Stories That Must Be Told: Sharing African American Women’s Narratives of Military Service

Last updated on: May 28, 2014 at 8:02 am by Guest Contributor

Stories That Must Be Told: Sharing African American Women’s Narratives of Military Service 2014-05-28T08:02:00-05:00 Guest Contributor

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By Elizabeth F.Desnoyers-Colas

R3 Contributor

Since the American Revolution, African American women have served, usually behind the scenes, in every military conflict in which the United States has been engaged. Despite this dedicated service to their country, very little empirical research has been published regarding African American servicewomen, including those who have served in the Gulf wars (Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom). There has also been a decided lack of interest among the national media’s on providing significant coverage of the accomplishments of African American military women. Media coverage of former U.S. Army Specialist Shoshana Johnson the first black female Prisoner of War versus the coverage of her Army unit colleague former Private Jessica Lynch (a white female Operation Iraqi Freedom Prisoner of War) is an example of the disparity of such coverage.

Media critics and journalism scholars noted that for the most part national media coverage of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) in 2003 focused on Jessica Lynch’s petite Northern European descended features and waif like persona to provide a more palatable, puritanical heroine’s image that white America could readily relate to. According to New Zealand Herald columnist Deborah Orr, the rest of the world also readily bought into this image. In that light, Orr suggests that the blonde-haired Jessica, a picture perfect Hollywood media product, became the “. . . archetype of what an All American girl is always portrayed as being . . . so typical of the American ideal . . . America does have a hierarchy of life with pretty blondes at the top, black Americans and native Americans further down and the rest of the world trailing hopelessly…”

By default Shoshana became the less desirable U.S. servicewoman’s image, which Gary Younge of the U.K.’s newspaper, The Guardian, described her service and those of other U.S. military women of color in April 2003 as “. . . the other American face of this war, fought by a military whose ranks have been swelled by poor, nonwhite women .”

As the 21stcentury Gulf War continued to unfold I wondered whether other black servicewomen have been ignored. If Shoshana’s story was not considered worthy of national media coverage as Jessica Lynch’s, what about the stories of other black women who have served this country in wartime, particularly in the Gulf.

My book Marching as toWar: Personal Narratives of African American Women’s Experiences in the GulfWars the stories of black women, who candidly and poignantly share their war experiences. Why are these stories so important? One word—history.

African American women leaders have strongly advocated collecting and maintaining their own histories. In her 1892 book, A Voice from the South, African American feminist and historian Anna Julia Cooper told African American women that they needed to gather their history and muster the creativity and ingenuity to develop and cultivate their own collective literary and rhetorical voice. Cooper’s fundamental fear was that individual and collective life stories and experiences would be ignored and totally dismissed by white men and women, as well as by African American men. A century later, feminist bell hooks echoed Cooper’s admonition and urged African American women to speak up and out about themselves and their lives. Doing so, she said would avoid having their histories and life experiences deemed insignificant or rendered invisible.

As an African American female officer who served in the first Gulf War, I felt I could properly share these stories as well as my own. To do so, I began with a national search for interviewees. I tried to get as wide a variety of women from the various military services as possible, so I sought those in active duty, veterans, and reservists with the National Guard, Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force. I specifically wanted to interview women who had actually served in the regions where the conflicts occurred. I felt they would have a different perspective of their role in the war if they had actually left the United States or Europe to experienced war first hand. The interviews were surprisingly personal. Thirteen women eventually told me their stories. I did not have to pry or prod. I was amazed at how much of their lives they shared. At times during interviews, I laughed or cried with them. Some said that the interview time was cathartic.

Most of the women interviewed were enlisted personnel. I interviewed two officers. One commanded a Civil Engineer’s Squadron in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Her unit’s mortuary briefly held the bodies of Saddam Hussein’s two sons, Udai and Qusai, while they were being positively identified by Iraqi and U.S. officials. The other was a commander of an Army administrative unit in Desert Storm. The woman who served in both conflicts was first a junior enlisted Air Force member and later a senior noncommissioned officer. One interviewee was among the first woman aircraft fuel technicians in the Air Force. She helped launch an aircraft that her husband was a crewmember of and did not know it. One interviewee drove a large vehicle down the infamous “Highway of Death.” Another arrived in Iraq around the time Shoshana’s unit was captured. She went through the same horror of briefly being in a l

ost Army convoy as Shoshana when she drove a jeep for her commander and two other male passengers.

Several of the women were forced to leave their children behind with family and friends. These stories are especially heart-rending, especially in the children’s reactions to their departures and returns. The threat of death was a constant fear. One of the interviewees was in the barracks that was bombed before Desert Storm officially ended. She was injured and still suffers from “survivor’s guilt.” Some of continue to suffer from PTSD. A few have mild to severe Gulf War Illness symptoms.

In 1989 African American Charity Adams Earley, commander of the all black women 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion in World War II, best summarized the possible plight of African American service women’s possible loss of legacy:

The future of women in the military seems assured. . . . What may be lost in time is the story of how it happened. The barriers of sex and race were, and sometimes still are, very difficult to overcome, the second even more than the first. During World War II women in the service were often subject to ridicule and disrespect even as they performed satisfactorily. . . . Each year the number of people who shared the stress of these accomplishments lessens. In another generation young black women who join the military will have scant record of their predecessors who fought on the two fronts of discrimination—segregation and reluctant acceptance by males.

Cooper’s 1892 warning, coupled with Earley’s, calls for continued research on African American women’s contribution to the U.S. military. As part of that call, stories like these should continue to be told as African American women (who can now be assigned to combat zones and fight on the front lines alongside men) continue marching as to war.

Follow Elizabeth on Twitter @MoveprofPHD

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