A Woman at War: Erin Stevens in Iraq

For six years I was a woman obsessed. And several times a week since 2003, I have been reminded, or reminded someone, that one day, I would be going to IRAQ. IRAQ was the ultimate goal, even when I was seventeen and bragging away about how I was going to WEST POINT and then to IRAQ. IRAQ was the gold standard: going to IRAQ proved that you were a bad-ass. And of course, when you are an eighteen or twenty-two year old at West Point, being a bad-ass is high on your list of priorities.

I entered the United States Military Academy in the summer of 2003, shortly after the initial invasion of Iraq, when everything was about tanks and toppling statues of Saddam Hussein. Our cadet leaders, juniors and seniors at West Point, insisted that one day they would go to IRAQ, but in four years that war—Afghanistan, too—would be long over and we would miss the whole thing. Along with most of my classmates, I experienced an irrational fear that I would miss the war. Missing the war would somehow make me a lesser officer, and for that matter, a worse human being. I could not miss the war.