Surviving As a Woman in a Place Built for Men
My winter at Camp Lejeune
Jacksonville was a man’s world, the whole damn place a bachelor pad. The main road leading to Camp Lejeune wasn’t much more than asphalt and spindly pines. The rest was car lots, strip clubs, and tattoo parlors, chain restaurants, and a sad excuse for a mall. Young men with matching crew cuts roamed in packs on the sides of roads. Colorful hot rods purchased with deployment money revved up at red lights. And during rush hour, on the median of Western Boulevard, the Jacksonville Ninja, an anonymous man who seemed as natural to the place as the pines, practiced his finest karate moves with a boom box on his shoulder. Background noise was artillery rounds and low-flying aircraft, both so loud they often set off car alarms. Few people were local, nearly all its residents were transplants somehow connected to the Marine Corps. It wasn’t the kind of place a woman chose.
In a town full of bored young men, the place wasn’t short on house parties. Cleve warned me on the way to the first one I ever went to, “The guys get pretty wild.” He said it was best I avoid the back rooms because the owners of the place were swingers. “Sometimes they snort lines and shit, too. Nothin’ you wanna mess with,” he told me as he took a sharp turn into a neighborhood of shabby duplexes and shiny cars.
