OMG no! It started changing w-a-y before that. I came in at the end of the Vietnam War and the demise of the WAC, 1975. Good because I wanted to prove that I was "equal" to the guys since I grew up watching WWII movies and was a tom boy in a neighborhood that was more male than female. My fiancee had enlisted a week before I did so he already had an assignment. Of course, I didn't want to get assigned somewhere else, nor did I want to wait to enlist so I was extremely limited in the MOSs available to me if I wanted to ship at the end of August. There were 11 total slots available in the fields of Clerk Typist, Asphalt Equipment Operator, Ammunition Storage and Supply and Infantry. No friggen way was I gonna be a clerk typist, so I said I wanted to be Infantry. Oh no. You can't do that. Why I asked. Because you would have to share a foxhole with a guy. Yeah and so what? Well, you can't, it's not allowed. OK, how about Asphalt Equipment Operator? Nope someone already took that slot. Alright, I'll take Ammo Supply. No, sorry that one is gone too. The only thing left is Clerk Typist, so I got stuffed into a traditional female role when I wasn't a traditional female. I was one of the guys. So I ship out to Ft Jackson to all-female Basic. It was easy and I loved it. I thought that was what the rest of my career was going to be like. It wasn't. Fast forward 5 years, it's 1980. One of the good things about the clerk typist job was that I learned how to work with and around the Army red tape and managed to get reclassified to Military Police. I show up at Ft McClellan and was one of seven females and two males who were "inserted" into a unit that was all male and had been together since Basic. This was the era of OSUT. Five females were Marines, one was Army Reserve, and me, the active duty NCO. So being an NCO I was expected to march the company to and from school and call cadence along the way, which I did. I'm calling a cadence that I learned in the all-female basic training and was not very far into it when one of the drills comes running up alongside me and tells me that he is taking over and to fall in. I'm embarrassed as all hell and I confront him when we get to the school, asking what I did wrong. I was told that my cadence could be considered offensive and I couldn't sing it when marching. To be honest, I don't even remember what it was because I still do not think that anything I learned in Basic was "offensive". I called the girls aside later that day and relayed the words to the cadence and asked if any of them had a problem with it. None of them did. So I sought out the Drill that I spoke with earlier and explained that none of the ladies had a problem with it. He informed me that he was not worried about the women being offended; he was worried that some of the MEN would take offense. I started laughing until I realized that he was being serious. What followed was a discussion of how the Army was turning soft. So fren, this has been going on since the 70's.

OMG no! It started changing w-a-y before that. I came in at the end of the Vietnam War and the demise of the WAC, 1975. Good because I wanted to prove that I was "equal" to the guys since I grew up watching WWII movies and was a tom oy in a neighborhood that was more male than female. My fiancee had enlisted a week before I did so he already had an assignment. Of course, I didn't want to get assigned somewhere else, nor did I want to wait to enlist so I was extremely limited in the MOSs available to me if I wanted to ship at the end of August. There were 11 total slots available in the fields of Clerk Typist, Asphalt Equipment Operator, Ammunition Storage and Supply and Infantry. No friggen way was I gonna be a clerk typist, so I said I wanted to be Infantry. Oh no. You can't do that. Why I asked. Because you would have to share a foxhole with a guy. Yeah and so what? Well, you can't, it's not allowed. OK, how about Asphalt Equipment Operator? Nope someone already took that slot. Alright, I'll take Ammo Supply. No, sorry that one is gone too. The only thing left is Clerk Typist, so I got stuffed into a traditional female role when I wasn't a traditional female. I was one of the guys. So I ship out to Ft Jackson to all-female Basic. It was easy and I loved it. I thought that was what the rest of my career was going to be like. It wasn't. Fast forward 5 years, it's 1980. One of the good things about the clerk typist job was that I learned how to work with and around the Army red tape and managed to get reclassified to Military Police. I show up at Ft McClellan and was one of seven females and two males who were "inserted" into a unit that was all male and had been together since Basic. This was the era of OSUT. Five females were Marines, one was Army Reserve, and me, the active duty NCO. So being an NCO I was expected to march the company to and from school and call cadence along the way, which I did. I'm calling a cadence that I learned in the all-female basic training and was not very far into it when one of the drills comes running up alongside me and tells me that he is taking over and to fall in. I'm embarrassed as all hell and I confront him when we get to the school, asking what I did wrong. I was told that my cadence could be considered offensive and I couldn't sing it when marching. To be honest, I don't even remember what it was because I still do not think that anything I learned in Basic was "offensive". I called the girls aside later that day and relayed the words to the cadence and asked if any of them had a problem with it. None of them did. So I sought out the Drill that I spoke with earlier and explained that none of the ladies had a problem with it. He informed me that he was not worried about the women being offended; he was worried that some of the MEN would take offense. I started laughing until I realized that he was being serious. What followed was a discussion of how the Army was turning soft. So fren, this has been going on since the 70's.