I took a slow sip of my champagne, not liking the small lie she had told but figured it was better than saying we’d had a falling out and were just recently back on speaking terms.
“Oh, is that so?” The woman cocked her head and gave me a false smile. “Thank you for your service.”
I took another sip of my champagne before murmuring, “It was no trouble.”
I’ve lost count of the number of times someone has thanked me for my service. I felt just as awkward being thanked now as I had the first time it happened. How do I respond to something like that? It’s not like I joined up to be thanked. I got a paycheck the entire time I was there.
It was particularly awkward when the person doing the thanking made it clear that they were just saying what people expected them to say.
“What did you do over there?”
“I was a broadcast journalist essentially.”
“I didn’t know the military had such things,” the woman said.
“They do.”
“But you probably only released footage to military channels, right?”
“No, news stations back home picked up some of the footage too.”
Especially given how expensive it could be to send a journalist in country. Not to mention dangerous. It was easier to pick up some of the raw footage shot by people like me and then overlay their own voiceover. It was the same with photos and news stories. A lot of my print friends had their stuff picked up in the local newspapers and magazines back home.
“You probably didn’t go on any missions though. They would have sent real journalists for that,” the man in the wire glasses asserted, almost like he had to discount what I did.
“Nope, I went on a lot of missions with the infantry guys. The patrols I was on even took fire a couple of times.” I even had the Army CAB, Combat Action Badge, to show for it.
“I thought women didn’t serve in combat roles.”
“There are no front lines in combat anymore,” I said. This was a common misconception civilians often had about the military. Just because women, up until last year, haven’t been able to serve in combat roles didn’t mean they were exempt from combat. It was rare to see a woman on patrol, but I’d encountered it several times while overseas. “Women go outside the wire on a regular basis, based on their MOS. My job required me to film events as they happened which meant I went.”
“Fascinating,” another man said. This one was in an ugly suit not at all common in this sort of event. “How did you find the dynamics between men and women in high stress situations such as you experienced?”
He, unlike his companions, genuinely seemed interested in my uncommon experiences.
I thought about it, trying to find the right words to express what I’d seen and felt.
“I think the issue of gender in combat is a complicated one and not at all universal. In my experience, any resistance I encountered had more to do with the fact that I wasn’t infantry than it did with me being a woman. As soon as I proved I could keep up and was willing to pull my fair share of the work, I had no trouble with my fellow soldiers. Other women may have had vastly different experiences.”
I needed to get the attention off me before I said something that gave them the wrong idea about the military. Some of the small group had already drifted into side conversations. “Enough about me, what is it that you do?”
“I’m a professor of archaeology and Pleistocene geology. My focus is the study of the migration patterns of early man. Specifically the diaspora that led to the settlement of the Americas during the Last Glacial Miximum via the Beringian Land Bridge.”
After that his words ran into a long line of incomprehensible babble as my eyes glazed over from the onslaught of information. He seemed only to require a periodic ‘uh huh and that’s interesting’ to warm to his subject.
I took another sip from my champagne, noting Caroline was in an animated conversation with the woman who’d thanked me for my service and the man who made the comment about women in combat.
I turned my attention to the rest of the gala. Despite the name, there seemed to be little dancing. There was a string quartet in the corner with a wide, empty space surrounding them. Maybe the dancing came later in the evening, once people got a little more of the bubbly in them.
My gaze caught on a pair of intense blue eyes staring at me. Liam gave me a lazy smile from across the room as I almost choked on my champagne.
“Are you alright?” my conversation partner looked like he didn’t know whether to break out the Heimlich maneuver or run for help.
I gave him a reassuring smile between coughs. “Quite fine. If you’ll excuse me, I see someone I need to talk to.”
I didn’t wait for his agreement before heading across the room.
Liam straightened from his slouch against the wall and stepped forward, drawing my attention to the man next to him. Thomas’s blond hair glinted in the light, a perfect contrast to Liam’s darker looks.
