The footage that hit Brazilian airwaves on the afternoon of September 4, 2015, was graphic and uncut. A drone hovers over the towering São Paulo Cathedral, before pulling back to reveal that the once-empty square in front of the church is swelling with people. They begin running toward the cathedral, where, at the base of the staircase, a line of police officers stand, guns drawn, behind a barricade of vehicles.

A man in a tattered dark-green jacket and baggy shorts climbs the staircase toward the church’s large wooden doors. He has a woman in a headlock, with a gun in the hand he has wrapped around her neck. She flails as he turns to shout at the crowd of onlookers in the square below him. As he drags her to the top of the staircase, the woman attempts to break free, but the man dives on top of her, pinning her to the ground with his knees.

That’s when another man, this one in a blue jacket, creeps into frame. He sneaks up behind the man in green and lunges at him. The two men go down as the woman, sprawled across the ground beneath them, covers her head. As the men wrestle, she makes a run for it, the man in green firing after her and missing. He turns his gun toward the man in blue and fires twice. The man in blue stumbles backward into the cathedral doors. Seconds later, the police open fire, as the man in green sits on the edge of the stairs, bullets riddling his body.

“Tragedy always goes viral."

The bloody standoff seemed to be pulled straight from the scenes of a crime drama; yet what happened in front of São Paulo Cathedral that Friday afternoon was all too real. The cathedral sits squarely in the neighborhood of Sé, São Paulo’s municipal heart and the nucleus of its homeless population and crack-cocaine epidemic. The man in the dark-green jacket was Luiz Antonio da Silva, a homeless man who lived in the neighborhood. The woman, Elenilza Mariana de Oliveira Martins, had been praying on a bench in the cathedral, before da Silva dragged her outside and took her hostage on its steps. And the man in blue who saved her was Erasmo Francisco Rodrigues de Lima, another homeless man, who tackled da Silva, allowing Martins to escape. According to official reports, de Lima was shot and killed by da Silva, who was then killed immediately afterward in a hail of 19 bullets fired by São Paulo’s military police.

Video of the standoff was broadcast by one of Brazil’s most notorious true-crime TV shows — Brasil Urgente — which ran it on a loop during its three-hour episode that afternoon. Images of de Lima’s body hit Brazilian social media soon after the newscast, catapulting his story into a national talking point.

Brazilian internet culture is a raucous, tragicomic, and unceasing universe of outrageous remixes, memes, and viral stunts centered around a concept known as zueira, an untranslatable word that means “to make fun of” or “to aggressively laugh at.” In the aftermath of de Lima's death, many horrified Brazilians on Facebook and Twitter turned video clips and screenshots of the shooting into angry memes. Some users were furious at Brasil Urgente for airing footage of his death. Others were angry that the video appears to show a police execution. By the end of the weekend, de Lima was a martyr and a symbol for Brazilian poverty, jump-starting a national debate about police violence and Brazil’s homelessness epidemic.

Six months later, though, the question remains: Once a tragedy goes viral, what does it mean for people like de Lima’s family or other members of São Paulo’s homeless community? Does anything change?

Ione Gabriela Pereira Reis, de Lima's niece.

Flavio Melgarejo for BuzzFeed News

Before his face flooded the feeds of hundreds of thousands of Brazilians, Erasmo Francisco Rodrigues de Lima’s family had gotten used to seeing him in short, spontaneous bursts. For the last 10 years of the 61-year-old’s life, de Lima would come around and then disappear again, often for weeks at a time. “Sometimes he would bring gifts, maybe something not expensive, but with a meaning,” says Ione Gabriela Pereira Reis, de Lima’s niece.

Reis, 19, is a law student at University of Mogi das Cruzes in São Paulo. From a bench at Parque Villa Lobos — the sprawling park that stretches lazily along the Pinheiros River a few blocks from the university — she recounts her uncle’s life story. De Lima was born in Ribeirão Pires, a touristy tropical region southeast of São Paulo. He was abandoned by his birth parents and adopted by a family in the northern state of Pernambuco, and his upbringing gave him what many Paulistas considered an unusual accent. A few years later, he was working construction when he met a cleaning woman named Izabel, who would eventually become his wife.

“They liked each other,” Reis says as she lights a cigarette. “He told her that he did not have a family, and if she wanted, she could be his family.”

De Lima and Izabel were married for 25 years and had four children: Juliane, Danilo, Erasmo II, and Kauane. De Lima went by “Baixinho," or “Shorty.” He was a fan of the São Paulo FC soccer team, a loyalty he made sure the rest of his family, who rooted for rival Brazilian team Corinthians, never forgot. Reis still laughs as she talks about him.

“He would arrive at my house wearing São Paulo’s jersey, sit on the couch, get the remote, and switch to São Paulo’s match,” she says. “He did that just to mess with us.”

According to Reis, de Lima and Izabel led a largely content life until about 10 years ago, when 18-year-old Danilo, with whom de Lima was closest among his children, was murdered. Danilo had gotten into a fight with an opponent while playing in an amateur soccer match at Parque Villa Lobos. A few days later, as he was riding his bike, the other player from the fight shot him.

“When Danilo died, Francisco got very sad,” Reis says. “He used to go to the cemetery all the time.” According to Reis, de Lima began drinking heavily and losing his temper. “He got angry whenever he drank,” she says. “That type of problem that alcohol brings to relationships and to the family.”

De Lima separated from Izabel and left home shortly thereafter, but he never disappeared completely. Every year on Danilo’s birthday, he would go to the cemetery, even if he didn’t have money for bus fares. “He always called on Juliane’s birthday, too. And whenever he wasn’t able to make the call, he would show up at my house to ask for contacts or to ask if we could call for him,” Reis says with a big smile.

However, details about the last decade of de Lima’s life outside of his sporadic contact with home aren’t as easy to piece together. He worked odd jobs in Sé: construction, plumbing, laying tiles. Reis’s mom helped de Lima buy a foam cooler so he could sell water outside São Paulo FC’s Morumbi Stadium.

He also amassed a criminal record. According to São Paulo’s Department of Public Safety, de Lima had four cases registered with police: one charge for intentional homicide in 1980, endangerment in 1995, arson in 1998, and fencing stolen property in 2000. (De Lima’s police records do not include any information about whether he was convicted or served jail time for any of the charges.)

As far as de Lima’s family knew, he lived in homeless shelters in Sé. Whenever he showed up for family visits, however, he was always showered and put together. Reis found it difficult to reconcile common images of homeless people with how her uncle looked. “I thought people who lived on the streets were beggars,” she said. “But then he would show up clean — he worked.”

Cracolândia.

Almudena Toral

One month after the shooting, in early October, the cacophony of Sé dies down as the neighborhood transitions from day to night. Commuters walk briskly to the nearby Liberdade metro station. The small kiosks dotting the tree-lined square are still selling newspapers and offering shoe shines, but their owners appear anxious, as do the few patrolling police officers. A man stands in front of a small circle of onlookers, rambling loudly and incoherently about Jesus into a microphone hooked up to a small distorted speaker.

The cathedral in Sé lies a few blocks south of Cracolândia, or “Crack Land,” a “human zoo" of drug addiction on the doorstep of the Luz metro station. The walk from the station to the cathedral is lined with little parks and clearings bearing the detritus of rampant crack use: homemade pipes; jerry-rigged lighters; filthy, rain-soaked blankets.

At the cathedral, three or four men are stretched out on scraps of cardboard on the steps. Paulo Luíz Ferreira, a security guard, is standing beside the building’s large wooden doors, on which there are still visible bullet holes. Ferreira knew de Lima and would often wake him and other homeless men who slept on the steps in the mornings. Everyone liked de Lima, Ferreiro says. “He was a very calm person. Sometimes he would even help collect the trash people leave at the door.”

“Homeless people are not all naughty, crazy, drunk junkies. They are human beings.”

Ferreira was working at the cathedral the Friday afternoon of the shooting and recalls it bustling with life. Eighty children from a local school were visiting on a field trip. Martins was sitting on a bench by the doorway when, around 2 p.m., da Silva made his way up the steps and through the entrance.

At 49, da Silva was a well-known personality in Sé. According to São Paulo’s Department of Public Safety, he had a record dating back to 1987, when he was charged with robbery and attempted murder. He went on to rack up a laundry list of other offenses and served three stints in jail for drug trafficking.

Da Silva was also an infamous fixture among São Paulo’s homeless community, members of which he would often terrorize. “He would use this screwdriver to disturb the homeless who were sleeping, to poke their asses,” Ferreira says. “He was mean! The dude was mean!” Da Silva spent most of his time hanging around the feira do rolo, an open-air market for stolen goods directly adjacent to the cathedral. One night, according to Ferreira, da Silva got into a fight with an old man who was selling phones at the market and ended up using his screwdriver to stab the man in the eye.

The day of the shooting, Ferreira and his partner watched as da Silva walked to where Martins was sitting on the bench toward the back of the cathedral. “His manner caught my attention, but I didn’t know whether he was by himself or not because he was just walking up the stairs,” Ferreira says. What Ferreira didn’t know at the time, however, was that, in addition to his usual screwdriver, Da Silva was carrying a concealed gun.

Da Silva sat down next to Martins and the two started chatting. Ferreira — who could overhear the two — said it sounded like da Silva was trying to apologize for something. “Let’s wait. If he gives us trouble or hits her, we take action,” Ferreira told his partner. However, what began as a quiet exchange quickly crescendoed into an argument that Martins looked as though she was trying to get away from. Eventually, Martins walked out of the cathedral and da Silva followed. When the two reached the bottom of the main staircase, da Silva struck her.

