In a co-ed military, sexual tension percolates under a veneer of political correctness and neutered professionalism. The United States Marine Corps maintains that professional façade remarkably well, fighting valiantly to stem a swelling tide of young hormones to maintain good order and discipline.

But in Iraq, under the surface, away from the cameras and imbedded reporters, a high stakes chess game of sexual politics plays constantly. Outnumbered by males 19-1, female Marines often find themselves at the center of a captive male audience’s attention, whether they want it or not. Most handle this with pragmatism and grace, finding a delicate balance between professionalism and human nature.

However, a few push the envelope.

While riding in a convoy out of Iraq, I met a female Marine who played the game differently than anyone I had ever seen—with reckless audacity, style and aggressive determination.

On May 7, 2003, I trudged wearily across a sandy motor pool at Camp Viper in southern Iraq. My back ached dully from my body armor as I approached a waiting line of military trucks. The war was over, or so we thought. A week earlier, President Bush had declared an end to major combat operations—“Mission Accomplished.”  Sixth Engineer Support Battalion, my reserve Marine Corps unit, was packing up and redeploying to Kuwait. The convoy was my ticket out of Iraq. Months of compounded stress—chemical weapons alerts, incoming fire, biblical weather, an amorphous enemy, and fear of the unknown—had twisted our nerves into knots. I couldn’t leave Iraq soon enough.

I climbed into the passenger side cab of an MK 48-14 Logistics Vehicle System (LVS)—a military semi-truck—and plopped down onto the seat. It was a low-profiled, 28-foot-long monstrosity affectionately known as a Dragon Wagon. The sloped cab had a squat silhouette and protruded over the front tires like a fat arrowhead. Dust billowed from my filthy cammies, swirling in the sunbeams that managed to penetrate the dirty windshield.

The driver’s side door jerked opened. A tall, thin, female Marine with short blonde hair climbed into the cab and sat behind the wheel. Even under the caked-on layer of sweat and grime, I could tell she was beautiful. Her chic sorority girl sunglasses hid her eyes. She fired up the truck’s engine, cursing out loud to herself about our convoy’s late start.

She gave me a look of supreme confidence and said with overextended bravado, “Good afternoon, Captain. Please put your helmet on and buckle your seatbelt.” Her alto voice was strong and slightly foreign—a British accent with Spanish undertones. She lit a Marlboro, took a deep drag, and blew the smoke impatiently through her teeth. She then flicked the butt of her cigarette manically with her thumb, tapping away imaginary ashes. 

During the four-hour drive to Kuwait, Patricia Gomez Peralta slowly revealed herself as we rolled through the aftermath of the invasion. Past shattered Iraqi tanks, abandoned weaponry, miles-long gas lines, twisted power lines, dazed locals begging for food along the roadside…an improbable Marine in a surreal landscape. 

Intelligent and charismatic, Gomez was a striking 26-year-old beauty straight out of central casting. Most female Marines try to tone down femininity and sexuality or even to erase it from their military persona. Not Gomez. She displayed her unique combination of playfulness and machismo like an ornament—clearly infatuated with her power to infatuate. But a whiff of manic desperation arose as the conversation meandered, exposing an outsider trying to fit in.

Born and raised in Spain, Gomez was the daughter of an American businessman and an aristocratic Spanish mother. She had spent two years at St. Leonards-Mayfield, an all-girls Catholic boarding school in England in her mid-teens. Her family moved to Las Vegas in her last year of high school. At 19, after drifting though a year at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, she decided to “run off to Hollywood and join the circus.”

Gomez lived Hollywood at full throttle. She had been a model, club promoter, film production company intern, and junior-level producer for independent films. She described a world of shallow beauty and decadence—partying with celebrities in a world of to booze, drugs, and calculated sexuality. She told cautionary tales about the rotten underbelly of Hollywood—hard work for little or no pay, backstabbing, manipulation and the high costs of chasing fantasies.

Her story had everything you would expect, surely including a zero percent chance it would lead to a lonely two-lane road in Iraq.

Motley crew

In late January 2003, Gomez stood rigid at attention in a Camp Pendleton, California, parking lot—thumbs along the seams of her cammie trousers, fingernails digging into her palms. Her uniform hung loose over her tall, lithe frame. Her delicate china face was tight and determined. Seventy Marine reservists—an American anthology drawn from the nation’s nooks and crannies—silently stood with her. Motor Transport Platoon was waiting to meet its new commander. 

