More American women have fought and died in Iraq than in any war since World War Two. Over 191,500 have served in the Middle East since March 2003, most of them in Iraq, which is nearly five times more than in the 1991 Gulf war and twenty-six times more than in Vietnam. By September 2008, 592 American female soldiers had been wounded and 100 had died in Iraq, more than in the Korean, Vietnam, first Gulf, and Afghanistan wars combined.

Yet, even as they increase in numbers, women soldiers are painfully alone. In Iraq, women still only make up one in ten troops, and because they are not evenly distributed, they often serve in a platoon with few other women or none at all. This isolation, along with the military’s traditional and deep-seated hostility towards women, can cause problems that many female soldiers find as hard to cope with as war itself: degradation and sexual persecution by their comrades, and loneliness instead of the camaraderie that every soldier depends on for comfort and survival.

“I was the only female in my platoon of 50 to 60 men,” said Army Specialist Chantelle Henneberry, a Montanan who served in Iraq from 2005-6 with the 172nd Stryker Brigade out of Alaska. “My company consisted of 1,500 men -- Marines, Navy, Air Force, and Army – and under eighteen women. I was fresh meat to hungry men. The mortar rounds that came in daily did less damage to me than the men with whom I shared my food.”