Women are taking larger roles in warfare than ever before. A new book documents their experiences.
By MARY CHALLENDER
REGISTER STAFF WRITER
Kirsten Holmstedt was fascinated by some of her neighbors in Jacksonville, N.C.
They were mothers, sisters and daughters - the same women the Drake University graduate ran into every day at the grocery stores and coffee shops around town.
They were also Marines at Camp Lejeune, preparing for war in Iraq.
"I was really curious about them," said Holmstedt, 43, who works in the public information office at Coastal Carolina Community College in Jacksonville. "I was curious about the guys going off to war, too, but when it's someone of my own gender.... I was really curious to see how they were going to do over there."
Holmstedt began clipping newspaper and magazine stories about women serving in Iraq and chose the subject for her master's thesis in creative nonfiction writing from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
Finally, she decided she needed to write a book.
"I really wanted to be the first to show women in combat and how that issue was unfolding on the battlefield," she said.
In "Band of Sisters," which was published this month, Holmstedt details the wartime experiences of a dozen female Marines, soldiers, airmen and sailors in Iraq.
The stories are personal - from how women in Iraq manage bathroom breaks on desert convoys with no trees to one top commander's Mother's Day breakdown - but the context is much larger.
Through most of human history, waging war has been the bastion of males.
The degree to which the war in Iraq is changing that may shock many Americans.
Technically, under rules drawn up in the early 1990s by then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, women in the U.S. military are barred from belonging to ground combat units.
But in the Iraq war, where there are no front lines, those restrictions have been blurred.
Although the women in "Band of Sisters" were classified by the military as "combat support" rather than combat troops, all saw action.
One female Marine mentioned in the book shot and killed an Iraqi armed with an AK-47.
An Army helicopter pilot survived being blown out of the sky.
A Marine aviator and a Marine Cobra pilot helped take out enemy barracks, buildings, ammunition sites, cars and convoys.
Some of the women in Holmstedt's book suffered injuries, including an Army long-haul truck driver whose leg was shattered when a booby-trapped van blew up next to her vehicle.
"That's what this book is about, to show their accomplishments, their sacrifices and their challenges," Holmstedt said. "I didn't want it to be like those Olympic stories. I really wanted to show the challenges they faced and not to sugarcoat anything."
Omaha Spanish teacher Rachelle Spors is among the women Holmstedt profiled.
Spors, 25, said she joined the National Guard in 2000 because she had a friend whose parents were in the military. Spors thought it looked exciting and fun.
Sent to Iraq in November 2004, she served in the 313th Medical Company as a combat medic. When Army convoys went out, she would accompany them in an ambulance, in case anyone needed medical attention.
The day Spors was wounded, she was on her way to help some injured Marines.
She never made it.
Explosive devices planted by Iraqis blew up beneath her ambulance, killing the medic with her, 32-year-old Staff Sgt. Tricia Jameson.
Spors, who had to be pulled from the burning vehicle, sustained a fractured shoulder blade, a collapsed lung, broken and cracked ribs and vertebra, and shrapnel wounds.
She still has breathing problems. But the only regret she has about her military service is the worry it caused her family.
"I would do it again," she said. "I think I'm a different person from it. I value my family and friends much more than before. I had a lot of fun doing what we did, being able to help people. There were a lot of drawbacks, but it was a fulfilling job, definitely."
Spors said she hopes by telling her story she can help people understand the things women experience as soldiers.
"A lot of people look at us there as, 'Women shouldn't be over there anyway. They're not strong enough to handle it,' " Spors said. "We're over there and we know our jobs, we want to be there, and we like what we're doing. I think we're always going to have someone trying to fight us. It's totally a done fight, but you're still going to have people who don't accept it," she said.
Even as Holmstedt was talking to women about their experiences under fire, some House Republicans were pushing for stronger curbs on women in combat. Those attempts failed when Pentagon officials made it clear to lawmakers from both parties how badly the military, which is approximately 15 percent female, would be hamstrung by such a move.
Holmstedt said the women in her book come from every branch of the military and hold a variety of positions. Some are married, some single. Some are mothers, some are not.
One of the biggest challenges she experienced, she said, was getting the women to face up to the fact that they were doing anything unusual.
"These women drop bombs, they fire missiles, they're driving in convoys in the middle of night, but they don't think anything of it," she said. "When they talk about it, it's like you describing a day at the office. The challenge is conveying in a dramatic way what they told in a very casual way."
One thing that makes Holmstedt especially proud is the number of "firsts" she was able to include in the book:
- First female pilot to be shot down and survive.
