‘Soldier Girls,’ women at war and at home

Review: ‘Soldier Girls,’ women at war and at home, by Helen Thorpe

August 21 2014 - The headlines about female soldiers in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have stereotyped them as nameless victims of sexual assault, ill-prepared damsels in distress (Jessica Lynch, captured and rescued at the start of the war in Afghanistan) or country naifs swept up in the infamous debauchery at Abu Ghraib (Lynndie England, now released from prison).

Yet for the vast majority of women in the armed forces, service is a tough job that they hope will lift them to a better station in life, and they persevere daily in an intensely male-dominated culture. The military is different from other traditional male bastions that admit women, such as law or medicine. Oh, law firms may have places they call war rooms, stacked to the ceiling with legal papers for major cases, but no one ever dies there. The military has real war zones where soldiers depend on one another for community and survival — and, of course, where people die.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were large-scale experiments in mixing men and women in war zones, the results of which remain to be fully measured. The Pentagon, however, seems to like what it saw. It announced on June 18, 2013, that about 33,000 positions formerly closed to women are now available to them, in a rollout of standards and training that began this year and will continue into 2016. Only positions in the infantry, Special Ops and a few other combat roles are off-limits.

This makes “Soldier Girls” especially timely. Journalist Helen Thorpe follows three women, tracking their ups and downs with faithful detail in a brilliant tableau of their overlapping lives for 12 years as they do multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq and readjust to civilian life. All three enlisted in the Indiana National Guard before Sept. 11, 2001. Michelle Fischer was a counterculture maverick from a dysfunctional family who joined to pay for college. Desma Brooks was an impulsive mother of three young children who joined on a dare. Debbie Helton, older and more conservative, joined for community. In an author’s note, Thorpe writes that a pseudonym was used for one of the women, but she doesn’t reveal which one. Then, while promoting the book on “The Daily Show,” she told Jon Stewart that Michelle Fischer was the invented name. read more>>>