Half Changed World

Today’s book is Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female In The US Army, by Kayla Williams.  This insta-memoir is Williams’ account of her year serving in Iraq as an Arabic-speaking military intelligence soldier. 

I first heard of the book through a fairly negative review from Debra Dickerson on Salon.  Their site pass system is broken tonight, so I can’t look it up to quote it, but Dickerson basically says that Williams is whiny and compares the book unfavorably with Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead.  Yes, Jarhead is a better written book, brutal, elegant and hallucinatory by turns.  Swofford has serious literary ambitions — he attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop — and has the advantage of writing 10 years after his military service.  Twenty years from now, I’ll guess that people will still be reading Jarhead, while they’ll have long forgotten Love My Rifle.

But that doesn’t mean that Love My Rifle More Than You isn’t worth reading.  Williams’ prose isn’t memorable, but it’s servicable, and she shares experiences that are worth hearing about.  She writes about the constant sexual harrassment and a near-rape by one of her fellow soldiers, about the ambiguity of the Army’s relationship with the Iraqi people, about her quest for vegetarian MREs, and about how some female soldiers use their gender to get out of unpleasant tasks.  She writes about her brief involvement with interrogation of prisoners.   There’s material in the book to discomfit both supporters and opponents of using women in combat roles, and both should read the book.

Yes, the book is whiny at times.  Williams sounds surprised that her armpits and groin chafe in the desert heat, that her commanding officers sometimes give her stupid orders that risk her life.  She doesn’t seem to have read Catch-22, let alone Jarhead.  (By contrast, Swofford never is surprised by any degree of official stupidity.)  But ultimately the book reads like Williams is sitting down and telling you what it was like.  And I was happy to spend a few hours in her company.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 13th, 2005 at 9:35 pm and is filed under Books, Current Affairs, Gender. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.