Generally Speaking by Claudia J. Kennedy Page B

accepted my women colleagues and me as equal was especially heartening. All the women were serious about the course, I guess because we needed to catch up on the profession of intelligence. Many of the men in the class needed to study as hard as the women, because they had been exclusively in counterintelligence and had not served in tactical assignments. We were all motivated to learn the course content. But a few were a bit too intense: One captain became famous in our class for writing down every fact our instructors presented on Rolodex cards and spending hours each night alone in the room off his carport, flipping the cards as he memorized the facts for the next test. That was hardly necessary. In tried-and-true Army fashion, the instructors stamped or slammed their desk with their fist for emphasis to drive home each point they were going to include on that week's test.
    It didn't matter that the instructors made no effort to bring the former WACs up to speed. You would have had to be asleep to fail the course. And none of us were dull. I did learn a lot about MI by listening to the nonstructured give-and-take of informal classroom discussions that many instructors encouraged. Since our colleagues had served in so many different units as young officers, they brought a wealth of experience to the practical problems presented in tactical exercises. And they weren't afraid to state their opinion. “In the 25th Division we did it this way …” “When I was stationed in Germany, we always did it like this …” Over the weeks, my notebook pages filled with concrete solutions to problems that I would never find in field manuals. I later realized MI was trying to evolve a new doctrine, a method of operations and procedures that best fulfilled its role within the Army, and to do so, the Intelligence School was willing to listen to its most innovative young officers. In effect, the Army school system provides a place where ideas that are developed in the field can be refined and standardized throughout the Army. This was especially important since Military Intelligence had only existed as a formal branch of the regular Army since 1962 and was still establishing its credibility.
    But there were other irritants that constantly reminded me we were still women serving in a man's Army. One woman in the class, who was single and very attractive, quickly drew the attention of the bachelors in the course. But she wisely decided to forgo dating among her classmates at this isolated outpost, so a couple of the jilted suitors started spreading rumors about her. She ignored them, but this situation was unfair to her and unworthy of those involved.
    Then there were the slides. Before almost every lecture or classroom presentation, our instructors felt it necessary to flash an “attention-getting slide,” actually a viewgraph image from an overhead projector. They were always sexually explicit, the mildest being centerfold nudes from
Playboy.
But as often as not the slides were truly crude, pornographic spreads from
Hustler
or cartoons involving women and barnyard animals. I guess the purpose of this allegedly innocent mirth was to snap the male officer out of his habitual stupor to a heightened degree of mental receptivity, so that he could be ready for fifty enlightening minutes on the Table of Organization and Equipment of a Military Intelligence Battalion. Well, I thought, it doesn't say much for the quality of this course if it takes these kinds of pictures to get the guys' attention.
    I originally thought the obscene slides were some type of one-time initiation prank aimed at women. But when the slides continued, it occurred to me that the instructors did not even realize that a pornographic cartoon bothered us. Nor did they understand that many men in the course were offended by this as well. My male classmates told me that they'd seen such slides in other Army courses, and my husband confirmed that their use had become