Arms And The Enlisted Woman

A. "I Am a Veteran ... "

APPENDIX A "I am a Veteran. • " I am a veteran of the United States Air Force, in which I spent six years from 1974 to 1980. My job was jet engine mechanic, and I had attained the rank of staff sergeant at the time of my discharge. I entered the service in September 1974 shortly after the war in Vietnam ground to a military halt, if not a diplomatic one. The decision to enter the service wasn't really a difficult one; it was one born of desperation. I had a lot of moral problems (which I quickly shelved) over the idea of joining the military because I had been quite involved in political activities, especially the antiwar movement, when I was in high school. I graduated high school in June of '72. The school I graduated from was a girl's Catholic high school in a predominantly working-class parish in San Francisco, where I grew up. The neighborhood that I grew up in, which was across town, was mostly Irish and Italian blue-collar workers. San Francisco in the late sixties and early seventies certainly bred in any somewhat alert kid a host of countercultural attitudes, and being against the war in Vietnam was a part of that. My cousin had gone to Vietnam, people in the neighborhood had gone to Vietnam, you would go into any of the high schools in the area and there was a list of kids who had gone and been killed during the previous five or six years. I was very righteous about war. When I graduated high school my prospects of going on to college were dim. Although I had gotten into San Francisco State, I couldn't afford to register, much less go. My parents were hard-working, but they couldn't have afforded putting the kids through college, and I wasn't about to suggest they try. So I left home, and I went to a vocational school which was primarily for retraining welfare recipients and the chronically unemployed. I learned to be a veterinary technician there and that took about a year. After that I practiced in the city. I guess I worked about six months as a veterinary technician. It was a very exploitative position, and I was young and stupid and didn't know you weren't supposed to put up with being economically exploited because you are female. I mean, I was intellectually aware of the women's movement, but that was something that happened to other people-and San Francisco as a whole was a Copyrighted Material - 245 246 - Appendices pretty loose town. 1 had seen women truck drivers and linemen and everything else; still, it didn't occur to me until 1 slapped up against it that discrimination could happen to me. When 1 left that job, I went to a coffeehouse which was in the same neighborhood and met a lot of interesting people. I was really involved at that point in my life with being a typical street freak. I had a lot of friends who came to the coffeehouse; it was almost a community center; there were a lot of artists, musicians, some famous and some not so famous, some just your basic degenerate freak. 1 played a central role in connecting people to housing and food and lodging and with knowing who was going east and who was coming west and that kind of thing; 1 really enjoyed it. After about a half-year 1 heard about a job in Ashland, Oregon, in another coffeehouse. I quit in San Francisco and went north to take over that job. When I got there the job didn't materialize and I was left hanging. I didn't have any contacts there so I went back to San Francisco via Stockton, where 1 lived with some old friends from HaightAshbury for a while. Then I went back to the city and began pounding the pavements. It was rough because San Francisco is a union town and there weren't a lot of jobs going, and I wasn't a skilled veterinary tech. In the recent past it had been a matter of going to school, getting training, and getting a licensed position, but it wasn't by then. I was good with my hands and I was a hard worker, so I used to bullshit my way into subcontracting jobs. You know, doing a bit of sheetwork or house painting. I put...