Having shown I could still best Fort Campbell High School’s star running back, I decided to cut him some slack. He was, after all, my brother. Slowing my pace, I waited until I could hear his labored breathing and oversized feet pounding the ground behind me before glancing over my shoulder. “You’ve been slacking off,” I sneered as he was drawing up to me.

“No fair, Runt,” Craig, the younger of my two brothers, shot back between hungry gasps of air. “Those tooth picks you call legs… They only need to move what… Ninety-eight pounds… If that.”

“Ha, ha. Very funny.”

“Okay… How much… do you weight?”

Coming to a dead stop, I watched as Craig shot past me. When he realized I wasn’t with him any more, he came to a screeching halt, turned and bent over. Planting his hands on his knees, he took a moment to suck in air like it was about to be rationed before looking up to where I was standing, staring at him with my hands resting on my hips. “Didn’t Couch Pulaski teach you anything while you were staying with him, like etiquette or at the very least, common sense?” I snipped.

Confused, he cocked his head to one side. “Yeah, sure. Why?”

Dropping my arms to my side, I rolled my eyes skyward before making my way up to where he was and continued on, but at a leisurely pace, more of a trot than a run. After falling in on my left, I took to explaining myself. “For one thing, I would have thought you would have learned by now you don’t go around asking a girl how much she weights.”

“Well, you don’t count,” he replied without thinking.

Having picked up a few tricks on how to deal with troublesome boys from Grams during the time I had spent with her, I responded to Craig’s comment by giving him one of those telling looks girls are so good at, you know, the one they cast out of the corner of their eyes that informs the male carbon unit beside them they’re about to cross a line only she is aware of. “Oh?”

Realizing he’d stepped on it again, Craig winched. After mentally regrouping, he made a desperate stab at regaining his verbal footing. “I’m your brother,” he finally shot back. “I’m authorized to talk to you about things like that. In fact,” he quickly added, “as your ‘older’ brother, it’s my job to look out for my ‘little’ sister.”

Ignoring the emphasis he put on the words older and little, I found myself strangely pleased he was now able to refer to me as his sister without gagging on that word. Once more I slowed my pace, this time settling into a walk. Doing likewise, Craig looked over at me. When he saw my expression, he up and turned serious. “Look Rache, you’re going to have to give me some time to get used to all of this. I mean, you can’t expect me to suddenly go from treating you like I have our whole lives to dealing with the way you are now. I mean damn, I’m only human.”

Not wishing to see one of my moods, an annoying feature of the new me, spoil the last day we’d have together before Craig left for West Point, I tamped down the maudlin reflections that bubbled up at times like this as best I could and instead, turned my full attention to coming up with a wickedly witty retort. “Is that how Brookie sees you now that you’re just another shit for brains plebe, nothing more than a wretched mortal to be pitied?”

Realizing what I was up to, and just as eager to push past the latest round of awkwardness we had veered into despite our best efforts to pretend all was as it had always been, Craig grinned as he glanced over at me and winked. “Oh, Brooke is too smart a girl to make that mistake. She sees me for what I am.”

Unable to resist, I returned his stare, cocking a brow as I did so. “And what’s that? A skinny ass jock who can’t even keep up with his little sister?”

Naturally Craig couldn’t let that stand. Game on.

Now in my family, populated as it is by two older brothers, creatures who had emerged from the depths of Lake Testosterone, a person like me doesn’t stand a chance unless they adopt some very basic survival skills like running fast or being able to deftly dodge a sib bent on extracting vengeance. I’d no sooner finished taking a verbal swipe at Craig the Jock than he turned and lunged in an effort to tackle me to the ground and tickle me until I peed. Fortunately, the slick moves he used to stymie defensive linemen were no match for the fancy footwork my older brother Steve, the Snake Eater, had taught me. With an ease that left Craig grabbing nothing but thin air, I managed to evade him and break into a dead run before he had managed to recover. Laughing, I couldn’t resist the urge to shout back at him even though he was now in hot pursuit. “Wait till the General hears Hudson High’s newest acquisition can’t even take down his kid sister.”

“Kid sister my ass,” he shouted out as he was closing on me fast. “You’re, you’re…”

And there it was, again. What exactly was I?

