I want to be pretty

It was June 2012 when the CH-53D helicopter that Marine door gunner and airframes ­mechanic Sgt. Kirstie Ennis was flying in went down in ­Afghanistan’s Helmand province.

The 21-year-old was on her second Afghanistan deployment. She suffered severe trauma, especially to her brain, spine, neck, shoulder, face and left leg, which after some 40 surgeries was amputated below the knee three years later. A month after that, it was amputated above the knee.

“The first thing I thought about wasn’t ‘Am I going to be able to run again?’ It was, ‘Can I wear a dress?’” Ennis told  Military Times. “Am I going to be able to wear heels? Are people going to look at me ­differently? Am I still going to be attractive?”

From Marine to Model 

 Can you talk about that moment and what happened in the crash? 

KE: June 23rd, 2012 was a day like many others I’d gone through in the past.  It started out as an extremely simple mission.  A few hours before we were outbound flight plans changed.  We would now be flying to FOB Nawzad to Musa Qala to pick-up some Marines that had gotten bogged down.  It was a bizarre day and nothing that we would’ve done normally really went the normal way.  There were a few things that changed throughout the day like my crew, my aircraft, but we were all so excited to be directly helping the guys on the ground.  That’s what Marine Corps Aviation lives for.  Our job is direct support.  We picked up three space available PACs and they were Army Medics we were going to bring to Nawzad.  All was fine up until we got right outside of Nawzad.   There was just a lot going on at the time. 

The pilot made inputs on the sticks and wasn’t receiving outputs that he desired.  At that moment it kind of became a little bit of a panic because we obviously aren’t going to come off of our guns until they say, “Crash is imminent.”   We are going to do everything we can in our power to help out the pilots in the front, but also to protect our cargo and what we are moving.   Next thing you know we started to go so far nose up that we rolled left and the rest was history.  My tail gunner tried to get out of his belt in hopes of getting into his seat which there weren’t many seats available in the first place because of all the cargo we were moving.  He flew out the back and when we hit the ground... I was kind of ripped apart.  The last thing I remember was the screaming I heard.  I was kind of in-and-out from there.  My leg was mangled and snapped, my right shoulder was destroyed, I could fit my fist through my face and my jaw was completely destroyed.  My teeth were gone, my jaw had to be rebuilt as well as one of my orbital sockets, it blew out my eardrums, I had fractures in my C2, C3, C4 cervical spine and had severe damage to my lumbar.

 The Veterans Project

I wonder if guys can understand what Ennis was feeling when she thought about being still able to wear a dress or heels.  They probably think it's silly female narcissism that a person with such horrible injuries would immediately wonder if she could still wear high heels.  High heels, after all, are designed to make your feet look smaller, your legs longer -- and give a sway to your sashay when you walk so men will look at you.  Well, maybe it is, but I don't think so.  Being attractive is so much a part of what it means to be a woman, to have self-esteem, that its loss, even gradually through normal aging, is resisted in every way, from wearing sun hats to using make-up, dying one's hair, to, in extreme cases, plastic surgery.  But most women come to accept the new non-attractive (okay, non-sexual, really), role life steers them into: being matrons and grandmothers.

But to lose your looks when you are young, to become someone men turn away from and other women pity ... it's just too much.  It's not fair!  You rage against it.  I know there are some women, maybe many women, who life did not give the greatest looks to who rebel against the hot babe meme, are hostile to attractive women and women who try to make the best of what God gave them by dressing fashionably, doing their hair, using make-up effectively and so forth.  I've written about them before, including one who refused to even wear pantyhose as some kind of political statement against the patriarchy or something.

But for normal women, we want to look attractive, to be sexy, to have men give us a second look -- or even a long third -- to walk past guys who gaze longingly at us, who say one to the other, "Did you see that? I would do that, I would so totally do that!" 

Now, there are all sorts of reasons women joined the armed forces, and a number of those reasons end up placing women in heavily male combat roles, roles in which they must suppress any indication that they are women.  And even if they don't serve in combat roles, the military uniforms women must wear are utterly asexual.  I suppose that's a good thing, although I do note that my grandmother, a navy nurse in World War Two, was able to wear very feminine uniforms, smartly tailored and attractive with hair styled to match and even high heels, whereas now we have to wear get-ups that look like shapeless camouflage-patterned pajamas and wear our hair short and tied in a bun, our feet shod in ugly frog stompers.

Well, okay, if that's what Uncle Sam requires, so be it.  But whenever we can, we bust loose and exult in displaying the fact that we are females, girls, women, total hot babes who have it going on, mad savage sexy.

And, of course, when all is said and done (to coin a phrase), the reason women's self-esteem is tied to looking sexy is so that men will want to enjoy their company, the end result being -- wait for it --  ... babies!  Huzzah!