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.
關於作者：
Helen Benedict, a professor of journalism at
Columbia University, has written frequently on women, race, and
justice. Her books includeVirgin or Vamp: How the Press
Covers Sex Crimesand the novelsThe Opposite of
Love, The Sailor''s Wife, Bad Angel, andA World Like
This. Her work on soldiers won the James Aronson Award for
Social Justice Journalism.
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