By that point, da Silva and Martins had attracted the attention of two police officers patrolling the square. The officers approached them and ordered da Silva to lean against the wall. That’s when da Silva pulled out his gun, grabbed Martins, and fired a shot toward the officers, missing them.

The 30 or so homeless men who usually mill about the stairs of the church then ran to its entrance, rushed inside, and helped Ferreiro and his partner close the cathedral’s massive doors. Behind them, the schoolchildren, ranging in age from 10 to 14, began to notice the commotion. “I asked the tutors to tell the kids that it was just fireworks, or something like that,” Ferreira says.

The school chaperones led the children down into the crypts of the cathedral as Ferreira, his partner, and the homeless men held the doors shut. Da Silva, still holding Martins, tried to make his way back up the cathedral’s front steps and into the church. The last thing Ferreira saw before the doors shut was a panicked da Silva turning to face a square that was flooding with police and terrified onlookers.

São Paulo Cathedral.

Flavio Melgarejo for BuzzFeed News

What happened next would end up having a profound effect on the public’s understanding of the events in the square. A Brazilian comedy show called Pânico na Band happened to be filming with a model named Mari Baianinha in Sé, around the corner from the cathedral. Pânico — a mix of Saturday Night Live–style sketches and Jackass-like unscripted pranks and stunts — has a reputation for being crude and offensive. Last August, the show had to publicly apologize for filming a Master Chef parody with a character in blackface named “Africano."

Pânico na Band is produced by the Bandeirantes Network, the fourth-largest TV station in Brazil. The network also owns Brasil Urgente, a Nancy Grace-esque sensational live news show hosted by José Luiz Datena, an ultra-conservative TV presenter and journalist who, in 2012, successfully negotiated with a man holding a family hostage at knifepoint on live television. Bandeirantes Network did not respond to a request for comment from BuzzFeed News.

With the use of a drone, as well as another camera at the base of the cathedral steps, the Pânico crew filmed multiple angles of the whole standoff: de Lima’s intervention, Martins’ dramatic escape, the officers eventually firing 19 shots at both men. They then gave the footage to Brasil Urgente. When the 4 p.m. broadcast of Brasil Urgente went live two hours later, its top story was the standoff in Sé.

As Brasil Urgente aired, phone calls and text messages ricocheted throughout de Lima’s extended family. Reis says that she first heard about the standoff at the cathedral via WhatsApp. “A friend of mine sent an audio message — I could tell she had a nervous voice,” Reis says. “She said, ‘Gabi, it’s your uncle! What’s happening now?! He is on TV!’”

Soon, everyone had heard the news. At first, there was confusion. Reis says family members started yelling, “Shorty’s on TV!" Only gradually did they realize what they were watching.

De Lima’s oldest daughter, Juliane, was at work when Brasil Urgente aired. She lives about four hours north of São Paulo, in Ibitinga. She got off work at 5 p.m. and had a message from her aunt — Reis’s mother — saying her father was dead.

“I turned on the TV and watched it on the news,” Juliane said. “They put the images on a loop and kept saying that he had saved the girl but had died. When I saw it, I thought, It is my dad! My husband even said, ‘No, it’s not.’ I said, ‘It’s my dad. It’s my dad falling.’”

A local man points out where one of the bullets struck the church wall.

Flavio Melgarejo for BuzzFeed News

This week for BuzzFeed News, Amanda Chicago Lewis reveals the legal weed industry’s race problem. Read that and these other great stories from BuzzFeed and around the web.

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In the wake of enormous momentum for the campus anti-rape movement, Katie J.M. Baker explores how younger students are largely being left out of the conversation. "Kids in elementary, middle, and high school are protected by Title IX too. But they receive a fraction of that attention — even though they face much greater barriers to reporting and are more vulnerable than college students." Read it at BuzzFeed News.

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When Pei Ying Yu and Yan Nong Yu learn they have to leave their apartment immediately, it comes as a sudden shock even though they’ve been dreading it for months. It’s January 28, 2015, the day after a blizzard hit Boston. The schools are closed and the governor told commuters to stay home. Along the narrow streets of Chinatown, the owners of grocery shops and bakeries shovel sidewalks while pedestrians climb over snowbanks, everyone displaying the exaggerated courtesy of neighbors getting through a minor disaster together.

Pei Ying is in her sixties; she came to the U.S. in 2008. Her younger sister followed two years later. Both speak very little English and make under $12 an hour as home health aides. Their apartment, which they’ve lived in since 2013 and share with another roommate, is part of a broken-down row house building at 103 Hudson St. When a new landlord bought the building in mid-January, the Yus knew he’d have a lot of work to do to bring it up to code. That meant he would need to move them, and the rest of the tenants, into a hotel for a while.

The two sisters stand in front of their old apartment building.

Kieran Kesner for BuzzFeed News

The sisters are at their jobs when they get the news. Yan Nong hadn’t been home since the day before — she was snowed in at a client's house. After work, they cram their clothes, clean or dirty, into plastic trash bags and talk about what might happen next. It isn’t just the inconvenience of being temporarily relocated to a hotel that worries the Yus. They wonder if, once they leave their home, they’ll ever be allowed to move back.

Boston’s Chinatown, home to around 12,000 people, takes up a quarter of a square mile near the center of Boston — an area that’s in the midst of a luxury housing boom. Seven blocks away, a new, towering apartment building, The Kensington, is asking more than $4,000 a month for an 822-square-foot one-bedroom, more than five times the $700 that the Yus and their roommate pay.

While the Yus and their neighbors pack up, community organizer Karen Chen talks with them about their next steps. She and a half-dozen volunteers document the possessions tenants will have to leave behind, make calls to the media, and hand out signs to supporters who joined them: "Stop Corporate Greed" and "This Is Our Home" and "We Shall Not Be Moved."

Chen is co-director of the Chinese Progressive Association, a group that's been at the forefront of a fight to keep Boston's Chinatown from disappearing. The CPA was founded in 1977 to work on issues, from housing to employment, that concerned Chinese-Americans in Greater Boston. Its small headquarters, just a few blocks from the Yus’ home, is often crowded with older Chinese-speaking local residents volunteering or seeking help. It also draws younger Chinese-American volunteers from all over the area, many of them high school and college students who have never lived in Chinatown but have strong ties to the neighborhood through their families.

Source: BRA, Chinatown Master Plan 2010; apartmentguide.com

As the protesters chant and sing in front of the building's steps, the person they’re protesting walks over to stand on the sidelines. Tim O'Callaghan, a former firefighter whose real estate company, First Suffolk LLC, had bought the old brick row house, is visibly flummoxed.

"I just want for you to understand," he tells the protesters. "I’m a humanist. I'm not a pig."

O'Callaghan's a longtime Boston developer, middle-aged with stubble and blue jeans, a pair of reading glasses perched on his baseball cap. He’s built his business for years while serving in the fire department, and since retiring in 2011 he’s been at it full-time.

He says the protesters have him all wrong. He’s a good guy. He works 12-hour days. In a different time and place, he says, he'd be standing with the tenants against big, unscrupulous developers. “People sell buildings in South Boston every day in Back Bay,” he continues. “What makes Chinatown any different?” Consequently, “I think this is harassment, what [the protesters] are doing.”

For O'Callaghan, the argument is straightforward: The previous owners left it an uninhabitable mess, so, by rehabilitating it, he’s doing the tenants a favor. "It's a shame a building could sit here 75 years being in that condition,” he explains. No one is debating that part: The city even filed criminal charges against the previous owners on account of the structural violations. What the protesters contest is whether the current tenants will ultimately benefit from those improvements. Chen says the plan is for the work to take six to nine months while O’Callaghan (who addresses her as a "beautiful woman") puts the tenants up in a hotel.

Source: Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, 2013

It’s a pattern becoming more and more familiar in the transitioning neighborhood. A 2013 report by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) found that the absolute number of Asian residents in Boston’s Chinatown actually increased a little in recent decades, as tall apartment and condo buildings nearly doubled the neighborhood’s population. Yet the overall percentage of Asian residents in Boston's Chinatown fell from 70% to 46% between 1990 and 2010. And the economic discrepancies between the two groups are extreme: The typical Asian household in the neighborhood made $13,057 in 2009, while the typical white one made $84,255. When a new residential project across from the Yu’s building designated 95 affordable units, it received more than 4,000 applications.

And it isn’t just Boston. Gentrification is not a new reality in American cities, but it is reshaping the country’s Chinatowns at a rapid pace. In New York City’s, strong community organizations and ownership of buildings by Chinese associations have helped stem the loss of housing for immigrants, but local advocacy groups say displacement is still a looming threat; a recent Vocativ analysis found that Chinese-Americans in NYC’s Chinatown dropped from 55 to 49% between 2009 and 2014. The shift in Philadelphia’s Chinatown has been even more dramatic, dropping from 74 to 48% in that same period. In Washington, D.C.’s Chinatown, there are only 300 Chinese-American residents left, down from a peak of 3,000 in 1970. The area’s still a tourist destination with Chinese restaurants, and a city regulation means that all businesses in the area have Chinese signage — you can find a Hooters with a sign in English and Chinese characters. But the local Chinese grocery stores and bakeries have all shut down.

“That is our nightmare,” says Andrew Leong, an associate professor of law, social justice, and Asian American studies at University of Massachusetts, Boston, who co-authored the AALDEF study. “That’s our warning sign. That’s what we do not want our Chinatowns, our living communities, to turn into.”

