In my advocacy efforts, I’d started to meet others who were working on behalf of veterans. One tiny, adorable, hyper woman I met chirpily informed me, “You wrote about me!” I was baffled until Tia explained. In Love My Rifle, I wrote about women who were sexually assaulted at DLI and threatened with being charged for drinking. She was one of those women. Now, she worked for an established nonprofit out in San Francisco called Swords to Plowshares, and speaking out about military sexual trauma (MST) was a big component of her mission.1 Her courage and openness astonished me. I hated being asked about my worst experiences and discussed them reluctantly. Tia’s willingness to share her own trauma in order to help others was inspirational.
When Tia got Swords to put on a show called SHOUT! Art by Women Veterans,2 she asked me to come and speak at opening night. When I got to the event, it was amazing to be around so many other women veterans at one time. Please don’t misunderstand me—I love my brothers-in-arms, too. Truly, we have shared experiences that civilians can never understand. But women in a combat zone face added pressures. We must deal with sexual harassment and be wary of sexual assault. Women have to keep their guard up not only around the enemy, but even among some of their fellow soldiers. We face pressure not to report sexual harassment just because we “can’t take a joke.” Being with a group of creative, strong women—and the friends and loved ones who support them—was moving.
And then something happened that truly shocked me.
An Army LTC was at the event in uniform. “I have to share this with you,” he told a group of us. He explained that a local teacher asked her students to draw pictures of what the word “veteran” meant to them, and lots of students drew American flags or soldiers at war. So the teacher had asked him to come into her class to talk to the students about what it means to be a veteran. But among all the other drawings, there was one that stood out.
The LTC pulled it out and showed it to us.
It was a drawing of a pretty, smiling girl in an Army uniform.
Mind you, as an Army vet, I have been well trained in the philosophy of “suck it up and drive on.” I can speak to hundreds of people calmly.
But when I saw that drawing, tears filled my eyes. I was so overcome with emotion that I had to turn around and pull myself together.
FOR A COUPLE OF weeks after the art show, I had pondered why I had such a strong emotional reaction to that drawing. It’s funny how some things just hit you.
My twin nephews are really into the Army, and at first they didn’t believe that I was really a soldier, because I’m a girl.
When I go places with groups of vets, I often have to explain that I’m not “just” a spouse or girlfriend. Being ignored when free beers were passed out when Zoe and I went to the bars with groups of guys fresh back from Iraq still stings all these years later.
Once when I was walking Kelby in the park, an old man walked up and asked, “IUD?”
I stared at him in total confusion. “Huh?”
He gestured at her stump. “Was it one of them IUDs that got her? In Iraq?”
“Oh. You mean IED. No, she isn’t a retired military working dog. She got hit by a car.” As Kelby and I walked away, it hit me: no one had ever, on sight alone, assumed I was a combat veteran. More people had now officially assumed that my dog was a combat vet than that I was.3 When Brian had first gotten Purple Heart plates on his car, he’d gotten deeply offended when a few people had asked him if it was his dad’s car—shoving in his face the realization that most people didn’t truly realize we were a nation at war, with injured troops coming home. Little incidents like the one with Kelby regularly drove home to me that many Americans—if they were conscious of the wars at all—either didn’t know women were serving or didn’t understand the types of roles we were playing.
So by the time I spoke at the art show in San Francisco, I was used to speaking out about veterans’ issues, and the special issues that women veterans face. Used to biting my tongue when asked if I was allowed to carry a gun in Iraq because I’m “just a girl.” Used to explaining that, yes, women are actually in combat, they have died in combat, earned Silver Stars for their valor in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Used to being patient and calm and citing facts and figures and statistics to prove my points.
What I was not used to was having a little girl think first of someone like me when she thinks of what a veteran is. Not used to feeling so included, having our service recognized by an outsider without prompting, being . . . accepted. I blogged about the drawing by that little girl, thanking her for all the hope it symbolized for me.4 And, thinking about how deeply moving being around a group of other women veterans had been, I decided to take action. Rather than just accepting the feelings of isolation and accepting my status as an oddity (a relatively rare woman in the veterans’ community, an extremely rare veteran in groups of women), I needed to find—or make—a community of my peers, other women veterans.
Brian was more than supportive through all of this, urging me to develop a support network of my own like the one he had built up at the fire department. He was standing on his own now, and I wanted to as well. Neither of us thought it would be healthy to be immersed only in one another, and we were strong enough in ourselves now to support each other in cultivating individual interests. Having lives that were both separate and together reinvigorated our relationship, and I found myself slowly backing away from the obsession with control I once had. I let Brian take the lead in more areas but made sure he knew that I would be there to support him. Now I was finally ready to learn that our marriage would thrive if I was just his wife, not his mother or his caseworker.
