Love My Rifle More Than You
Young and Female in the U.S. Army
by Kayla Williams, with Michael E. Staub
Norton, 288 pp., $24.95
AS NEVER BEFORE, the war in Iraq has forced the question of women's proper role in the military and, specifically, in combat. Though Pentagon rules still preclude women from serving in the infantry or artillery, their supporting roles in Afghanistan and Iraq have put them in the direct line of fire, with familiar consequences. From Jessica Lynch, the petite West Virginia girl who was wounded, taken prisoner, and returned home a prime-time media heroine, to the far less appealing Lynndie England, whose wartime triumph consisted of humiliating Iraqi soldiers at the end of a dog leash, the debate is once again a live minefield.
In the wake of such uncertain legacies as those provided by Lynch and England, the question of whether women should be placed in "combat situations" seems to have devolved from an issue of principle--is it in America's national security interest, followed by social and cultural concerns--to one of perverse pragmatism. As in: They're getting shot, killed, captured, and raped anyway, so why not call it combat? Women die just like men, don't they? And who, in these egalitarian times of drive-through sperm banks and surrogate uterobots, would dare suggest that women's lives are more valuable than men's? (Other than the small children who are left mommyless--and often, in the case of single mothers who join the Army, orphans. But we'll leave that for another discussion.)
For now, who better to answer than a woman soldier recently returned from Iraq? Kayla Williams is the smart, sassy, sexy, in-your-face, Arabic-speaking Army intelligence soldier/author of this first-person account of what it's like to be a female in the U.S. military.
Did I mention profane? Without profanity and enough F-bombs to saturate Greater Baghdad, this book would be much thinner, and Williams, notwithstanding her occasionally wry perspective, a more sympathetic narrator. Let's just say that if cussing like the proverbial pre-sensitivity-trained sailor, talking X-rated raunch, and doing the random ancient deed constitute being one of the guys, Williams has secured her place at the urinal.
Yes, yes, I know: It's war, dammit. F-bombs and other explosive literary devices happen. As a veteran of newsrooms, I confess to having contributed a little shrapnel myself, as women often do as a way of desexualizing themselves in testosterone-rich environments. But an almost 300-page book surely deserves more editing than the stall doors of public restrooms, lest the reader tire of what amounts to a longwinded, monosyllabic grunt. Further, while I understand that war imposes certain hardships, including the sharing of involuntary intimacies--to wit, the toilet--surely there's a more artful way to express it than: "You know their s----g habits."
Fine. I suppose in wartime that hygiene, like everything else, is reduced to unromanticized simplicity. And perhaps, granting Williams her due for having served her country, her inner artist was striving for a hardcore realism consistent with her experience. As a reader, however, I found myself longing for a Baptist editor around page 42.
Williams's realism doesn't stop at style, for which we should be sincerely grateful. Her truth-telling about the relationships between men and women (or boys and girls, as circumstances often reveal) may be the best argument yet for keeping men and women apart as much as possible. Those deployed on the frontlines of Mother Nature's daily skirmishes usually have little trouble grasping the notion that boys and girls are different in ways not merely anatomical--though, inarguably, biology dictates many of those differences. They also strain little to embrace the understanding that young men and women thrown together in stressful circumstances, without family or other institutional constraints, might find sexual release both appealing and convenient.
Picture prewar Iraq. The desert. Dust, tedium, boredom, a man, a woman, and no one but Allah and Jupiter to bear witness. Et voilá! as they say. I'm not sure which is cause for greater concern: the bacchanalia that Williams hints at, or the sexual frustration that leads to hostilities and other distractions where mental and physical discipline are paramount. If the men and women aren't sneaking off to consummate their starlit love, they're throwing rocks at each others' zippers and, in Williams's case, her ample bosom. How do we know her bosom is ample? The same way we know that Williams is very, very smart. She tells us. Repeatedly.
In fact, by Williams's estimation, she's not only the lone woman in many instances (during one period, the only gal among 500 men), she's also the only one with half-a-wit. When she finally meets a fellow soldier who can nod knowingly when she slips the names of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn into the conversation--liberal code for voulez-vous couchez avec moi, ce soir?--we are to infer that this is one mighty mind. Her politics coyly emerge through the fog of war as Williams mentions more than once that there were no WMD in Iraq, and that the U.S. invasion was based on explicit "lies," never to be confused with faulty intelligence.
