Ladies, rejoice. What I’m about to tell you is that the baddest creature on this planet is not some musclebound guy of WWE or some action movie star, but a Lady (notice I capitalized that because that’s exactly what she is) I met at my unit in Germany.

Now as a police officer and as an MP, I’ve had more than a few serious encounters. I’ve had my clock cleaned a time or two, but of course, you can’t stop. You better take the guy at that point. Well, this Lady didn’t clean my clock.  he knocked it to next Tuesday.

Leigh wasn’t exactly what you’d think of as a serious customer. She stood maybe five foot three, blonde, cute as a button. If you looked up the word “Southern Belle” in the dictionary, there’s a really good chance you’ll see her picture right next to the word. She knitted, had very gracious manners, and as I came to realize, it was a disguise that Super Girl would have worn. It was the exact opposite of what she really was.

So, here’s the story.

I first met Leigh when I got to my unit in Germany. Quiet, cute, and of course all us testosterone-fueled guys took it upon ourselves to make her life interesting, to say the least. We were always hitting on her and so on. You have to understand that we were all poster children for sexual harassment, and respect for the opposite sex was something we were about to learn the hard way.

Well, this went on for about four months, and then it all happened on a Wednesday.  Wednesdays in the Army is “Training Day.” Well, this particular day the bulletin board simply read, “Uniform of the day – Army PTs. Fall out to the gym at 0830 hrs for unarmed self-defense training.” So we all go over, and there she is. There are several wrestling mats rolled out, and she’s standing the middle of one of them in her little white outfit with a black belt around her waist. Well, she gets the class going, demonstrates some moves, and then says she’s going to show these really work. She needs two volunteers.  “Sgt. Ablan, Cpl. Heckler, front and center,” she says.  We were the two biggest guys in the unit. Both of us lived in the gym at the time, and boxed and wrestled with the Field Artillery guys who shared the Kaserne with us. So we thought, of course, that we were all that.

We join her on the mat.

So she says, “Guys, come at me.”

Karl and I both said, “Oh, come on Leigh. We don’t want to hurt you.”

“Come on, come on.”

“Leigh, we don’t want to hurt you.”

I mean here we are. Both of us over six foot five, with muscles that would make Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson look like the proverbial 95-pound weakling. Both boxers and wrestlers and with an attitude. If we go after her, it isn’t going to be pretty.

“Come on, come on!”

We repeated ourselves, and this time she just smiled as said, “Come on.  Pussies!”

Well, if you insist, I thought. So we made our move.

My last memory of that engagement was seeing her foot in front of my eyes, and then I’m staring up at the ceiling wondering what the hell had happened. Then she comes into view, puts out her hand, and helps me up off the mat. Karl was lying a few feet away with that same “Oh my God, what just happened?” look on his face.

Someone had timed the engagement. Karl and I lasted less than a second against her.

We used to proclaim that we were so bad, we got Christmas Cards from Chuck Norris. It turns out she actually did. Not only had he trained her, but she’d been one of his lead instructors. She had boxes of trophies collecting dust, and blacks belts in more Japanese, Korean, and Chinese words than you could shake a stick at. She was one seriously bad animal!

Needless to say, we had nothing but the utmost respect for the girl after that.

She had us whipped gentle.