Spec/4 Rebecca ("Becky") Wojewoda

The descendant of Polish Jews who fled German aggression in the 1930s, Becky Wojewoda grew up in New York City.  Her family's expectation was that she'd go to college, and while she had the aptitude, teenage rebellion led her down a somewhat different path.  On her 18th birthday, she enlisted in the Army.  Ostensibly, her plan was to earn GI Bill benefits for tuition while learning a trade that could be a backup plan in case college didn't work out.  In actuality, she enlisted mainly to piss off her father, who'd served as an infantryman in Vietnam.

Despite being a fervent atheist, Becky had mixed feelings about having Sickels Army Airfield in Fulda, Germany as her first duty station.  As an avionic mechanic (MOS 15N) fresh out of AIT, she was posted to the 4th Squadron of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment.  This lasted all of four uneasy months before the 11th crossed the Inner German Border in December 1996.  Somewhere along the way, someone realized that Becky had natural 20/15 vision and weighed 98 pounds (one pound above minimum weight for enlistment at her 5'0" height).  These qualities made her an acceptable, if not ideal, replacement for the aircrews that had suffered grievous losses in the war's first months.  By spring 1997, Becky was reclassified as a 93B aeroscout observer and was in a crash course for aerial reconnaissance and forward observation.

The end of 1998 saw the 4/11th disbanded, with its personnel dispersed among other American units in Germany and Poland.  Becky was sent to the 5th ID as a replacement for 1/5th Aviation, where she had another ten months of flight time before being grounded permanently.  None of the infantry platoons wanted her because of her size (or lack thereof), so she was sent to the gun trucks, where she at least could stand on an ammo can to reach a mounted machine gun.

For the remnants of 1/5th Aviation, Becky is now a navigator, electronics maintainer, and, when the dismount team goes out, RTO.  She's capable of serving as a backup driver or gunner, though her height requires some equipment adjustments in both roles.  She also grew up in a bilingual household and is fluent in Polish, has smattering of Yiddish, and has picked up bits of German and Russian from her wartime service.

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Slender and diminutive even before several years of warfare and inadequate rations, Becky is now borderline emaciated.  She's in her early twenties; in the right clothes, she could be mistaken for half that age.  Her shoulder-length hair is dark brown, now slightly sun-streaked from the Polish summer, and she usually wears it braided and pinned up.  She hides her dark eyes behind polarized Ray-Ban Aviators; they've been light-sensitive ever since her battlefield nuke exposures.

Becky is fiercely possessive of her BDUs, flight suit, and Interceptor Body Armor rig, mainly because they're all the right size and she doesn't expect to be able to find replacements in XS if she loses any of them.  The BDUs are well-worn generic replacement depot attire without any identifying marks except a subdued American flag on the right shoulder and her Spec/4 rank tabs.  The flight suit is her last one, and she wears aeroscout observer morale patches on both shoulders.  The right is a Kiowa Warrior silhouette with the motto, "The Only Helicopters With Balls."  The left is a Kiowa going down in flames, captioned "Recon by Sacrifice - Unarmed and Unafraid."

Her rifle is the same beat-to-shit M4 SOPMOD with ACOG and AN/PEQ-2A infrared laser that she carried in her bird (though she dearly misses the bungee-slung SAW that she rigged as an unsanctioned door gun).  She also carries a Browning Hi-Power as a last-ditch backup.  However, as far as she's concerned, her primary armament is the array of signals equipment she packs along - everything from the team's AN/PRC-119 radio to a pair of VS-17 marker panels.