American Amazons

Women at War
By Pamela Martineau and Steve Wiegand -- Bee Staff Writers

Published 2:15 am PST Sunday, March 6, 2005
Story appeared on Page A1 of The Bee

Short Text:

For the first time in its 232-year existence as an independent nation, America is fighting a war with a military machine that is dependent on women. More than 200,000 women are on active duty in the U.S. armed services and an additional 150,000 serve in the National Guard and Reserves - an estimated 100,000 of them have served in the Iraq combat theater so far. Women make up 19 percent of the Navy, 15 percent of the Army, 20 percent of the Air Force and 24 percent of the Army Reserve.

The women span a universe of backgrounds. There are women like Ranbir Kaur, a 19-year-old part-time college student from the obscure San Joaquin Valley town of Earlimart. By summer's end, Kaur expects to trade her textbooks for an M-16 rifle and head for Iraq.

And there are women like Elizabeth Vasquez, 49, who has been to Iraq and seen up close what war is like. These days she often sits on her Vallejo houseboat, sipping coffee, her eyes clouded with memories of things she'd rather forget.

Original Full Text:

Part 1: Women at War

Two years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and for the first time in its 229-year existence as an independent nation, America is fighting a war with a military machine that is dependent on women.

The women span a universe of backgrounds. There are women like Ranbir Kaur, a 19-year-old part-time college student from the obscure San Joaquin Valley town of Earlimart. By summer's end, Kaur expects to trade her textbooks for an M-16 rifle and head for Iraq.

And there are women like Elizabeth Vasquez, 49, who has been to Iraq and seen up close what war is like. These days she often sits on her Vallejo houseboat, sipping coffee, her eyes clouded with memories of things she'd rather forget.

More than 200,000 women are on active duty in the U.S. armed services and an additional 150,000 serve in the National Guard and Reserves - an estimated 100,000 of them have served in the Iraq combat theater so far. Women make up 19 percent of the Navy, 15 percent of the Army, 20 percent of the Air Force and 24 percent of the Army Reserve.

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In 2002, they constituted 17 percent of those recruited to active duty. By 2010, that figure is expected to reach 30 percent.

'There's no going back,' said Lory Manning, a retired Navy captain and director of the Women's Research and Education Institute, a nonprofit Washington-based think tank that studies women's issues. 'If you tried to pull women out of the equation, this country could not fight a war.'

But America's new dual-gender formula for fighting has raised numerous combat zone issues that are rapidly becoming home-front problems:

* Every branch of the military has been shamed over the past two years by a deluge of reports of women being sexually assaulted or harassed by their male counterparts while in the combat zone. Stung by the scandals, the Pentagon has begun to respond - in part by coming up with its first formal definition of sexual assault and harassment.

* Returning female vets are bringing back wounded minds, beset by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an illness that affects women at twice the rate of men. Health experts fear an avalanche of cases among female vets will smother the military health care system.

* Tens of thousands of children are struggling to cope while Mom goes to war - and sometimes Dad too. The kids are casualties of rules promulgated when the military actively discouraged mothers from staying in uniform and long before the military was so dependent on women.

The cumulative effect, according to many of the dozens of female soldiers interviewed by The Bee, is that the male-dominated military has failed to adapt to a truly integrated two-gender force.

'You cannot integrate halfway or part of the way,' said Erin Solaro, a former Army Reserve officer and military historian.

'Yes, there are differences between men and women ... , (but) why on earth would you discourage anybody from entering military service by offering them a second-class experience?'

While the Pentagon struggles to solve the current problems, and with its hand forced by the need for more personnel as a result of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Defense Department is inching toward removal of the final - and most controversial - obstacle to women's full integration into the military work force: the ban on ground combat service.

'The nature of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, where women have had to pick up weapons and fight side by side with men, has made them colleagues in a way they never have been before,' said Manning, who served 25 years in the Navy.

'The experience of what's going on over there will drive a whole rethinking of what should or shouldn't be off-limits for women.'

