Love My Rifle More than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army - Hardcover

Williams, Kayla; Staub, Michael E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393060985 ISBN 13: 9780393060980

Publisher: W. W. Norton, 2005

Synopsis

A brutal and honest account of being a woman among men in the United States Army.

"A woman soldier has to toughen herself up" writes Kayla Williams in this fiercely honest account of what it's like to be part of the female 15% of today's Army. "Not just for the enemy, for battle, for death. I mean to toughen herself to spend months awash in a sea of nervy, hyped-up guys...."

By turns irreverent, vulnerable, angry, and humane, Williams describes what it's like for a young woman to be surrounded by an ocean of testosterone, respected for her skills and qualifications, but treated variously as a soldier, a sister, a mother, a bitch, and a slut.

During her five years of service—including a year of deployment to Iraq during and after the invasion—Williams and her female peers navigate both extreme physical danger and emotional minefields. As a specialist in Military Intelligence, fluent in Arabic language skills, Williams finds herself at the forefront of the troops' interaction with local people. Brave and patriotic, with a strong sense of duty to her country and her fellow soldiers, she is unafraid to level complaints and criticism against the inefficiencies and errors of the military—sketching a blunt portrait, inspired by Ayn Rand, of the U.S. Army as "a vast communist institution."

Taking us from Baghdad to Mosul to a remote mountainous outpost on the Syrian border, Williams demonstrates a keen eye for the complexity of the U.S. military's evolving and ultimately deteriorating relations with the Iraqis. Before she leaves the country, she witnesses death up close and sees soldiers cross the line in the handling of prisoners.

Through it all—the violence, boredom, and fear as well as the light-hearted moments of humor, comraderie, and flirtation—Kayla Williams brings home with vivid intensity and empathy what it is like for a woman soldier to serve her country today. 8 pages of photographs.

About this title

About the Author

Kayla Williams was formerly a sergeant in a military intelligence company of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault). She lives near Washington, DC.

From Publishers Weekly

Williams's account of her Iraq service tries very hard to be a fresh and wised-up postfeminist take: Private Benjamin by way of G.I. Jane. Showy rough language peppers every paragraph, and Williams's obsessive self-concern, expressed in a lot of one-sentence paragraphs beginning with "I," verges on the narcissistic. The surprise is the degree to which the account succeeds and even echoes military memoirists from Julius Caesar to Ernie Pyle. The fear, bad weather, intermittent supplies, inedible meals (especially for the vegetarian author) and crushing boredom of life in the field are all here. Williams's particular strength is in putting an observant, distaff spin on the bantering and brutality of barracks life, where kids from the Survivor generation must come to terms with a grim and confusing reality over which they have little control. The differences are less in the sexual dynamics (which mostly are an extension of office politics) than the contradictions of the conflict in which the troops are engaged, which Williams embodies more than illuminates. She learns Arabic; there's a Palestinian boyfriend and a short, failed marriage during her state-side training. While an ex-punk, Chomsky-reading liberal, Williams questions the day-to-day conduct of the war without ever really engaging with its underlying rationale. Such nuance, though, might be too much to ask.
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About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0393060985
• ISBN 13: 9780393060980
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288