What is it like being a woman in the military?

Bobi Pike-Oates, a retired Air Force Senior Master Sergeant, had been fixing jets for years when she got promoted. The promotion came with news.

“When I made staff sergeant, I was in Arizona. They said didn’t need female staff sergeants on the flight line.”

Hear it at 5:02

So they moved her indoors, to maintenance control. She went. She learned how the whole operation fit together, worked her way back out to the line, and stayed in aircraft maintenance for 23 years. She tells it flat, the way you would describe a detour on the way to work.

That is one answer to the question. In interviews filmed by Vegas Veteran Voices, a Las Vegas nonprofit, eleven women who served gave us theirs, from the 1970s to a few years ago, in four branches. They do not agree on whether it was a boys’ club, on whether that was a problem, or on what women should be doing in a war. We are not going to settle it for them.

The boys’ club

Pike-Oates wanted to be a city police officer first. It was the 1970s and the department had a height rule.

“In the 70s it was men requirements, 5’7, 5’8. I was only 5’3.”

Hear it at 10:35

A state trooper told her to try the Air Force, which had just started putting women into aircraft maintenance. Her maintenance scores were her lowest. It did not matter, she says: could you lift the toolbox? What she saw next she still describes carefully.

“They set a lot of girls up to fail when they started putting girls in maintenance.”

Hear it at 3:51

One woman in her class had three breakdowns. Another, a small woman, was assigned to pull ejection seats out of F-4s over rails close to six feet tall. “There’s no way she could have done that,” Pike-Oates says, and she does not know what became of either of them. As for herself, some nights every bone ached and she went back anyway.

“I’d have to work three times as hard to prove myself, but that’s what I did.”

Hear it at 20:32

Ross D. Bryant, a U.S. Army Veteran who leads UNLV Military and Veteran Services, brought her up in his own interview without being asked. He compares her to Jackie Robinson.

Now put Jessica Jay Dee across the table. She is a Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant and combat Veteran, she left in 2014, and she uses the same phrase Pike-Oates might and means something else by it.

“I know that I’m joining a gun club. I know that I am joining a boys club, a men’s club.”

Hear it at 40:28

She went in expecting to meet a standard and to be judged on it, and says that is what happened. “I knew what I was signing up for and I didn’t expect any level of special treatment.” Hear it at 41:47 When Marines say brotherhood, she takes it as including her.

“They look at me as a sister. And so that to me is important enough. I don’t need to be told that I’m a part of a sisterhood.”

Hear it at 42:12

She is careful about it. She says other women in the Marine Corps may have had a different experience, depending on the base and the people. One of ours did, and we come to her below.

The job you were allowed to do

Rachel Veronica, a U.S. Army Veteran, trained in logistics and deployed to Afghanistan, where she was put on the front gate for twelve hours a day. Sort of.

“I was only allowed to stand guard because obviously I’m a woman and the culture in Afghanistan is a little different.”

Hear it at 4:50

No searching trucks. No searching people.

“I just had to stand there and look like soldier, like I knew what I was doing.”

Hear it at 4:57

She laughs about it. The Afghans at the gate mostly wanted to ask about her glasses.

The biggest argument about what women should be allowed to do is the one about combat, and the sharpest opinion on our tapes comes from a woman. Jay Dee again:

“I do not think that women should be on the front lines in combat.”

Hear it at 43:23

Her reasons are not about ability. She says some women are fully capable. She thinks the country, the enemy and the men alongside are not ready, and that a man’s instinct to protect a woman would end up competing with the mission. She was offered the chance to make the case from the inside: she says she was selected to volunteer for a pilot program that sent women staff NCOs and officers through infantry training. One of her Marines told her she had to go. She remembers her answer.

“I’m not going. I don’t even believe in this. Why would I go?”

Hear it at 46:26

She did not want to be the Marine in the news story, on either side of it. A Marine at the same table in that episode, a man, agreed with her about the fighting hole and then said the other half out loud: the day is coming anyway, and somebody has to be first. We could not tell from the tape which of the two men at the table said it, so we credit the episode.