Escaping a small town
It was the limits of life in a comatose San Joaquin Valley farm town that spurred Ranbir Kaur to join the California National Guard in late 2002, two days after her 17th birthday and more than a year before she graduated from Delano High. That, and the $3,000 bonus for enlisting.

The daughter of Sikh grape farmers, Kaur emigrated at age 7 from India to the Bay Area, then moved to Earlimart, a dusty burg of 6,600, about 40 miles from Bakersfield, 70 miles from Fresno and light-years from the kind of things that would interest most teenagers.

The only restaurants in town are a mom-and-pop burger joint and a Mexican bakery that sells tortas and burritos. The high school is in Delano, eight miles away. There is no movie theater, no bowling alley, no nightspot.

'There's nothing to do here,' says Diana Sinobago, 18, who joined the Guard a year after Kaur, when the enlistment bonus had doubled to $6,000.

Nor is there much future for anyone who wants to be something other than a farmer or an employee of one of the area's two state prisons.

'Let's put it this way,' Delano High career counselor Joanne Connelly said of local vocational possibilities. 'We have a lot of fast food.'

The paucity of jobs has attracted an abundance of military recruiters.

'The recruiters are here on an almost daily basis,' said Jim Beltran, the high school's dean of students. The kids, he said, 'are looking for an out. They're looking for a place to go.'

Ten girls and four boys were recruited from Kaur's graduating class of 650. Three of the girls are in Kaur's Guard unit, the 349th Quartermaster Company.

A contributing factor, Connelly said, was Kaur's infectious enthusiasm about joining up.

'Ranbir wasn't pushy,' the counselor said. 'She didn't ask like, 'Do you want to join?' The girls were like, 'Wow, you did that?' She'd just tell it like it was. It was like the girls didn't realize they had this option.'

Kaur, who works as a clerk in a doctor's office and studies at Bakersfield College while she waits to be deployed to Iraq, wasn't motivated solely by patriotism.

'It's going lead to a lot more opportunities in life,' she says as she uses a thin metal wire to push a cleaning cloth down the barrel of her M-16 rifle, then struggles to reassemble the weapon, during training at Camp San Luis Obispo. She will serve as a supply clerk in Iraq.

Kaur and her high school classmate Melanie Zapata 'want to be really good nurses,' they say in unison, and their hitches in the Guard will help pay for college.

Besides, the military is exposing the girls to people and places they might never have encountered.

'Two girls from Vallejo sleep over there,' Zapata says, pointing to two cots on the other side of the narrow barracks as if they were part of a national monument.

'Before we got here, we didn't even know there was a Vallejo.'

For many women, joining the military offers enticements beyond escaping from places like Earlimart or meeting people from Vallejo.

Unlike the private sector, men and women of equal rank in the military receive equal pay and benefits. More than 90 percent of all the job categories in the Army, Navy and Air Force now are open to women. And between 15 percent and 16 percent of women in the military are officers, the same proportion as men.

'The military is one of the best things I've ever done,' said Cynthia Shattuck, a 29-year-old Sacramento woman who joined the Navy, then the National Guard, nine years ago. 'It allows me to feel I'm serving a greater purpose than just myself.'

For many women, the tough conditions of living and working in a combat zone instilled a sense of empowerment. Sgt. Rebecca Humbard, 40, a 20-year National Guard veteran from Antioch, had always been afraid to get a driver's license because of memories of an accident from her teens. Returning home after driving forklifts and other heavy equipment in Iraq, however, she got her first California driver's license.

'My life has changed immensely,' the Antioch woman said. 'I'm more independent.'

But the military's increasing reliance on Reserve and National Guard troops for foreign operations, coupled with the vagaries of modern warfare, has given women an additional opportunity in the current conflict: the chance to be shot.

From makeup to M-16s
There was little chance of that when Elizabeth Vasquez joined the Army. Women wore uniforms with lime-green wraparound skirts, and took lessons in makeup and etiquette. Vasquez wasn't even allowed to touch a weapon during the first three years of her enlistment.

