Formation: A Woman's Memoir of Rape, Rage, and War by Ryan Leigh Dostie

Abstract

Reviewed by: Formation: A Woman's Memoir of Rape, Rage, and War by Ryan Leigh Dostie Bettina Hindes (bio) formation: a woman's memoir of rape, rage, and war Ryan Leigh Dostie Grand Central Publishing https://www.grandcentralpublishing.com/titles/ryan-leigh-dostie/formation/9781538731529/ 368 pages; Print, $17.99 To be a soldier at war produces a harrowing tale, albeit one that has been told many times. The story of war, often related by men, is as old as human culture itself. In the period covering the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an admirable body of veteran memoirs has been appearing. Brian Turner poetically contributed his book on Iraq, My Life as a Foreign Country, Adrian Bonenberger's Afghan Post uses the epistolary form, and Un-American, by Erik Edstrom, employs a sociocritical, almost academic style to depict the disillusionment of a generation of US soldiers. These are just a few of many such moving and commendable books by veterans of the era. Fewer stories have been told by women, however, despite women serving in the military and deploying in ever greater numbers. To be a woman soldier at war is, of course, part of being a woman in the military. To be a woman in the modern, barely post-gender-integration American military, is where being a woman still remains the defining characteristic of the story. Men tell tales of being soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen, whereas women tell of being seen only as women. To be a woman in the military was and often continues to be a liability. Almost every book by a woman veteran recounts sexual assault and covers the spectrum from constant discrimination and harassment to rape, suicide, and murder. One such book is Formation, by Ryan Leigh Dostie. A bright-eyed young religious woman, she enlists in the US Army right out of high school shortly before 9/11 and becomes a Persian-Farsi linguist. Her memoir is not just a story of how a woman can do as well as a man in the military, but reveals in painful, riveting detail and beautiful prose how much more difficult this job is made by military sexual trauma and the bungled response to it by an Army that was willfully ill-equipped to deal with such rampant abuse. [End Page 34] Although women have always played a role in war, official integration into the various branches of the US defense forces has been slow. Despite having served in World War II, it wasn't until the 1970s that women began to be admitted to the service academies, until today we have the highest numbers of women ever in the military. Their representation ranges from 8 percent of Marine Corps to 15 percent of Army and 19 percent of Air Force members. Integration became the task of individual women in a military composed of men who often didn't want them there and didn't always know how to deal with them when they were. The female veteran memoir in the era of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars arguably began with Love My Rifle More Than You (2005), by Kayla Williams, about her 2003 deployment to Iraq. The book provided a raw and direct view into the life of a woman who does her job in a war zone as "just one of the guys" and accomplished as much as if not more than her male counterparts. The book is full of drinking, carousing, and pre-enlightenment gender-integration experiences. Williams had to contend with the constant sexual advances, harassment, and a sexually charged environment of her male peers while forward-deployed on a remote mountaintop. Her story reveals the many tasks of integration and just how much of the burden falls on the women to become like the men who represent the dominant culture. Other memoirs also demonstrate that women can do it, such as Shoot Like a Girl, by helicopter pilot Mary Jennings Hegar, who was shot down in Afghanistan. Hegar was later party to the class-action suit against the secretary of defense, which led to the lifting of the ban on women in combat in 2013. All these memoirs show...