As the rally continues, several members of the local press approach O'Callaghan and he declines comment. But then, as Pei Ying Yu takes the mic to tell her story, he suddenly interrupts to call to the reporters: "She can move back in the building. You can put that on record.” State law requires that tenants displaced for a building rehab be allowed to return, he says. (Which is sort of true: Were O’Callaghan to evict the tenants that day, they could have protested due to the building’s code violations. But no-fault evictions are legal in Massachusetts, so once the building is repaired, he’ll be within his rights to evict the tenants and raise rents.)

But O'Callaghan insists it isn't just a matter of following the law. "We're not looking to displace the people," he promises, as the tenants pack their belongings inside. "They're going to move back in. They're coming back. They're not going to get screwed."

Kieran Kesner for BuzzFeed News

The Yus’ apartment is part of a few blocks of row houses, dotted with produce stands and tiny grocery stores and wedged between Tufts hospital, a DoubleTree Hotel, and the I-90–I-93 interchange. Nearby, in the shadow of growing high-rise apartment buildings just a few blocks from Boston Common, is a cluster of hot pot and dumpling restaurants with bright red and yellow signs. There are a couple chain stores — a CVS, a Boston Pizza — but also social clubs where new immigrants get help translating paperwork and finding jobs. At the local public elementary school, students learn English and Mandarin and celebrate Chinese festivals.

Hemmed in by poverty and discrimination in the 1870s, Chinese immigrant workers settled in a neighborhood that was home to a series of impoverished immigrant groups: Syrians, Jews, Irish, and Italians. Riddled by railroad tracks and terminals, it was one of the worst places in the city to live. Chinese residents put up laundries and restaurants, building what would be a center of Asian-American life in New England for more than a century.

In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act barred most Chinese women and children from immigrating, leaving the neighborhood a little world made up almost entirely of men. So local leaders built a system of family associations: surrogate uncles and nephews and cousins bound together in mutual support by a common family name. That same exclusion helped give rise to organized crime; a 1974 city decision to locate a red-light district known as the Combat Zone right next door to Chinatown also stoked Bostonians’ concerns that it was a dangerous place to live. But those worries dissipated as crime fell throughout the city over the past two decades. Since 2005, dozens of neighborhood volunteers in blue vests have been patrolling the streets in the evenings, helping to keep illegal activity down.

A man reads a community bulletin board in Chinatown where local announcements, job notices, news items, and cultural events were posted.

Boston Globe / Getty Images

Chuck Kwong, an upstairs neighbor of the Yus who’s around their age but has lived in Chinatown much longer, recalls the neighborhood as he found it when he first moved to Boston in the early '70s. He'd been able to rent an apartment with friends for $100 a month — worth it even though they spent very little time there. He'd work at restaurants on Cape Cod, staying in boarding houses owned by his employer. On his days off, he returned to the apartment and spent hours wandering through Chinatown, stopping at restaurants and bakeries and social clubs where locals played mahjong.

But the neighborhood was already starting to get squeezed. Between the 1950s and 1970s, state and local governments built roads through Chinatown, knocking down homes and businesses. Urban renewal projects razed apartment buildings and replaced them with hospital and medical school buildings. Then, with the turn of the new millennium, luxury condos and apartments sprang up. Today, Kwong says, the social clubs are still filled with old-timers, but for the most part, new immigrants who could use their support can't find anywhere to live in Chinatown.

From one perspective, what’s happening is just part of life in a dynamic, thriving city.

“It is natural and it needs to happen,” says Skip Schloming, executive director of the Small Property Owners Association, a Boston-area landlords’ group. “The neighborhood needs to adjust to what’s needed.”

Schloming says it’s common for old buildings with low rents to deteriorate because the owners don’t have money for proper repairs. A booming housing market means landlords have the incentive to make improvements, but only if they’re able to charge higher rents. If that means displacing lower-income tenants, Schloming argues, the city should provide relocation services, helping tenants to find apartments in more affordable neighborhoods where they can reconstitute their local communities.

To some extent, that kind of relocation of the community is already happening, with many Chinese immigrants now living in the Boston suburbs of Malden and Quincy. But Leong, the UMass professor, says these Chinese enclaves are too diffuse to replicate Chinatown.

It's something the Yus themselves had experienced prior to moving to Boston. They grew up together in China’s Guangdong province, but took different routes to America as middle-aged adults. Pei Ying's a tiny, gregarious woman who usually wears jeans, graying hair tied up in a practical bun. She was an accountant before she left Guangdong for Atlanta, where her grown son still lives. Yan Nong, the more shy of the two, headed to San Diego, a longtime destination for Chinese immigrants. Yet without cars, U.S. work experience, or strong English proficiency, both sisters struggled to adapt to life in cities without major Chinatowns.

Acquaintances insisted that things were different in Boston. When they arrived, they were thrilled to find streets densely packed with shops catering to Chinese tastes and a bus and subway system that let them travel independently to jobs. In the midst of the tight real estate market, it was their new network of friends in Chinatown that helped them find the apartment at 103 Hudson.

"You can take transportation everywhere," Pei Ying Yu says. "Lots of agencies in Chinatown can read over letters for you. It's very easy. There's a lot of places to learn English as well."

Beyond practical conveniences, she says, there’s a sense of comfort in Boston’s Chinatown that she and her sister hadn’t found in other American cities. She said that, if it weren’t for housing issues, she wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Boston to any Chinese immigrant.

“I would say to them that coming to Boston will be just like going home, because everything you find at home you can find here in Boston,” she says. “You don’t have a language barrier. You step out your door, you’re going to have access to Chinese people.”

Kieran Kesner for BuzzFeed News

This week for BuzzFeed News, Anne Helen Petersen goes inside a school with a surprising take on gun control. Read that and these other great stories from BuzzFeed and around the web.

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During the winter, it can take 45 minutes for police to arrive at Garden Valley High School — one of several reasons the district trains teachers to use guns stored in their classrooms. To some outsiders, it’s foolish. But to the people who live here, the solution meets the challenges that distinguish their home. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

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Since 1981, more than 20,000 San Franciscans, mostly gay men, have been killed by AIDS. Erin Allday profiles survivors, who had the "remarkable luck and brutal misfortune" to outlive a generation of their partners and friends. “I’m the luckiest unlucky person in the world. No one wants to be the last man standing.” Read it at San Francisco Chronicle.

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Look out the window of Superintendent Greg Alexander’s office in Garden Valley, Idaho, and you’ll see the football field — where, if you wait patiently, you’ll also see one of the herds of elk that fill the valley, their winter antlers blurring with the mountains behind. Alexander has a video of them that he likes to show off, as he did one morning in January. The elk stream by for a solid minute before you hear Alexander’s deep, linebacker voice boom from behind the camera: “Yep, I work here.”

As the video ends, Alexander tells me to turn and look over my right shoulder. I see something that looks like a wall — the specifics of which he’s requested I not describe — but which he informs me is, in fact, a camouflaged safe. Inside that safe, there’s a rifle.

“That’s how close these safes are,” he says. “And it’s been sitting here this whole time we’ve been speaking. You didn’t notice. It’s simple, it’s locked, and I have the ability to get into it. Without electricity, I can still get into it. At Sandy Hook, they put millions of dollars into security, they had all that stuff to help make the school safer, and you just feel awful that it didn’t.”

"If I can’t take care of our kids by saying I’m going to call the police, then I’ve got to figure out a different way.”

Those safes are the reason that the Garden Valley School District, enrollment 235, has recently found itself in the national news. For the last year, select Garden Valley teachers and administrators have been training to handle rifles in safes placed in undisclosed locations (outside, in hallways, or in classrooms) across the school, which houses grades K through 12. Open and concealed carry is “permitted” in schools in some capacity by 18 states, but formalized programs remain rare. Garden Valley’s is one of very few that does not involve teachers actually carrying guns in the classroom.

There have been 169 school shootings in the three years since 26 were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, and many see it as logical to work toward fewer guns in the classroom, not more. On the satirical site Wonkette, a representative comment declared: "'Rural Idaho student/teacher/administrator shot by student/teacher/administrator with official school gun’ watch starts now.”

But the specifics of Garden Valley’s situation — its isolation, its particular approach to training — shifts the debates that normally swirl around guns in schools, reframing them in terms of practicality. As a blogger in the Spokesman-Review averred, “This might be an exception to the rule re: how I feel about guns on campus.”

“On any given day, the police could be 45 minutes away,” Alexander told me. “And a gun situation could happen in between two and five minutes. So how are we going to deal with that? We want our kids to stay safe. So if I can’t take care of them by saying I’m going to call the police, then I’ve got to figure out a different way.”

Downtown Crouch, Idaho, a minute's drive from Garden Valley High School, on Feb. 10, 2016.

Joe Jaszewski for Buzzfeed News

Situated just over an hour away from Boise, Garden Valley couldn’t feel farther from the state’s urban center. Ten miles out of the city, the highways narrow to two lanes; the shadows from the mountains get deeper; passing opportunities become perilous and rare. Keep on Highway 55 and you’ll hit Boise County — which, confusingly, does not include the city of Boise — an area about the size of Delaware, with a total population just over 7,000. From there, the road hugs the Payette River until it forks in two, and Garden Valley unfurls in the space between.

“We have a geographically challenged county,” Janet Juroch, a reporter for the local paper, the Idaho World, told me. “From here to Idaho City, it’s over a dirt road! And it’s a good dirt road, but it’s an hour drive on a good day. You can’t go more than 25 miles an hour, and it just beats you to death.”

But Idaho City is the county seat — and the closest police station. Officers patrol through the area, but patrons at the local bar say they only really come around when they know there’s a theme night at the bar; after Ugly Sweater Night this past December, cop cars hovered around the entrance.

