Private Payne

Inside my communications rig, while on forty day field training exercises, I had an electric perculator coffee pot which the entire platoon used for heating up its water on cold January nights in southern Bavaria.

I fed and washed my platoon like a mother hen tending to her nest.

My generator and coffee pot never went down.

I was a natural mechanic who could fix those things in the dark of night with no flashlight.

"Taylor, come help us," the straight male soldiers cried as they flooded their generators when trying to restart them.

I put down my cooking utensils, picked up a screw driver and turned on the power for everyone.

Even highly trained generator mechanics who outranked me could not repair those machines like I, and they broke down a lot in sub zero temperatures.

I would have been fierce during war but a fag- hag was trying to take it all away from me. Like any well prepared, obsessive-compulsive budding queen would do, I kept tons of shampoo, soap, conditioner, candy and packs of cigarettes stocked away for field training exercises along with my much worshipped coffee pot.

We never knew when an alart was coming and when the unit would be forced to roll out at 3 a.m. into the woods of Bavaria, and not return to civilization and hot running water for weeks.

I was always ready for war and kept my rig and duffle bag stuffed with basic necessities.

Heterosexuals were never prepared for the field or war and they turned to me when we wandered into the Black Forrest for training exercises without all the comforts of life.

I sold smokes for conversation and ran a beauty salon long before "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" ever conceived itself through Bill Clinton’s sinful hands out of the back of a camouflaged radio teletype communications rig while serving the nation.