Gomez was giddy, excited to go to war. 

She had joined the Marine Reserves three years earlier. Personal and professional success had eluded her. Burned out on the Hollywood game, Gomez wanted to do something “real.” The Marine Corps offered a blank slate and the outside chance to be tested in the ultimate human drama – war.

Through charm, luck, and sheer force of will, Gomez had overcome bureaucracy and the consequences of her personal mistakes to stand in that formation. Gomez received her first DUI before she joined the Marines—almost derailing her enlistment and requiring her to get a criminal waiver. She acquired her second DUI in fall 2002 by making an illegal, early morning U-turn directly in front of a cop. The officer pulled Gomez out of her car and asked her to perform a field sobriety test. She slurred, “Hell, I couldn’t even do that sober.” Gomez’s second DUI resulted in a suspended license.

When Sixth Engineer Support Battalion (6th ESB) was activated on January 14, 2003, Gomez knew it was her chance. She requested a transfer from her non-deploying reserve unit to 6th ESB’s Bakersfield Detachment. Gomez then drove to Bakersfield with a plan to shock and awe its command. She strutted into the office of the First Sergeant—Bakersfield’s senior enlisted Marine—and pleaded her case as if she were pitching a screenplay to a studio executive. He bit. She was going to war.

The second DUI came back to haunt her. To check into the Bakersfield unit, she needed her civilian license to update her military truck licenses. Without them, she couldn’t be deployed overseas. She flirted heavily with the corporal in charge of licensing and persuaded him to overlook her lack of a driver’s license.

Gomez was driven by a deep need for credibility, bragging rights, and the earned-edge of the war experience. She had interned for a year at Oliver Stone’s production company and deeply admired the Vietnam combat veteran. There was gravity to the man. She marveled at how he could make real movies, about real people, because he was real himself. To Gomez, he had always stood above and apart from the typical Hollywood stereotype. She felt that his combat experience gave him a deep pool of earned credibility. She desperately wanted what he had—the “thousand-yard stare”—the kind of moral gravity that couldn’t be faked or duplicated. Iraq would offer her the opportunity to be a hero to her Hollywood friends, and after the war she could leverage her newfound credibility into Hollywood success.

Now Gomez’s eyes fixated on Gunnery Sergeant Nicholas Formosa as he walked in front of the formation. At 53, Gunny had a face weather-worn with deep crevasses that Johnny Cash might covet. His haircut was tight, shaved from his ears upward leaving only a patch of bristle on his crown. He wore slightly faded cammies and 1960s-style military sunglasses. Battle gear hung snugly to his frame—flak jacket, load-bearing vest, and two knives strapped to each boot for decorative flourish. His left hand clutched a green notebook. His right index finger and thumb gingerly held a cigarette. He exuded that same gravity. When he opened his mouth to speak, Gomez expected John Wayne, but instead heard what sounded like a 45 RPM record of Joe Pesci’s voice slowed down to 33.

“I am your platoon commander. I am Sicilian and live in South Philly.” He paused after each sentence, punctuating each point. “My family is the most important thing in the world to me. You are all now part of my family.”

“In other words, you all need to think of this platoon like it’s your family. You need to look at each other as brothers and sisters. You need to look at me as your dad. I am here to take care of you and protect you.”

The Gunny gave them a glimpse into his 33 years with the Marines. This would be his third war. He had been drafted during Vietnam and served a tour of duty there, running convoys through the jungles around the Perfume River. Then came the Gulf War, leading convoys from Saudi Arabia to Kuwait. This time it would be Baghdad. Gomez was energized by the mere mention of the word. Baghdad was the goal—the mountain’s summit.

“Basically, it all boils down to this. If you want to survive this war, you had better fucking listen to me. Always do what the Gunny says, no questions asked. This is not a friggin’ democracy. A family can have only one father. It’s my goal to bring you all home alive. If you put your hands in my hip pocket, you will make it back.”

The Marines nodded their heads in rapt attention, hanging on every word. Gomez was spellbound. She knew the Gunny was the real deal.

“Now, I want to go around the horn and have you all introduce yourselves to each other.” And then, South Philly completely asserting itself: “Before we start, do any of you’se have any questions for me?”

