ON MONDAY MORNINGS the trashcans outside the WACs’ dorms were full of Coors beer cans. There were three hundred WACs and they had showers and two bathtubs to share among themselves, which they told us about on several occasions. Their hair could not touch their collar; they wore beige skirts and oxfords.
AT NIGHT WE COULD hear them gathered around campfires singing songs we did not know the names of but once they were in our heads we could not get them out:
They get us up at five a.m.
To scrub the barracks clean.
Then what do we do when we get through?
We scrub the damn latrine!
AND WHEN WE were certain we could not take any more singing about military life we heard them marching and chanting:
Duty is calling you and me.
We have a date with Destiny.
Ready, the WACs are ready.
Their pulses steady, the world set free.
THEIR VOICES CARRIED as they marched from the campfire to their dorm door and into their rooms.
THERE WAS NOT a bed check on Saturdays and on their days off they went to Santa Fe, perhaps watching the sunset on the roof of the La Fonda hotel, as we wished we could. One WAC, Pat, was rumored to, on her breaks, sleep in the stable next to the horses.
SOME WERE TEXANS who said little bitty and right nice and had names like Bobbie-Joe and Jimmie. Or they were former schoolteachers named Esther or Marian, from Indiana or Illinois, who said joining the Women’s Army Corps was the right thing to do. They organized the motor pool, shot dice, played the pump organ at church services, and called our husbands over the townwide intercom by their last names—Mitchell, Farmer, Perlman—but more frequently, about ten times a day, they called out Gutierraz and Marsh—the two maintenance men. They operated the telephones, censored our mail, and ran the PX, the diner where our husbands got their afternoon coffee and listened to the jukebox. They said they were proposed to once a month because there were ten military men on the Hill to every one of them.