Idahoans have been fleeing the “big city” of Boise for the Garden Valley area for decades. There are thick, isolated woods in every direction, multiple natural hot springs, and golfing at Terrace Lakes, the Dirty Dancing–style development that, during the winter, hosts a game called “snolf”: hitting a tennis ball, in the snow, with an implement of the player’s choice.

Routes and distances between Garden Valley and the closest police department in Idaho City.

BuzzFeed News

Cell phone service in the valley is weak and at times nonexistent. As a result, no one, not even teens, walks around with their eyes glued to their phone. Because of the size of the school, Garden Valley plays eight-man football — a version of the sport, popular in small towns, in which defense is a low priority and the scores run high. Alexander’s biggest concern isn’t threats of violence, but absences: When a parent just can’t get their kid to school, either because of weather or a broken-down vehicle. “Some parents decide to live out in Primitive,” he told me. “It’s called Primitive — that tells you something right there. They have to plow their own stuff, do their own snowplowing. You have no idea how far up they are in those trees.”

In Idaho, where the state has continued to slash the budget and decrease taxes, districts rely heavily on bonds, or "levies," to fund new buildings and run the district on a year-to-year basis. These bonds must pass by a two-thirds supermajority, and in a district like Garden Valley — filled with snowbirds and residents who own massive swaths of land — it’s incredibly difficult to muscle one through the process. That started to change about ten years ago, when the valley’s so-called old-timers, whose family names can be found on the names of streams and buttes that crosshatch the county, became increasingly outnumbered by a mix of retirees (some from Idaho; most from California, a name that’s uttered like a dirty word), “new blood,” and telecommuters whose jobs allow them to relocate.

Surveying the political landscape, you can see how it took nine tries to pass the bond to fund a new school. But now that it’s completed, you can also see how the town rallies around it. On a Friday in late January, the bleachers of the school gym were filled for a home basketball game. The next day, the school would host the funeral of Orpha Ward, a woman who’d graduated from the high school in 1942 — and mother of Alan Ward, who serves as county commissioner, school board member, sawmiller, and, if you believe the blogs that cover the intricacies of local politics, one of the most controversial figures in the community. He’s also, according to those who know such things, the man responsible for the guns initiative.

A herd of elk wander on to Banks Lowman Road in Garden Valley, Idaho, on Feb. 10, 2016.

Joe Jaszewski for BuzzFeed News

Ward drives a massive flatbed Dodge Ram that, like every other vehicle in the county, bears splatters of gravel and dirt and slush. (The best way to tell an out-of-towner in these parts, people say, is by the cleanliness of their car.) He wears a plain chamois shirt and well-worn jeans; when he walks into Wild Bill’s — a coffee shop that doubles as the best place in town to find internet — half the customers say hello.

Ward speaks in a steady meter, his speech peppered with “well, now, you know.” When asked about the genesis of the guns program, his memory is imprecise. “I don’t know if it was after Newtown. All of them were just so awful,” he tells me over a cup of coffee that cost a buck. “But living in this community all my life, I felt some responsibility to try and make sure that couldn’t happen. Newtown was just unimaginable. They’re all unimaginable. But that one in particular, though...”

School board member and County Commissioner Alan Ward.

Boise County / Via boisecounty.us

He pauses, blinks back tears. “I'll be honest with you. The gun program, I certainly pushed for it. Every month the school board would invite people in and talk about whether we should have concealed carry or a gun safe/storage deal. We talked about the composition of the building and what would be efficient and not too powerful, how far the sighting distances are. There’s just a horrific amount to it.”

“It was all very well-calculated,” he adds. “And coming from a board and a group of people who really cared. Not in any way off the cuff.”

After Sandy Hook, many schools began conversations about how to better protect their students. Nearly a year after the shooting, Garden Valley presented a plan to the Idaho State School Boards Association requesting a firearm training program, available to all school employees, through the state police academy. The proposal was voted down, but around that same time, Ward found himself delivering a load of firewood to Steven Ryan, who lives in the far western edge of the county. Ryan’s résumé includes 23 years on the police force and a term as a SWAT team commander; he currently trains police officers and members of the military across the U.S. on “active shooter” situations. “I sure’d want him on my side in a battle, I’ll tell you that,” Ward says. “That man can shoot.”

Ward asked Ryan, whose email signature is “The only thing that can stop a bad man with a gun is a good man with a gun,” for his thoughts on the issues facing Garden Valley, and Ryan prepared a presentation for the board — including a slide indicating the states with the lowest number of school shootings (at the top of the list: Idaho: 0 shootings; 0 dead).

“People think guns in schools and think handguns,” Ryan says. “But a handgun is really hard to shoot without hurting someone. So I talked them out of that. Instead, we went with a handgun-caliber rifle: a Beretta Storm 9 mm, which is very accurate, with very little felt recoil for the shooter.”

Students don’t know the location of the safes or who, exactly, has received training.

The board discussed the policy for several months before voting unanimously, in October 2014, to approve it. The next five months were spent refining the wording; acquiring the rifles (at least four, which were purchased, at $680 apiece, from a Boise gun store); installing safes, donated from a local machine shop; and scheduling training sessions. By May 2015, the safes, each of which is camouflaged in a different way, were in place. (Students don’t know the location of the safes or who, exactly, has received training, but as one resident told me, “I’ve been to the gun range, so I know who they are.”)

Soon after, the news went national. Like the signs that will soon be posted at the entrance to the school declaring it “armed,” the publicity was intended to announce, on no uncertain terms, that the school was ready to defend itself. “The fact that we’re prepared to respond so quickly is the real deterrent,” Ward told me. “Those who may do something know that they would be met with resistance.”

According to Ryan, “When we talk about making our schools safer for our children, we talk about target hardening. In an urban environment, you have ready access to resource officers and police, which means [an attacker] knows they only have so long until law enforcement responds. But when you get away from that urban environment, they think, I can do a lot of damage before cops get here. A lot of attackers intend to [commit] suicide, so they’ll analyze the situation and say, 'I’m gonna go someplace where they haven’t prepared.'"

“When you look at active threat situations,” Ryan says, “lives are measured in quarter seconds. Any quarter second lost is a life lost.”

Ryan came up with a specific plan for the teachers, each of whom goes through a vetting process, and trains three or four times a year. “I’m big on basics: first and foremost, how to safely use a gun. I teach them the tactics and techniques to be safe in a crowded, chaotic school environment. If they have to shoot the gun, they don’t want to miss — you don’t want to shoot the wrong person. So we work on marksmanship.”

Beretta Storm 9 mm rifle

Beretta

For a recent training, teachers spent a full day working on scenarios using airsoft guns, which pelt the target with stinging air, and role-playing as “actual adversaries” to ramp up the stress quotient. “Nothing can compare to actually having someone shoot at you,” Ryan says. “But you want to put them under similar stress so they can learn to respond.” Representatives from the sheriff’s office also attend the trainings, in part to avoid a scenario in which law enforcement arrives and cannot distinguish between the “good guy with the gun” and an armed shooter.

“Steve has such a gentle approach,” Ward told me, noting that Ryan is paid only for his travel expenses. “He doesn’t have to do this. He does it out of the goodness of his heart, and he’ll tell you it’s for the community.”

From the next table over, a seventysomething man in coveralls turns, stands up, and shakes Ward’s hand. “Looks like you’re surviving that job,” he says, referring to Ward’s relatively new post as county commissioner. “I couldn’t handle it, I tell you,” he continues. “I’d wanna kill somebody!”

“When you look at active threat situations, lives are measured in quarter seconds. Any quarter second lost is a life lost.”

“Well, you can’t do that,” Ward chuckles.

Ward drives the quick seven minutes over to the school, which is set back from the main road by a quarter-mile entrance road. White buses marked FIRE PATROL are parked like matchsticks in an enclosed lot. Like so many areas in the Northwest, the area’s been hit hard by wildfire; five years ago, a blaze devoured the hillside when someone at the skinny-dipper hot springs tried to set her toilet paper on fire so as to “leave no trace.”

The school is shaped like a massive plus sign. On one side, the artwork of elementary school students and Khan Academy achievement certificates line the walls. On the other end of the hallway, three chimes indicate a class change, and middle and high school kids yell and push and flirt as they move through the single hallway. For budget reasons, classes run just four days a week. Fifty-eight percent of the students in Garden Valley are on free or reduced-cost lunches — 10% higher than the state average for Idaho. Alexander describes the school as “a very white community”; according to census data, the county is 95.4% caucasian.

Above the blue lockers that line the walls, there are composites of every graduating class going back to 1930. Ward searches for his mother’s name but doesn’t take the time to find his. He graduated, but barely: “I never was too good at school.” We reach the end of the hallway, and Ward leans in, speaking in a hushed tone so as not to disturb a group of elementary students circled around a teacher 10 feet away. “You see here, how you can see all the way from this end to the other? It’s a straight shot. That’s why we’ve got rifles.”

Garden Valley School

Joe Jaszewski for BuzzFeed News

This week for BuzzFeed News, Jessica Ogilvie hits the road with a female trucker. Read that and these other great stories from BuzzFeed and around the web.

Ramblin' Woman: A Week on the Road With a Female Trucker — BuzzFeed News

When most Americans think of truckers, they imagine big, burly men — not Melissa Rojas. The Michigan-based mom is one of less than 6% of long-haul drivers who are women. Though weeks on the road can sometimes bring more frustration than freedom, she wouldn’t have it any other way. Read it at BuzzFeed News.

Laura McDermott for BuzzFeed News

The Weight of James Arthur Baldwin — BuzzFeed

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah travels to James Baldwin's home in France to examine the impact of a writer whose legacy cannot be erased. "Baldwin left the States for the primary reason that all emigrants do — because anywhere seems better than home." Read it at BuzzFeed.

