A bigger battle than the sex war

But surely it’s not overly wonkish to suggest that the big question prompted by reports of the US Army’s activities in Iraq is not “what’s it like being a woman in that Army?” It’s: “What’s that Army like?”

Or, more laboriously, “What’s that Army like now, three generations after D-Day, two after Vietnam and 15 indolent years into the postSoviet age of zero discipline and mutually-assured obesity? Can it honestly think about anything other than looking after its own, out in the desert 3,000 miles from Tennessee? How does it react when attacked? Is it smart, or just big and heavy? Does it give a monkey’s about hearts and minds? And what does the average soldier know of Iraqi culture and history, up to and including Saddam’s nonresponsibility for 9/11?”

Love My Rifle More Than You answers all these questions. You wouldn’t think so from the cover (subtitle: Young and Female in the US Army) or from the first few pages, which Williams’s editor forced her, against her wishes and to her abiding regret, to drench in FHM-ish sex prose (“Take this one girl. I heard from reliable sources that she gave head to every guy in her unit.”) But it does. And the answers aren’t uplifting.

Wiliams is shortish, blonde, polished and poised. The polish is not evident in her sometimes self-consciously ragged writing and may have been acquired through practice: she is a veteran of US and European book tours. The poise (despite crutches — she broke her ankle rockclimbing last month) comes across in frequent reminders that she understands the context of her time in Iraq. She was a lowly NCO, not a general, and has put together her version of the “bigger picture ” only since returning from the war zone. She was a former punk feminist graduate among young men of intense but narrow experience who deserved some slack for their indiscretions. She expected a backlash after the US publication, especially from fellow soldiers, but has been heartened that readers “actually recognise that I point out some positive as well as negative things”.

Even so, in 290 pages, a total of three officers get an unqualified thumbs-up for competence and leadership. She acknowledges a couple of buddies, both female. Otherwise the book is a parade of maladjusted mediocrities to whom you would be foolish to entrust the mowing of your lawn. There’s the dork at Fort Campbell who refuses to admit that the 101st Airborne Division is going to Iraq even though it’s been confirmed on CNN. There’s Staff Sergeant Moss, Williams’s unit leader, who lurches between incoherent excitement and sullen, dangerous apathy in the back of her Humvee. There’s the lieutenant who needs an interpreter to talk to a Baghdad monk, even though the monk is replying in perfect English; the colonel who forces Williams to interrogate a dying civilian about “these ragheads” after a roadside bomb; the young male sergeant who lectures Williams about her “productivity”, then gets freaked out by UFOs while sharing a night shift with her; and the very loopy Staff Sergeant Simmons, Moss’s replacement, who can’t keep track of her own night vision goggles and cries in front of her soldiers, blaming it on PMT.

Saving Private Ryan this was not. There were, in fact, plenty of decent, professional soldiers, Williams assures us. “But the people who were just awful certainly stick out more, and they have such a terrible negative impact.”

Especially when unsure of their roles. “The US Army’s actually really good at fighting wars,” Williams says, brooking no argument. “We’re really good at winning wars. That’s our job. That’s our mission. We did that and we did it great. We won that war very quickly.

“What’s really hard is to train people to go to war and kill people if you have to and treat everyone like the enemy, and then, ‘OK, combat is officially over, now these people are your friends. Now you are supposed to help them and love them and stop blowing things up and start building things instead’.”

There is a sad and very telling passage in which Williams describes the sudden congealing of friendly relations with the Yezidi tribespeople in northern Iraq, among whom she was stationed for several weeks after the invasion. The insurgency had begun. American casualties were picking up. All units were required to surround themselves with razor wire. Carefully-nurtured friendships with the locals who had welcomed them, literally, with flowers, dissolved more or less overnight.

So what came first? The insur- gency or the collateral damage that an uninvited 180,000-strong Army obsessed with its own protection inevitably leaves in its wake? “From where I was standing it looked as if they were progressing in lockstep. They fed each other. In colonial times if the Native Americans killed one settler we’d kill their whole village, and if one Iraqi would shoot at US troops then we’d break into five houses and we would have five families pissed off. It doesn’t necessarily matter who did the first bad act. Once that started it just snowballed.”

Iraqis were also dismayed and increasingly frustrated that US forces couldn’t prevent looting or maintain security. “And then it proved later that we couldn’t even do that in our own country after Katrina.”

You wouldn’t guess from Williams’s grown-up smile and demure teal top that she tried heroin at 16, sex well before that, and spent much of her teens with purple hair, listening to the Dead Kennedys. For similar reasons, her parents were shocked when she announced, at the age of 23, that she was joining the Army.

She had a home and a dog in Tampa, but had recently lost her job and separated from her boyfriend. Adrift with “a college degree for reading books”, she says she felt she’d been “taking the easy route”. It was the ex-boyfriend who unwittingly suggested a harder one. He was Jordanian-born. Williams had picked up some Arabic from him, and the Pentagon’s improbably-located Defence Languages Institute (on the Monterery peninsula in California) offered a quick route to fluency.

She joined up in 2000 with no particular expectation of going to war. The 9/11 attacks changed all that. As an Arabist she was exactly what the Army didn’t have enough of. As a woman Caucasian Arabist, she was almost as eyecatching for the Iraqis as for the men with whom she served.

The attention could turn a girl’s head. The most talked-about lines from her book are those in which she argues that many of the 15 per cent of US military personnel who are women use and enjoy their sexual allure, including by having sex with any number of sex-starved guys right there in the war zone!

Williams has a go at these “sluts” because they make all the other women soldiers, herself included, “bitches” (both words in standard male military usage). She lists the routine sexual harassments that she experienced, from being offered money by her fellow soldiers to show them her breasts to having rocks thrown at them for fun. But in the end she is reluctant to condemn. Even “Rivers”, who comes close to raping her, apologises pitifully the next morning and gets away with it.

Two years after returning from Iraq, she’s not short of righteous anger. But most of it is directed at her Commander-in-Chief, not his subordinates. She peppers our conversation with exasperated Bush references — relaxing only when she remembers how nice it was to go on Fox News, the US network that most consistently supported the Iraq War — and say that she felt betrayed by him; by his condemnation of dissent as unpatriotic; by his failure to retrain or support the Army after the toppling of Saddam; and by twisting the evidence on WMDs and al Qaeda links — although she insists that they fooled no one she served with.

Williams’s chief strength as a witness to the Second American Adventure in the Gulf is not her sex but her sheer effort to be honest. To be sure, she comes off better than most of her comrades. You can practically hear her conscience screaming as she describes her participation in the sexual humiliation of an Iraqi detainee in Mosul before anyone had heard of Abu Ghraib. And you can picture the scene at the first Starbucks she stumbled upon on her homeward journey, in Kuwait. She ordered her usual, a grande half-caff non-whip non-fat white chocolate mocha. “And yes,” she says. “I felt a tool.”

Love My Rifle More Than You is published by Weidenfield & Nicolson, £12.99, 290pp; offer £11.69 from 0870 1608080