'I had a drill instructor,' the 49-year-old Vallejo woman recalls, 'who used to sing us to sleep at night.'

That was 1976. The all-volunteer Army was 3 years old. The country's military academies had just been opened to women. And less than 5 percent of the active-duty armed forces was female.

A few changes have occurred since then.

Vasquez retired last year from the California National Guard, after a tour in Iraq, where women have made up from 10 percent to 15 percent of the U.S. military personnel in the combat theater.

Over there, wraparound skirts gave way to bulky suits for protection against potential chemical weapons attacks. Etiquette lessons were abandoned in favor of learning to build toilets from 50-gallon oil drums. And weapons were plentiful, from the M-16 that was Vasquez's constant companion to the mortar rounds raining down on her camp several times a day.

'We'd have to sit in the bunkers for hours because of the mortars,' she said.

No one sang her to sleep.

Vasquez is a living embodiment of women's evolution in uniform. Although thousands of women served in earlier wars, their roles were strictly limited.

With the end of the draft in 1973, American military forces stepped up efforts to recruit women by making more career opportunities available to them.

Following the Persian Gulf War, in which nearly 41,000 women served and 16 were killed, the Clinton administration and Congress opened tens of thousands of ground support jobs in the Army and Marines to women. Women were allowed to fly combat aircraft and serve on most ships.

But women were deemed unfit for some combat roles because they lacked upper body strength, and because it was assumed their presence might create tensions or damage morale in fighting units.

Under current federal law and military regulations, women are barred from ground combat groups such as the infantry; tank, artillery and armored vehicle units; coastal patrol boats and submarines; and special operations units such as Army Rangers and Navy SEALS.



'There's no change of policy as far as I'm concerned,' President Bush said in mid-January. 'No women in combat.'

There are indications, however, that the Pentagon is less steadfast than its commander-in-chief about maintaining the status quo.

In February, the Army's 3rd Infantry Division acknowledged it has assigned women to units in Iraq that directly support combat troops by providing food, equipment maintenance and other services.

The process, called 'collocation' - literally to place side by side - is at odds with an 11-year-old Army policy that bans women from serving in front-line support groups.

'This is an incremental change that will gradually lead to a more direct deployment of women in combat,' said Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness - a nonpartisan group focused on military personnel - and a critic of what she considers an end run. 'It is a way of implementing a very bad policy, which is to weaken these units' fighting ability, in order to make some sort of political statement.'

Pentagon analysts, however, say modifying women-in-combat rules is based more on pragmatism than politics.

In a report circulated among commanders last summer, analysts said the Army lacked enough male soldiers with the right skills to fill all the openings in combat support units.

A late November briefing on the same subject was more succinct:

'The way ahead: rewrite/eliminate the Army collocation policy.'

Call it combat
As in all wars, there is official military policy, and there is reality, and sometimes there is a chasm between the two.

While think-tank directors and Pentagon analysts debate the efficacy of women in combat, women who have been to Iraq tend to laugh at the question. Of the 33 women killed so far in the combat theater, 23 died in combat situations.

'The entire country is a combat zone,' said Vasquez, adding that every convoy mission she was on took hostile fire.

'We had a gun truck on every run with a machine gunner sitting half in and half out of the top of the Humvee,' she said. 'And sometimes those gunners were women.

'When we convoyed, the first thing you did when you pulled over was get out and 'pull' a perimeter. Everybody had a section. You got out and you loaded your weapon and you kept people away.

'That may not be hand-to-hand combat, but if it isn't combat, I don't know what is.'

It certainly seemed like combat to National Guard Sgt. Brenda Monroe, 40, of Natomas, who spent a year in Iraq.

'You're not generally told as a female that you will be in that type of situation where you are in harm's way directly,' Monroe said. 'I never dreamed that I would wake up every night and have to run to a bunker and take cover because we were being attacked or under direct fire.'