Despite my tepid response to Williams's passionate personality, I will give the woman--or perhaps her "with" writer, Michael E. Staub--credit for crafting an enviable "Good God, Martha!" lede. She begins: "Sometimes, even now, I wake up before dawn and forget I am not a slut." Indeed, the Prologue is worth the price of the book, wherein Williams explains what being a woman is really like if you're one of the 15 percent of the military that is female. Here's the joke all female soldiers somehow must transcend: "What's the difference between a bitch and a slut? A slut will f--anyone, a bitch will f--anyone but you."
Okay, baby feminists, rally round the Tampon dispenser for the quickie translation. It means this: If you're outgoing and friendly, sez Williams, you're a slut. If you're reserved and professional, you're a bitch. See what I mean? War may be hell, but if you're a woman, it's . . . complicated. Not only are women considered lesser mortals militarily, but they're otherwise objectified by their male counterparts whose eyes are always on "your breasts, your ass--like there is nothing else to watch, no sun, no river, no desert, no mortars at night," writes Williams.
Awful, isn't it? Except, no, it's not. The dirty little secret, which Williams tells with a rare and selfless honesty, is that the women (many? some? most?) love it. Especially--she said it, not I--the attractiveness-challenged ones. They're called "queens for a year" because even women who never enjoyed male attention in civilian life are viewed admiringly by the lonely, sexually deprived men in their late teens and early twenties who make up much of the military. Williams's report is hardly the stuff of revelation. Any prep school male from pre-coed days will confess his lust for the headmaster's wife, who seemed like Brigitte Bardot during the interminable weekdays before girls his own age arrived for Friday night's dance.
Williams writes admirably of her own inner struggle as her emotions and intellect duke it out: "Their eyes, their hunger: yes, it's shaming--but they also make you special. I don't like to say it--it cuts you inside--but the attention, the admiration, the need: they make you powerful. If you're a woman in the Army, it doesn't matter so much about your looks. What counts is that you're female."
Some women sleep around, Williams tells us--"lots of sex with lots of guys, in sleeping bags, in trucks, in sand, in America, in Iraq. Some women hold themselves back." She has personal knowledge of both, she says. And then, in the bunker buster of sexual politics, she drops the MOAB. Despite our best, enlightened designs, human nature prevails. Jealousy rears her magnificent snout.
"And I know about something else," writes Williams. "How these same guys you want to piss on become your guys. Another girl enters your tent, and they look at her the way they looked at you, and what drove you crazy with anger suddenly drives you crazy with jealousy. They're yours.
F--k, you left your husband to be with them, you walked out on him for them. These guys, they're your husband, they're your father, your brother, your lover--your life." And not to ruin the movie, but they're also our first-string defense against a ferocious enemy.
Just possibly, we have shelved Dr. Freud at our peril.
Before I leave the impression that Kayla Williams is a narcissist undeserving of so much attention, let me urge everyone remotely interested in a gender-integrated military to read this book. It's raw, yes, but also funny in places. And bittersweet, as well as heroic at times. A quick read, it is also a first-person account of war by a voice rarely heard--a woman's. She sees things many men might not notice: for instance, the way other women in occupied countries look, talk, and feel. She notices the gardens, the desert light, and offers female insights that betray her reluctant femininity. She is best when she turns her humorous inner eye on herself and the absurdities of military life.
In one section, certain to capture screenwriters' imaginations, Williams is asked to translate during a search-and-seizure operation at a monastery. While her officer stands by, she asks the monk in Arabic whether he has any weapons. The monk replies in perfect English, and so goes the conversation from then on. Yet Williams's officer, instead of talking directly to the monk in English, persists in asking Williams what he said, and instructing her in what she should say in response. All in English.
Williams says she wanted to build a bridge with her book between the extremes of Lynch and England, to show that women in the military aren't all good or all bad, but something in between. She also wanted to make the case that women can be anything men can be, and she may be right when she says that "women are no different from men in their corruptibility. Women are just as competent--and just as incompetent."
Her observation may serve to recommend this book to those curious about women at war. But equal corruptibility and incompetence are weak arguments to advance Williams's view that our nation is well served by mixing men and women in combat where the imminent possibility of death apparently brings out the basest instincts in both.
Kathleen Parker writes a syndicated column for Tribune News Services.</ p>