WHEN I HEARD ABOUT an all-female-veteran Outward Bound trip not long after that, I knew I had to go. For a week in August 2009, I went kayaking in the Apostle Islands on Lake Superior. Through the generosity of Sierra Club donors, this women-veteran-only trip was completely free, even the travel. I was terrified to leave Brian alone after how badly my trip back to Iraq had gone a couple of years before, but he assured me that he would be fine and pushed me to go. “Do something for yourself. You deserve this. You need a break, Kayla.”
The drive from the airport to the shore of Lake Superior was lushly beautiful. In the van, bonds were immediately formed—it is so easy and comfortable to be around other women vets, who speak the same language and think the same shit is funny. Right after we got to our first camping site, we repacked what we had brought into seaworthy gear, and packed away our mobile phones. It felt fantastic to turn mine off and put it away—both symbolically and actually cutting ties with the demanding regular world for a week.
We had Army, Navy, and Air Force, ranging in age from twenties to forties, some more fit than others, in all different stages of dealing with our deployment experiences and ability to share, with different strengths and weaknesses, traits and quirks. The first day, we got briefed on all the basics of how the next week would go. One of the guides was a nurse at an OB/GYN clinic. When she was giving us a briefing about what we should do if we had any medical problems on the trip, she mentioned that sitting in wet gear for hours could sometimes cause problems and we should come see her if we had any issues “down there.”
It reminded me of the way every single time the question of women in combat comes up, someone will mention “the hygiene issue.”5 They never spell out what this means. It’s just, “You know, the hygiene issue.” At first I tried to be polite during those conversations, explaining that there wasn’t a real area of concern. But eventually I started to smile sweetly and say, “I’m not sure what you’re talking about, can you please explain it?” . . . Trying to force them to explain that they believe we will get infections in our vaginas if we lacked access to running water. Then I could point out that if women couldn’t survive without indoor plumbing, the species wouldn’t have survived long enough to develop it. For goodness’ sake, half the world’s population doesn’t have indoor plumbing today.
So I said to the nurse, “You mean in our vaginas? You know, if you can’t say ‘vagina,’ I’m not that likely to come talk to you about mine.” Everyone laughed and she said, “Yes, your vaginas.” And we all said it: “Vagina!” It felt goofy and ridiculous but also strangely comforting—I would not have said anything in a group that also included guys.
We then learned how to handle ourselves on the water (basically), packed, and kayaked ten miles. We camped on Oak Island for two nights. There were wild thimbleberries (an exciting new food for me) and raspberries. We went hiking, and I learned a lot about useful local plants from one of our guides, including which is best for wiping your ass. The guides—clearly experienced at dealing with groups of people from challenging backgrounds—were able to tailor their approaches to each of us individually, and knew what we needed. Given my own obliviousness to subtleties of human interaction (as Brian had pointed out to me when I complained about troubles at the office), I was impressed.
The next morning we got up early, kayaked another ten miles to Stockton Island, set up camp again, and camped there for another two nights. There were wild blueberries and blackberries. Here, our luck with the weather broke, and life became damp and cold and sandy.
My OCD tendencies must have been clear when I was younger (a guy I dropped acid with once gave me a mop as a gift . . . ), but this way of compensating for the unpredictability of life by controlling my immediate surroundings had become more extreme as I’d gotten older. The Army encouraged these behaviors, and I felt that embracing them was the only way to manage our lives after I married Brian and had to help him cope with his TBI and PTSD. I’d been working on them with my therapist—the damned canned goods exercise—but still tended to be hyper-controlling of my environment.
On this trip, there were different roles (e.g., cook, navigator, leader, kitchen cleanup) that rotated daily. The second day on Stockton, the group decided that my role was to do nothing: I was not allowed to help (meddle? fiddle? fuss?). This made me twitchy. Surely things would fall apart if I wasn’t actively engaged in running them! That woman is doing a task wrong! That won’t work!
But it was actually good for me. Nothing terrible happened, nothing blew up, nothing burned down. No one starved or got hurt. Everything was . . . fine. A few times I literally bit my knuckles to restrain myself from jumping in to help out—okay, to take over. Being forced to wait and watch problems get resolved without my intervention was humbling and strangely soothing.
