Customer Reviews

The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

As a female who is considering joining the military I wanted to read everything I could about the current environment. I purchased this along with others such as Band of Sisters (which is the complete opposite of this book - women who did enjoy the military, even making careers), Joker One, and I Love My Rifle More than You. I could barely put down this book reading horrifying accounts of not just the war in Iraq but the sexual assaults occurring. There is some obvious liberal bias but NOT in regards to what the women say in their own words. All wanted to join the country to do something patriotic and most to elevate themselves out of poverty so it was beyond disappointing to hear how the military treated these women. I believe all the women covered in these stories were in the Army or National Guard- you didn't hear from women in the Air Force, Navy, or Marines (which Band of Sisters). It's also not about just sexual assaults - the parts of Halliburton not getting the soldier's armor for their cars or vests or even food makes you so angry you have to take a deep breath to continue. Even if you're not considering joining the military - this is a good read to see what our military goes through on a grueling basis. These are strong women from all races and income levels who did not wimp out in any shape or form. Very eye-opening.

Benedict's book is well-written and engrossing, as one would expect from a journalism professor. The book is hard to put down but at the same time, it's extremely painful to read.

Benedict interviews five enlisted women who served in Iraq. The interviewees provided graphic accounts of their experiences, sparing no one, including themselves. At a time when joining the military seems to offer unique economic benefits and stability, it's helpful to realize that the military can also offer painful, life-changing outcomes that destroy the soldier's physical, mental and economic health.

For example, civilians rarely hear about mandatory vaccinations. I met a young female Air Force veteran in my local dog park. She loved the Air Force and her job with the military police, but she was forced to take a medical discharge after getting diabetes from an anthrax vaccine. She will live with this condition for the rest of her life, yet she was denied medical disability benefits until she got a congressman to intervene.

While I suspect these women are not unique, it would be helpful to include at least a couple of stories from women who had positive experiences with the military. In the resource section, the author notes that commanders who treat women respectfully will make a difference. Maybe we could hear from women who served with those commanders. We can learn from strong examples as well as painful ones.

The author provides a long list of recommendations based on what the military "should" do. They're good ideas but unlikely to be heard. It's also unlikely that young women who are considering the military will find this book and read it.

I would suggest that readers write to their congressional representatives, urging them to read this book. Elected officials take even a small number of letters seriously.

As for anyone who wants to enlist, male or female, I've heard first-hand stories of recruiters who changed their spiel after being challenged by someone who knew the ropes. In this book, one woman says her recruiter became more honest after her father asked some direct questions. High school guidance counselors seem to view the military as a solution to problem kids and they're hardly in a position to act as an advocate for their students.

Being a female in the military myself, I can truely relate to these women and there situations. It's about time someone give the female view of how it is to serve and be under-minded and not looked at as an equal. To civilians that probably have no idea. Please read this book and maybe just maybe this could be addressed. Believe it or not the military will listen and take action faster if the concern comes from a non military personal. And what an owesome! title because at times, that's actually what I felt like.

Helen Benedict's book "The Lonely Soldier" is well written and not completely inaccurate. I wish I could give it 2.5 stars but I'm not willing to "round up."

First, the positives: Benedict got some good first person interviews with some female Veterans. Our stories are under-told. The author points out that women Veterans are under-served in the VA, which was set up for men. Many women do wrestle with PTSD, not only from combat exposure but also from sexual trauma. Something should be done about that inexcusable crime and she has some good suggestions - screen potential recruits more carefully for sexually based crimes, punish these crimes more severely in the military, and try to send women to units in clusters so that they are not so isolated. Women who didn't experience cameraderie and trust in their units often suffered deep isolation and loneliness - because it is the sense of unity that makes serving in the military so worthwhile.

However, there are some inaccuracies. The military has no deep seated hostility towards women. There ARE some men who are hostile towards women but they are a minority among the men I served with. I can well believe that sexual assault and rape can cause PTSD but I do not buy that sexual harassment puts women at the same risk. It is not accurate that 1 in 3 female Veterans have experienced sexual trauma. To be accurate you have to say that 1 in 3 women seeking mental health treatment experienced sexual trauma. You can't extrapolate if your sample is not randomly selected.

