One of the historical anomalies of our country's recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has been the increasing presence of women in our own armed forces, as well as in some of the other military forces and paramilitary groups involved in these conflicts.
All wars are followed by the biographies and autobiographies of some of the participants; our own recent wars are no exception. But the fact that a number of these combatants are now women, with a whole new set of female perspectives, experiences, and challenges above and beyond those of their male counterparts, has led to some particularly absorbing new examples of the timeless soldier's memoir. Shoot Like A Girl is one of the best such accounts I've read to come out of the last two decades of American wars abroad.
Hegar starts at the beginning, with her Texas childhood and family. Her young years were spent with a physically abusive father, and a mother who tried but struggled to protect her and her sister from their father's rages. Eventually they escaped, and their mother remarried, providing them this time with a kind and supportive step-father, who played a positive role in convincing Mary Jennings that she could be whatever she wanted. And what she wanted more than anything since she was a small child was to be a military pilot.
From there, she takes us through her college years as an ROTC cadet, her constant striving to be the best, the accidents and setbacks she encountered in cadet training, and direction changes she had to make along the way to realize her dreams. She describes how she took flying lessons on her own to become a pilot, and the near disaster of her first long-distance solo. She tells the story of her sad short-lived first marriage, her first assignment abroad as a young Air Force officer supervising aircraft maintenance, the gender-based discrimination she encountered from the male officers above her, and a horrifying sexual assault by an Air Force physician.
Eventually, though, through sheer force of will, persistence, excellence and a little luck, she was selected for Air Force flight training. She went through the basic flight school for fixed wing aircraft, and learned to fly the Air Force's T-37 trainer, before transitioning to flying helicopters. We experience through her the incredible challenges of surviving the rigorous flight training, and what it took to make it in the macho "man's world" of military aviation.
Once she had her wings, she began flying missions in support of the civilian world: search and rescue, fire fighting, and drug interdiction. But with the onset of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was inevitable she would end up there. And so she did. She volunteered, and sought it out, to serve her country, and to face the ultimate personal challenge of combat.
Her role in Afghanistan was to fly injured soldiers out of active combat areas. It was a dangerous job, with long days spent on duty, flying constantly, and frequently into "hot" landing zones. She describes it all, and how much she relished the mission, even with the pain and heartbreak of the constant injury and death around her. She also relates the range of experiences she had dealing with her fellows, including incredible solidarity and close friendships with many of her fellow servicemen and women, but also ongoing discrimination and harassment from some of the men in her units and chain of command.
She also describes the one mission where she was wounded in combat, lost her aircraft to enemy fire, and still managed to fly out on another helicopter's landing skid while firing her rifle at enemy fighters at the landing zone. That exploit earned her a Distinguished Flying Cross with Valor, as well as a Purple Heart, and made her a decorated war hero.
At the end of her story, we see how she ultimately ended her flying career with the National Guard, then became a political advocate, who helped lead the national fight to remove limitations on women serving in combat roles in the military. She also reveals that she did ultimately find happiness with another man from her Texas hometown, who became her husband and partner in her civilian life, which was a nice happy ending.
This is a very readable and inspiring adventure story of how one woman managed to live her dreams of flying and military service, even against the headwinds of institutional resistance to women serving in the Air Force, and how in the process, she became an American hero, and a force for positive change in the military. Recommended.
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