Even jobs like delivering gas were fraught with peril.

'They were popping IEDs (an acronym for 'improvised explosive devices,' or homemade bombs) all the time,' said Sgt. 1st Class Elizabeth Saucedo of Fairfield, 46, who served as a platoon leader in Iraq, refueling convoys and riding in 15,000-gallon fuel tanker trucks. On one mission, the windshield of the truck she was in was shot out.

'We had intel (intelligence), so we knew how many IEDs were out there,' she said. 'And even then we had these women who would say, 'I'll go.' It taught me to have faith in their abilities.'

Shouldering the burden
It isn't blind faith, however. Saucedo makes sure women can do their part. During physical training at Camp San Luis Obispo, after her return from Iraq, several of the new women in Saucedo's unit, including one of the teens from Earlimart, fail a sit-up test.


Saucedo counsels them to work on increasing their strength so they can shoulder the 40-pound packs of gear - including bulletproof vests and chemical protection suits - that soldiers carry on overnight missions in Iraq.

'The men won't carry them for you,' she says.

Physical training is only part of the Iraq-bound soldiers' education. There is, for example, weapons training.

In a clapboard building with bars over the mud-streaked windows, 15 women take apart, clean and reassemble their M-16s. They use Q-tips and brushes, following their instructor's directions.

'I'm just scared when the gun goes off,' says Kaur, the teen from Earlimart. 'The noise, it's like, 'Whoa! Is that coming at me, or is it going to hit someone else?' '

This intricate indoor training followed eight hours spent on their bellies in 3-inch-deep mud, shooting at paper targets stapled to wooden boards.

'The longer we stay out here, the better we get,' a drill sergeant yelled.

Training weekends also offer education about personal health and hygiene, both the military version and the civilian version.

'Females should be allowed time to urinate on a regular basis, especially since they have to remove much of their gear and require more time than men,' says the Army's 'Guide to Female Soldier Readiness.'

In reality, female vets from Iraq tell the newbies, learn to pee in water bottles with the tops cut off, because the truck convoy isn't going to stop in ambush country for a woman to urinate. And shed any qualms about cleaning yourself up in front of men.

'Personal hygiene for women was very, very important over there,' says Humbard, the National Guard sergeant from Antioch, who endured two urinary tract infections in Iraq.

Combat theater medical facilities were not adequately equipped for women, Humbard said. The medical staff had no equipment to run cultures of women's vaginal and urinary tract infections. Antibiotics were simply handed out in hopes that the women's symptoms were the result of common infections.

In the end, it will likely be these kinds of experiences, rather than the training and advance warnings, that could help determine whether women opt for careers in the military.

Recruitment on the rise
Back when Elizabeth Vasquez was a new recruit, the U.S. military didn't much care if women stayed in uniform. In fact, says a Department of Defense report released last March, military women who married in the 1970s were encouraged to quit.

That, however, was then. Following the end of the Cold War, the United States began paring back its armed forces, to where it now has to rely on National Guard and reservists to wage war.

Absent a draft, the various services have stepped up their recruitment of women. At Delano High, where the career center is festooned with pro-military posters and stickers, the girls' 'eyes pop out of their heads when a recruiter talks to them,' according to counselor Connelly. 'The girls think that the military is a man's career.'

Vasquez does too. After seven years in the regular Army and seven more in the Reserve, Vasquez left the military. Her experience in Iraq was enough to convince her that because of a lingering culture of what she called 'sheer sexism,' men and women shouldn't serve in the same units.

'I think we have every right and capability to be on the front lines,' she said. 'But you need that sense of unity, and I don't think it's possible in integrated units.

'It's hard to do your job to your fullest capability when you're thought of as less than what I wanted to be - a soldier.'

Gender issues linger
Military officials acknowledge that to retain women like Vasquez and attract more women like Kaur, they will have to tackle such issues as sexual assault and harassment, the lack of exemptions from foreign deployments for women with children and the ban on women from combat roles.