Corporal Frank Villaverde, at six-feet nine-inches possibly the tallest Mexican in the Marine Corps, raised his hand. The Gunny gave him a nod.

 “Yeah, Gunny, uh, we’ve heard a couple of rumors floating around out there. Are you in the Mafia back home or what?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the Gunny said, visibly annoyed. “I don’t know anything about that stuff. We’re not going to talk about that, so forget it.”

Another dramatic pause, then, “But if I wanted you to disappear, you would disappear. Are there any other stupid questions out there?”
No hands.

The Marines gathered in a semicircle around the Gunny and introductions occurred one by one. The noncommissioned officers gave gung ho salutations, highlighting their bravery and virility. The junior Marines—lance corporals and below—kept theirs short and direct, trying not to draw undue attention.

Finally, eyes turned to the blonde. Gomez smiled, and in a chipper voice said, “My name is Lance Corporal Gomez. I live in West Hollywood, and I work in the movie business. Since I am a pathological liar, nothing I say makes any difference anyway.”

A few nervous chuckles couldn’t break the deafening silence. Most of the Marines looked at her as though she had just pulled out a crack pipe and fired up. A staff sergeant growled menacingly, “OK, that’s enough out of you.”

The Gunny didn’t quite know what to make of her.

Contrite, Gomez added meekly, “I was just joking.” Too late. The introductions had moved on. She stood there, perturbed, not understanding why everyone didn’t find her introduction clever and funny.

She had been with her platoon for only 30 minutes, but already she seemed on the outside looking in. They didn’t get her. She knew she would have to prove herself to them—behind the wheel on the road to Baghdad.

No one’s bitch

The never-ending wind stirred up dust in a makeshift motor pool at Camp Solomon Islands, 6th ESB’s Spartan tent city in central Kuwait’s featureless desert. Gomez stood on the passenger side seat of an LVS.  Her head and torso, swimming in her oversized battle gear, poked through the ring mount in the cab’s roof. Her eyes were transfixed on the M2 50-caliber machine gun in front of her—a weapon almost as big as she was.

A Marine on the ground told her to charge the weapon—an action that transforms it from an inert 84-pound lump of metal into a deadly weapon with no safety mechanism.

She grabbed charging handle and pulled, trying to force the bolt back and chamber a round into the gun’s barrel. She strained and grunted, but her slender arms couldn’t find the leverage to make the cold, angular steel budge.

“Can’t you even pull the bolt back on the gun?” said the corporal driving the LVS. “Gomez, if you can’t pull the bolt back, you can’t go.”

 “You’re shitting me, right?” she said.

“No.” 

It was late February 2003, and Gomez was slated to be a security gunner on one of the battalion’s first supply convoys from their base in central Kuwait to Breach Point West, an expanding logistics base on the Iraqi border and a main staging point for the coming invasion.

As Gomez struggled with the weapon, another Marine said to her, “So you’re manning a 50-cal, and you can’t even pull the bolt back. That’s just great.”

The Gunny had joined a growing crowd of Marines on the ground below, watching her struggle with the gun. For him, Gomez was an odd duck. Some of her sergeants had already told him that her driving skills were below par. She was moody, unpredictable, and didn’t fit in well with many of the Marines, especially the company’s few females.

Most critically to the Gunny, Gomez appeared not to understand the main concepts of convoy operations. He always prided himself on being a street kid. He was good at reading the con, and he recognized that Gomez was trying to con him—but in a good way. She wanted to be there, she wanted to do it all, but she was building herself up to be more than she was. She could get killed. She could get other people killed. So before he allowed her to drive on convoys, he wanted her to see the big picture.

Back in California, the Gunny had made Gomez his platoon scribe—a personal assistant. For the past month Gomez had followed the Gunny around, recording the day-to-day details as he organized convoys. He figured she would absorb the education and soon come into the fold as a team player. But he knew it all hinged on whether she wanted to learn.

“Gents, I have Marines going on convoys that can’t properly handle their weapons,” Gunny said to the corporals and sergeants present. “You gents need to fix this.” He shook his head in disgust and walked away.

