thedrifter
05-04-08, 08:21 AM
Females on the front: Author examines the life of female Marines in her new book
Published Sun, May 4, 2008 12:00 AM
By MARK ALLWOOD
mallwood@beaufortgazette.com
843-986-5538
Gunnery Sgt. Rosie Noel knew that she had been injured, but the piece of shrapnel that tore into her face had cut the nerves in her cheek, so she didn't realize she was bleeding until she felt blood trickling down her neck. A 20-year Marine, Noel served one year in Iraq, but Aug. 27, 2005, marked the first time she had been injured in combat. The shrapnel flew at her as she was riding her bicycle to an armory.
"Facial wounds bleed, let me tell you," said Noel, 40. "I lost a considerable amount of blood. I have some nerve damage and some paralysis. Every now and again I get earaches. Nerves, they regenerate very slow, so when they start to heal, I actually experience more pain, and I'm allergic to painkillers, which really doesn't help. That's difficult."
Noel, who is retiring from the military, said doctors have told her that they don't know how long the effects from her injury will last.
"I would imagine it's permanent," said Noel. "I'm alive, so I don't look at it in the same sense that some people might look at it, because I am alive. I mean, if I was dead, I wouldn't feel anything."
Noel is one of several women featured in the book, "Band of Sisters: American Women at War in Iraq," by Kirsten Holmstedt. Although female Marines do not serve in infantry, artillery or armor, they support infantry, including convoys, and they serve as MPs, truck drivers, heavy equipment mechanics and in logistics and maintenance.
"When this war started, some people were saying women aren't on the front lines, they're not in combat. Well, give me a break," said Holmstedt. "One of the most dangerous places you can be is in a convoy. You're so vulnerable."
According to Holmstedt, female service members have served more than 185,000 tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than 550 have been injured and approximately 100 have been killed.
"The reason why it's titled 'Band of Sisters' is not because it's a small unit, it's because this is the largest band of sisters to ever serve in Iraq," Holmstedt explained. "I wanted the book to be really representative of the women who are serving. It's not sugar-coated at all. These women empower me. We need to honor not only the men but the women who are serving, too, because they are right there on the battlefield. I think people forget that."
TELLING THEIR STORY
A native of Connecticut, Noel was a part-time student studying for an Masters of Fine Arts in creative non-fiction writing at University of North Carolina Wilmington and working full-time in public relations at Carolina Coastal Community College. Her thesis for the class had to be a book, and although she has several family members who have served in various capacities in the military, Noel admitted that she hadn't read much military fiction or non-fiction. But she lives in Jacksonville, N.C., near Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, and the women she saw going off to war, many of them neighbors, struck a chord with her.
"I would hear stories about the women on the radio, on TV, in the paper, but I was never fulfilled," said Holmstedt. "As a woman, with all of the women serving over there, I had a bigger interest in this war than ever before. I definitely had a heightened awareness. It's the biggest war in my lifetime. I was too young during Vietnam to really pay attention. It's amazing what women are doing on the battlefield, and nobody knows."
In researching her book, Holmstedt interviewed several Marines and traveled to Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, Fort Campbell, Ky., Fort Bragg, N.C., as well as military installations in Miramar, Calif., and in Norfolk, Va.
The book is the recipient of the 2007 Golden Quill Award in the military genre from the American Authors Association and the 2007 Founder's Award from the Military Writers Society of America. In January 2007, Holmstedt was part of a panel of authors who spoke about the war in Iraq to members of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) was among the senators who wrote letters to the book's publisher, Stackpole Books, praising the publication. Next week, she will travel to Ramstein Air Base in Germany for her first overseas book signing, and on June 4, she will appear at the Pentagon.
Holmstedt was in Beaufort recently for an educator's workshop on Parris Island, and she spoke about her book while taking lunch at her favorite local restaurant, Plums, before driving back home to North Carolina.
"The Fourth Battalion (on Parris Island) is doing a great job producing female Marines," said Holmstedt.
