thedrifter
08-30-05, 01:52 PM
September 05, 2005
Books
A soldier’s story
By Phillip Thompson
Times staff writer
Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army. By Kayla Williams. Norton, $24.95
Kayla Williams’ Army is full of misogynistic, sex-obsessed soldiers; incompetent senior enlisted leaders; and indifferent officers.
A former cryptologic linguist in military intelligence, Williams deployed to Iraq for nearly a year. Her “Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army” is part memoir, part Dear Diary and part therapy-couch rambling.
In lurid and often profane detail, Williams reveals herself with a starkness few writers would dare attempt. It is the book’s strength and its weakness, much the way Williams’ own brazenness is her biggest strength and her biggest weakness.
An example: She writes her thoughts after reading Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” while in Iraq.
“Rand is all about personal responsibility,” Williams writes. “In a lot of ways, she’s an intellectual snob. A tremendous elitist. There’s a sentiment expressed by a central character in ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ She talks about how she has to struggle against other people to get her job done. It’s hard enough to do her job, but then she also has to actively fight people who appear to be trying to prevent work from happening. She talks about how frustrating it can be to deal with incompetence. How exhausting and draining it can be.
“I identified strongly with this.”
Her story is a complicated, sometimes contradictory, account of an Ohio girl who joined the Army to conquer her own fear of failure and overcome the self-doubt she’d carried since her turbulent, rebellious childhood and adolescence laced with drugs and sex — even after attaining a college degree and a successful job with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in Florida.
So, after a brief marriage that quickly ended in divorce, she joined the Army, where her intelligence and aptitude for languages put her in training to become a linguist.
In Iraq, she served mostly as a translator for grunts as they dealt with Iraqis. Williams notes that translator duty was not her primary mission, but readers will have difficulty understanding exactly what her primary task was, especially when she describes vague “missions” and “ops” that ultimately serve only as backdrops to the sexual tension between her and the male soldiers present.
Williams hits her stride when she focuses her formidable intellect on the humanity of the war in Iraq. She writes of the Iraqi people with great empathy, and her painful description of an Iraqi man who dies in her arms as she comforts him in Arabic rings true.
So does her chilling account of her assignment to a prison (not Abu Ghraib). Her unease with humiliating prisoners is palpable, as is her shame at her reluctant participation. She is honest enough to admit to feeling morally trapped on more than one occasion in situations that turn her American-based ideology inside out.
And she writes with great passion about the camaraderie she shared with her fellow soldiers.
Yet, in the end, the book is not about what it’s like to be young and female in the U.S. Army. It’s what it’s like to be Kayla Williams in the U.S. Army.
Other recent releases
The Gift of Valor
By Michael M. Phillips, Broadway, $19.95
Marine Cpl. Jason Dunham saved the lives of his comrades in Iraq by covering a grenade with his body. He died in the blast, and he’s been nominated for the Medal of Honor. Here’s his story.
Breach
By Brooks Tucker, Author House, $16.95
An officer’s suicide during the 1991 Persian Gulf War becomes a matter of intrigue in this novel by former Marine Brooks Tucker.
First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
By Gary C. Schroen, Ballantine Books (Presidio Press), $25.95
One of the CIA’s own tells his story as part of a team of agents that went into Afghanistan shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, to prepare for the American invasion.
Ellie
Books
A soldier’s story
By Phillip Thompson
Times staff writer
Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army. By Kayla Williams. Norton, $24.95
Kayla Williams’ Army is full of misogynistic, sex-obsessed soldiers; incompetent senior enlisted leaders; and indifferent officers.
A former cryptologic linguist in military intelligence, Williams deployed to Iraq for nearly a year. Her “Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army” is part memoir, part Dear Diary and part therapy-couch rambling.
In lurid and often profane detail, Williams reveals herself with a starkness few writers would dare attempt. It is the book’s strength and its weakness, much the way Williams’ own brazenness is her biggest strength and her biggest weakness.
An example: She writes her thoughts after reading Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” while in Iraq.
“Rand is all about personal responsibility,” Williams writes. “In a lot of ways, she’s an intellectual snob. A tremendous elitist. There’s a sentiment expressed by a central character in ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ She talks about how she has to struggle against other people to get her job done. It’s hard enough to do her job, but then she also has to actively fight people who appear to be trying to prevent work from happening. She talks about how frustrating it can be to deal with incompetence. How exhausting and draining it can be.
“I identified strongly with this.”
Her story is a complicated, sometimes contradictory, account of an Ohio girl who joined the Army to conquer her own fear of failure and overcome the self-doubt she’d carried since her turbulent, rebellious childhood and adolescence laced with drugs and sex — even after attaining a college degree and a successful job with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in Florida.
So, after a brief marriage that quickly ended in divorce, she joined the Army, where her intelligence and aptitude for languages put her in training to become a linguist.
In Iraq, she served mostly as a translator for grunts as they dealt with Iraqis. Williams notes that translator duty was not her primary mission, but readers will have difficulty understanding exactly what her primary task was, especially when she describes vague “missions” and “ops” that ultimately serve only as backdrops to the sexual tension between her and the male soldiers present.
Williams hits her stride when she focuses her formidable intellect on the humanity of the war in Iraq. She writes of the Iraqi people with great empathy, and her painful description of an Iraqi man who dies in her arms as she comforts him in Arabic rings true.
So does her chilling account of her assignment to a prison (not Abu Ghraib). Her unease with humiliating prisoners is palpable, as is her shame at her reluctant participation. She is honest enough to admit to feeling morally trapped on more than one occasion in situations that turn her American-based ideology inside out.
And she writes with great passion about the camaraderie she shared with her fellow soldiers.
Yet, in the end, the book is not about what it’s like to be young and female in the U.S. Army. It’s what it’s like to be Kayla Williams in the U.S. Army.
Other recent releases
The Gift of Valor
By Michael M. Phillips, Broadway, $19.95
Marine Cpl. Jason Dunham saved the lives of his comrades in Iraq by covering a grenade with his body. He died in the blast, and he’s been nominated for the Medal of Honor. Here’s his story.
Breach
By Brooks Tucker, Author House, $16.95
An officer’s suicide during the 1991 Persian Gulf War becomes a matter of intrigue in this novel by former Marine Brooks Tucker.
First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
By Gary C. Schroen, Ballantine Books (Presidio Press), $25.95
One of the CIA’s own tells his story as part of a team of agents that went into Afghanistan shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, to prepare for the American invasion.
Ellie