The General in this story is Major General Thomas Shaw, a second generation Airborne Infantry officer and a proud ring knocker. Yet despite a reputation that caused the soldiers in his division to refer to him as ‘The Chain Shaw’ behind his back, he’s a pretty cool character, at least as far as Steve, Craig and I are concerned. If he weren’t, odds are I’d still be in traction instead of beating feet back to my maternal grandmother’s Wyoming home in an effort to escape the clutches of my brother. You see, I didn’t always go by the name Rachel, the third and by far the puniest of the General’s three children. Until recently, I was known as Richard Shaw, or as Craig and Steve call me, ‘The Runt.’

Backstory alert!

I have no living memory of my mother, for she died of breast cancer when I was four. At least I don’t think I have any real memories of her that matter. Whether the images I have filed neatly away in my mind are derived from the little time I actually had with her or are drawn from the photo albums my father keeps in the bottom drawer of the china closet doesn’t matter. I can honestly say I do not recall what it felt like to be touched by her or to hear her unrecorded voice. They, like my curiosity of what life would have been like had we lived in one place during my entire childhood instead of moving from post to post every few years are something I think about from time to time but do not dwell on. Sentimentality in the Shaw family, while authorized, is seldom displayed in an overt, simpering, huggie, kissy manner. I mean geez, with a father who could give Rambo a run for his money, one brother who was Special Forces and another who was hell bent for leather to be all he could be, for things to be otherwise would have been way too much for a mere mortal such as myself to ask for.

Which leads many to wonder how it came to past that I managed to slip in under the wire and become a part of this family. While Craig and Steve have concocted all sorts of exotic and off the wall theories on this subject, some of which are quite creative thanks to my brother Craig’s warped sense of humor, at the moment they are of no concern to this narrative. Suffice it to say, even before I decided I needed to pole vault over the gender line I was something of an outlier. Where as my brothers were pretty much cookie cutter versions of the General, even before I started down the path I was now trotting along, I looked as if I had been left on the doorstep of my parent’s quarters by the German milkman. That’s how I wound up being saddled with the nickname ‘The Runt,’ a natural enough moniker seeing how my father and brothers all stand well over six feet tall, dwarfing my five foot eight frame that gives a whole new meaning to the term puny. Hooah!

For those who have never had an opportunity to spend time with folks like The General and my brother Steve, Hooah is a term they and everyone in and associated with the Army use for just about anything save no. For example, it can mean I heard what you said and understand, all right!, thank you, say what?, outstanding!, that's cool, or simply okay. Hooah can also be used as a cheer, one heard all over the post whenever a gathering of soldiers have been informed by their first sergeant they’re about to enjoy a rare good deal or they’re scheduled to spend the next eight hours crawling through the obstacle course’s perma-mud. Often it is used sarcastically, especially when someone is in the midst of something that is particularly unpleasant, like cleaning the barbecue grill at the beginning of Spring after one of my brothers put it away the previous fall without bothering to scrape off the old grease and clingy bits and pieces of burnt burger before doing so. At the time, I thought that was about as hooah as you could get. Well surprise, surprise. I was wrong.

Had my pathetic physical presentation been the only distinguishing characteristic setting me apart form the rest of the Shaw clan, things would have been very different and this story would have been a heck of a lot shorter. Unfortunately, there was more than vertical disparity separating me from Dad, Bro One and Bro Two. Despite enjoying many of the same things they did, I did not have what one could call a positive self image of myself. It wasn’t until I was in middle school that I realized it had nothing to do with my failure to physically measure up to my brothers. Rather, as I watched by peers begin deal with the trials and tribulations of being teenagers, ever so slowly I became aware I the wrong side of the great divide.

Check Fire!

Let me rephrase that. What I meant to say was the physical me was sadly out of sync with the primary circuits of my brain housing group, the ones that should have been proudly proclaiming, ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane.’ Instead, the signal traffic they were passing onto my psyche were confusing and, I dare say, more than a little scary. At first I thought I was gay, which I guess would have been a relatively minor issue for most normal people. Unfortunately, I did not live with normal people. At the time this all came bubbling up to the surface, Dad was an assistant division commander of an airborne division, Steve was a cadet captain in West Point’s corps of cadets and Craig was lighting up the scoreboard of the post’s high school by bulling through defensive linebackers as if they weren’t there, scoring on and off the field.