Besides dealing with the emotions and difficulties of a violent war, Holmstedt said that one of her challenges in the book was "breaking down the jargon," so the average reader would know that RPG stands for rocket-propelled grenade, and IED stands for improvised explosive device.
"I think there's a need for this book," said Holmstedt. "It's the first book on women in combat, because this is the first time women have been in combat. The response from service members is just awesome. I get e-mails from all over the world, women in Iraq, Afghanistan and the United States, thanking me for writing this book."
EARNING RESPECT
Gunnery Sgt. Yolanda Mayo, also a public affairs chief, is one of those women. A veteran of both the first Gulf War and the current Iraq War, Mayo is the only reservist Marine featured in "Band of Sisters." The last time she was in Iraq, part of her duties included being put in charge of an embedded reporter from the BBC who made a habit of disobeying Marine orders and risking his life in pursuit of a story.
"We were rocketed every night," Mayo recalled. "We had IEDs every day. I had people shoot at me while I was in convoys. That was a daily occurrence for us. It's always the fear of the unknown. When the first alarms went off and you feel that first impact, it's like, 'Oh my God. This is real. People are shooting at me.' "
Mayo talked about a friend, Maj. Megan McClung, who was killed in Iraq. McClung was serving as head of public affairs for the Marine Corps for Al Anbar province when her Humvee was destroyed by a massive IED, which killed her and the vehicles other two occupants instantly. McClung was the first female graduate of the Naval Academy to be killed in action since the school's founding in 1845.
"The first casualty names come in, and you know these people, and it's like, 'Oh wow. This is really happening,'" said Mayo. "You have to find a way to deal with that. You have to find a way to laugh, but it's laughing in the face of fear, because you're nervous. It's hard. Every single (death) is hard."
Mayo has served as a drill instructor on Parris Island and said despite the sand fleas ("You can keep them," she joked), she loved living in the Lowcountry, where she was a member of Carteret Street United Methodist Church.
As one of the few female .50 caliber gunners, Marine Lance Cpl. Chrissy DeCaprio, 23, also trained at Parris Island. The 128-pound, Brooklyn, N.Y.-native said the gun weighs more than she does, but she became an expert at shooting it. She volunteered to deploy to Iraq, and once she got there, she asked to have her stay extended. While in Iraq, she also was in charge of searching female and Iraqi children, and she guarded a female, highly valued detainee.
Like other Marines featured in "Band of Sisters," DeCaprio spoke of having to prove herself to some of the male Marines who were skeptical of women serving in combat. She earned a lot of respect after she fought for the position of .50 cal gunner.
"When I took that position over from somebody else, it made people feel like, 'She's not afraid to get her hands dirty,' " said DeCaprio.
DeCaprio got more than her hands dirty the first time she faced fire from Iraqi insurgents. Standing in the turret of a scout vehicle and manning her .50 cal machine gun, DeCaprio was leading a convoy of 50 vehicles on a four-hour trip to Fallujah when one of the vehicles was struck by an IED, spraying oil from one of the Humvees into DeCaprio's face. It wasn't until after she helped pull some of her fellow Marines to safety that she realized she had been hurt. A central belief among Marines, said Noel, is that "Marines don't leave their Marines."
"It wasn't bad," said DeCaprio. "It basically looked like I got a sun burn. It's definitely stressful. You just have to kind of put your training forth and just do it. There's always the possibility that there's going to be the one that you miss, and that's the one that's going to be your final miss, honestly, but I tried not to think of it that way. I just used my training to find and spot (IEDs) before they hit me or my Marines."
MISSING FAMILY
One of the main sources of stress for Marines and all military personnel, male or female, is struggling with being away from family and friends. For Noel, who has two sons, ages 13 and 16, being away from them in such a hostile environment was particularly hard. After her injury, other Marines tried to convince her to go home, but she felt like she had to provide an example of strength to younger Marines around her.