For now, Kaur is ambivalent about her escape route from Earlimart. While sitting at home with her family, Kaur says she thinks she'll quit the military after she gets married.

'I need to take care of my family,' she says, 'instead of being deployed and having (my children) raised by someone else.'

But while cleaning her weapon during a training session, she decides going to war with her high school buddies will be an 'awesome' experience to have together.

'And then come back alive together,' she says. 'That would be the best thing.'

Part 2: Sexual Combat

Gina W. went to Iraq, and came back with a different kind of war story. Her battlefields were in the barracks and the mess hall. The weapons were innuendoes and threats. And the enemy? Her own boss.

'When you go there, you have to be prepared for war,' she says. 'And then you have to be worried about being raped by your own people.'

The former Army specialist is one of dozens of military women interviewed by The Bee who say they faced some kind of sexual harassment while in the combat theater in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Though publicity about sexual misconduct in the war zone has focused on rape, female soldiers said unwelcome advances, demeaning comments - and a feeling that being alone around male comrades in arms meant being unsafe - were far greater concerns.

'I think every female (soldier in Iraq) has been sexually harassed,' said Sgt. Yolanda Medina of Long Beach, who is doing her second tour there with the California National Guard's 2668th Transportation Company.

The exact number of U.S. military women who have been assaulted or harassed is probably somewhere between Medina's 'every female' and the number reported by the Department of Defense.

Defense Department numbers show that from August 2002 through October 2004, 118 cases of sexual assault on military personnel were reported in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan. But the Miles Foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps victims of military domestic violence and sexual assault, reports that it was contacted by 258 military assault victims in the combat theater during that same time span. That number rose to 307 through mid-February, according to the foundation.

A Pentagon official said the military would release more up-to-date numbers sometime this month. Yet military officials acknowledge their numbers don't reflect the true situation because many women are reluctant to report an assault. One study by the Department of Veterans Affairs found nearly 75 percent of military women who said they had been assaulted did not tell their commanding officer.

No statistics are kept on cases of sexual harassment that fall short of physical assault, and none reflect what many women interviewed by The Bee described as a bawdy combat zone environment that made them feel like second-class soldiers:

Playboy magazines on sale at the Post Exchange. Porno films purchased on the Iraqi black market and pornographic pictures scrawled on the bathroom walls. Platoon leaders handing out condoms even though sex between soldiers is illegal.

And the reality of mostly young women, vastly outnumbered and surrounded by mostly young men, far from home in a highly stressful situation.

One of the standing jokes in Iraq, returning female vets said, was that on the 10-point scale some men use to rate women, female soldiers got two extra points just for being there.

Those bonus points came with bathroom-wall taunts like the one a female soldier remembered from an Iraq camp latrine: 'All you queens will turn back into frogs once you leave Iraq.'

The sexually charged atmosphere brought continual come-ons from male soldiers, leaving women feeling unsafe even inside the military camps. Virtually every woman interviewed by The Bee said that while she was in the camps in Iraq or Kuwait, she did not walk alone at night.

A common thread in tales female soldiers bring back from Iraq concerns the disregard for military rules against fraternization among officers, noncommissioned officers and enlisted personnel.

'There were affairs going in all directions, up, down and sideways, with command staff and lower ranks,' said Elizabeth Vasquez, of Vallejo, who served with a California National Guard unit in Kuwait and Iraq. 'It's almost like the Army helped to push the sexually charged scene.'

Complaint does no good
Gina pushed back, challenging what seemed to be accepted behavior and filing a complaint against her tormentor.

The result was the end of her four-year Army career and a lingering fear that her accused would pursue her even in civilian life - a fear so intense she asked that her real name not be used.

One of about 100 women in a 500-member battalion, Gina said she began receiving unwanted attention from male colleagues almost as soon as the battalion reached Iraq.



'Most of the men who would hit on me were senior enlisted, warrant officers and officers,' she said. 'They feel they can do anything to you and nothing will happen.