Having been raised as part of a military family bereft of a female parental unit, the pearls of wisdom and advice that flowed from Dad’s mouth sounded more like they were lifted from FM 3-31, the Joint Forces Land Component Commander’s handbook and not Dr. Spock’s ‘Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.’ It wasn’t really his fault, not when you consider his father, known throughout the Army as ‘No Slack Shaw,’ raised him to be a soldier. I guess that was why Dad never attempted to influence any of his own sons by steering us toward a military career. That Steve, followed in time by Craig chose to go that route was due to their own choice, not his.

Still, Dad didn’t escape his own upbringing unscathed. Nor was he able to set aside his well honed approach to dealing with people when it came to raising what he lovingly called the Three Stooges. Many of the same policies he used to govern his conduct on duty seamlessly lapsed over into the home. Among them were his admonishment that we bring him solutions and not problems. This caused me to fall back on a much quoted maxim of his when I finally came to the conclusion something was rotten in Denmark. In the Shaw family, at least our branch of it, instead of being told to look before you leap, we were always reminded time spent in reconnaissance was time well spent. With this thought in mind, I set out on a journey of self discovery, an odyssey I ever so slowly came to appreciate I could not avoid even if I had I wanted to.

The only thing I can imagine that could possibly be worse then having a father who was a compulsive planner is being one yourself. In his case, this is a good thing. I mean, who would want to go into battle being led by someone who was in the habit of making things up as they went along. I know I wouldn’t. Not that being overly obsessive about plotting your every move is the mark of an exceptional leader. Having spent my entire life surrounded by military types, I’ve had the opportunity to meet a fair number of officers I wouldn’t follow to the bathroom, let along go into combat with. As with any profession, you have the good, the bad and the certifiably dumb.

The down side of doing nothing until you have every little detail nailed down is all too often you find yourself putting off doing anything for fear of having missed something. Dad has been able to push past this quirk only because he had the good fortune to serve under officers who believed in the philosophy that a good plan today is better than scathingly brilliant plan tomorrow. And though this bit of wisdom was added to the usual rotation of fatherly advice, its significance wasn’t driven home with the same force Dad’s superiors used to pound that point home.

Thus, by the time I finally felt I was ready to discuss my problems with Dad it wasn’t a good time for him, or anyone else for that matter. You see he was slated to deploy to the sandbox with the bulk of his division. For anyone who’s ever been involved in such an event, you can appreciate the strain this puts on a family. During the day the military member is harried by a thousand and one details that need to be looked after before they were wheels up and winging their way over to Southwest Asia. At night, when they finally are permitted to set aside their labors, they return to a home where everyone does their best to pretend as if it’s just another day. This enforced domestic normalcy can be just as wearing as the stress and strain a soldier experiences while on duty. So I punted.

Okay, stay with me. This backstory is leading to a point. Promise.

Unlike previous deployments, when it came time to head off to my maternal grandmother’s, I went alone. Craig, who was entering his senior year in high school managed to talk Dad into allowing him to stay with the family of his football coach. Mind you, that wasn’t a hard sell for either man. Coach Pulaski jumped at the opportunity to keep his star running back for another year and Dad, with his heart set on seeing Craig play for the Black Knights the following year, was anxious to do whatever he could to ensure Craig stayed in shape and out of trouble, tasks he expected Coach could handle with ease.

As much as I hated the idea of spending my freshman year in Wyoming, it was infinitely preferable to the alternative, a point Dad made every time I was foolish enough to complain. All he needed to do to shut me up was to remind me his parents would be more then happy to have me. Not that I think he would have actually left me to the tender mercies of No Slack Shaw. Though he never openly criticized his father, at least not to us kids, we all knew there were some seriously unresolved issued between Dad and his father that would, in all likelihood, remain unresolved. Which is why when I finally did muster up the chutzpah to tell Dad I was playing for the wrong team, he took it in stride and heard me out. But I digress. Back to the backstory.

As Army aviators tend to say in lieu of once upon a time, there I was, exiled to Wyoming, a state that beats out Alaska when it comes to population density, but just barely. Rachel Fleming, whom we all called Grams, lived in a suburb south of Cheyenne. Fortunately for me, she was anything but your typical old lady. Though retired, she kept herself busy by teaching several classes in accounting and business administration at the local community college. While I’m hard pressed to think of anything duller than those two subjects, by staying engaged Grams maintained what Dad would call a keen edge. It also kept her in touch with young people and the real world problems they face, giving raise to my plan B.