"I still felt like I was responsible for those Marines that I had brought out there, and I wasn't going to go home before they were," said Noel. "It was a tough decision. Not that I'd ever want the opportunity to make that kind of decision again, but if I had to make it over, I would have chosen the same. The fact that they saw me within two days of having been hit in the face with shrapnel back walking around the compound, some of these kids who've never seen anything remotely combat related, it helped ease their anxiety a little bit."
Noel's mother got a phone call at 3:45 a.m. saying her daughter had been wounded in Iraq, but Noel made her mother promise not to tell her sons because she didn't want them to worry.
"I basically woke up in recovery to a satellite phone being put in my hand to talk to her," Noel recalled.
Her ex-husband and the father of her two sons is also in the military, so her children were familiar with the hazards of her job, but she still wanted the opportunity to tell them about her injury herself, in-person.
"My older one figured it out from just looking at it that I had gotten hit with shrapnel, and my younger one, who was 10 at the time, was like, 'Chicks dig scars!' " said Noel.
"But they've only known the Marine Corps. I don't want to say they accept it, but they know that it's part of the job. They know their momma wears combat boots."
Mayo's two children, Tony and Sydney, also had a hard time dealing with their mother being so far away, serving in a war no less, and they both dealt with her deployment in different ways.
"My daughter did a whole scrap book for me so I wouldn't feel like I was gone, so she could tell me everything that had happened in their lives while I was gone," said Mayo. "My son tries to be the big boy, like it doesn't matter to him. He'll say things to me like, 'Well that was when you weren't here Mom.' "
As someone working in the media, Mayo said that in addition to shining more light on the females serving in Iraq, she would like to see more stories about how the war has impacted the lives of Iraqi women. She said that she has seen how the opening of schools have improved the lives of Iraqi women, and she recalled an incident where she spoke to young Iraqis, and a young girl decided she wanted to become a journalist after Mayo's visit.
"We are performing as well as anybody, and we can do the job that they're asking us to do," said Mayo. "I just want everybody to realize that we are the girl next door. We are your cheerleaders, we are the pom pom girls, and just because we're in the military doesn't make us any less feminine. We're still feminine.
"We're still the people that you grew up with. It's just that we've been asked to do something for our country and we want to show that we love our country as much as you do."
LOOKING AHEAD
Holmstedt said that "Band of Sisters" is being developed for an off-Broadway play, and she has already begun work on her follow-up, tentatively titled "When the Girls Come Marching Home," which will focus on the war in Afghanistan, as well as how women transition back home with post-traumatic stress disorder but also how women "are strengthened by their experience on the battlefield." She expects it to be released next summer.
Noel still has the 1/2-inch long piece of shrapnel that injured her, as well as the guardian angel she kept in her pocket for blessings and good luck. Mayo kept a four-leaf clover on her for the same reasons. While Noel said that she is struggling with PTSD, Mayo wasn't sure how to define what she struggles with.
"It's hard to say," said Mayo. "Have I gone in and had (PTSD) diagnosed? No, but do I have flashbacks? Do I have dreams? I think we all do."
The female Marines featured in the book are happy that Holmstedt has told their story. It's difficult to separate civilian life from life in the Marines, but it's this survival tactic that made staying in Iraq a no-brainer for Noel after her injury.
"I wasn't one of the most severely wounded women, but when I did get wounded, instead of going home, I stayed," said Noel. "There were several people that felt that I should leave because I was a mother. I say it like this: 'Rosie would have loved to have gone home, but Rosie wasn't in Iraq. Gunny Noel was,' so I stayed out there for my Marines."
Holmstedt forged friendships with many of the Marines that she interviewed, and she described herself as feeling like the "weakest link" in the social circle she formed with the women since they are so courageous.
"I interviewed a mother of a wounded Marine, and I cried for an hour," said Holmstedt. "It's so emotional. I mean, look at Tammy Duckworth, who will also be in my next book and who wrote the forward to 'Band of Sisters.' She's a Black Hawk pilot who was shot down, lost part of an arm and both legs. Now she's the director of veterans' affairs for the state of Illinois. If I lost part of my arm and both my legs, I probably wouldn't get out of bed for the rest of my life. These women inspire me."
