Serving with Dignity.

• Author: Clinton, Kate
• Position: Unplugged

After the historic lame duck repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, many have written about the esprit de corps, about readiness, and, inevitably, about showering. I write about one officer.

In 1985, after a set at Sisterfire, a D.C. women's music and cultural festival, I was standing under the one shade tree at the high school in Takoma Park. A young woman came up to me and shyly asked me to sign her program. She said that if she was seen at the concert, she could be court-martialed. I blithely signed, "See you in court!"

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Thus began a twenty-six-year correspondence, then friendship, with the "Chief"--and my continuing education about women in the military.

The Chief is from a small upstate New York town. She wanted to serve her country and under the influence of a nearby finger lake, she chose the Coast Guard, enlisting when she was twenty-one. During her career, she had to work twice as hard to rise from the rank of storekeeper to chief warrant officer, hence the name "Chief."

The Chief is a great storyteller. For years, I received long, single-spaced typed letters from her. Often she was the only woman on Coast Guard cutter patrols. As a woman with the good ol' boy salts, and as a closeted lesbian in quarters the size of a closet on heaving seas for weeks at a time,

her letters were her way of staying sane. That, and racking up miles on a treadmill.

The Chief's stories about her cutter's interdictions--she won't call them rescues--of Haitian boat people and their return to Guantánamo were full of excruciating detail. As storekeeper-in-chief, her letters were not about dictatorships or the refugee crisis but about finding clothing, lotions, medical supplies, tarps, blankets--the actual items of humane treatment.

Stateside, the Chief volunteered as the Coast Guard's enlisted representative to DACOWITS (Defense Department Advisory Committee on Women in the Services), deactivated by Donald Rumsfeld but now back in action. While she was still a chief petty officer, she was told that she would be grossly...