Anyone who has served knows a woman who would take that fighting hole and be fine. We have not had her on the show yet. That is a gap in our tapes, not in the force.

Not everything is about the men

Ask these women what they remember and a good share of it has no man in it.

Caitlin Duffy, a U.S. Army Veteran and 50 cal gunner, describes herself in those years as independent to the point of unhealthy. Then came an eight-week deployment with two other women.

“I was probably 23 years old, 24 years old. And that was the first time I’d had real girlfriends.”

Hear it at 8:02

Jennifer Bennie, a U.S. Navy Veteran and naval aviator, came home from nine months in the Middle East and had her moment on a bridge in San Diego.

“I am an American woman in my own car driving to my own apartment and I’m a Navy pilot and this would never happen in the Middle East.”

Hear it at 5:49

Lindsay Gutierrez, a U.S. Air Force Veteran, was hurt when a truck rolled over on a deployment and spent years afterward wondering why her emotions were all over the place. People had a ready explanation. She had a different one, once a doctor finally gave it a name: a traumatic brain injury.

“It’s not because I’m a girl. It’s because the TBI.”

Hear it at 22:57

And Evelyn Pacheco, a U.S. Army Veteran who went on to become Nevada’s first Black female union plumber and to found Nevada Women in Trades, gives the least complicated reason anyone has given us for enlisting.

“I think it was the rebel part of me, to be really honest.”

Hear it at 1:21

The kid and the deployment

Jamie Waterberry and her husband Cole are both Veterans. Two careers, two sets of orders, and for a long time it worked.

“It wasn’t too difficult being mil to mil, even active or reserve, without children.”

Hear it at 24:52

Then they had a son, and when he was one, Cole left on his fourth deployment. She had a full-time job, a toddler and a Reserve squadron that kept asking her to come on orders somewhere else. When her time came up she separated. She says it was not a hard choice. Read the list again and decide for yourself.

Pike-Oates and her husband both wore the uniform too, a generation earlier. Her memory of it is short: when she deployed, nobody asked her husband how he was doing, and when he deployed, nobody asked her. She asked the Air Force’s family support people recently whether they look after dual-military couples. They told her they do now.

What some of them carried

Not every woman’s account is Jay Dee’s. Chelsey Gray, a U.S. Marine Corps Veteran and parachute rigger, was the only woman in her platoon when she arrived. What happened to her there is not ours to summarize in a paragraph. She tells it herself, with four other Veterans, in What happens after military sexual trauma when you never reported it?

Pike-Oates, asked about it, picks her words.

“I know some girls had been abused. I never experienced any of that. I was very fortunate for that.”

Hear it at 44:32

Fortunate is the word she chose for not being assaulted at work.

If you are a Veteran in crisis or having thoughts of suicide, call 988 and press 1, or text 838255. The Veterans Crisis Line is free and confidential, 24 hours a day.

After the uniform

The Department of Veterans Affairs counts about 2.1 million women Veterans in the United States as of 2023, a little over 11 percent of all Veterans.

Anisa Palmer, an Iraq combat Veteran who served with the 82nd Airborne and founded I Will Survive, names something the men’s transition stories do not have a word for.

“Some of us still have a hard time transitioning out and finding our femininity.”

Hear it at 29:00

Pacheco left the Army, raised kids, went into the building trades and found she had been there before.

“Not to say men don’t, but women go through a lot.”

Hear it at 25:09

She says the trades put her through more of what the military had. Her answer was to build the program she wishes had existed for her, sexual harassment class included.

Bryant says there are 300 women Veterans on his campus alone, and that they recently held a retreat that put generations of them in one room. Letoi Adams, a U.S. Army Veteran and adaptive athlete with Paralyzed Veterans of America, gets asked to speak all over the country.

“People have reached out and say, ‘Hey, I want to hear your story as a woman.’”

Hear it at 19:00

So do we. Eleven is not many.