Waring Abbott / Getty Images

The Best African American Figure Skater in History Is Now Bankrupt and Living in a Trailer — The Washington Post

In the 1980s, it seemed that there was nothing Olympian Debi Thomas couldn't do. Now, after failed careers as both an athlete and a physician, Thomas tells Terrence McCoy what she would — or wouldn't — have done differently. “I don’t want to be normal. Normal is not quite right. Normal is not excelling.” Read it at The Washington Post.

Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post

By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead — Toronto Life

Between 1999 and 2001, John Hofsess facilitated eight assisted suicides. This month, he told his story as as he prepared to end one more life — his own. "Someday, doctors will offer assisted death services much more sophisticated than anything I created." Read it at Toronto Life.

Troy Moth for Toronto Life

View Entire List ›

It's mid-morning on a muggy Wednesday in August, and Melissa Rojas and I are careening east through Texas on Interstate 30. The sky is ominous and dark for miles, but we’re making good time, and we’re convinced we'll outrun any storm that’s brewing.

Just outside of Dallas, though, the heavens crack open and we slam into sheets of water. The road becomes a manic, gray blur. Red brake lights pop up ahead. A man’s voice yells over the CB radio: "Where the fuck did the road go?" Twenty yards up, a black sedan has spun out. Rojas, 34, slows our Freightliner Coronado to 55 miles per hour, then 35, then 15 as we glide around the accident.

Throughout this meteorological emergency, Rojas has kept her French-manicured hands resting calmly on the steering wheel. As we drive past the breakdown, she eases the 13-speed gearshift into sixth. "This is actually no more dangerous than being in a car," she says casually, reaching up to adjust her rearview mirror. "That car spun out ’cause it was really light.”

"But," she adds, turning her eyes back to the road, "if I hydroplane, we're flipping over."

I'm trying not to panic, but I will later be told that my knuckles turned white during what seemed to be a close brush with death. But for Rojas, a third-generation truck driver, this moment could not be more ordinary. The Michigan-based mom has been behind the wheel of long-haul trucks for three and a half years and currently runs a route that takes her from Michigan to New Mexico and back again — a six-day, 3,500-mile round trip that she makes every single week.

By the time we hit the rain, we're five days in. We've dined in the truck, slept in the truck, and considered the possibility of urinating in the truck. We have answered to no one and, with the exception of getting the cargo at the right time, have made our own schedule, determined our own route, and stopped whenever nature called.

This isn’t to say that the open road is totally lawless. There are rules — regulations, even! — that govern the behavior of the men and women who commandeer 18-wheelers. But trucking is one of the last American industries in which those seeking to start over can create themselves anew on the country's highways. Training programs are open to anyone and everyone, and many see it as a path to salvation in exchange for little more than putting life, limb, and sanity on the line and staring down the very nothingness of the turnpike in the name of American commerce.

Melissa Rojas is one of very few women who do this job. In 2014, 3.4 million truck drivers were on the road, and only 5.8% of them were women. It's a dangerous job all around; in 2013, 3,858 drivers were involved in fatal accidents. There are also constant, unexpected hazards: One of Rojas's male friends would later tell me about encountering alligators at a loading dock lot in Louisiana bayou country. But for female drivers, the danger goes much further. Reports of rape and sexual harassment on the road are rampant, often at the hands of other drivers. And trucking is riddled with an outdated boys club mentality; last year, lawsuits were filed against at least two major trucking companies, claiming that female employees were routinely harassed or assaulted, and that supervisors did nothing about it.

Driving a truck keeps Rojas away from her children and puts aches and pains in her body. The road can be tiresome, and the hours of solitude sometimes become heartbreakingly lonely. But she's propelled by her desire to take care of her kids by any means necessary, and the job’s isolation is balanced by the constant promise of freedom over the horizon.

“What other job, besides construction, do you get to be outside all day long?" she says. "What other job can you set your own schedule? I thought about doing something else. Dispatching or something. ... But this is the best job I ever had.”

Laura McDermott for BuzzFeed News

Our trip begins on a pristine Saturday afternoon at Rojas’s two-bedroom home in Coldwater, Michigan, on the banks of Cemetery Lake. After picking up her truck’s cab from its parking spot down the street, we take a 45-minute southwesterly drive to Kautex's warehouse in Avilla, Indiana, where we’ll retrieve a truckful of empty racks. An international automotive supplier that makes and distributes car parts, Kautex manufactures the smog-checking devices that we’ll be transporting back from New Mexico. Inside the warehouse, Rojas picks up paperwork from a matronly, bespectacled receptionist dressed in a highlighter-yellow safety vest, then returns back to the truck.

"The only trucker code that's out there now — but it's dying — is you help your brother."

Before every trip that they take, drivers are required by federal law to conduct a vehicle inspection. They check their brakes, steering mechanisms, lighting reflectors, tires, horn, wheels, and emergency equipment to make sure they’re functioning properly. These inspections are done again every morning before getting on the road, and once again at night before going to sleep. Drivers don’t always adhere to the rules, but Rojas — like many other women who get behind the wheel — is a stickler for precision.

“If you don't pre-trip your cab,” she says, “you’re an idiot.”

The truck Rojas and I will be living in for the next six days is notably enormous; imagine four grown elephants walking in tandem, trunk to tail. There’s a good 3 feet between the bottom of the truck and the pavement, into which Rojas, at 5'2", crouches easily to examine the brake lines, brake pads, tire pressure, and landing gear. She then climbs up between the cab and the truck — an area called the fifth wheel — to inspect air and electricity hoses.

It’s worth noting here that Rojas doesn’t allow the grit of the job to preclude any feminine beauty practices. Her asymmetric bob is freshly blown out and highlighted with pale streaks of baby blue and My Little Pony purple. Her acrylics glisten, rhinestone-pocketed jeans accent her physique, and her makeup is painted on with a deft hand — all of which proves a striking contrast to the greasy, oily gray of the machinery.

As she takes me on a tour of the machine, I point to the empty truck that will eventually house our cargo.

“What is this called?” I say.

Rojas looks down at me incredulously.

“The trailer?” she says. “Trailer” — she points again to the large compartment — “tractor” — she points to the cab. “Tractor-trailer. I have never been around anyone who is literally that clueless.”

"I have to realize," she will tell me later, "that there are people out there like you."

Laura McDermott for BuzzFeed News

The brisk blue Indiana horizon is punctuated with cherry-red barns and cobalt tractors and golden rows of corn. Over the course of two hours, the two-lane farm road intersects Route 3, which eventually merges with Interstate 69.

The country's roads are almost part of Rojas's genetic makeup. Her mother and stepfather both operated long-haul commercial vehicles, as did her maternal grandfather. As a teenager, she was often left alone while they were on the road, and she swore up and down and on everything holy that she would never follow in their footsteps.

But in 2012, she was working three part-time jobs — bartending, cashiering at McDonald’s, and selling shoes — and still struggling to support herself and her children. One day, she was scrolling through Monster.com and an ad kept popping up. “‘Get your commercial driver's license! Make $60,000 a year!’” she remembers. “I did it because I needed money."

C1 Truck Driver Training, the school that ran the ads, put Rojas up in a hotel in Fort Wayne, Indiana, for four weeks of training. True to her genes, she was a natural.

"I took to it like a fish to water," she says. "It was not necessarily conducive to the home life I wanted to have, but it paid the bills — more than working at McDonald's for the rest of my life."

Rojas went on to work for three companies: USA Trucks and Schneider National — both of which are among the largest trucking companies in the U.S. — and her current employer, a mom-and-pop operation owned by Michigan-based Therese and Larry McComb.

The trucking industry has changed tremendously since Rojas’s parents were on the road; in the past 30 years, capitalist competition has erased the once-courteous relations between companies. According to the IRS, after the industry was partially deregulated in 1980, “the formerly gentlemanly manner in which the big players dealt with each other became a battle to the death.”

In the U.S., the largest trucking companies — including J.B. Hunt, C.R. England, and Swift Transportation — operate tens of thousands of vehicles each. Drivers are at the mercy of anonymous dispatchers, and can be on the road for months at a time.

The McCombs, on the other hand, operate five trucks. Larry McComb and Rojas talk on the phone daily, and he deeply understands the importance of getting her home to see her kids; the McCombs' daughter was killed by her husband in 2010, and they now run a nonprofit, The Venus Foundation, for victims of domestic abuse. Rojas’s bosses also allow her to bring her children on the truck if need be; they’ve come along over school vacations and long weekends, and Rojas briefly experimented with home-schooling them from the road.

For the McCombs to care so much about their employees is a breath of fresh air in an industry that’s plagued with problems. In addition to drivers being run into the ground with unrelenting routes, their pay has been tumbling for decades, many are beset with health issues, and sexual harassment is common enough that one major U.S. trucking company has faced multiple lawsuits in the past decade.

That company is Iowa-based CRST Expedited, which employs over 3,500 drivers and sends them on the road in teams. Often, women are paired with men for one-on-one, hands-on training. In 2007, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed suit on behalf of 270 female CRST Expedited employees or former employees who had allegedly been sexually assaulted by fellow drivers or trainers.

The allegations were shocking. In one instance, a female employee said that her trainer raped her on his truck after she turned down his bribery and advances. “He said, ‘Well, you give me a piece of your ass, and I will grade you and will pass you,’” she stated in her testimony. When she said no, “he force[d] me to have sex with him.” In another instance, a male trainer allegedly told his female trainee that he and his friends wanted to tie her up and “do things to her.” When she repeatedly turned down his requests for sex, he pulled out a knife, placed it on the dashboard, and refused to let her off the truck.