Ellie
Published Sun, May 4, 2008 12:00 AM
By MARK ALLWOOD
mallwood@beaufortgazette.com
843-986-5538
Gunnery Sgt. Rosie Noel knew that she had been injured, but the piece of shrapnel that tore into her face had cut the nerves in her cheek, so she didn't realize she was bleeding until she felt blood trickling down her neck. A 20-year Marine, Noel served one year in Iraq, but Aug. 27, 2005, marked the first time she had been injured in combat. The shrapnel flew at her as she was riding her bicycle to an armory.
"Facial wounds bleed, let me tell you," said Noel, 40. "I lost a considerable amount of blood. I have some nerve damage and some paralysis. Every now and again I get earaches. Nerves, they regenerate very slow, so when they start to heal, I actually experience more pain, and I'm allergic to painkillers, which really doesn't help. That's difficult."
Noel, who is retiring from the military, said doctors have told her that they don't know how long the effects from her injury will last.
"I would imagine it's permanent," said Noel. "I'm alive, so I don't look at it in the same sense that some people might look at it, because I am alive. I mean, if I was dead, I wouldn't feel anything."
Noel is one of several women featured in the book, "Band of Sisters: American Women at War in Iraq," by Kirsten Holmstedt. Although female Marines do not serve in infantry, artillery or armor, they support infantry, including convoys, and they serve as MPs, truck drivers, heavy equipment mechanics and in logistics and maintenance.
"When this war started, some people were saying women aren't on the front lines, they're not in combat. Well, give me a break," said Holmstedt. "One of the most dangerous places you can be is in a convoy. You're so vulnerable."
According to Holmstedt, female service members have served more than 185,000 tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than 550 have been injured and approximately 100 have been killed.
"The reason why it's titled 'Band of Sisters' is not because it's a small unit, it's because this is the largest band of sisters to ever serve in Iraq," Holmstedt explained. "I wanted the book to be really representative of the women who are serving. It's not sugar-coated at all. These women empower me. We need to honor not only the men but the women who are serving, too, because they are right there on the battlefield. I think people forget that."
TELLING THEIR STORY
A native of Connecticut, Noel was a part-time student studying for an Masters of Fine Arts in creative non-fiction writing at University of North Carolina Wilmington and working full-time in public relations at Carolina Coastal Community College. Her thesis for the class had to be a book, and although she has several family members who have served in various capacities in the military, Noel admitted that she hadn't read much military fiction or non-fiction. But she lives in Jacksonville, N.C., near Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, and the women she saw going off to war, many of them neighbors, struck a chord with her.
"I would hear stories about the women on the radio, on TV, in the paper, but I was never fulfilled," said Holmstedt. "As a woman, with all of the women serving over there, I had a bigger interest in this war than ever before. I definitely had a heightened awareness. It's the biggest war in my lifetime. I was too young during Vietnam to really pay attention. It's amazing what women are doing on the battlefield, and nobody knows."
In researching her book, Holmstedt interviewed several Marines and traveled to Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, Fort Campbell, Ky., Fort Bragg, N.C., as well as military installations in Miramar, Calif., and in Norfolk, Va.
The book is the recipient of the 2007 Golden Quill Award in the military genre from the American Authors Association and the 2007 Founder's Award from the Military Writers Society of America. In January 2007, Holmstedt was part of a panel of authors who spoke about the war in Iraq to members of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) was among the senators who wrote letters to the book's publisher, Stackpole Books, praising the publication. Next week, she will travel to Ramstein Air Base in Germany for her first overseas book signing, and on June 4, she will appear at the Pentagon.
Holmstedt was in Beaufort recently for an educator's workshop on Parris Island, and she spoke about her book while taking lunch at her favorite local restaurant, Plums, before driving back home to North Carolina.
"The Fourth Battalion (on Parris Island) is doing a great job producing female Marines," said Holmstedt.