- First female back-seater of an F-18.
- First female African-American pilot in combat.
- First female commander of an Air Force combat squadron.
"This stuff that I wrote about just scratches the surface," said Holmstedt, who wrote "Band of Sisters" while working full time and earning her master's degree. "I wish I could spend the rest of my life telling their stories."
Holmstedt never met Marilyn Gabbard of Polk City, but she probably would have been impressed by her.
Gabbard was the first woman promoted to command sergeant major in the Iowa Army National Guard.
She was killed Jan. 20 when the U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter she was in went down northeast of Baghdad, just 26 days into a six-month tour.
So far in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than 70 female U.S. soldiers have been killed and 450 wounded. That's a small fraction of the nation's total, but far more than the eight who were killed in Vietnam.
Gabbard's husband, Ed, 65, a retired soldier who met his wife in the Guard, was quick to say that Marilyn wasn't in true combat.
She was stationed at headquarters at Camp Victory, where she helped monitor the welfare of Guard troops.
Gabbard said his wife was very proud of her military service, and he sounded proud of her, too.
He thinks women are doing important work in the military and that military service provides women with the discipline and leadership skills to qualify for better and more competitive jobs - just as it does men.
But he can't support opening up what he calls "direct combat" positions to women.
He said he felt the same way before his wife died.
"My opinion is, yes, they should remain off-limits," he said. "And I think if the Army was going to change, they would have done it by now."
Jaime Jaenke was a first, too - the first female Iowan to die in the war in Iraq.
The 29-year-old Navy medic, a single mom with a 9-year-old daughter, was killed in June 2006 when a roadside bomb exploded near her Humvee.
Jaenke's mom, Susan, said her daughter joined the military because she wanted to become a nurse and wanted to be able to pay her own way.
"I brought my daughter up to be a strong person," said Jaenke, 55, of Iowa Falls, who once tried to join the military herself but was turned away because she was too short.
Susan Jaenke said her daughter went through some hard years before she joined the military.
The respect she earned from the people who served with her, many of whom just called her "Doc," helped her regain her confidence.
"I saw the light come back into her eyes," said Jaenke, who also has two sons in the Navy.
Women today are a lot different from women 20 years ago, Jaenke said. They're a lot stronger, a lot more self-assured.
Why not the military?
Why not combat, if that's what they seek?
Jaenke said from what she's heard, her daughter did great work when she was in Iraq. She said she wouldn't stop granddaughter Kayla, 10, who loves to wear her mom's campaign hat, from joining if she chose.
"Sometimes you have to have those women over there to make sense of things," she said.
One of the things that stands out about "Band of Sisters" is that it is filled with strong, proud women.
"What I love about my book is there are no victims," Holmstedt said. " I feel every book that's been written about women in combat, women in the military, in the past, has been about victims - women being sexually harassed, women getting pregnant. None of these women is perfect, but they all went over there and accomplished their goals and the military's goals."
And just like the men, for some of them, the hardest challenge has been readjusting to life back home.
Jaymie Holschlag, 33, who lives in the Iowa City area, spent all of 2005 in Iraq as a combat medic with the Iowa National Guard's 224th Combat Engineer Battalion.
The danger was constant.
"While we were over there, our lineup had a bounty on it," she said. "I lost one of my guys to a sniper. It was just a matter of chance what vehicle you were in."
She'd do it again in a minute, Holschlag said.
"I gained ... oh, goodness, where to start?" she said. "A sense of knowing I could do so much more than I ever thought I could, and a respect for other people in my life. A true sense of brotherhood and a sense of pride. There's no other job I have found since I've been back (where I feel) remotely like how I felt there. I discovered strength and courage that I never knew was there."
She also made sacrifices, she said.
"I lost time with my kids I'll never be able to get back," she admitted. "I lost a piece of myself with each guy that I lost."
Holschlag, who now is a nursing unit coordinator with the Iowa Medical and Classification Center at Oakdale, says she's struggled to find the same level of vitality and satisfaction in civilian life.
She doesn't think what she's going through is anything different from the experiences of the men she served with, an opinion that has been confirmed by a recent report from the military's Mental Health Advisory Team.
The team found that, overall, about 19 percent of male and female veterans exposed to "moderate" levels of combat tested positive for post-traumatic stress disorder and about 8 percent screened positive for depression.
Holschlag said it bothered her that even as she was serving, politicians continued to debate whether women could handle the stress of combat.
"This war could not have happened without females there," she said, "and for them to debate - while we're at war - whether we should have been there or not is a slap in our face."