After reporting him to several of her supervisors, the trainee went up the chain to a member of CRST Expedited’s nearly all-male senior management team. “What are you going to do when they [harassing male drivers] kill one of these women?” she asked. The manager replied, “We'll deal with that when it happens.”

Though CRST ultimately settled with the lead plaintiff, the class-action suit was dismissed by a federal judge because the EEOC hadn’t met certain requirements before bringing the claims to court. (The EEOC and CRST Expedited have since been in a protracted legal battle over whether the commission should pay the company’s court fees, a case that is scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court later this month.) In 2011, CRST was ordered in a separate case to pay $1.5 million to another former driver who alleged her trainer had raped her.

Most recently, in May 2015, another lawsuit was filed against CRST Expedited by three female drivers on behalf of an estimated group of over 100 women. It alleges that nothing has changed in the past several years, and that some women resorted to sleeping with knives and tasers under their pillows to ward off any attacks. CRST has since earned a nickname: Constantly Raping Student Truckers. (The company declined BuzzFeed News’ request for comment).

Desiree Wood, 51, founded the advocacy group REAL Women in Trucking in 2010 after constantly hearing stories about female drivers suffering sexual harassment and assault — herself included — and then being ignored by their superiors. “What I found was, [harassment and assault] wasn't just happening where I was working,” she says. And brushing off womens' reports "seemed to be the way they dealt with drivers. The easiest way to deal with a woman who’s complaining about sexual assault or sexual misconduct is to say she can’t drive, or she’s crazy, and make her go away.”

Rojas knows all of this quite well; at one of her old companies (she declines to say which one), she was sexually harassed by a colleague. She called her supervisor and insisted that the other driver be reprimanded. He was, but as far as Rojas knows, he was not fired. “I had asked that he be reprimanded instead of fired if it had been his first report,” she says. “I hate to see someone lose their job [but] I wanted him to be aware, women in our field will not tolerate such behavior.”

Jessica Ogilvie for BuzzFeed News

A general lack of attention to female employees’ safety exists despite the fact that the industry is desperate for more drivers; according to the American Truckers Associations, the trucker shortage in the U.S. was near an all-time high as of 2014, at 38,000 vacancies and counting. The group notes that the lack of women drivers is part of the reason for the shortage, and that they represent a "large, untapped portion of the population"

Efforts have recently been made to fix the problem, but trucking still poses major safety risks for women. Overnight rest areas are not overseen by security personnel, nor are showers or truck stops. (Driving equipment for women is even hard to come by; at a truck stop in Indiana, Rojas has to buy men's working gloves, which dangle off her fingers like a kid’s hand-me-downs.) With all this in mind, Rojas takes no chances. "If I ever have to stop at night where I don't feel comfortable," she says, "I will get out, and I will take my tire thumper with me."

"Guys will joke when I walk by, like, 'I didn't do it, I swear!' I'm like, 'Yeah,'" she says, hoisting her eyebrows, “'Keep it that way. ’Cause I'm not afraid to start swinging, buddy. If I catch you in the nuts, I don't care.’”

Jessica Ogilvie for BuzzFeed News

Jim Gaffigan thumbs through copies of ESPN the Magazine and turns to the receptionist. “Can I have one of these? I'm a celebrity.”

It’s Monday afternoon, and Gaffigan has just arrived at ESPN Studios from a taping for The Jim Rome Show that will air that weekend on Showtime. Gaffigan, a doughy, affable, surprisingly tall actor and comedian who wrote a book two years ago called Dad Is Fat, is wearing dark jeans, a T-shirt, and bright turquoise sneakers. He has five kids and a wife named Jeannie, and he has a sitcom — The Jim Gaffigan Show — in which he plays a dad with five kids and a wife named Jeannie.

Jim and Jeannie developed the show four years ago for NBC, but the network passed. “They said it felt very slice-of-life to them, and not in a good way,” Gaffigan says, “but that was how Jeannie and I designed it.” The show shot pilot episodes each of the next two seasons for CBS with the same autobiographical premise. After CBS passed the second time, TV Land picked it up and quickly renewed it for a second season that will premiere this summer.

Jim Gaffigan in the green room, waiting to make his guest appearance on Conan.

Nathanael Turner for BuzzFeed News

“It’s about having a show that has a broad appeal and isn’t compromising," Gaffigan says. "There are a lot of TV comedies going for people in the back row — simple jokes for people folding their laundry.”

Neil Everett, the co-anchor of ESPN’s West Coast edition of SportsCenter, will arrive shortly to tape the bit in which Gaffigan will stop by Everett’s cubicle looking for someone else and pretend not to know who Everett — a longtime friend — is. They’ll be in and out of the sketch in 30 minutes. ESPN will air it as a promo over the weekend.

“All these shows,” Gaffigan says, “they need content. I’m certainly not an expert on the NFL, but I’m someone who enjoys the NFL. I like what Rob Riggle does on Sunday — it’s topical. It’s content.” Riggle, a fellow actor and comic, does a popular sketch every week in the fall called Riggle’s Picks at the beginning of Fox’s NFL pregame show.

After taping the bit at ESPN, Gaffigan will head across town to be on Conan and then to Chavez Ravine to read the starting lineup at the L.A. Dodgers game. (“And play third base,” Gaffigan adds.) Then, barely 24 hours after he arrived, he’ll fly back to New York. Multitasking is hardly anything new for working comedians; but at a moment when there are more opportunities and more outlets than ever, managing to not get lost in the fray is its own full-time job.

“There’s so many shows,” Gaffigan says while getting his makeup touched up. “I haven’t even seen Transparent yet. That Jim Gaffigan Show is pretty good — I was pleasantly surprised.”

Kumail Nanjiani performing a short set at The Virgil.

Nathanael Turner for BuzzFeed News

The back room at this speakeasy-style club, The Virgil, holds 75 comfortably; there are probably twice that many people in here. Kumail Nanjiani of HBO’s Silicon Valley is closing the show with a bit about a visit to the dentist.

“She said she’s 90% sure my mouth has The Shining,” he says. “I knew it was going to be bad.” He pauses for a beat. “I knew it was going to be bad because when she asked if I had any symptoms, I said, ‘Ice cream on the left side of my mouth makes my spine hurt. That’s bad, right?’”

Nanjiani’s routine moves seamlessly from observational to topical to biographical. His story about watching The Silence of the Lambs with his dad in Karachi was a new bit that he was trying out, and it had the same casual polish as the rest of the routine.

“Until last year, I had all of my wisdom teeth. I had all of them, and they hurt for years.” He speaks in short, declarative bursts that give the audience time to breathe. “They hurt all day, every day, for years. And then one day they just stopped hurting, which I think is like when the check-engine light —” The crowd knows immediately where he’s going, and he lets them laugh. “— in your car has been on for a month and just goes off. You know what? Don’t worry about it. LIVE YOUR LIFE. What’s left of it.”

Kumail Nanjiani performing a short set at The Virgil.

Nathanael Turner for BuzzFeed News

Nanjiani and writer-comedian Jonah Ray host a weekly stand-up show called The Meltdown With Jonah and Kumail in a small room in the back of a West Hollywood comic book store. A taped version of The Meltdown just finished its second season on Comedy Central, which has already ordered a third.

“Who has been the longest without going to the dentist?” he asks the audience. A man seated near the back raises his hand. “Sir with the beard, how long has it been?” Nanjiani asks.

“Since September 11, 2001.”

Nanjiani didn't know that was coming, but his response is light and deft. “And you were like, never again,” he says. That response got the biggest, most sustained laugh of the night.

After Nanjiani’s set, we talk about the autobiographical impulse that runs through comedies like The Jim Gaffigan Show, Louis C.K.’s Louie, and Aziz Ansari’s Master of None. The diverse range of individual points of view on those and other shows has expanded comedy into new places and new kinds of stories over the last few years. Gaffigan is raising a house full of kids. Louis C.K. is a divorced dad with issues. Ansari is a child of immigrants. Maria Bamford’s Lady Dynamite, which premieres in May on Netflix, deals with her own bouts with mental illness. Their shows are funny, but they’re not just funny.

“I don’t think anyone is completely biographical with their comedy,” Nanjiani says. “Even Louis has observational jokes that are very funny. A good comedian has a point of view that allows you to do both of those things. That’s what I try and do.” Louis C.K.’s name comes up frequently in our 45-minute conversation, so I was surprised at Nanjiani’s answer to a question about whether Louie is largely responsible for comedy’s move toward more introspective storytelling. “Louie is amazing, but I think podcasts have a lot to do with it. It created this appetite for comedians to be themselves and to tell personal stories.”

When the production on the third season of Silicon Valley wraps in early spring, he’s planning to begin production on a film he recently wrote with his wife Emily Gordon, the talent booker for The Meltdown and a writer on The Carmichael Show. Nanjiani describes the film, called The Big Sick, with little more elaboration than to say that it will be autobiographical. Judd Apatow is producing it.

“For a long time, the only way you could see comedians was by seeing their act,” Gordon says in an interview after the film was announced. “Podcasts and all these TV shows where comedians can do things besides stand-up have changed things a lot. People that knew comedians through their jokes are now getting to know that person. It adds a context that we didn’t have before.”

Rod Corddry, David Wain, and Jon Stern in the editing bay, working on the new season of Children€™s Hospital.

Nathanael Turner for BuzzFeed News

“Alright,” David Wain says. The editor hits the space bar to stop the playback. “I think that would be funnier without Shirley saying, ‘Well,’ and without any air.”