The final morning out on the water, we got up at 3 a.m. and kayaked fourteen miles back to the mainland—battling high winds and waves as well as our own exhaustion and crankiness. We camped on the mainland and went rock climbing the next day.
I was nervous.
I hadn’t been able to get back into climbing after breaking my ankle. We went back to the gym a couple of times, but whenever I got to a certain height, I would hear the sound my ankle made when it snapped echo through my memory and immediately come back down. Then we moved, and there was no indoor gym near us, so I had a good excuse to quit entirely.
At an indoor gym, you climb up and rappel down. Out on this cliff above Lake Superior, we rappelled down and then had to climb up. Once down, you must come up (like gravity is reversed! but it isn’t . . . ). So down I went. And up I tried to go. But I froze. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t bring myself to move, to risk it, to try.
I stayed at the bottom of the cliff for what felt like an eternity before—with lots of encouragement from one of the instructors and another vet—finally dredging up the courage to scale the rock wall. And throughout the climb, I was believing my eyes, listening to the voice in my head telling me I couldn’t, worrying about how long I was taking, freaking out.
At the top, I had a little emotional meltdown, and started crying. One of the other women took me aside. I’d known her from the 101st; we’d actually been co-located in Iraq for a couple of months. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“I used to be good at this! I used to enjoy it! I used to listen to my body, trust myself, believe in my abilities on the wall, have fun—oh.”
She laughed and hugged me.
Hmm. It was unmistakable that all of these things were as true symbolically as literally. I used to have fun at lots of things, believe in my abilities more broadly, be more loose and relaxed, not try to control everything, trust my instincts . . . That worked pretty well for me. And I was a lot more fun to be around. But now I had become tight, tense, controlling. Brittle.
We returned to the Outward Bound base, cleaned all the gear, got showers, sat in a sauna, slept on bunk beds, and graduated. The next morning, breakfast and back to the airport. I felt cleansed, simultaneously lighter and more grounded.
When I got home, my house was still standing, the dog was still alive, and Brian had managed to feed and clothe himself while I was gone. He admitted that he only ate sandwiches, but he ate. Nothing terrible happened, nothing blew up, nothing burned down. No one starved or got hurt. Everything was . . . fine.
This was a bit jarring. Did he not need me at all? What was my purpose? Could I genuinely let myself step back and unwind?
I was able to become much more relaxed, regain perspective, and try not to control things as much. Let a lot more little shit go. I had open, honest, and not-tense conversations with Brian about important things like money. We took the TV out of the living room to set up an exercise room. Brian said, “You know, you’re much more pleasant to be around. Maybe you should go on an Outward Bound trip every year.” And I started to listen to my instincts (intuition, the voices in my head, whatever) more. I felt good. For the first time in a long time, I felt genuinely good—about myself, my place in the world, the prospects for the future of the world, all of it.
BACK HOME, I BECAME part of a small and tight-knit group of women vets in my area. Our glue was not just our military experience: it was a book club that became both a psychological and an emotional outlet for us all. The book club was Carolyn’s idea. We’d met at a VoteVets event—as usual, almost all the attendees were men. She came up to me right away, saying, “It’s so nice to not be the only woman at one of these things!” As we chatted, we realized how much we had in common. Carolyn and I were close to the same age and had both enlisted to become linguists in the Army when we already had bachelor’s degrees. She’d studied Russian and been in the National Guard; both of us had deployed to Iraq. Carolyn is tall for a woman, with red hair and a gentle smile. She was the organized one who always planned get-togethers, and after a few times when small groups of women vets Carolyn invited to her place hit it off, she suggested we formalize a regular session.
“What about a book club? We could meet once a month—switch between military books and fluff. A different person could host each time. It would be fun!” The rest of us readily agreed. Especially for those who were married with kids, it was too easy to bail on informal plans—but this might work. A regular get-together with a loose purpose to draw us together. We’d discuss the book of the month briefly, and quickly move to random topics, wine, and laughter. After the first session, we started calling it the Honeybadger Book Club, after a goofy YouTube spoof of nature videos in which the narrator says several times, “Honeybadger don’t give a shit.”6
One month, Rachel was hosting. I met Rachel through her husband, Jason. We had hit it off when we worked together at my first post-Army job, and I’d invited him to bring his family to a barbecue we hosted. Jason was a lower-leg amputee from a training accident at Fort Drum, an artillery misfire. The first time we all hung out, he got drunk and ended up talking to our three-legged dog. Normally averse to strangers, she was curled up at his feet, and he slurred, “You and me, we’re the same, Kelby!” He pointed at his prosthesis and her stump. “We’re both missing our legs! We’re the same, dog!” She thumped her tail and licked his hand.