Besides dealing with the emotions and difficulties of a violent war, Holmstedt said that one of her challenges in the book was "breaking down the jargon," so the average reader would know that RPG stands for rocket-propelled grenade, and IED stands for improvised explosive device.
"I think there's a need for this book," said Holmstedt. "It's the first book on women in combat, because this is the first time women have been in combat. The response from service members is just awesome. I get e-mails from all over the world, women in Iraq, Afghanistan and the United States, thanking me for writing this book."
EARNING RESPECT
Gunnery Sgt. Yolanda Mayo, also a public affairs chief, is one of those women. A veteran of both the first Gulf War and the current Iraq War, Mayo is the only reservist Marine featured in "Band of Sisters." The last time she was in Iraq, part of her duties included being put in charge of an embedded reporter from the BBC who made a habit of disobeying Marine orders and risking his life in pursuit of a story.
"We were rocketed every night," Mayo recalled. "We had IEDs every day. I had people shoot at me while I was in convoys. That was a daily occurrence for us. It's always the fear of the unknown. When the first alarms went off and you feel that first impact, it's like, 'Oh my God. This is real. People are shooting at me.' "
Mayo talked about a friend, Maj. Megan McClung, who was killed in Iraq. McClung was serving as head of public affairs for the Marine Corps for Al Anbar province when her Humvee was destroyed by a massive IED, which killed her and the vehicles other two occupants instantly. McClung was the first female graduate of the Naval Academy to be killed in action since the school's founding in 1845.
"The first casualty names come in, and you know these people, and it's like, 'Oh wow. This is really happening,'" said Mayo. "You have to find a way to deal with that. You have to find a way to laugh, but it's laughing in the face of fear, because you're nervous. It's hard. Every single (death) is hard."
Mayo has served as a drill instructor on Parris Island and said despite the sand fleas ("You can keep them," she joked), she loved living in the Lowcountry, where she was a member of Carteret Street United Methodist Church.
As one of the few female .50 caliber gunners, Marine Lance Cpl. Chrissy DeCaprio, 23, also trained at Parris Island. The 128-pound, Brooklyn, N.Y.-native said the gun weighs more than she does, but she became an expert at shooting it. She volunteered to deploy to Iraq, and once she got there, she asked to have her stay extended. While in Iraq, she also was in charge of searching female and Iraqi children, and she guarded a female, highly valued detainee.
Like other Marines featured in "Band of Sisters," DeCaprio spoke of having to prove herself to some of the male Marines who were skeptical of women serving in combat. She earned a lot of respect after she fought for the position of .50 cal gunner.
"When I took that position over from somebody else, it made people feel like, 'She's not afraid to get her hands dirty,' " said DeCaprio.
DeCaprio got more than her hands dirty the first time she faced fire from Iraqi insurgents. Standing in the turret of a scout vehicle and manning her .50 cal machine gun, DeCaprio was leading a convoy of 50 vehicles on a four-hour trip to Fallujah when one of the vehicles was struck by an IED, spraying oil from one of the Humvees into DeCaprio's face. It wasn't until after she helped pull some of her fellow Marines to safety that she realized she had been hurt. A central belief among Marines, said Noel, is that "Marines don't leave their Marines."
"It wasn't bad," said DeCaprio. "It basically looked like I got a sun burn. It's definitely stressful. You just have to kind of put your training forth and just do it. There's always the possibility that there's going to be the one that you miss, and that's the one that's going to be your final miss, honestly, but I tried not to think of it that way. I just used my training to find and spot (IEDs) before they hit me or my Marines."
MISSING FAMILY
One of the main sources of stress for Marines and all military personnel, male or female, is struggling with being away from family and friends. For Noel, who has two sons, ages 13 and 16, being away from them in such a hostile environment was particularly hard. After her injury, other Marines tried to convince her to go home, but she felt like she had to provide an example of strength to younger Marines around her.
"I still felt like I was responsible for those Marines that I had brought out there, and I wasn't going to go home before they were," said Noel. "It was a tough decision. Not that I'd ever want the opportunity to make that kind of decision again, but if I had to make it over, I would have chosen the same. The fact that they saw me within two days of having been hit in the face with shrapnel back walking around the compound, some of these kids who've never seen anything remotely combat related, it helped ease their anxiety a little bit."
