![]() The combat exclusion policy, though lifted in 2013 after OIF and fully eliminated in 2015, had been in practice only titular, as women were serving in combat operations in various capacities throughout Iraq. By its end, they were not only in combat, but, as of 2017, 166 women had been killed and more than 1,000 had been injured in combat ( Service Women’s Action Network, 2017, p. At the outset of the Iraq War, women were restricted to traditionally non-combat roles. Women would play a central role in that campaign, and in doing so, would take on especially important “combat” roles.Īt the same time, activist agitation in the US led to increasingly liberal policies for women in the military. ![]() Initially recruited and serving in purportedly non-combat roles, women became increasingly important to military readiness and combat preparedness as the US began to realize that the fight to “win the hearts and minds” of the Iraqi people was most likely to occur through the development of relationships with local leaders and populations. Because the Iraq War spans significant changes in US military policy for women, it stands as an especially important conflict for understanding how women have negotiated, responded to, accepted, advanced, or resisted military cultures.įrom March 2003, the start of OIF, to December 2011, the official end of combat operations in Iraq, nearly 300,000 women served across both OIF and Operation Enduring Freedom. This special issue of the Journal of Veterans Studies takes a closer look at the role of OIF women, both as active-duty service members and as veterans, with the explicit purpose of expanding our conceptions of how women served within OIF and how they have been represented as members of the military, whether in legal documents, medical documents, or various creative modes of expression. Perhaps preeminent among the drivers for change was, and continues to be, the shifting role of women within the military. Of course, some changes might best be understood as responding to both influences on the military: the on-the-ground circumstances in Iraq and social changes within America. Some derived from the unique challenges posed by unconventional warfare and the military response to terrorism within Iraq, and others derived from cultural pressures within the United States (US) and its citizenry that, throughout the long conflict, grew increasingly frustrated with American deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan. ![]() military culture that often casts this dual position as an inflexible binary, and asked its contributors to reflect on the ways that the Iraq War has produced a body of literature in both fiction and first-person memoir that portrays women as active combatants and participants instead of spectators or victims.ĭuring Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), the military underwent a series of fundamental changes in its culture. This special issue of The Journal of Veterans Studies focuses on the double bind that females face as both women and service members within a hyper-masculine U.S. The Iraq War is groundbreaking in both historical and literary terms: first, women not only served but also fought openly as women for the first time in a full-scale war waged by the United States second, authors have begun to feature openly female combatants as the centerpieces of war narratives. Yet, public discourse rarely spotlighted or celebrated this achievement. Might the voices of women veterans cast a new light on the realities, ravages and aftermath of war? At a time when we have an increasing number of women in active combat, what would it mean to see war through their eyes? What might their writings and reflections have to teach us? During the Iraq War, American women made history insofar as they participated in combat on an unprecedented scale.
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