Gomez burned with anger. The Gunny had become her biggest obstacle. Now she saw her job as platoon scribe as punishment—a Hollywood player’s intern, but far less glamorous.  She didn’t travel 7,900 miles to pick up the Gunny’s laundry and record his every word in a little green notebook. She didn’t volunteer for the war to be the Gunny’s bitch. She came to kick ass and take names.

After a couple of weeks in Kuwait, her complaints to her peers and superiors had finally been heard. She was now going to the border, the edge of the empire, a dangerous place where anything could happen. She was back on track, bound for glory as an ass-kicking, sports bra wearing Jarhead. 

But the machine gun sat there quietly mocking her, taunting her, determined to keep her from her destiny.

Sergeant David Blecman looked up at Gomez and said reassuringly, “Come on, Gomez, you can do it. All you have to do is pull the bolt to the rear and chamber a round.”

Blecman was a cowboy. He had a soft spot for Gomez’s unconventional spirit. The slim Arizonan had a dishwater-blond buzz cut and a dry smoker’s rasp of a voice that tickled the ears.

Gomez bent her knees, pulled her feet up, and reared horizontally, planting her boots firmly on the ring mount in front of her. She grabbed the charging handle with her right hand, and steadied her body with her left. She pulled with all her might. The bolt slid back, chambering a round with a loud “ka-chunk!”

“Good to go!” Blecman said. “Let’s get the fuck out of Dodge.”

The convoy pulled out of Camp Solomon Islands onto a four-lane highway bound for Breach Point West, the border, the division between the civilized world and Saddam’s thugocracy. Her hands were wrapped around the gun’s handles, holding the power of life and death over all she could see. 
The convoy, in the left hand lane, slowed down for a red light. A civilian Chrysler Town & Country pulled up on the right. Several Kuwaiti men waved and smiled. Gomez smiled and waved back, then took her helmet off to fix her unruly, windblown hair. Seeing her blonde mane burst forth, the men realized the warrior they had saluted was a woman. They shot her dirty looks.

Enough. She grabbed the handle.

The machine gun—a weapon without a safety switch, with a live round in the chamber—swiveled around until the barrel pointed directly at the Chrysler. The men’s looks plunged into panic. The van tore away.
Kick ass and take names. The war was coming soon, and nothing would stop her now.

Into the breach

On March 20, 2003, the war was on. Now behind the wheel, Gomez tore across open desert, gunning her LVS northward toward the border. Silt flew like a hydroplane’s rooster tail. A naval shipping container, filled with engineering equipment, sat on the trailer. A 445-horsepower turbocharged engine roared behind her driver’s seat, straining to push 65,000 pounds of vehicle and cargo through a sea of sand. Adrenaline pumped full throttle through her veins. 

The war began early in the morning while Gomez was at the Kuwait City Pier, picking up her battalion’s engineer equipment that had just arrived by container ship. By the early afternoon, she had driven back to Breach Point West, now the front line in a war zone. 

Breach Point West’s expansive ten-foot-tall sand-bermed walls grew larger on the formless, sun-drenched horizon. Over the previous month, it had grown from a dusty makeshift redoubt into a sprawling logistics base holding six million gallons of fuel. The northeastern sky threatened as blown Iraqi oil wells—just over the border—spewed black plumes into the heavens, mushrooming into toxic thunderheads.

Gomez drove through the base’s vehicle checkpoint. The Marines at the post were nervous, sweating in their chemical suits. She maneuvered her LVS to the battalion’s motor pool and melted into the semi-controlled chaos of the day.

More than 200 hundred trucks of various stripes, both civilian and military, were haphazardly arrayed in the motor pool, idling, belching smoke, kicking up dust, and waiting for word and direction. Every vehicle bristled with cargo, guns, and crisp, virgin American flags. 6th ESB didn’t have enough military trucks to accomplish the mission—laying an expeditionary fuel pipeline 65 miles from Breach Point West to Jalibah Airfield in southern Iraq. So, in a fit of desperate improvisation, the battalion staff went into Kuwait City and contracted every civilian semi-truck they could find.

Therefore, a curious mix of vehicles belched diesel exhaust into the sunny morning. American flags hung from every vehicle. One Mercedes Benz big rig, with a baby blue paint job, appeared to have driven into the camp right out of the 1960s. The hodgepodge of monstrous military and civilian trucks, flags, guns—framed against the bleak desert, with blown Iraqi oil wells belching black smoke into the distant sky—looked like a post-apocalyptic Fourth of July parade.