Noel's mother got a phone call at 3:45 a.m. saying her daughter had been wounded in Iraq, but Noel made her mother promise not to tell her sons because she didn't want them to worry.
"I basically woke up in recovery to a satellite phone being put in my hand to talk to her," Noel recalled.
Her ex-husband and the father of her two sons is also in the military, so her children were familiar with the hazards of her job, but she still wanted the opportunity to tell them about her injury herself, in-person.
"My older one figured it out from just looking at it that I had gotten hit with shrapnel, and my younger one, who was 10 at the time, was like, 'Chicks dig scars!' " said Noel.
"But they've only known the Marine Corps. I don't want to say they accept it, but they know that it's part of the job. They know their momma wears combat boots."
Mayo's two children, Tony and Sydney, also had a hard time dealing with their mother being so far away, serving in a war no less, and they both dealt with her deployment in different ways.
"My daughter did a whole scrap book for me so I wouldn't feel like I was gone, so she could tell me everything that had happened in their lives while I was gone," said Mayo. "My son tries to be the big boy, like it doesn't matter to him. He'll say things to me like, 'Well that was when you weren't here Mom.' "
As someone working in the media, Mayo said that in addition to shining more light on the females serving in Iraq, she would like to see more stories about how the war has impacted the lives of Iraqi women. She said that she has seen how the opening of schools have improved the lives of Iraqi women, and she recalled an incident where she spoke to young Iraqis, and a young girl decided she wanted to become a journalist after Mayo's visit.
"We are performing as well as anybody, and we can do the job that they're asking us to do," said Mayo. "I just want everybody to realize that we are the girl next door. We are your cheerleaders, we are the pom pom girls, and just because we're in the military doesn't make us any less feminine. We're still feminine.
"We're still the people that you grew up with. It's just that we've been asked to do something for our country and we want to show that we love our country as much as you do."
LOOKING AHEAD
Holmstedt said that "Band of Sisters" is being developed for an off-Broadway play, and she has already begun work on her follow-up, tentatively titled "When the Girls Come Marching Home," which will focus on the war in Afghanistan, as well as how women transition back home with post-traumatic stress disorder but also how women "are strengthened by their experience on the battlefield." She expects it to be released next summer.
Noel still has the 1/2-inch long piece of shrapnel that injured her, as well as the guardian angel she kept in her pocket for blessings and good luck. Mayo kept a four-leaf clover on her for the same reasons. While Noel said that she is struggling with PTSD, Mayo wasn't sure how to define what she struggles with.
"It's hard to say," said Mayo. "Have I gone in and had (PTSD) diagnosed? No, but do I have flashbacks? Do I have dreams? I think we all do."
The female Marines featured in the book are happy that Holmstedt has told their story. It's difficult to separate civilian life from life in the Marines, but it's this survival tactic that made staying in Iraq a no-brainer for Noel after her injury.
"I wasn't one of the most severely wounded women, but when I did get wounded, instead of going home, I stayed," said Noel. "There were several people that felt that I should leave because I was a mother. I say it like this: 'Rosie would have loved to have gone home, but Rosie wasn't in Iraq. Gunny Noel was,' so I stayed out there for my Marines."
Holmstedt forged friendships with many of the Marines that she interviewed, and she described herself as feeling like the "weakest link" in the social circle she formed with the women since they are so courageous.
"I interviewed a mother of a wounded Marine, and I cried for an hour," said Holmstedt. "It's so emotional. I mean, look at Tammy Duckworth, who will also be in my next book and who wrote the forward to 'Band of Sisters.' She's a Black Hawk pilot who was shot down, lost part of an arm and both legs. Now she's the director of veterans' affairs for the state of Illinois. If I lost part of my arm and both my legs, I probably wouldn't get out of bed for the rest of my life. These women inspire me."
Ellie