Book Review: Soldier Girls (three deployed National Guard women, Afghanistan, Iraq)

Soldier Girls, by Helen Thorpe (Scribner, 2014, $28 HB, 432 pp) Best book of the year: Publishers Weekly

If you have worked in a hospital or for a college or have served in the military, you know that that experience is more than just a job. It is a culture. 

Soldier Girls is a long yet fascinating book about three women soldiers' lives in the Indiana National Guard: three women of different ages, with different jobs. They deployed together to Afghanistan in 2004-05, returned home to various experiences, and two of them also deployed to Iraq in 2008, then returned home.  This book chronicles their friendships, the trials of working and living in a man's world, operating in a combat zone and also returning 'home,' changed, to family and friends.

The National Guard is a unique career, whether full-time, or, more likely, part-time. One can stay with the same unit of soldiers for an entire career. On the other hand, we are more familiar with the larger national military services - Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force - where one is transferred as an individual every 3-5 years, but in smaller job classifications, may work with the same people years later at a different duty station.

So, being in a state national guard unit, soldiers may form long-lasting bonds. And, if deployed together, a group quickly establishes relationships* that may last a lifetime. Or not.

Our group of three women were truck drivers and weapons repair technicians, two were married, one had children, one was in her 50s while the others were in their 20s and of college-age. Different, yet when living and working together, formed stable long-lasting relationships

So Different and Yet, So Much the Same

Everyone in the military shares some of the same experiences. Every combat soldier has had some  experiences in common. And yet, each one is different. This reviewer spent several days of her deployment at the military base where these three women spent a year, in Afghanistan, albeit a couple of years after the incidents in the book, when some rules were relaxed and others tightened. 

Soldier Girls traces the lives of the three women from the day they enlisted to twelve years later, after deployments, marriages, divorces, IEDs, injuries, leaving the Guard - but mostly focuses on the friendships, the training, the culture, the dogs each base 'adopted,' the housing (tents) and PXs, the weather and the food. If you, dear reader, have been deployed, you will relive your time 'down range' in the 'sandbox' and remember, amid the differences.

Uniforms erase differences: on a deployment, one does not have kids or a mortgage to pay. Your laundry is taken care of, your meals are provided and you do not have to go grocery shopping. Life is simpler. And military friendships differ from civilian ones - some last outside of the deployment and others do not. The military changes people and deployments really change a person for the better - in some ways.

Writing Style

Soldier Girls is a keeper!

Review by Skye Anderson

*Some readers may feel this book should be R-rated for the frequent accounts of affairs. Rest assured this is not as frequent in all deployments.