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Insight
When Janey comes marching home
by Tom Gresham
When Laura Browder, professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, wrote her 2006 book, “Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America,” she delved deep into the history of American women’s involvement in military efforts, tracing their participation in armed struggles from the Revolutionary War to the current conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. She decided she wanted to learn more about the lives of those females serving in the military today — women whose stories, she believed, had not been told.
The project she subsequently embarked upon shines a light on these women with uncommon clarity. “When Janey Comes Marching Home: Portraits of Women in Combat” is a series of 40 portraits and narratives of American female soldiers, sailors and marines. The exhibition, a collaboration between Browder and Sascha Pflaeging, a freelance photographer, was on display at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond from Sept. 12 to Dec. 14.
“Janey” is the result of 46 in-depth interviews Browder conducted with female veterans. Their stories are compelling and sometimes harrowing.
“Some women have cried as they narrated their stories and several have told us that these are experiences that they have not shared with even their spouses or counselors,” Browder said.
Among those featured in the exhibition are:
- An Army doctor who cared for Abu Ghraib prisoners after they were relocated to her battalion station. The prisoners included Saddam Hussein’s personal physician, whom she befriended and worked with and with whom she exchanged medical knowledge and techniques.
- An explosives-sniffing dog handler in the Marine Corps, whose deployment ended abruptly when she discovered she was five months pregnant and whose replacement was killed by a mortar.
- An Army sergeant who spent 12 hours a day outside her base in Baghdad conducting sweeps for improvised-explosive devices and performing house-to-house searches.
- A Marine corporal who joined the military after being expelled from high school and received her deployment orders when her daughter had just turned 1, but who ultimately extended her six-month deployment so that she wouldn’t have to leave her unit.
“If we listen to them, these women — these mothers and wives, these soldiers and veterans — will unsettle our fixed ideas about Americans at war and add dimension to the often flawed or fragmentary pop culture depictions of women in the military: as novelties, but not as real soldiers,” Browder wrote in the Virginia Quarterly Review, which featured excerpts from the exhibition in its fall 2008 issue.
Browder says it has gone largely unnoticed that Afghanistan and Iraq mark the first major conflicts that feature a large cohort of women serving in combat zones; more than 180,000 women have served in the two operations so far. And, although women legally cannot be assigned to combat duty, the unpredictable nature of the current conflicts means that women often are pressed into that role.
“Many of these women have expressed how important they think it is for the American public to understand the experiences of women fighting in Iraq,” Browder said. “There are so many different stories to tell.”
Browder and Pflaeging hope that “Janey” will become a traveling exhibition. In addition to the excerpts from the exhibition in the Virginia Quarterly Review, audio interviews with 12 of the veterans are available on the publication’s Web site.
To view the slideshow you must have the Adobe Flash player installed.