Beyond the Call: Three Women on the Front Lines in
Afghanistan.
By Eileen Rivers. Da Capo. $27.
The focus on women in the armed forces
tends, in the United States, to be one of combat readiness: even after the
first female Army Rangers graduated in 2015, questions continued to be raised
about whether standards had been relaxed for them in the name of political
correctness, making the women Rangers less fit than men. Strong denials from
the military to the contrary, this issue continues to reappear from time to
time. Yet women’s roles in combat zones amount to a great deal more than those
on both sides of the female-readiness argument in the U.S. tend to realize.
Just how much more extensive those roles are, and have been, is the topic of Beyond the Call, whose author, Eileen
Rivers, herself served in the armed forces: an Army veteran, she was an Arab linguist
in Kuwait following Operation Desert Storm in the early 1990s.
Rivers, now an editor at USA Today, focuses in her book on a
Marine sergeant, an Army major and an intelligence officer, all of whom were
members of FETs in Afghanistan. A FET is a Female Engagement Team with an
unusual and crucial mission: to develop relationships with Muslim women, who
are founts of information on their nations’ customs, needs and difficulties,
but are culturally forbidden to speak to male soldiers. Never mind the facile
notion that they should speak to male
soldiers who are there to protect them: the FETs deal with the reality on the
ground, not the wished-for social equality that is many years, if not
generations, away in a place such as Afghanistan. Rivers’ book follows the
three women – Sgt. Sheena Adams, Maj.
Maria Rodriguez, and Capt. Johanna Smoke – as they go about their duties,
developing relationships with Muslim women in a bid to gather intelligence
vital to U.S. success in the country. Adams, Rodriguez and Smoke are on the
front lines of attempts to engage hearts and minds and thus weaken the hold of
the Taliban on parts of Afghanistan – and they have to fight some
dyed-in-the-wool barriers of their own to do so.
Thus, Beyond the Call is both
a story of the little-known but important role of FETs in Afghanistan and of
the lengths to which military women have gone – have had to go, according to Rivers – to serve in all the ways of which
they are capable. The book actually starts with a short history of women in the
U.S. military before the scene shifts to Afghanistan and the story of a woman
named Jamila Abbas, who became a women’s-rights activist – a role placing her
in great personal danger – after Taliban killers beheaded her husband. The way
Abbas interacts with FET members is an important part of the book, which also
details the personal struggles of the three women profiled within the U.S.
military. Thus, Rivers shows how hard Adams fought her own chain of command to
be assigned to Afghanistan – and what happened when, after she was injured by
an improvised explosive device (IED), her advancement was blocked because she
was not given credit for combat service. Is this a system glitch or systemic
discrimination? Clearly the latter, Rivers suggests, and she says Adams is
scarcely alone in suffering from it.
Rodriguez’ circumstances forced her to fight both the provincial
government in Afghanistan and her own chain of command. She was supposed to
give Afghan policewomen training, but was not allowed, under U.S. military
regulations, to leave base without a male escort. There are arguments
explaining this – having to do with extra risks in a culture such as
Afghanistan’s if women are out and about on their own – but Rivers suggests
that the rules are part of a pervasive anti-female orientation in the U.S.
military that is changing slowly when it changes at all. As for Smoke, Rivers
shows her working with Abbas to register women to vote, contrasting this bid
for female empowerment in a repressive society with the difficulties these FET
members faced in their own military lives.
Beyond the Call is as much an
advocacy book as a military-history-and-analysis one, and, perhaps as a result,
tends to drag: Rivers is not especially skilled at interweaving the two
elements of her narrative, and her writing is matter-of-fact and rather
unstylish. The underlying story of FET members helping the fight for women’s
rights in a country whose entire religious and political system opposes them is
a strong one. But what never quite gels is Rivers’ attempt to relate that level
of systemic oppression to the comparatively small and certainly less dangerous
facing of barriers involved in women’s service in U.S. defense. It is certainly
true that the U.S. military has not been an equal-opportunity organization
where men and women are concerned, and that the country as a whole continues to
face many issues of inequality involving a wide variety of under-appreciated
groups. But comparing the structural inefficiencies and slow-to-change policies
of the United States with the vicious, violent, religiously based systemic
oppression of the patriarchal system in Afghanistan really makes no sense.
Adams, Rodriguez and Smoke certainly had to overcome barriers to be able to do the
work that, by Rivers’ account, they all did well and with pride. But their
difficulties are on an entirely different level from those of Abbas and the
other women trapped in a system that, by the standards of the generally open
and designedly secular one in the United States, is backward and borderline
evil – just the sort of fertile ground in which cancerous growths such as the
Taliban flourish and become extremely difficult to root out.
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