The editor backs up the scene a few frames and cuts out guest star and Partridge Family matriarch Shirley Jones saying, “Well,” and the short pause that follows. Then he scrubs back to the beginning of the scene and plays it again for Wain, Jon Stern, and Rob Corddry, the three executive producers of Adult Swim’s long-running absurdist comedy Childrens Hospital.

They are sitting on a couch at their Abominable Pictures production office in Universal City. Opposite them is the editor, his computer, and a 42-inch display. The scene — in which Jones coaches Henry Winkler’s hospital administrator character on how to act like another character’s Grandpa Willy — is in an episode from the new season. A postproduction supervisor notes more edits to be made later.

“Can you go back to that reaction shot,” Wain says at the end of a later scene, referring to a shot of one longtime series regular watching two other characters interact. “I just, I love it.”

“Do you?” Stern asks. “The reactions in this scene are my least favorite performances of the season.”

“I know the quality you’re reacting to there,” Corddry says, leaning forward on the couch and looking across Wain at Stern, “and it’s what makes the scene funny.”

“To me it works, but I don’t know the footage,” Wain says to Stern, “so I wonder if you’re having a thing about —”

“I just see someone overacting,” Stern says flatly.

“I agree,” Wain says, “but I think it’s really good.”

“It plays like a —,” Corddry says.

“Like an SNL sketch?” Stern asks.

“No, no,” Corddry says, “definitely not like that. It plays on genre, like melodrama.”

“I see that too,” Wain adds, “but the content of the reaction shots is funny. Even if she’s not nailing it, it’s working.”

“What I’m saying,” Stern says, “is that there’s footage where she just doesn’t play it so big. Mugging it up like that, I think, lessens what she’s trying to do.”

“It’s a big performance,” Corddry says, “but I don’t see it as a dishonest one.”

Guest star Paul Scheer and show creator Rob Corddry in a scene from Childrens Hospital.

Adult Swim / Via adultswim.com

Stern, Corddry, and Wain have worked together on seven seasons of Childrens Hospital, which began as short webisodes before being reinvented in a 15-minute incarnation for Adult Swim. Corddry, who works mostly as an actor, will leave Hollywood a few weeks after this edit session for Miami to film the second season of HBO’s football series Ballers, on which he plays a wisecracking money manager.

In 2014, Wain worked on 17 different projects for film, television, and streaming video. In 2015, he spent a big chunk of his time on one project — Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp — for which he co-wrote and co-produced, directed all eight episodes, and played a hunky Israeli camp counselor named Yaron. At various points on Wet Hot’s production schedule, though, he was also acting on Comedy Central’s Another Period and getting Childrens Hospital ready to shoot.

Wain will likely return for the second season of Another Period, and there is momentum for a second season of Wet Hot that he would again produce, direct, and write. He’s circling a couple of movies to direct. And tonight, he’s performing solo at an experimental comedy show.

“When I directed Role Models,” Wain says, “and Wet Hot American Summer and Wanderlust...” The room starts to giggle. “...and The Ten and They Came Together...” Everyone in the tiny editing room is now laughing, and Wain delivers the speech with fumbly deadpan. “...and The State and Stella, I learned some things over the years about comedy.”

“I think David makes a good point,” Corddry says, laughing. “Let’s move on.”

Thomas Lennon as Felix Unger and Matthew Perry as Oscar Madison on The Odd Couple.

Michael Yarish / CBS

The audience members fill into their seats at Stage 15, a warehouse-sized building on the CBS lot. An episode of The Odd Couple, the reboot that stars Matthew Perry and Thomas Lennon, begins to play on the overhead monitors. Sets for a restaurant, a living room, a kitchen, etc., are lined up side by side across the stage like a single-floor Barbie Dreamhouse. An announcer calls out the cast of the show like they're the starting lineup for the L.A. Lakers. "As Felix Unger, Thomas Lennnnnoooon!"

In the first scene, Lennon and two of the supporting cast members are at a table on the restaurant set. The writers and producers sit in director's chairs just behind the cameras. The director calls action from a giant video monitor and quickly calls cut to work out how one of the characters will eat a French fry. He calls action again.

“I have loads of quirks,” Lennon says — fast-talking and overarticulating — midway through the scene. “I can list them alphabetically. The first one is my incessant alphabetizing.”

The line gets a laugh but not a big laugh; it’s one of several jokes that the writers flag to replace for the next take. Every Thursday, the writers deliver a new script and the cast does a table read. The writers room revises the script at the end of every day’s rehearsal until the following Wednesday’s taping. And during the taping, they keep revising. After Lennon’s “incessant alphabetizing” line gets a lukewarm reception, they throw out some suggestions. Lennon winds up improvising it.

“I have tons of quirks,” he says. “In high school, they called me Captain Quirk. And not in a nice way.”

That gets a much bigger laugh.

“I knew going into it that I was not doing an artsy kind of show that would be critically well-received,” Lennon says several days after the taping. His career began over two decades ago with Wain in The State. “This is popular entertainment. That said, I’m proud of what I’m doing in the role. In my career, even the cult-y stuff that people loved later like The State and Reno 911! never got much attention. I’ve never been in the business of pleasing television critics, but why start now, right?”

A multi-camera show like The Odd Couple is a strange amalgam of stage play, improv show, and circus. A magician or a stand-up comic keeps the crowd attentive between takes. The script is in constant motion. Everyone onstage — both in front of and behind the cameras — is in constant motion. The acting is broad and stylized, and every line is weighed for audience approval.

“You can very much hear the audience,” Lennon says after the taping. “There’s nothing more distressing than when you come out and your first line isn’t funny. It can almost undo the rest of the scene.”

Lennon plays the prissy, uptight Felix Unger role that Jack Lemmon played in the 1968 film and Tony Randall played in the ABC series in the 1970s. As much as Lennon’s lines change throughout the Tuesday night taping, his mannerisms and gestures are virtually indistinguishable from take to take. The Odd Couple premiered on CBS as a midseason show in early 2015, and the second season will run starting in April. The show skews older — ranking among network comedies last season in total viewers (11.3 million) but eighth in the 18–49 demographic (2.7 rating).

“If you start moving around with what you’re physically doing, the editors can’t cut your performance together,” Lennon says. “Even if you’re saying something different, it’s super important to look like what you looked like before — the way your hold your hands, the way your body is resting.”

In the next scene, Perry’s grouchy, unkempt Oscar Madison is in the living room of his apartment mixing a cocktail in a giant bucket. Lennon is heading out the door with two large suitcases to spend the evening at his girlfriend’s place for the first time.

“Well, I’m off to Emily’s,” Lennon says.

“You sure you’ve got enough stuff for one night there?” Perry asks.

“Just a few essentials. Eye mask. Nasal strips. Special pillow. Special sleep fragrances. Do you suppose Emily has a mister?”

“Sure doesn’t seem like it.”

That one gets a big laugh on every take.

Kirk Fox at The Laugh Factory in West Hollywood.

Nathanael Turner / BuzzFeed News

“You come back here, you take off your heels, and you put on your combat boots,” Denyse Gordon shouted as the contestants fastened the straps of golden stiletto heels, and zipped and unzipped garment bags. “You girls got it? Heels to combat boots, then back onstage, and show some leg.” Gordon smiled and lifted up her skirt, flashing her muscular calves.

Gordon, an Air Force reservist turned pageant director, stood in the middle of a room lit with fluorescent lights at the University of Nevada Concert Hall in Las Vegas, waiting for 25 military veterans to gather around her. It was hours before they would parade onstage in ball gowns, before they would be drilled on military history and participate in a “Push-up Princess” competition while a drill sergeant screamed commands, before they would find out who among them was the next Ms. Veteran America.

This wasn’t just any beauty pageant. Ms. Veteran America, now in its fourth year, was launched as a fundraising event for Final Salute, a nonprofit created to benefit the estimated 4,338 homeless female veterans in the U.S. — the fastest-growing segment of the homeless veteran population according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Judged by an all-female, all-veteran panel, the contest is more sisterhood than sabotage, the contestants striving to prove their resilience, grace, and poise. The winner receives $15,000 to be used on education, student loans, home purchase or repairs, or starting a business. She also becomes the official face of the contest and Final Salute, attending dozens of public speaking events, parades, morning talk shows, and next year's pageant.

Onstage, the women milled into a circle around Gordon. One contestant, Heather Worley, 30, a short, towheaded Army sergeant with youthful cheeks and a snub nose, leaned against a wall among discarded high heels. To her left stood Szu-Moy Toves, 40, a 20-year Air Force veteran and former bodybuilder with long black hair and a striking white smile. Kerri Turner, 32, an active-duty platoon trainer for the Washington National Guard and regimental operations officer, sat in front of the group, nervously clutching a large water bottle, her round eyes thick with mascara and fixed on Gordon. They all wore pageant sashes bearing “MVA 2015” over white T-shirts reading “Served Like A Girl.”

"The crown is not what it’s about."

“We so appreciate you girls’ hard work, dedication, and sisterhood over the past two days — over the past few months,” said Gordon, who won the title in 2012. “But you girls know, the crown is not what it’s about. The talent is not what it’s about—” her voice cracked. She paused, putting her hands on her hips and letting out a sharp sigh.

“Oh god, don’t start,” Toves said. The veterans began sniffling, pulling out tissues, and fanning their eyes to keep makeup from running. “I think we all just got a little bit of dust in our eyes,” another laughed.

Many of the women — contestants and judges alike — cried during the competition. Sometimes a song or monologue during the talent competition got to them. Other times their tears were aided by alcohol and the joy of being surrounded by fellow military women — a rare occurrence even before they'd left the armed services. Toward the end, some cried when they lost, and others, when they won.