I do not appreciate the comparison of the military to prison and high school. Our servicemembers are neither high school kids nor convicts. Army recruits are not randomly sent to different job training than they signed up for (except temporarily in combat situations) and any recruit who signed up after 9/11 without knowing they were going to war is not paying attention. It is not true that dating and alcohol are banned in the military. Alcohol is banned in Iraq and Afghanistan. You are not allowed to date your supervisor or subordinates, which is the same standard of professionalism required at most civilian worksites.

I did not sacrifice my personality or my femininity in the Army. While some Veterans do come home with PTSD, and most of us suffer a few of the symptoms for at least a few months, we Veterans are not dangerous and not everyone is permanently traumatized by their experiences. We do not like being portrayed as victims. The toughness we show is not just a front, it is who we become in the process of serving in the military. We are not invincible - we simply learn and acknowledge the true limits of our strength decades before most of our peers. And my pet peeve of all Iraq reporting: the vast majority of civilians in Iraq were not killed by U.S. GIs. They were killed by the insurgents or in the sectarian warfare that erupted from 2005 through 2008.

This book still serves a valuable purpose. The interviews Benedict conducted with the women Veterans offer direct insight into today's military and I hope that readers will focus primarily on the first person perspectives and consider the author's commentary merely as a framework.

I felt as if the author protrayed these women as victims and idiots. This is not the experience of all female soldiers. I think the best intentions were made but it rips a hole into the army and blames the army for these female's lack of research. They take a "well life kinda sucks and I'm kinda poor so I think I'll join the national guard because I can't be deployed" attitude. This book makes the females it interviews out to be trashy, stupid females and we do not need that stereotype reinforced.

Try "Band of Sisters: American Women at War in Iraq"
"The Girl's Come Marching Home: Stories of Women Warriors Returning from the War in Iraq"
both are by Kirsten Holmstedt, She interviews women from all branches of service and doesn't collectively dismiss them all as soldiers because she unlike Helen Benedict was not too lazy to decipher the difference between female marines, soliders, coasties and sailors. The stories that Holmstedt tells are through the voice of the servicewomen she interviews without an "I hate the Army" spin that Benedict puts on her subject's stories.

I am not a woman and not a veteran. I am a psychologist who works with veterans, both female and male. This is, so far, the most accurate (and therefore the best) book I have read thus far about the experiences of female soldiers. Almost all the female soldiers I have interviewed report rapes, attempted rapes, and big time sexual harassment by men who are supposed to be their comrades and by the superiors in their chain of command. Some reported it; all were discouraged from doing this and harassed for doing this. Most learned not to report it, perhaps even to themselves. Many of these soldiers talk or do not talk about the rapes as if it is obvious to any idiot that no one will care about it or do anything about it. As a human being, and the father of a daughter, this saddens and horrifies me.

Benedict is also good on the sense of betrayal and loneliness these soldiers experience. Being raped or harassed by your own men is like being an incest victim: the very people who are most supposed to take care of you and be concerned for you, mess you over. Not surprisingly, these soldiers feel betrayed, on guard, and distrustful on a deep and intimate level which does harm to their marriages and their families. It is hard to trust your husband when he is a member of the gender that has screwed you. It is hard to be as casually close to your children as you would like when you don't trust the ability of humans, including yourself, to be compassionate.

Benedict's suggesions for change are good, especially the demand that the military make treating female soldiers in one's command well a criterion for promotion. Benedict is good also on the lack of services provided for these women in the service and upon return to civilian life; she is a little vague about the lack of services and concern offered to their families as well.

This book has its limits: it pays little attention to any good experiences female soldiers have had. But it is honest and accurate and tells a tale of suffering that we need to hear. If we permit our daughters and granddaughters to be treated like this without resistance, what are WE like, what do WE care about, what matters to US? These women offer their lives for men who may betray them and for we who are safe and often oblivious at "home." This is shameful and tragic.

Benedict, a journalism professor at Columbia University, focuses on five American servicewomen who served in Iraq in the two years following the U.S. invasion in March 2003. To put it simply, none of these women - including two who were longtime members of the military - had an easy time of it. But in her eagerness to portray the problems of women who choose to serve their country by joining the armed services, Benedict's anti-military bias often leads her to lose sight of the direct causes of these problems.