Weary sailors and Marines shuffled through the cacophony, vehicle to vehicle, trying in vain to coordinate with each other. Most had been awake for two days or more, franticly preparing for the invasion. Fear registered on their faces. Rumors flew recklessly.

The fear of chemical attack was real for Gomez. Iraqi rockets flew over and landed around Breach Point West, rattling the ground. Each time intelligence detected a missile launch in Iraq, a distant air raid siren would sound from the battalion headquarters. Vehicles all over the motor pool would repeat three short horn blasts, telegraphing to all that a chemical attack was coming. Gomez and her platoon would quickly don and clear their gas masks and zip up their chemical suits—heavy charcoal-filled trousers and hooded blouses with rubber boots and gloves.

The day was 85 degrees, but the temperature inside a chemical suit could top 130 degrees. Every Marine and sailor at Breach Point West there knew that if a minute droplet of VX nerve agent touched their skin, within a minute their body’s muscles would contract uncontrollably, causing them to flop about like a headless chicken, until their backs snapped and hearts failed.

Over a dozen times that afternoon, Gomez heard sirens, triple horn blasts, and clanking metal warning of incoming chemical attacks. She and her fellow Marines responded to the stimulus with Pavlovian conditioning—gas masks, trousers, blouses, over boots, gloves, and snugly cinched hood. Through the fear, adrenaline, and crushing heat that followed, they continued to function, swallowing their panic and focusing on their mission. 

That night, Gomez drove her LVS across the border into the unknown. She heard howitzers thunder and saw artillery rockets rise into the night sky and streak toward Iraq, their light bathing the desert moonscape like giant arc welders. Through the swirling dust, Gomez saw shattered tanks, twisted hulks, and weathered fighting positions—silent ghosts from the Gulf War, forgotten in the fresh mayhem. Fatigue gripped her eyelids, but fear and cigarettes kept her alert. In a few short hours, her world had descended from order into bedlam. Her survival now relied on luck and the competence of those around her. For the first time in her life, she had no safety net.

There was no other place in the world she wanted to be.

Dead sheep

First Marine Expeditionary Force drove on to Baghdad at breakneck speed. Replenishment points, where Marine and Army units could get food, water, ammunition, and medical support, were needed in central Iraq to support the blitzkrieg behind the “shock and awe.” Gomez had spent the first week helping to establish Camp Viper, a sprawling logistics and air base 65 miles into southern Iraq.

But the front lines moved quickly, and Gomez’s battalion needed to establish Camp Anderson—one of the first replenishment points across the Euphrates River, about 120 miles south of Baghdad. A large, cumbersome convoy was scraped together for the job. Gomez was on it.

From the beginning, everything seemed to go wrong. The convoy was five hours late getting on the road. Tactical radios were in short supply. The convoy had only a couple of them, and the only way drivers could talk to each other was to use Wal-Mart two-way radios they had purchased themselves. Neither Gomez nor anyone she knew understood the convoy’s pyrotechnic plan—a visual signaling system using fireworks to communicate important orders. With more than 60 vehicles, the convoy was unwieldy and often split in half. Large, unsafe gaps occurred at the convoy’s center, where Gomez’s LVS was positioned.

Danger was everywhere, and the war had already produced its own cautionary tales. Gomez had already heard about the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company’s ordeal.  They took a wrong turn in Nasiriyah, got ambushed, lost 11 soldiers, and had several soldiers captured—most notably Private First Class Jessica Lynch. The war’s new urban legends gave her a healthy dose of fear.

The vehicle spacing problem worsened as the afternoon wore on. Gomez stomped on her accelerator—engine whining under the strain—desperately trying to keep the vehicle in front of her within eyesight. Near sunset, the front half of the convoy stopped along the roadside, trying to reconstitute itself. After catching up, Gomez parked her LVS alongside the road and waited for the others.

She heard shooting in the distance. Through the LVS cab, she saw a military GMC pickup truck barreling down the side of the road from the convoy’s front. A major leaned out of the passenger side window and yelled, “Watch the pickup! Watch the pickup!”

Sergeant Mark Gospoderek, Gomez’s squad leader, was a couple of vehicles ahead of her when he heard the major’s frantic warning. Adrenaline flowed as he got out of his truck with his M-16, knelt, and looked off to the left side of the road.

