PRODUCT INFORMATION PAGE Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army View and buy for $9.98 on Amazon.com

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Here are some customer reviews of Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army : Kayla William was not just any American soldier. During the second Gulf War, as an Arabic-speaking linguist in a Military Intelligence Unit attached to frontline troops, she experienced first-hand combat. In the War in Iraq she took enemy fire and made the tough calls of when to shoot and when not to shoot. In her memoir, Love My Rifle More Than You she gives an utterly fresh view of what it means to be a woman solider in today's Army as she recounts her five years of military service. Love My Rifle More Than You is filled with revelations. In describing how it feels to be one of the Army's 15% female soldiers, she puts sex and testosterone-charged male conduct "up front and personal". Unflinchingly she describes the occasions when she was coarsely asked to have rough sex in the back of a Humvee and when her breasts were groped and fondled while on she was on duty with a combat team. But she also writes that it was not "all that bad" being a woman surrounded by men. She was acutely aware that her sex attracted favorable attention and gave her power - power that she was not above using to make her life easier, such as having her male counterparts dig her foxhole. She provides a candid assessment of her part in belittling the sexual prowess of Muslin male prisoners during hostile interrogations. She speaks frankly about her sister soldiers who are sexually rakish and the difficultly their conduct causes all woman soldiers. She offers unvarnished contempt for those women soldiers who resort to tears and claims of PMS to excuse their glaring ineptness. Bounded by such a thicket of sexual dynamics, it is a wonder that Williams is not bitter, about her Army tour: but, she is not. She draws immense satisfaction from the many times she was respected for her intelligence and competence by her fellow soldiers and officers. She, also, has a deep and abiding appreciation for her Army friends who saw her through the good and bad times. On the other hand, Williams has many gripes about the Army. Her complaints about stupid decisions, lousy leaders, bad food and overwhelming periods of tedium and boredom are common to all soldiers who are concerned with their own survival and safety. As a self-described liberal, she does not support our War in Iraq and gives her reasons. These, however, are plainly biased and devoid of any serious consideration of events that led to U.S. involvement. However, her views on the U.S. involvement notwithstanding, it is her gender-specific disclosures that make this insightful memoir a good read. I read this book with great interest because both Williams and I were deployed witht he 101st and I thought it would be interesting to see the war from another 101st soldier's perspective. What I got was angry, wondering really, what war did Williams go to. I spent my year the only female in an all male unit and did not once get groped, leered at, or attacked. I went out everyday with the guys and was expected to pull my weight. The only part of William's book I found myself connecting with was the last chapter about coming home. That chapter was spot on. Otherwise William's story is not a accurate description of what it is like to be female in the military but should be subtitled The Story of One Young Female Soldier in the Army. Kayla Williams is an intelligent, interesting person with a lot to say about the war in Iraq and what it's like to be a soldier in today's American Army. Most of the publicity surrounding this book has focused on her experiences as one of the 15% of soldiers in Iraq who are women, and while that's reason enough to read it, the book is much more than that. If you've ever wondered what it would be like to be a soldier in Iraq, or a woman stationed on a hilltop on the Syrian border, or a vegetarian enlisted in the Army, or an Arab linguist in the Middle East, you should read this book. It would not surprise me to see much of this book used as a primary source in business management and organizational studies texts. She writes a lot about the leadership faults of people in positions of authority in the Army, and about her frustrations with incompetent management. At one point she concludes that the Army is like a form of Communism. A lot of her complaints about mistakes her leaders make are not really specific to the Army however and any manager in any organization can learn from this book. For example, she often complains that she doesn't receive enough encouragement and reassurance that she is doing a good job. She's fairly typical of a lot of bright "individual contributors" who are smart enough to recognize faults in their leaders but do not yet have enough supervisory experience to learn how hard it is to be a leader. Ultimately she is very positive about her experience in the Army and although it is clearly not her intent, I think a lot of teenage boys reading this book could get the impression that a tour of duty in Iraq might be kind of fun. For this reason I would not want my 17-year-old son to read this book, because I don't want him to enlist. My only real complaint with the book is that she doesn't go into more detail on the many topics she covers. I would love to know, for example, how exactly one goes about doing "signal intelligence": what frequencies they monitor, how successful are they at intercepting and understanding radio traffic in Arabic, and how it is that half of her team in Iraq are trained in Korean and not Arabic (what is it that they can do exactly?). I would like to know more about what books she read while stationed on the Syrian border. She says that "everyone" understood that the war was not justified and yet I have to think not "everyone" thought this at the start of the invasion. I would like to know more about how people serving in Iraq would come to this conclusion. The very essence of what she writes about, is exactly what has needed to be said. I also am glad how she said it, uninhibited. She's a hero in my book for having the guts to bring to the light what the Army continually tries to keep covered up--that female soldiers are looked upon and used primarily for sex (whether anyone likes it or not). She further impressed me by admitting to using this to her advantage. What beautiful honesty! but Ms. Williams account goes further than many in conveying the reality of military service today and this war. While her abrupt writing style may irritate some readers, through it, Ms. Williams conveys a more authentic sense of the wartime experience. Something we rarely get in the movies or from the media is what the routine is like--how do our soldiers make out when they are not under fire? How do they recover from the moments when they were under fire? I would never presume to claim knowledge of how returning war-veterans feel, but I can certainly understand far more of the experience now than I ever did before. Lack of "trigger-time" notwithstanding, Kayla Williams is a true warrior.

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