Benedict states that she interviewed about forty Iraq and Afghanistan veterans for THE LONELY SOLDIER, mostly women, and from all service branches except the Coast Guard. And, she adds, she did talk to some women who "had only positive things" to say about their foreign service. But you wouldn't know that from reading the accounts of the five principal figures in the book (all in the U.S. Army, including two National Guard members and two Army reservists). Do all, or even a large proportion, of women who enter the U.S. military come from such dysfunctional backgrounds? The near-unrelenting negativity of their experiences -- before, during, and after their Iraq service - opens the question: Just how typical were these women of the more than 160,000 female service personnel (Benedict's figure, as of 2009) who have served in Iraq?

Suffice to say, the decision of President George W. Bush and his administration to invade Iraq in 2003 has been deemed a major blunder by most Americans, justified with dubious evidence of Iraqi involvement in "terrorism," and resulting in more than 4,400 American deaths (including more than 100 women), almost 32,000 U.S. service wounded, and at least 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths. Many of the servicewomen's problems that Benedict describes - e.g., inadequately armored U.S. military vehicles, multiple and extended tours that disrupt families - were experienced by male soldiers as well, and are directly attributable to the Bush administration's decision to go to war and then try to fight it on the cheap, with a smaller force than was needed.

Although the U.S. Army had been aggressively recruiting women into its ranks for more than a quarter-century before the Iraq invasion and promising female recruits essentially equal status with males (save for the notorious and generally unworkable ban on women in "combat" roles), Benedict portrays a male-dominated service that still has considerable difficulties in treating women as equals. Benedict's depiction of a high incidence of sexual harassment and sexual assault by male soldiers on female soldiers (aggravated by the abuse of military rank) is a constant theme of THE LONELY SOLDIER. She charges that military recruiters frequently mislead potential service members about the nature of the service and the likelihood they will be involved in combat. Moreover, both female and male Iraq veterans, especially those with service-related injuries and medical problems, are shown to have difficulties navigating the bureaucratic mazes of Pentagon and Veterans' Affairs regulations.

The U.S. Army and the other military services are not perfect. They are prone to many of the problems to which all large institutions are subject, including impersonality, abuse of hierarchy and power, and the frequent insistence that the interests of the individual be subordinated to the organization. But Benedict, while supporting the idea that women should be part of the American military, constantly displays a hostility to that military and to its long-term mission of protecting and advancing the interests of the United States. In the U.S. system, it is the political leaders who are largely responsible for the use and mis-use of military power. The men and women who join the armed services -- one would hope, with full awareness of the dangerous possibilities that service might present -- must trust that those political leaders will put military lives at risk only when all other avenues of action have been exhausted. War and combat are grotesque and brutal experiences under any circumstances, but they are what armies do. They are what armies are for. To portray the hardships of combat (and preparation for combat) as something that the Army, or even politicians, deliberately and unnecessarily inflict on soldiers -- especially female soldiers -- is to miss the point.

The Army and the U.S. military generally -- and, in a larger sense, the American people who support the military establishment, morally and financially -- need to do right, and do better, by our servicemen and servicewomen. Benedict identifies many problems for female soldiers that need fixing, quickly. But her overall anti-military tone and seeming inability to understand the nature of such institutions definitely undercut the credibility and value of this book.

I read this book because a friend is joining the Army and I am having the same thoughts... it hurts to see that women are treated so badly by everybody, including their female teammates. I know not everybody has the same experience but at least there is a book that will tell you the possibilities of what could happen when your recruiter tries to blind you with promises that may not make it on to your contract. Worse that they try to sell the armed forces so hard to a woman knowing that misogyny and abuse (verbal and physical) run rampant and let them walk into the Army blind.

True, it mostly focuses on the hardships that the women faced but I believe that the point of the book is to showcase that even in this day and age they are treated like second class citizens even though they are putting their lives on the line for their country like the men. They are forced to take injections that are proven to cause long lasting illnesses including a birth control shot that deeply affects many soldiers' bodies.

I like the fact that it featured women from different backgrounds and while it was a biography it was supported with credited outside facts and figures. It shows the front the administration puts up, the poor treatment of all US soldiers, and Bush's disgusting lack of morals and knowledge. It's an excellent and saddening book.