The sinking sun still illuminated the landscape. The road was elevated about a yard above the bleak scrubland that extended from the road. Modest mud-brick farmhouses were clustered 300 to 400 meters away. A dirt irrigation canal ran parallel to the road about 100 yards away. In the fields along the road, dozens of sheep lazily nipped at the few tufts of grass brave enough to pierce the hard clay soil. A few shepherds, minding their ragtag flocks, watched the convoy.

Gospoderek saw the white pickup truck about 700 yards away. It fit the profile given at the convoy briefing of what the Saddam Fedeyeen—Saddam’s paramilitary fighters—was using to attack convoys and supply lines.

The pickup came closer to the convoy, stopping in front of a shepherd who talked to the driver briefly, then quickly walked away. The pickup moved on to another shepherd—same reaction. The pickup crept closer to the convoy.

Gospoderek had a bad feeling. He ordered the half-dozen Marines around him to ready their M-16’s.

Then, a military police humvee came barreling up the side of the road from the south. A single, anonymous rifle shot cracked. Hundreds of shots followed it a heartbeat later. 

Gospoderek and dozens of Marines around him—dismounted drivers and assistant drivers—fired their rifles and light machine guns at the pickup. The volume of fire grew as scared Marines quickly committed, adding their fire to the din. The truck slowed in the hail of bullets, then came to a dying halt.

“Cease fire!” someone yelled.

The scene was eerily silent for a few seconds as wisps of gun smoke drifted away and dissipated. Joy pulsed through Gospoderek—the euphoria experienced after navigating a life and death situation and emerging unscathed.

Gomez stared long and hard at the shattered white pickup. The windshield was a spider web of shattered glass. The grill, headlights, hood, and fenders were Swiss cheese. The driver lay slumped over his rolled-down window, bloody and motionless.

Seven sheep lay dead, in mounds of red flesh and stained wool, from the convoy to the pickup truck.

Military police rushed the pickup, quickly pulling the doors open and dragging three occupants out. Gomez saw they were severely wounded or dead, bodies riddled by the hail of lead that had engulfed the truck.

The lone survivor was quickly restrained with zip-ties, given medical attention, and taken away. The dead Iraqis were dragged from the cab. Blood stained the driver’s door, collecting in a puddle underneath. Gomez had watched from her LVS cab in fascinated horror.

Then, to his astonishment, Gospoderek saw white flags appear from the lip of the small canal 100 yards away. Although no one had fired at them, the group of Iraqis hiding in the canal surrendered. The MPs quickly pounced and took three men—armed with AK-47s—into custody.

Gospoderek began to wonder, uncomfortably, if their 600 well-aimed rounds had been directed at the wrong target. 

Then they heard bloodcurdling, grief-stricken shrieks.

As the firefight began, an Iraqi girl in her early teens had been tending her sheep several hundred yards away. Frightened, she fled the field in panic, running for home.

She tripped and fell, breaking her neck. She died instantly.

In the fading light, her relatives now carried away her lifeless body. Women, probably relatives and neighbors, filled the night with haunting wails.

Hours slowly passed as Blackhawk helicopters ferried away the injured and dead. The MPs handled their prisoners, and an Army tanker convoy rumbled past into the northern unknown. A distant distress call appeared to the north—red aerial flares—a sure sign that some calamity had befallen the tankers.

Gomez felt vulnerable in the darkness, stationary along the road, a fat target for the enemy. Hypotheticals danced in her head. Would she be killed? Would she end up a prisoner like Jessica Lynch, with Iraqis doing God-knows-what to her? With her fight-or-flight response triggered and adrenaline pumping, she could only sit there in the night, powerless, with grief-stricken cries filling the blackness.

A couple of hours later, the convoy began moving again. As miles ticked on the odometer, Gomez’s anxiety and adrenaline gradually waned. But the adrenaline of combat made her feel alive, like being briefly energized from a life-long sedation. It created an addiction demanding to be fed. She knew how to get her fix—she needed to go further. Baghdad was calling.

Sandstorm facial

Gomez stood behind a humvee window in the dark with her travel makeup kit and a red lens flashlight. The convoy had arrived at Camp Anderson and set up camp just before dawn. The drivers immediately crashed for some much deserved sleep—all except Gomez. That night, and every night, Gomez fought her own personal war against time and the elements. After the war, she would strut her stuff—with a John Wayne swagger—for all in Hollywood to see.

