Published in 2007
327 pages
Kirsten Holmstedt grew up in Mystic, Connecticut. She graduated from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1985 with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Journalism and from the University of North Carolina Wilmington in 2006 with a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Creative Nonfiction Writing. Ms. Holmstedt was finishing her first year of graduate school in the spring of 2003 when the war in Iraq started. Living in Jacksonville, North Carolina, near Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, Ms. Holmstedt was in an ideal location to initiate her research of women serving in combat for the first time. Over the next several years, she traveled throughout the United States and spent hundreds of hours interviewing female soldiers, Marines, airmen, and sailors.
What is this book about?
In Iraq, the front line is everywhere… and everywhere in Iraq, women in the US military fight. More than 155,000 of them have served in Iraq since 2003-4 times the number of women sent to Desert Storm in 1991 – and more than 430 have been wounded and over 70 killed, almost twice the number of US military women killed in action in Korea, Vietnam, and Desert Storm combined. But should women be in combat? Do they have what it takes to be warriors? Compelling questions once… but empty questions now, because more than ever, American women are in combat, and they are warriors. The real question is: What is their experience of war? We haven’t heard their stories – until now.
