Jaime Buffalari
Jaime Buffalari -
Iraq soldier and female bodybuilder
July 2007 -
By Hans Klein
Jaime
Buffalari’s
bodybuilding career began in an
unlikely place: Iraq.
National-level
heavyweight Jaime spent most of 2003 in
Iraq as a US Marine assigned to the 3rd Civil Affairs Group. Based at
Camp
Commando, a Marine base in the Kuwaiti desert, her unit provided
humanitarian
assistance to the Iraqis while under constant threat from mortar
attacks and
roadside bombs.
It
was
while Jaime was there that she met a coach for the
Marine bodybuilding team, who saw her potential. She started training
with him
at the gym at Camp Doha, the main US army base in Kuwait, and her body
quickly
responded. After her unit finished its tour in Iraq and she returned to
Camp
Pendleton in California, she was picked to join the bodybuilding team
full-time. For the next 12 months, Jaime was basically paid to be a
competitive
bodybuilder. “My job in the Marine Corps was just to eat, sleep and
lift, and
get ready for shows and stuff,” she says. “It was not a bad deal!”
Now
out of the Marines, 28 year-old Jaime has a big
future ahead of her in bodybuilding. After competing at the Junior USA
in
April, she now has her sights set on Nationals in Dallas in November.
At
5-foot-5 and around 145 pounds in contest shape, she undoubtedly has
the size
to hang with the best national-level heavyweights but in her last few
shows she
hasn’t come in as lean and hard as she would like. For Nationals,
however,
she’ll have a new trainer: Lisa Bickels, another former Marine who she
knows from Camp Pendleton and who won the middleweights at Nationals
last year.
“I’m very excited about working with her,” Jaime says.
Jaime
Nicole Buffalari was born in Pennsylvania but grew
up mainly in Indiana, where her family moved when she was in second
grade. She
was a typical athletic girl, who played soccer, volleyball and softball
in high
school and had what she describes as “stocky, jock-type” body. In the
tenth
grade, she even tried out for the football team – the first girl in her
school
to ever do so. She kept up with the boys all through summer practice,
but drew
the line when the coach told her she had to cut her hair short. “I
didn’t want
to do that!” she says.
Jaime
joined the Marines in 1997 right after she left
high school and breezed through the basic training at Parris Island,
S.C. – the
same the same grueling 13-week boot camp that male Marines do. “The
physical
part was too easy,” she says. After that she was posted to Camp
Pendleton in California, where she spent four
years in
communications, working with high-tech cryptographic gear used to
encode
messages.
Jaime,
nicknamed “Buff” for obvious reasons, instantly
felt at home in the Marines. She left in 2001 but signed up for another
four
years shortly after 9/11 and was assigned to the 3rd CAG,
which was sent to
Iraq in the run-up to the US invasion. Her husband, Eric Kocher, a
sergeant in
the 1st Marine Reconnaissance Battalion who had met in the gym at Camp
Pendleton, was also sent to Iraq in 2003. His elite unit spearheaded
the
invasion, operating behind enemy lines ahead of the main Marine battle
group
advancing on Baghdad.
Jaime
already had a lean, athletic body, with muscular
shoulders and arms.
But
once she started lifting
heavier and eating a
bodybuilder’s diet (she was even able to get supplements on base in
Kuwait),
she quickly put on a lot more size. In fact, when she and Eric saw each
other
at a base in Iraq in mid-2003 for the first time in months, she was
actually a
lot bigger than he was. “Everyone was giving him a bunch of crap
because he was
so much smaller than I was!” she laughs.
In
September 2003 the 3rd CAG returned to Camp Pendleton
(Eric, who had been wounded, had returned a month earlier), where Jaime
joined
the bodybuilding team. She was the only female bodybuilder on the team,
which
trained together three times a day and pushed her to lift heavier and
train
more intensely than she had ever done before. “If you said you couldn’t
do it,
they’d be like, ‘Whatever,’ and put more weight on and you’d press out
like 5 or 6 more reps,” she says. Pretty soon she was
squatting 405 and bench pressing 205.
Jaime
was inspired to get onstage
after attending a
bodybuilding show in California that one of her coaches was competing
in. “It
was completely awesome,” she says. “I thought, ‘This is what I want to
do!’”
With just 15 days to prep, she did the Orange County Classic in April
2004 - a
day before her 25th birthday – and won the novice overall, weighing
135. “It
was a great feeling,” she says. She ended up doing another three shows
that
year.
“I had the fever!” she says.
Jaime
finally quit the Marines
after eight years in January
2005. After Eric was transferred to Camp Lejeune,
they moved to Jacksonville, N.C., where
Jaime
started working as a personal trainer.
Last
year, Jaime starting
competing in shows on the east
coast, placing second in the heavyweights at the Gold’s Classic in
Wilmington,
N.C., before going on to the Eastern Seaboard, a national qualifier,
where she
won the heavyweight and overall, weighing in at 147 pounds.
Jaime
and Eric plan to move back
to California some time
this year. After being deployed to Iraq 4 times and being wounded
twice, Eric
has now also quit the Marine Corps. HBO is now making a mini series
based on
First Recon’s exploits in Iraq, based on Generation Kill, a book by
Evan
Wright, a writer for Rolling Stone magazine who was embedded with the
unit. The
mini series will be shot in South Africa this summer and Eric will be
spending
six months there as a military advisor.
Jaime,
meanwhile, will be planning her assault on
Nationals. After originally planning to compete at the amateur show at
the
Arnold Weekend, Jaime decided instead to do the Junior USA in April –
her
national-level debut. She ended up coming in at 152 and placed fourth
in the
heavyweights - “very frustrating, but a learning experience.” With that
experience under her belt – and Lisa Bickels’s help – Jaime is hoping
to come
in in much better shape in Dallas in November. If she does, she could
easily be
pushing for a top five placing.