'They can't go to the bar on weekends to let off steam, so they look to the female soldiers. (But) I wasn't exactly in the mood to be picked up. I was in a war zone.'

That didn't matter much to her sergeant, she said, who unleashed a steady sex-tinged bombardment. It began with comments about her appearance, then graduated to questions about which sexual positions she preferred. The comments grew increasingly lewd.

Finally, Gina said, he got physical, grabbing her and trying to kiss her.

Tired of the weeks of harassment, Gina filed her complaint. Another woman in her unit, who said she also had been harassed, joined her. But other female targets stayed quiet.

'Some people either got scared, or they were worried about their own careers,' Gina said.

The complaint was passed from the unit's Equal Employment Opportunity Office to the battalion commander - who was a friend of the sergeant's.

'He thought it was minor,' Gina said of the commander's reaction. But he did assign an officer from within the battalion to investigate.

The sergeant, meanwhile, threatened to beat up Gina and the other woman for filing the complaint. He began making crude comments about them to other soldiers and spreading gossip about how Gina and the other woman had received 'irregular' results from their pre-deployment Pap smear tests for cervical cancer.

If she had threatened the sergeant the way he threatened her, Gina said, 'I would have gone to prison.'

In the end, no charges were filed. Instead, the sergeant was passed over for promotion and received a letter of reprimand.

When her hitch was up, Gina left the Army in disgust.

'Basically, it's fair game on women soldiers, and nothing's going to happen,' she said.

'You're a piece of meat.'

No escape from abusers
Echoes of Gina's complaints about a look-the-other-way attitude by military leaders reverberate through the combat theater.

Testifying before a congressional women's caucus last summer, Army Capt. Jennifer Machmer said she was assaulted by her jeep driver in Kuwait, 17 days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

After reporting it, she told the panel, she was forced to work in the same unit as the man and was threatened with fraternization charges. Her assailant, who never was charged, eventually was promoted.

Machmer, a West Point graduate, was forced to accept an early retirement when she developed post-traumatic stress disorder.

'Every time you turn around, you're re-victimized and re-traumatized,' Machmer told the caucus.

Even cases that don't involve physical assault send shudders through female soldiers.

In one such instance, the commander of a National Guard military police company from Contra Costa County, who was stationed outside the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, was accused of snapping pictures of three women in his unit while they showered.

Caught with copies of the photos stored in his laptop computer, the commander was allowed to resign rather than face a court-martial.

Even though no one was assaulted in the shower photo case, word of it spread through the ranks. For many women, the daily hygiene routine became a potential combat patrol.

'It was really dark around the camp,' said Elizabeth Vasquez, then serving in Kuwait. 'We had to go quite a ways for our showers, and we had to be escorted all the time ... . It was upsetting, because we were supposed to be a family.'

Of course not all of the women soldiers involved in sexual activity are blameless victims. Some pursued the affairs as zealously as the men. For some, the distraction and intimacy of sex helped them ward off their fears.

'You got to the point where you didn't know whether you were going to be alive tomorrow,' Spc. Alexandra Cerda, 21, said of some female soldiers' rationale for engaging in sex.

A female soldier in Vasquez's unit was known as the 'woo hoo girl,' because that's what she would yell after having sex.

'She would have sex in the back of a Humvee, have sex standing behind the trailers,' Vasquez said. 'She had the most pleasant personality, but she loved sex.'

One female platoon leader said such encounters sometimes interfered with work. More than once, she said, she had to switch out soldiers who were due to drive in a convoy together because of a lovers' spat.

Grappling with a new reality
While consensual sex may have contributed to problems of fraternization, the problems of assault and harassment are rooted in a military culture still coming to grips with a two-gender fighting force, a culture that until recently lacked even uniform definitions for 'assault' and 'harassment,' and is still struggling to differentiate between predators and prey.

'There were so many men over there and so few women,' said Sandy Moreno, a single mother from Sacramento who served in Iraq as a psychiatric technician in one of the Army's 'stress units,' established as refuges for troubled soldiers.