“Military girls don’t get emotional,” Capt. Jaspen Boothe, a 15-year war veteran and founder of the Ms. Veteran America competition, told BuzzFeed News. “That’s what we were always told. So it can’t be tears. It has to be dust.”

From left: Andrea Waterbury, Szu-Moy Toves, and Heather Worley at the Ms. Veteran America semifinals on Oct. 17, 2015.

Cheryl A. Guerrero for Buzzfeed News

The fourth annual Ms. Veteran America competition took place over two days in and around Las Vegas. Sunset Station, the hotel-casino where the contestants stayed and the semifinals were held, smelled like decades of cigarette smoke and spilled cocktails treated with industrial-strength cleaner. Like in many other casinos in the area, the ceiling was made to look like a bright sky — but here the paint was peeling.

Sunset Station in Henderson, Nevada.

Cheryl A. Guerrero for Buzzfeed

Though the semifinals and finals were held in October, the journey to Ms. Veteran America actually began months earlier. Over 150 women of different ages, races, upbringings, and military branches entered regional competitions over the summer, which took place in Virginia, Nevada, and over Skype. The panel of judges looked for applicants who were the most creative, eloquent, vivacious, and committed to helping their fellow women veterans.

Once chosen, the 25 finalists spent months soliciting donations for the charity, creating social media presences, and trying to get funding for their ball gowns, travel, and other expenses. Most came to Nevada on their own dime — no easy feat on veteran compensation and disability checks. Many had to find child care and take time off work, while others faced emergency surgeries, deaths of family and friends, PTSD flashes, and other catastrophes days before the main event.

“Preparing for this — getting donations, being on social media all the time — has basically been my life for the past few months,” Worley said, helping herself to the backstage snack spread. “My husband would sometimes get frustrated, saying, ‘I wish you had a little more time for me.’” But she needed to do this for herself.

At 8 a.m. the day of the semifinals, the 25 contestants — made up and stilettoed, large biceps bulging from cocktail dresses — squeezed into a waiting area for registration, meeting and greeting, then mostly waiting. They knew only 10 of them would move on to the next day’s finals, where they would compete in front of a live audience at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. They pored over binders, tapped their fingers, chatted in hushed tones, and checked their makeup using selfie mode on their phones. One woman fixed and refixed the harness of her service dog, a golden retriever named Grace.

They were waiting to be called one by one into the conference room to sit alone in front of a panel of five judges led by Command Sgt. Maj. Michele Jones, the first woman to reach that rank. There the judges asked each veteran about military history and current events, soliciting fact-based answers or personal opinions. The questions were “top secret” — a classification the women took very seriously — and reminded the contestants of the many nerve-racking, challenging tests they had to take as military trainees. An hour in, multiple women had emerged from the interview room sobbing.

“Right now is worst part of the whole competition,” Worley said between offering fellow contestants doughnuts. The sergeant is originally from Ohio but has spent the last seven years in Alabama, where she adopted a slight Southern twang. “It’s just that it’s all unknown that makes it so nerve-racking.”

“And also the sergeant major,” she said. “Talk about intimidating!”

“When a male veteran is homeless, his country failed him. When a female veteran is homeless, she failed her country.”

While the contestants waited, they swapped stories of first hearing about the competition — and reacting with disgust. “Great, just what girls want to be celebrated for after years of unrecognized military service — their appearance,” one contestant recalled. Another said she pictured women holding M16 rifles and parading around in bikinis and heels, waving at an audience of civilians. But as they learned more about the competition, they came to realize it was about charity, not bathing suits. More specifically, a charity for them.

Worley herself was homeless for much of her childhood. For years she lived in tents, motel rooms, or tiny apartments with her five-person family, working in fast-food restaurants with her mother long before she was the legal working age. At 17 she joined the military “without much thought,” she said. She was shipped off to South Korea.

Several other contestants became homeless after leaving the military, finding that the skills they'd honed since they were 18 were not applicable in the outside world. As they struggled, they felt overlooked by the VA and civilians alike.

“When a male veteran is homeless, his country failed him,” founder Boothe said. “When a female veteran is homeless, she failed her country.”

Contestants arrive at the Ms. Veteran America finals at UNLV.

Cheryl A. Guerrero for BuzzFeed News

After the interviews and lunch at the casino’s buffet, the contestants returned to the waiting room for the next part of semifinals: the talent contest. In Ms. Veteran America, there are two distinct talent rounds. On the first day, the top 25 perform in front of the judges in a stuffy, windowless room at Sunset Station. Based on their performances — or, as Boothe put it, based on how hard it seems like they tried — and their scores from the interview section, the top 10 contestants move on to the next day’s finals, where they reperform their talent in front of a live audience.

The women got creative with their talents. One dressed convincingly as a World War II–era housewife — blue polka-dot dress, long red hair done up in a 1940s swirl — and hosted a faux cooking-show segment on baking cinnamon bread. Others screened documentaries shot on their iPhones about their lives, or showed off their sword-swinging abilities. One woman’s talent was particularly straightforward: correctly pronouncing her own name.

Szu-Moy Toves

Cheryl A. Guerrero for BuzzFeed News

Toves wore a feathered tutu, bra, and headdress and performed a “traditional Tahitian dance that my military sisters taught me,” she said. As the self-described “motorcycle nut” shook her hips, the straw and feathers rattled, shivering like a peacock’s tail. She yelped enthusiastically and smiled at the judges like a practiced contestant.

Others were not as confident. Some trembled with nerves; others kept apologizing and asked to start over multiple times. “It’s OK, take your time,” said Jones. She wore a tailored, creaseless, military-inspired pantsuit with stiletto platform boots in matching army-green suede. She radiated such an air of authority that when she cracked a smile or laughed her loud, warm, laugh, those around her looked startled.

The judges cheered along, joked with the contestants, encouraged the ones who messed up, and, often, cried. For her talent, one woman told the story of having to deploy shortly after giving birth and return to a daughter who didn’t recognize her. “I watched my baby girl grow up through photos,” she said. When she returned from deployment, she said, “Here was this chubby baby, and it was so wonderful to hold her. But she didn’t know me.” Many judges wiped tears from their eyes and said they related.

Toves joined the military at 18 and gave birth to her son at 20, during her first active-duty station in the U.K. “I was too young,” she said. “I named him Chance because he happened by chance.” She went to work when he was 6 weeks old. The military base had a daycare, but her shifts were usually at night, so she had to find babysitters to watch her “little peanut.” “It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do,” she said. Chance took his first steps and said his first words with people she barely knew.

Turner, like Toves, was calm and assured during the talent portion. A petite woman with giant eyes, a Cheshire cat smile, and sleeves of tattoos, she was dressed in a white shirt, leggings, combat boots, and a puffy, wraparound skirt. The only returning contestant, she'd placed third last year. This time, with more free time to prepare after losing her full-time job days before the competition, she hoped to make it all the way.

Her talent was a monologue she wrote that followed four different women in four different wars, from Revolutionary to Iraq. “I come along my husband who was lyin’ on the floor bleedin’,” she said in an imitation old-timey American accent. “He told me he loved me, but to keep fightin’. So I heaved to cannon in the barrel, and I lit it.” As she switched eras, the skirt transformed into a 1950s apron, then a hippie poncho, and as she got to present day, a hijab.

Turner was a teen mom and the daughter of a teen mom. She had her first son at 16, her second at 19, and her daughter at 21. At the age of 22, Turner enlisted. She was seeking stability, financial independence, and a college education, she said. “And I got it: The military is the longest relationship I’ve ever had.”

She was deployed to Kuwait in 2012. “We were in the middle of the desert; everywhere you looked it was brown,” she said. “You wake up, go to the gym, look at the same colors and shapes every day, and go to bed. A groundhog day.” She organized a Christmas brunch and a Halloween zombie run to change things up. “I dressed up as a pregnant zombie with a baby zombie coming out of my belly,” she laughed. “It was awesome.”

But as the only female officer on special staff, it was lonely. “There’s only so many cock and balls jokes you can take,” she said. At one point she tried to give the men a taste of their own medicine by reading 50 Shades of Grey aloud in the office, but ended up spending most of her time in her shipping container turned bedroom by herself.

“The Army, ha! It’s a cross between high school and prison itself,” Turner said during her monologue, quoting from Sand Queen, one of her favorite books. She was in character as a woman deployed to Iraq. “‘Females aren’t allowed in combat! This is a man’s war!’ Seriously? ‘Cause here I am.” The judges applauded enthusiastically as she bowed.

Kerri Turner performing her monologue at Sunset Station.

Cheryl A. Guerrero for BuzzFeed News

The performances were followed by a dinner at the casino’s buffet. The women sat at a long table, eating sushi and lasagna of the same temperature and drinking cheap red wine they paid for themselves. Boothe handed out triangular glass trophies engraved “MVA 2015, The Woman Behind The Uniform” in categories like “Social Butterfly” — for the woman who was most successful promoting the contest and charity on social media — and “Hot Mama” — which “honors the woman who serves and sacrifices for not only her country, but her family as well.”

There were many tipsy tears, speeches, hugs, and raisings of glasses that continued into the casino bar next door. They talked about their experiences in the armed services: being mothers-at-arms, meeting their husbands on deployment, experiencing sexual trauma. What a relief it was to be around military women and let their “girl flags fly,” as Toves said.

“As a woman, you are constantly proving yourself to everyone around you every single day in a way that men just aren’t,” Turner said. She felt that if she presented herself as overly feminine she would be regarded as a “pretty girl” — a label, she said, one does not want to be given in the military.

“As a woman, you are constantly proving yourself in a way that men just aren’t."