Rachel and I chatted about what it was like to have husbands who had been severely wounded while serving. She and Jason had been dating but not yet married when he was injured, and their young relationship had been strained by the need to cope with intense trauma before they had a solid foundation yet. Though neither of them had deployed, we still felt kinship as couples. Their two kids, a boy and a girl both younger than Brian’s daughter, were polite and bouncily active. Rachel is petite and blond, speaks half a dozen languages, and is visibly ambitious.
Rachel had put out an amazing spread of snacks and drinks, and we spent an hour eating and drinking wine and catching up before even turning to the book. It was military book month, and we had read Jane Blair’s Hesitation Kills: A Female Marine Officer’s Combat Experience in Iraq. “I thought I wouldn’t like her based on her photo,” I admitted, “She looked so blond and perfect! But I really did like her by the end.”
“I didn’t like her,” Meg said bluntly. “She made it sound like she was the only woman in all of Kuwait, not just in her unit.” The first time I met Meg was when we spoke on a panel together at a fund-raiser for a nonprofit devoted to raising awareness about women veterans that a mutual acquaintance was trying to get off the ground, American Women Veterans. In groups of women, I often felt too loud and brash, worrying that I dominated conversations and needed to consciously give space for others to talk—I get so excitable that I can just run right over demure people in conversations. This was never a concern of mine with Meg. Her curly brown hair is as uncontainable as her big, bold smile and infectious laugh. When we start talking, we immediately trample all over each other’s sentences, happily clicking into a fast-paced conversation that leaves no one else a chance to join. She’d been a medic who had spent time at Fort Campbell while on active duty and was now in the Reserves. We eventually figured out that there was a fifty-fifty chance she was on the plane that flew Brian from Baghdad to Germany.
“The thing that did actually set me off at the beginning of the book,” I admitted, “was that she seemed to think she wouldn’t go to war as a female.”
“I wanted to ask about that,” Carolyn said, “That never crossed my mind, but I wasn’t there at the beginning.”
Meg and I spoke simultaneously: “It never crossed my mind.” I had always known that if I enlisted in the Army, I could go to war—though when I signed up pre-9/11, it didn’t seem terribly likely.
“And she seemed willing not to go,” I added.
“Right, like if they said, ‘You’re a woman, you don’t have to go,’ she might have said, ‘Oh, okay!’” Carolyn chimed in.
“You both went into the military older, so you had more life experience,” Jen broke in. She was one of Meg’s friends, a reservist married to a guy in her unit. Jen is a blonde with an undergraduate degree from American University, and her sweet smile makes her bitingly sarcastic humor come as a surprise. She received a Purple Heart during her deployment to Iraq after an IED peppered her face with shrapnel, but when the infantry brigade commander, a colonel known to his men as “the Dragon,” presented her with the medal during an awards ceremony, the injury she chose to mention was getting “shocked in the buttocks.”
“I was only seventeen when I enlisted in the Army,” Jen continued. “If I could talk to my eighteen-year-old self, I would shake her! My recruiter said, ‘You’re Civil Affairs, you’re a woman, you’re a reservist, you won’t go anywhere.’ So even though this was right after 9/11—sorry, I got caught up in the patriotic fervor, I was seventeen—I really thought that as a reservist and Civil Affairs, I wouldn’t be going anywhere!”
“Don’t be sorry. A lot of people did. On that note, she really seemed to buy the official party line that we were going there to liberate the Iraqi people,” I said.
“Do you think that’s because she was still in? She’s still a reservist,” Carolyn offered.
“Maybe—I definitely didn’t want my book to come out until I was out of the military,” I said.
“Or because she was an officer,” Rachel suggested.
“Well, I did wholeheartedly believe that both times I was there,” Meg said. “That we were doing the right thing and needed to be there. I had in my head that we were doing the right thing.”
“When I got to meet individual Iraqis,” Jen said, “we could see how maybe my micro-grant helped them, I thought, ‘Oh, this is a really good program.’ But most of the time—and I was there during the surge—I felt like I was a placeholder to send X number of troops to Iraq, and anything I did wasn’t really going to matter in the long run.”
“The conclusion I tentatively came to was that maybe even though we had the wrong reasons we might have done the right thing . . .” I suggested.
“Me too,” Meg cut in.
“ . . . but we won’t know for a generation, and maybe it’s going to go to shit,” I finished.
