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The Private War Of Women Serving In Iraq
Beacon Press
April 2009
On Sale: April 1, 2009
280 pages ISBN: 0807061476 EAN: 9780807061473 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
More American women have fought and died in Iraq than in any
war since World War Two, yet as soldiers they are still
painfully alone. In Iraq, only one in ten troops is a woman,
and she often serves in a unit with few other women or none
at all. This isolation, along with the military’s
deep-seated hostility toward women, causes problems that
many female soldiers find as hard to cope with as war
itself: degradation, sexual persecution by their comrades,
and loneliness, instead of the camaraderie that every
soldier depends on for comfort and survival. As one female
soldier said, “I ended up waging my own war against an enemy
dressed in the same uniform as mine.” In The Lonely Soldier, Benedict tells the stories of five
women who fought in Iraq between 2003 and 2006. She follows
them from their childhoods to their enlistments, then takes
them through their training, to war and home again, all the
while setting the war’s events in context. We meet Jen, white and from a working-class town in the
heartland, who still shakes from her wartime traumas; Abbie,
who rebelled against a household of liberal Democrats by
enlisting in the National Guard; Mickiela, a Mexican
American who grew up with a family entangled in L.A. gangs;
Terris, an African American mother from D.C. whose childhood
was torn by violence; and Eli PaintedCrow, who joined the
military to follow Native American tradition and to escape a
life of Faulknerian hardship. Between these stories, Benedict weaves those of the forty
other Iraq War veterans she interviewed, illuminating the
complex issues of war and misogyny, class, race, homophobia,
and post-traumatic stress disorder. Each of these stories is
unique, yet collectively they add up to a heartbreaking
picture of the sacrifices women soldiers are making for this
country. Benedict ends by showing how these women came to
face the truth of war and by offering suggestions for how
the military can improve conditions for female
soldiers—including distributing women more evenly throughout
units and rejecting male recruits with records of violence
against women. Humanizing, urgent, and powerful, The Lonely
Soldier is a clarion call for change.
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