'A lot of the (harassment complaints) we took with a grain of salt,' she said. 'We would ask the women, 'What do you think happened? How do you think you could have changed things?' '

Moreno said the women's complaints often concerned things like 'slaps on the butt,' or unwanted kissing.

'I'd say to them, 'Because of the situation we're in, maybe you shouldn't smile at him, maybe you should just ignore him.' One thing about the military, when you go to war, you really bond. Sometimes you make friends with the opposite sex, and sometimes there are misunderstandings.'

But Kate Summers, a sexual trauma expert and director of services at the Miles Foundation - which advocates for women who are sexually assaulted or harassed in the military - said that a female soldier's uncomfortable feelings about a male colleague's comments or actions should not be discounted or chalked up to misunderstandings.

'It's not about whether she wore her camouflage shirt one button or two buttons open too much,' Summers said. 'What's at issue is the victim may have been describing a pattern of manipulation that is going to lead to assault.

'My reaction would have been entirely different. I'd say, 'Let's talk about the other encounters you've had.' '

Aside from the questionable efficacy of avoid-eye-contact counseling, the military is wrestling with trying to weld a zero-tolerance policy about sexual harassment onto soldiers' traditional code of silence about one another's behavior - particularly while at war.

In a combat zone, said Medina, the National Guard sergeant from Long Beach, 'the rules change within the unit.' On her first tour in Iraq, Medina herself was offered money for sex by another soldier. She turned him down but never reported it.

'If you do something to discredit your company, it's on your ass,' she said.

Medina offered another reason women in the war zone were hesitant to file a harassment complaint against fellow soldiers.

'You don't know if that person will save your life out there,' she said.

Fears of coming forward were heightened, other women said, by the possibility that neither they nor their assailants would be removed from the unit.

Standard military policy has been to give commanders wide discretion in separating accused and accuser, or deciding whether charges will be filed, or even investigated.

In testimony at a congressional hearing on sexual assault in the military, Gen. George Casey Jr., the Army's vice chief of staff, acknowledged that when a female soldier files a complaint against someone in her unit, it is strictly up to the unit commander to decide if anyone should be transferred - even if the accused is the alleged victim's commander.

'We don't dictate that,' Casey said. 'We leave that up to the commander on the scene to make an evaluation.'

Critics of the military's attitudes point to problems that range from a shortage of rape examination and HIV testing kits in the war zone to encouraging women to use an injectable contraceptive called Depo-Provera so they won't menstruate during their tour.

'One woman rape victim in Afghanistan was given high doses of antibiotics after a rape and told, 'This will kill anything,' ' said Summers, of the Miles Foundation. 'It took her two weeks to get to a hospital.'

From study to action
The U.S. military's problems with sex certainly didn't start with the war in Iraq.



After the Persian Gulf War, the Army acknowledged that its male personnel had committed at least 34 sex crimes, many of them rapes of female U.S. soldiers.

Graphic testimony by female Gulf War vets before a congressional committee prompted one senator to charge that during the brief conflict, U.S. female troops 'were in greater danger of being sexually assaulted by our own troops than by the enemy.'

In 1991, Navy and Marine pilots at a convention in Las Vegas molested at least 26 women. In 1996, it was revealed that dozens of female recruits had been sexually assaulted while training at the Army Ordnance Center in Aberdeen, Md. In 2003, an investigation found that 142 female cadets at the Air Force Academy alleged they had been assaulted during the previous nine years.

In each case, Pentagon officials launched task forces and studies, and promised reforms.

'Over the past 15 years ... we have had 18 major studies on sexual assault,' said an exasperated Rep. John McHugh, D-N.Y., during a hearing last June on a Pentagon task force report on assault and harassment problems in the Iraq combat zone.

'That's more than one a year. And yet ... to put it kindly, we've got a long way to go before we have in place the kinds of programs, in terms of both prosecution and prevention and response, that are necessary.'