“My biggest issue was her definition of a combat mission and mine—they’re very different. I was on a combat mission. She wasn’t,” Meg added.
“Yeah, she was a REMF [rear-echelon motherfucker] officer who got to look through a camera. If her drone gets shot down she’s fine. I’ve still got shrapnel coming out of my chin,” Jen said.
“I will say, though, there were some things I thought she captured really well—like the surreality of calling for fire. When Lauren and I watched artillery being fired, it didn’t register with me at the time that people were getting killed. And being possessive about ‘her boys’—that resonated with me,” I threw out.
“She seemed kind of like a prude, though,” Rachel said.
“Yeah, she was one of those women who wouldn’t drink enough water so she wouldn’t have to pee in front of anyone. Fuck that! You have to drink water! Just pee!” Jen added, her voice noticeably louder at the end.
“I did that sometimes,” Carolyn said, “Because missions could be so long, and I didn’t want to make everyone stop for me.”
“But she did it because she was too modest to pee in front of people!” Rachel said.
“Oh no, I didn’t care about that,” Carolyn said. “You learn how to manage. One day I’m pulling security and this lieutenant colonel came up to me and said, ‘How do you pee out here?’ I said, ‘I pee.’”
Meg interjected, “‘I pull my pants down, squat . . . ’”
“And he said, ‘Because I had this genius idea from this other girl that you could put your poncho on!’” Carolyn continued. “And I said, ‘But then you get pee on your poncho.’ I’m like, uh, I’m not going to carry around a pee-covered poncho. I just tell guys not to look this way and then I drop trou.”
“Even if they do look,” Meg added, “if you haven’t seen it by now . . .”
We laughed in mutual understanding and recognition.
To be honest, we didn’t each always even read the book. The composition of women changed through time, and we couldn’t all make it to each meeting—but the friendships were powerful. We supported one another through major life changes: celebrating weddings, births, and promotions, brainstorming about how to tackle troubles at work, venting about our partners. Though our military experiences had been different, we shared some core traits: all of us were strong women with low tolerance levels for bullshit and the ability—desire, even—to laugh about shitty experiences.
I’d talked to a documentary filmmaker who had filmed lots of veterans about whether she saw any differences between the men and women vets she’d worked with. She had immediately answered, “Yes. All of the men cry. It’s clearly a very cathartic thing for them; many of them have never described the war trauma they experienced before opening up to me. But the women can laugh about it. They’ve obviously already discussed what they went through with each other and started to process their feelings.” In the Honeybadger Book Club, we had formed a community of our peers, a safe space where we could share our secrets, admit our anger and fear, brag about our successes, brainstorm solutions to vexing problems, and laugh about it all. Still a tiny minority in the larger community of veterans, we had each other’s backs.
1. Tia and I spoke at the Senate hearing together; her remarks are at http://veterans.senate.gov/hearings.cfm?action=release.display&release_id=36f78b3c-95e7-4732-9f03-063ff694c2bf. According to the VA, “The definition of MST used by the VA is given by U.S. Code (1720D of Title 38). It is ‘psychological trauma, which in the judgment of a VA mental health professional, resulted from a physical assault of a sexual nature, battery of a sexual nature, or sexual harassment which occurred while the Veteran was serving on active duty or active duty for training.’ Sexual harassment is further defined as ‘repeated, unsolicited verbal or physical contact of a sexual nature which is threatening in character.’” For more information, see http://www.ptsd.va.gov/public/pages/military-sexual-trauma-general.asp. Both men and women experience MST, and it is more strongly correlated with symptoms of PTSD than either combat trauma or civilian sexual assault; see, for example, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1513167/.
2. It’s become an annual event: http://www.swords-to-plowshares.org/2012/03/09/shout-art-by-women-veterans-may-9-2012/.
3. It happened again after that, too. Since Kelby was a German shepherd missing a leg, several people assumed she’d been a military working dog injured in combat.
4. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kayla-williams/being-a-woman-veteran_b_178894.html
5. When I was in the Army, an astonishing number of guys actually believed that the Army was required to pull us out of the field every three days so we could shower. It’s just not that big of a deal. The exception is that some women are uncomfortable urinating in front of men—perhaps understandably so, given the sexual assault rate—and so wouldn’t drink enough water on deployments and got urinary tract infections. Luckily, there’s a tool for that—http://www.backpacker.com/gear-zone-gear-review-female-urination-devices/gear/14173—and they’re even available through the Army logistics chain these days.
6. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg