever. They confide that they will
shed many tears, though Private Jordan insists she will not.
Likewise, much of Private Jordan's time at home on the eve of her
deployment has been a portrait in contrasts: of a father's fierce pride
and worry, but a service member's nonchalance and certainty; of a young
woman who now fluently speaks the military language of acronyms and
weapons systems, but who still also gossips with her old high school
girlfriends like the teenager she is; of a soldier's new, intense focus
on the task ahead in Iraq but her admission that, even now, she does
not fully grasp all that has happened there.
"I don't know all the facts as much as I should," said Private Jordan,
of the First Armored Division, 501st Forward Support Battalion, as she
sat in her childhood home here. "What I know is that we're protecting
our country still. We're concentrating on keeping insurgents away from
the United States."
If Private Jordan was once ambivalent about Iraq, she now seems certain
she wants to go. She said she knows that her job, as one of only a few
female mechanics in her unit, could send her out to pick up disabled
vehicles - potential targets for attack. Still, she said, she is more
excited than nervous. And she is already anticipating the higher
paychecks she will make in a war zone; she said she hopes to save
$15,000 so she can buy a car when she gets home.
"Honestly," she said, "a lot of my friends like Iraq. It's not as bad as people say."
Private Jordan said she felt prepared for the situation on the ground
in Iraq. Her unit has trained for months, she said, to understand the
nature of roadside bombs, to scan for out-of-place objects and to
consider anyone a possible suspect.
"The threat changes day by day, so I'm going to live day by day," she
said. "You can just hope God is on your side and move through the tour
and all that other great stuff."
Mr. and Mrs. Jordan say they are proud of their daughter, and proud of
her strong wish to go to Iraq. Still, if the mission were called off,
Mr. Jordan said, "We'd say, 'Oh that's too bad,' and secretly we'd be
cheering."
In truth, Private Jordan's trip home was an odd balancing act for her
parents. On the one hand, she is a 19-year-old, whom they said they
worried about as she wandered her way through O'Hare International
Airport in Chicago, as she stayed out with friends one night here until
3 a.m. without so much as a call home, as she proposed a road trip to
Manhattan, Kan. On the other hand, she is about to be a soldier on her
way to a war zone.
At one point, Mr. Jordan, who says he knows there will be plenty of
sleepless nights ahead for him, grew choked up as he offered a prayer
before his extended family: "Katherine, you know we love you. God will
be on your side because I just know he will be."
Of course, he told his relatives, voice shaking, he was still terribly frightened.
Mr. Jordan, 52, was also once a soldier. As a young man working at a
bank in Des Moines, he received a draft notice and felt sure he was
going to Vietnam. "I was probably as devastated as I could get," he
said. So he signed up, he said, hoping to get a safer assignment.
In the end, after two tours in Thailand, Mr. Jordan said he came away
believing the military had been the best thing to happen to him. He
needed the order in his life, he said, and he said he now believed the
same might prove true for his daughter.
During one of several dinners in Private Jordan's honor, her uncle,
Gene Jordan, another veteran who is now 62, quietly passed her a shell
casing from an M-14. He said he had carried it with him all through his
Marine tour in Vietnam and wanted her to carry it now. It brought him
luck, he said.
He had but one piece of advice for his niece: Keep your tail down.
He said he rarely spoke of what he had seen in Vietnam, even to family
members. Of war in general, he said, "For a long time, I thought this
was going to be over."
"I hate to see her see any of it," he said of his niece.
If Private Jordan's biggest fear was once that she might disappear into
her small town, never being anyone special, she seemed to have overcome
that, at least on the eve of her deployment.
Sprawled out on her bed on a recent afternoon, Private Jordan showed
her old high school girlfriends - all of whom are in enrolled in
college - her photo albums from the military. As they stared at the
images from an Army base in Germany, she spoke the puzzling language of
the Army, of "getting dropped" (being ordered to do pushups), of
"getting chaptered out" (being kicked out of the military) and of the
"gas chamber" (where soldiers are tested on their ability to get their
gas masks on in the event of chemical warfare).
The young women shared pizza and breadsticks at the local hangout,
Buzzard's, but Private Jordan's words - and the new tattoos, $1,000
worth, that cover her back and forearms - now seemed a universe away.
"I'm a homebody," said Candace Howell, 19, who is a sophomore at the
University of Kansas, explaining why she and most of their girlfriends
had not enlisted.
And, one morning, just after 9, three elderly women waited in a bus in
the driveway outside the Jordans' house to get a look at Private
Jordan. They were headed to their weekly bingo game, and Mr. Jordan,
who drives the bus for the Osage County Council on Aging, agreed to
introduce them to his daughter.
Eventually, a yawning Private Jordan emerged from the house and stepped
onto the bus, still in her fuzzy slippers and Metallica sweatshirt.
"Do you like the Army?" one of the ladies, deep into her 90's,
inquired. "Yes," Private Jordan answered. She is going to Kuwait, then
Iraq, her father said proudly. "But you know, to me, she is still a
kid."
In three years, Private Jordan's enlistment will be over. She said she
had yet to decide whether to make the military a career and extend her
service or to leave and do something else, perhaps back here in Lyndon.
"If the war in Iraq ends, I might get out, because what's the point of
being in then?" she said. "But if another war is happening, I could get
back in full time, that's what I'm thinking."
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