Free The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice by Vanessa M. Gezari

Her teacher, Sally Engle Merry, asked students to learn about the neighborhood’s ethnic composition and describe the social and economic issues affecting its people. This was not easy for college students. They had to walk the streets and brave the awkwardness of talking to strangers. But Loyd was her mother’s daughter, and she did this with ease. She impressed Merry as an ideal anthropologist-in-training: outgoing, poised, independent, and genuinely interested in what other people were thinking.
    At Wellesley, Loyd championed human rights and equality.Her much older half brother, Paul Loyd, Jr., by now a wealthy Texas oilman, grew accustomed to their arguments. He saw himself as a pragmatist, while Loyd was more like Don Quixote, always off on a worthy but possibly hopeless crusade. “Paula would say, ‘It’s right, it’s moral, it’s what we should be doing,’ and she’d go ahead,” Paul Loyd told me.He and others were shocked when, upon graduating from Wellesley, she joined the Army.Loyd’s decision also surprised Johnson, who remembers talking with her about it at the time. “She made it sound like there was a place in the military even for people like her, who loved peace and didn’t like war,” Johnson told me.
    A possible clue lay in an ambitious academic project Loyd had undertakenbefore leaving Wellesley, where she had been one of a very small number of students selected to write an honors thesis in anthropology.Her paper clocked in at 181 pages, and it hinted at questions about the military and the lives of people in conflict zones that would absorb her for years to come. Loyd’s thesis was a sensitive and meticulously researched account of the growth of underground resistance in the gay bar scene in San Antonio, which was home to three major military bases.Drawing on Marxist and feminist theory, Loyd wrote that she was seeking a “subtle and nuanced account of the various wayssubordinate people subvert domination.” While some social scientists focused on armed peasant uprisings, Loyd was more interested in “small acts of everyday resistance.”“I have found that subordinate groups use the forms of resistance most readily available to them,” she wrote. “Yet, resistance is also structured according to the social networks it makes use of.” Bars were natural gathering places for working-class gay people, often in rough parts of town that lay beyond the easy reaches of civilian and military authority. Their patrons committed small but crucial acts of rebellion against San Antonio’s dominant heterosexual order and the newspapers, churches, police, and military authorities that enforced it.Loyd wrote that she was interested in “the numerous gray areas between overt rebellion and abject submission.”
    Loyd had always identified with the underdog, always craved a challenge. With her college degree, she could have become an Army officer.Instead, she enlisted. Some acquaintances wondered at this, but it was a choice anthropologists would have recognized.Loyd thrived as an outsider; morally and politically, her sympathies lay with the grunts. The Army gave her an aptitude test that showed she was mechanically inclined. Loyd’s maternal grandfather had been a mechanic, and her mother had always been good at fixing things. When Loyd turned sixteen, Ward had taught her how to change a car tire, and Loyd had helped her mother and stepfather rebuild their house in St. Thomas after two hurricanes. Now the Army trained Loyd as a heavy-wheel vehicle mechanic.Soldiers with this job description fix trucks weighing more than five tons; they must be able to lift more than one hundred pounds on occasion and more than fifty pounds frequently.Loyd stood five foot six and weighed 120 pounds at most, but she routinely scored in the men’s range on fitness tests.Her commanders marveled at the contrast between her flaxen delicacy and her physical toughness, this tiny woman who could take on a roaring deuce and