Benedict writes about several women veterans of the Iraq war, all of whom saw combat, lived in the constant fear of imminent death over which they had no control. These soldiers lacked even minimal protection due to the unspeakable corruption of KBR, a branch of the notorious Halliburton, illegally given lucrative contracts by the Bush administration, whose total lack of concern for the welfare of the troops is demonstrated so disgustingly clearly and repeatedly. Soldiers were supplied with broken down, stripped vehicles, many driven by women, lacking even spare tires (KBR stripped them before sending them to the troops) and did not have tops, doors or armor. Many were sent to battle without even adequate body armor, suffered from lack of food at times because KBR did not deliver food, preferring to allow it to rot, and when they did establish mess halls, refused to consider staggering hours forcing soldiers to wait in line for hours, making them sitting ducks, and leaving troops whose working hours might not coincide with the rigid operating hours set by KBR to starve. Many women soldiers returned with dangerously low weights. KBR also supplied waste water for troops so toxic and contaminated it was worse than the raw sewage-contaminated water from the Euphrates. Women veterans are returning with such serious reproductive and internal systemic problems from probable exposure and ingestion of bacteria and toxins they may never return to a state of health. All through the accounts the lack of organization, complete lack of coherent planning from the top on down, failures of leadership and often outright criminal neglect demonstrate a state of chaos and an incredibly dangerous atmosphere for women soldiers, most of whom were crammed into grossly inadequate filthy tents in overwhelming heat with only one or two women left to fend for themselves with hundreds of men. There was no attempt to establish or maintain order, and the constant, unrelenting sexual harassment and frequent sexual assault was invariably not only not dealt with properly, if the victims were naive enough to report their violations, they usually found themselves blamed for their own attacks. Often, the so-called "leadership" participated in their abuse.
The sheer scale and volume of the massive failures to provide decent leadership, establish any sort of organization, or to pursue any attempt to manifest justice at any level is mind-boggling in this book. Perhaps more egregious, victimized women often found they could not get away from their abusers, but had to continue to serve side by side with their attackers. Benedict objectively and steadily chews through the BS of "support the troops" so blithely and sickeningly vomited out by the administration. Public apathy has never abated, and these vets are returning to the same uncaring, bureaucratic snafus vets of other wars have faced, but this time with the double or multiple whammeys of the silent slither of the snakes of war the the governments will not even acknowledge. Women vets are returning to a VA woefully ill-equipped to help them, and many bureaucrats see no difference between the PTSD and health problems of women veterans and male veterans. Nothing could be further from the truth. Unique physical health and mental health problems curse the lives of these women vets, and they deserve far, far better care than they're getting. Every American who cares even minimally about the soldiers, and in particular, the women soldiers of these wars must read these words. Every American needs to read them. Politics are not the issue; deliberate wasting of precious lives is. The hatred and resentment directed toward women simply because they are women needs to be seen clearly, and the military must gain control of this rampant racism and sexism that destroys the souls of so many soldiers who must shoulder not only the unspeakable violence of war, but of the equal violence of their own fellows in arms. Donna Dean

This could have been a powerful, cutting, informative indictment of a legitimate, widespread issue in the military.
Instead, I don't trust the author, nor do I trust her veracity. Why? The most powerful, convincing and persuasive way to change a culture is to know it well enough to encompass, appreciate and articulate both its weaknesses AND its strengths.
The author makes no sincere attempt to do this. Instead:
1) Her data manipulation is obvious, as at least one reviewer mentioned here.
2) She has a pronounced, obsessional antipathy toward the military and makes no sincere attempt to understand the culture. She makes only half-assed, single-sentence attempts to provide journalistic "balance", while otherwise peppering her writing with pejorative adjectives. She comes off as an civilian outsider who has not done her homework and instead resorts to liberal stereotypes.
3) Her writing is trite and amateurish, particularly while transcribing her interviews.
4) She paints most of the women as victims in a way that is offensive to me as a female who has experienced similar issues but is willing to take ownership and responsibility for healing as well as for ways in which I've contributed to my own oppression. The "victim" stereotype is precisely what most women within the military hate. They feel it undermines them further. Offenders use the stereotype too, as ammunition to further oppress women.