First she dribbled canteen water on her hands and face, getting the grime and dust off. She then used a “fantastic” Biore cleansing cloth, getting the deep-seated grime, oils, and dirt out of her pores and exfoliating the dead skin.

She then pulled out her sample size Superline Preventor from Proscriptives—to prevent wrinkles. She applied it heavily around the eyes, sides of her mouth, eyebrows, and forehead, and then let it soak in and dry. After her “mask” dried, she quickly applied Clinique eye cream and night cream anti-wrinkle moisturizer.

Gomez’s assistant driver watched slack jawed. Saddam Feddayeen were operating nearby. This makeshift camp was guarded by nothing more than a couple of weary Marines. Their stressful 20-hour day—the convoy, the firefight, the dead Iraqi girl, the senseless waiting—had frazzled their nerves, and they would be back on the road in four hours. Their lives were in danger, and the assistant driver’s starlet partner was nonchalantly applying anti-wrinkle cream.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he finally inquired.

Gomez locked eyes, held up her calloused hands—worn from wrestling an LVS steering wheel for thousands of hard miles—and proclaimed, “The hands are fixable; the face is not.”

Her assistant driver retorted, “But why the fuck would you do that here?”
Gomez responded with what any self-respecting Hollywood drama queen would say, “Helloooo… Sun damage, stupid. My God, I want to be a Marine, not a man.”

Club Med

Two and a half weeks into the invasion, Gomez found herself back at Camp Anderson on a convoy layover. During her time driving in Kuwait and Iraq—wearing a T-shirt, flak jacket, and helmet—Gomez had acquired a trucker tan. Her left arm, neck, and face were golden brown while the rest of her body had faded into a pasty white. She decided to do something about it.

Camp Anderson had a natural pool inside its perimeter. Marines filtered, stored, and dispensed the water to coalition forces. The pool was remarkably clean, and it soon began doubling as a swimming hole for the hot and bored—Gomez included.

She had seen the guys at the watering hole, wearing only skimpy Marine Corps running shorts or tighty-whities, getting fantastically bronzed. Why couldn’t she? Gomez reached into her backpack and pulled out a black bikini.

She arrived wearing military running shorts and an olive drab T-shirt. Gunnery Sergeant Malinski, the Marine in charge of the water production site, was the only one there. He sat in a lawn chair on a small hill overlooking his pool, wearing shorts, flip flops, and a stress-free smile—the king of his own little Club Med.

“Gunny, I have a bikini on underneath,” Gomez said discretely. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“No problem,” Gunny Malinski said nonchalantly, trying to hide a smile.

“Go right ahead.”

Gomez stripped off her T-shirt and shorts, laid out her towel, and settled in, letting the warm sun bathe her skin.

Heaven.

Two Marines at one of the camp’s perimeter observation posts, who were supposed to be monitoring the neighboring village 500 yards away, described the “event” in detail to the other posts over their two-way radio. Army women from passing convoys had occasionally come to the pool wearing shorts and T-shirts, but never a hot chick in a bikini.

The word spread like wildfire throughout the camp. Marines called temporary truces to their vicious card game tournaments in the off chance the rumor might be true. The guards on the hill forgot about the village for a while and trained their binoculars on Gomez. They focused breathlessly as she climbed out of the watering hole—beads of water glistening on her wet skin—and lay down on her stomach. Then she untied her top.

Within a half hour, a dozen Marines turned the watering hole into a sea of testosterone—swimming, wrestling in the water, and “getting a tan.” Gomez shot a perturbed look at Gunny Malinski. He shrugged and looked on, silently amused, as the sexually frustrated Marines pined for her attention.

Gomez wanted her male peers to consider her an equal, just another Marine. But her looks opened doors and opportunities—and deep down she loved the attention. Unbeknown to her, the flirtatious charm and flamboyance that got her from Hollywood to within a hair’s breath of Baghdad were starting to impede her from reaching her goal. Her Marine and Hollywood worlds were beginning to collide.

Continued on page 2.

Reach the reporter at chshep1302@yahoo.com.

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The Cronkite Zine showcases the coursework of individual students at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University.

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