Book Review: Love My Rifle More Than You, Part Two

Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the US Army, by Kayla Williams (Norton, 2005, 290 pages, $24.95)

Part Two

This reviewer takes part in a Veterans’ Book Club that runs for five months under a special grant at the county library. Members include veterans from all five services and from every recent conflict, men and women both, but a group with rotating membership as it turned out, both losing and gaining members each month.

Love My Rifle is the second book we read and discussed (after When Books Went to War). My review of Love My rifle appears here but I thought I would add the comments from other veterans who read the book or spoke with the author.

First of all, we were amazed at the rapid publication - within a year of Kayla Williams’ return to the US after her deployment to Iraq. We decided this was due to being the right person at the right place at the right time: female, after the Iraq conflict supposedly ended, the author having a college degree and having been in combat, and Norton (a prestigious publishing house).

One veteran in our group joined the military in spite of her father saying that all military women were either whores or lesbians: this mirrored Williams’ mention of a fellow soldier calling female soldiers either sluts or bitches. And I learned a new term, WUBA – woman used by all. Despite all this, my years in the Army did not expose me to any more gender-based negative experiences than my civilian years did. Did bitching among the bitches really take place to the extent the author experienced or does each person in the military experience his or her own individual world?

The book club discussed the need to dehumanize the enemy in order to survive, a theme rampant in World War II and more recent wars. We talked about ‘herd mentality’ and compared situations in Love My Rifle to My Lai and the Nazis creating The Holocaust. 

Perhaps the younger one is, the more one is susceptible to the pressures of the group.

Our facilitator emailed Williams who responded about the tensions of her transition back into the civilian world, particularly since she married a wounded veteran and subsequently became a civilian – the trials and tribulations of a civilian in the military medical system was quite taxing, especially for a spouse who was a veteran. We all took home a copy of a blog Williams wrote on the subject (“Dear Military Spouses: I’m Sorry”) and learned of her follow-up book, Plenty of Time When We Get Home: Love and Recovery in the Aftermath of War.

We talked about the several incidents in Love My Rifle where a lower-enlisted person back-talked to an NCO and got away with it – perhaps a different culture exists in combat. And none of us experienced such poor leadership and lack of professionalism from NCOs as did Wiilliams. (Book Club members were in the military both before and after the author.)

A major portion of our session focused on both the sexual harassment and the interrogation incident (and suicide) and the frequency (or lack thereof) of the former along with my experiences of the latter. (I did not mention the female in my unit who threatened suicide with her weapon – I wonder if the relative percentage of females attempting or committing suicide is greater than that of males.) We talked about ROE (rules of engagement) and one person brought up the notion that the thin line between an army and a mob was separated only by discipline. With less than the requisite discipline, that line has a greater probability of being crossed.

All in all, our book club session was so engrossing that some of the members asked me to see if we could continue the book club after May when the grant is finished. That will be easy to do and very worthwhile to talk among men and women veterans from different eras!

(See Part One here)