When I told her I was having issues with my gender, which is how I phrased it since it wasn’t possible for a Shaw to admit he, or is it she, is a transsexual. For her part Grams was neither shocked nor surprised by what I told her, leading me to wonder if she had spotted something in me I had only recently become aware of. Nor did she hesitate to do something about it. With an alacrity and sure-footedness that would have impressed Dad, she took the information I had accumulated to support my position and did her own research. When she was satisfied I wasn’t pulling her leg, that I really was screwed up when it came to the boy-girl thing, she made a series of appointments with medical doctors and shirks who knew a good deal more than simply how to spell transgender.

Ever so slowly we, Grams, me and Dr. Jeannette Wheeler, a psychologist in Cheyenne, began to get a handle on the situation. Physically I was every bit a normal, healthy fourteen year old male. No big surprise there. It was the mental aspect of this dilemma that proved to be difficult to get sorted out. I mean, I wasn’t effeminate by any stretch of the imagination. With one brother who liked to use me as a tackling dummy, another who thought he was doing me a favor by teaching me hand-to-hand combat when he wasn’t otherwise occupied biting the heads off of snakes and a father who prescribed to the notion that anything that didn’t kill you made you stronger, for things had been otherwise would have been unimaginable. Nor was I drawn to the sort of thing one would expect a teenage girl to get all giddy over. Like my brothers, when it came to fashion all my taste was in my mouth, which is why I think they opted to pursue a career where they didn’t need to worry about what to wear in the morning. Going about with a cell phone glued to my ear, gabbing incessantly with my friends or pouring my heart out to them was something I never understood. I mean, just how interesting can the day to day routine of the average teenager be? Besides, though I had a working knowledge of multi-syllable words and put them to excellent use while in school, in a home ruled by a grunt and shared with a jock, they were carefully rationed. And when it came to the sex, Justin Bieber did nothing for me. But then neither did Taylor Swift.

I’ll not bore you with a long winded discussion of how we came to the conclusion Mother Nature had played a cruel trick on me. Not will I dwell on the many nights I spent tossing and turning while reenacting my very own version of Macbeth’s ‘to be, or not to be,’ soliloquy in my head. At the moment all you need to know is that by Christmas of my freshman year, whatever doubts I still clung to on the day I told Grams about my issues were gone. Equally important, both Grams and the shrink were not only onboard, both thought it might be a good idea if I start taking steps to see if playing for the other team was right for me.

By now I expect a fair number of you are no doubt saying, “Wait a minute. How does a normal teenage boy raised in an almost exclusive male environment who’s not a fairy decide becoming a girl is right for him?” That’s an excellent question. As soon as I have an answer that makes sense to me, I’ll break into the story and tell you. All I did know for sure that Christmas in a way that defied my ability to explain was it was the right call.

With this in mind, Grams and I spent the next few days discussing what we, or more correctly I should do. For starters, the idea of informing Dad, at least while he was deployed down range was dismissed out of hand. I mean, I might be royally screwed up when it comes to the gender thing, but do give me a little credit. The idea of sending a man like my father an email or letter informing him a son of his wanted to become a girl while he is in the middle of a shooting war is beyond dumb. Telling either or both of my brothers was also out of the question. Steve was preparing for another deployment to Afghanistan and Craig was in the midst of enjoying his senior year. Besides not being in any position to do anything for me other than try to convince me I was few beers short of a six pack, which was something I was already painfully aware of, one or both of them would inform Dad in the misguided belief they were saving me from myself.

Grams, on the other hand, was perfectly positioned to help me get the ball rolling. With Dad on the other side of the world, she was my legal guardian, armed with a general power of attorney that gave her all the legal authority necessary to follow through on Dr. Wheeler’s recommendations. When we finally sat down to discuss what to do, she made it perfectly clear to me she had no reservations about helping me, provided of course that was what I wanted to do. Knowing full well Dad would not be at all happy with the way we pressed on without bothering to inform him, I asked her if she was sure she wanted to get involved. With a kindly, grandmother sort of smile on her lips, she reached out and placed a gentle hand on my cheek. “Your father’s a good man. He’ll understand. Besides,” she quickly added while chuckling, “I’m already up to here in this,” she pointed out while holding her hand over her head. “As they say, in for a penny, in for a pound.”

