even if I had, it wouldn’t have done anything to remove the target on my back.
The logistics of hooking up were their own ball of bullshit. The size of the ███████████ rendered privacy more or less nonexistent. These ███████████████████████████████ are incredibly tiny. They usually hold fifty people at most and have the size and mentality of a rural middle school. Everyone knew everyone else’s business. You could literally walk into the bathroom after a couple weeks and know, from the smell alone, exactly who had taken that shit and how long ago they had taken it. The irony was never lost on me that nobody on the outside really knew where I was going, but everyone on the inside knew what I was doing. And who.
Then there was the issue of where we could hook up. At least at █████ I could steal a truck and hide behind restaurants run by local contract employees who could give two shits about what I was up to. Here, it was Libra’s ten-foot-by-ten-foot plywood-walled pod or nothing (I had roommates). One hundred square feet of fornicating possibilities, which sat as far across the compound from my pod as any one pod could sit. It’s like they wanted it to be hard for us to have sex. Regardless, the fact of the matter was that there was no tiptoeing around corners or sneaking down hallways if I wanted to get my hands on Libra’s top-secret briefs, if you know what I mean. (Sex. I mean sex.) I had to cover a good chunk of open ground any time I went to or from our respective pods, which violated my soldier’s sense of tactical decency, if I’m being honest. The best time to “infil” was typically at lunch, when I could come up with a semi-decent explanation for why I needed to head over in that direction.
Now, I don’t want to give anyone a false impression here. While Libra and I did have full, unlawful carnal knowledge of each other countless times over the course of my deployment, and despite the fact that I am widely regarded in military circles as a generous and passionate lover with above-average stamina—I regularly satisfied Libra for two, three, sometimes even four minutes at a stretch—neither she nor I flaunted our exploits or got lost in the passion. We kept things on as much of the DL as possible, which didn’t turn out to be all that much in the end, because we’d regularly leave the chow hall together after dinner. Then on the nights when I didn’t have work the next day, I’d stay over and come out of her pod the next morning to find six people standing there in the hall. That was not being very covert.
Fortunately, no one ever said anything. They just stared and went on about their day. For the most part, everyone was pretty cool about it, actually. The salty old guys were oblivious, deployed elsewhere, or so despised by everyone else that the enemies of my enemy became my friends. It helped that I was good at my job, and I got along with everyone pretty well, too. If I’d been a dickhead, someone would have found the perfect opportunity to out us and bring the whole thing crumbling down.
That opportunity, had someone chosen to accept it, arrived on Halloween, when I decided to dress up for the base Halloween party as Jessica Simpson’s version of Daisy Duke from the Dukes of Hazzard movie. Since I didn’t have to work the next day, I went all-out. I had the wig, the cut-off jorts, the high heels, even the makeup. Yeah. Full lipstick, rouge, mascara, the whole nine. When I tell this story to other military people who know me, the part that shocks them the most isn’t the cross-dressing, it’s that the ███ organized a Halloween party.
The hardest part wasn’t even getting up the nerve to do it; the hard part was the physical act of getting dressed as a woman in a 100-square-foot room with no mirror. As a guy, you can get dressed and shave 90 percent of your face in total darkness in under five minutes. Grown women, who have been dressing themselves, doing their hair, and applying makeup for years, still need like six different mirrors of varying shapes, sizes, and magnification just to be squared away enough to leave the house. Not by choice, either. It’s just what you have to do as