This is a guest post from Andrea. Andrea lives in the backwoods of northern Virginia with a small menagerie, where she fritters her life away reading, hiking Civil War battlefields, and surfing the internet when the weather allows her primitive satellite connection to stay up. She’s involved in social justice, battlefield preservation, and is crazy enough to try going to school full time while holding down a full time job that requires a 100 mile daily commute. You can catch her blogging this idyllic life over at the Manor of Mixed Blessings (posts there have no redeeming social value).
Let the generations know that women in uniform also guaranteed their freedom. That our resolve was just as great as the brave men who stood among us. And with victory our hearts were just as full and beat just as fast – that the tears fell just as hard – for those we left behind.
Anonymous WWII Army Nurse
I’ve been talking about writing this for a long time, but haven’t really sat down to put fingers to keys and get it done until today. Part of it has been the sudden onset of kittens, and part of it has been the difficulty of articulating exactly what’s going on here.
I am a woman. I served for nine years, seven months, and one day in the United States Navy, not that I was counting. I enlisted in 1998, three years before the military world changed forever, and five years before Operation Iraqi Freedom broke out. I was a Fire Controlman working on the Tomahawk weapons system, and until a shortage of Army and Marine Corps members lead the Department of Defense to start deploying sailors as boots on the ground, I was as close as you would come in the regular Navy to a combat veteran, having participated in the launch of cruise missiles against Iraq in the opening weeks of the war.
The ethics of what I did are not up for debate, not right here and right now. I have my own struggles with my part in the war and I don’t know you well enough to tell you about them. No, what I want to talk to you about to day is this: what happens when female veterans come home?
The word “veteran” conjured up, until Iraq and Afghanistan started getting press, the image of a man who had served in World War II or Korea, or maybe even Viet Nam. Older men, usually white, in VFW caps perhaps. If the phrase “disabled veteran” was brought up, it called forth the image of a man with a disability that wasn’t too frightening, wasn’t too disfiguring. These days, of course, we admit that veterans may be young, may have wounds that are even invisible. Traumatic Brain Injury and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder get press.
What doesn’t get press is the mass of women who return home, some of them wounded. Despite the fact that we’re fighting two wars with no clear front lines, people assume of military women that we were all secretaries or nurses, sequestered in safe places. When faced with a woman with combat experience, they stammer and stutter and look away in the face of their own blithe and sexist assumptions.
I nearly went ballistic on Memorial Day, when a friend of my mother’s posted a note on Facebook directing people to be grateful “to the men” who had served and sacrificed. Nine years, seven months, and one day of my life. A nine month deployment in support of a war, missiles launched. I came out of the Navy with hearing loss, a damaged back, an arthritic shoulder. In total I missed one wedding, three Christmases, three births in the family, countless birthdays and anniversaries and other celebrations. Didn’t I sacrifice? Didn’t I suffer? Don’t I still? Don’t I count?
The societal conspiracy to disappear female service members and veterans extends into the halls of government. This article in The Olympian details problems with the VA’s services. A few choice points:
None of 19 medical centers the Government Accountability Office surveyed were in complete compliance with regulations that govern women’s privacy.
Only 37% of the VA’s 144 medical centers had a gynecologist on staff.
22% of women using the VA’s services “are suffering from the effects of sexual trauma while serving in the military. These women are nine times more likely to suffer from [PTSD] than women who weren’t sexually assaulted…”
It’s difficult to readjust to civilian life, or even just life at home, after being deployed to a war zone. We know this, and much attention has been paid…to the effects on male veterans, from raising their likelihood for homelessness to increasing the probability they will commit acts of domestic violence. If similar studies have been done on the hardships of female veterans, they aren’t getting press. How much harder is it for those of us who are invisible and disregarded?
How much harder is it for those of us in the Navy and Air Force, who may also be sent into harm’s way, but without getting the press of the Army and Marine Corps? Women in the Navy and Air Force are thus doubly invisible to the citizens they served. For example, this article on the BBC’s website mentions service women once, then goes on to interview two male Marines and one male Army reservist. Meanwhile, the Navy is still running its Individual Augmentee program, which turns sailors into soldiers and puts boots on the ground.
Women have participated in wars since the beginning of the nation: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War (including two unknowns discovered among the Federal dead at Petersburg after the Battle of the Crater), the list goes on. And yet we continue to be invisible, we continue to be disappeared, and the country continues to pretend we never happened. Didn’t we sacrifice? Didn’t we suffer? Don’t we still? Don’t we count?