I expect a fair number of you are probably saying to yourself, “Yikes! Transitioning in Wyoming? Poor girl.” Well, I am here to inform you things could not have gone better. First off, I did not do anything overt or over the top, at least not at first. While I continued to see Dr. Wheeler and go to school in my male mufti, under Grams watchful eye I ever so slowly dipped a toe in to test the waters. For those who have gone the M. Butterfly route, you know the drill, so I’ll not bore you to tears with long, drawn out descriptions of the shopping trips Grams insisted we take in order to buy a wardrobe suitable for a teenaged girl or how I managed to make a fool out of myself during my first public appearance in female battle rattle. Awkward doesn’t even begin to describe these initial forays out and about as Rachel.

And yet, and yet, in a weird way that was absolutely baffling to me even to this day, I came to appreciate what I was doing was more than right. It was necessary. Had I not come to that conclusion, I never would have found the courage to sit down with Dad and tell all when, upon completing his latest round of God and Country time in Never-Neverland he made his way west to police me up.

I cannot think of any greater fear a child harbors than to be rejected by a parent. For a boy, to have a man you admire above all others look down at you with an unfettered look of disgust is perhaps the most devastating thing imaginable. I know there were times when I had wished Dad would have up and slapped me silly rather than see him avert his eyes and shake his head while letting out a slow, well measured sigh. So, when I sat down with him on the front porch of Gram’s home to inform him about my gender issues, I could not look him in the eye. Instead, I gazed off in the distance as I ever so carefully explained things to him. Even when I finished without him once interrupting me, I could not look as he stood up and slowly walked away without uttering a single word. It was his way of dealing with his children when they disappointed him or, in this situation, dumped a massive ‘S’ bomb on him he needed time to absorb before responding.

Round two came later that evening after a meal he, Grams and I sort of enjoyed in utter silence. When he was sure everyone was finished, he looked across the table at me for the first time sporting a deadpan expression that would have reduced a lesser mortal to tears. Now I’m not saying I’m some kind of demigod or supernatural being, unless of course you’re one of those who think people like me are a twisted version of Satan’s spawn. No, I simply understand dear old Dad and his moods. Having uploaded and processed the data I had provided earlier in the day, he was ready to discuss the matter in a clam, reasonable manner. At least I hoped that was what he was getting ready to do. Given he was a general officer who had just come back from dealing with people who had no idea how to spell Geneva Convention, I could not totally discount the possibility I was on the verge of finding out just what the term rendition meant.

Okay, back to the story.

Needless to say, I didn’t get a chance to play soccer with the All Islamic Jihad team at Club Gitmo. Nor was there any need to dust me off to the nearest trauma center. Instead, Dad informed me if I was really serious about what I was doing and Dr. Wheeler could convince him she knew what she was talking about, he would leave me in Wyoming with Grams over the summer, during which I would assume the role of Rachel 24/7. Though Dr. Wheeler thought this might be a bit premature, she saw no harm in it. In the meantime, my father would return to Fort Campbell alone where he would get on with the business of handing his division over to his replacement as scheduled before moving onto his next tour of duty at Puzzle Palace on the Potomac. At the end of the summer, when he was settled into his new assignment, he promised he’d return to Wyoming, sit down with me and discuss what he called ‘this gender thing’ once more. If, during that time I had come to the conclusion the girl thing just wasn’t for me, I promised I would drop the matter and never mention it again. If, however, the opposite was true, he made it clear he’d take his daughter home with him and see this thing through to the end, consequences be damned.

Hooah!

This is the second time around for this story. Having finished ‘The World Turned Upside Down,’ which by the way is available on Kindle and Lulu.com, as well as a collaborative effort with my favorite Anglo-Irish co-writer even as I am going back to finish ‘Caitlin’, I decided I needed to spend sometime writing something that was a wee bit more lighthearted than revolution and world wars.

Besides, I have been taking advantage of Erin’s kind indulgence by using this website to promote and advertise all my other books, (which, in case I haven’t mentioned, are available on Kindle and Lulu.com). I figure it’s time for a little payback. So I am reposting ‘The General and the Butterfly’ with the intent of finishing it.

Hopefully those of you who read it, even if it is a second time, enjoy the story.

Nancy Cole
a.k.a. HW Coyle