Stung by such criticism, the Defense Department has announced a series of initiatives in recent months.

In October, Brig. Gen. K.C. McClain, an experienced Air Force command officer and educator, was appointed to head an eight-person team called the Joint Task Force for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response.

In January, the task force announced new policies for all military branches that include more support for victims and more training for everyone in uniform, along with the Pentagon's first-ever definitions of sexual assault and harassment.

Officials acknowledge that the lack of precise definitions has led to haphazard investigations and prosecutions.

'We're off to a good start,' McClain said in announcing the policies, 'but I need to be clear ... this is not a silver bullet. There is no overnight solution, and to do this right, it is going to take time.'

McClain and other Pentagon officials acknowledge that all the policies in the world won't make much difference if commanders in the field don't implement them.

The sentiment is emphatically emphasized by military women, who say the level of sexual tension and the number of incidents within a unit depend on that unit's commander.

'It starts with the command,' said National Guard Sgt. Sharon Stallworth. 'He sets the tone.'

Capt. Torrey Hubred commands Stallworth's unit, the Sacramento-based 2668th Transportation Company, which is currently in Iraq. According to Hubred - and troops serving under him - the unit has been largely free of sexual harassment problems.

Hubred attributes it to the 'three golden rules' he lays down. The first is to treat others the way you would be treated. The second is to make decisions you wouldn't be ashamed to see in the headlines tomorrow.

'And the third,' he said, 'is ask, 'Would you do this if someone you love is watching?''

Part 3: Scarred Survivors

No one shot at Pamela Schultz. No one lobbed mortar shells in her direction, or planted mines under her vehicle during the time she was in Jordan as a master sergeant in the Air Force Reserve's 163rd Air Refueling Wing.

The nearest she came to death, in fact, was when she helped load planes with the caskets of American and coalition forces killed in Iraq.

But something in Schultz was deeply damaged anyway.

'It affected me, it changed me,' she says from an easy chair in her Pocket-area home, where the rustling of the two Chihuahuas in her lap contrasts with the din of late-night warning sirens still echoing in her mind.

'It's not just that you were there and you could die, it's the way you lived,' she says. 'My body ain't broke.

'It's my mind and heart.'

There's nothing new about what's wrong with Pamela Schultz, 48, whose friends call her 'P.K.' During the American Civil War, it was 'Da Costa's syndrome,' named after a doctor who wrote about the symptoms. During World War I, it was 'shell shock,' and in World War II 'battle fatigue.'

Even its current name, 'post-traumatic stress disorder' (PTSD), dates back 25 years, when psychiatrists began using the term to describe the malady among Vietnam War vets.

Whatever it's called, PTSD is an illness with symptoms that range from headaches and insomnia to severe paranoia and deep depression - a group of debilities that often trigger problems with drugs and alcohol. Although it can affect anyone who experiences trauma, PTSD is most prevalent among military personnel who have been in combat situations.

And medical experts fear that as U.S. troops return from the war, it could prove to be far more prevalent among female vets than among their male counterparts.

Women like Schultz, whose mood swings are so sudden and severe she must take breaks from her office job to retreat to a restroom and 'just breathe.'

Or Linda Wesner, 45, a California National Guard soldier from Sacramento, who came under fire several times as a heavy equipment truck driver in Iraq. Shortly after returning home, Wesner was in uniform at a pancake house when she was hugged from behind by a patriotic elderly woman.

Instinctively, Wesner flipped the woman to the floor.

Or California National Guard Sgt. Yolanda Medina, 30, of Long Beach, who decided to postpone facing her PTSD symptoms - drinking more, eating and sleeping less, snapping angrily at life's slight irritations - by returning for a second tour in Iraq.

'Everybody has it when they come back,' Medina says during a break in training at Fort Lewis, Wash., a few days before leaving for another year in the war zone.

The hardest thing about adjusting to life after Iraq?

'Being a person,' she replies.

Women at greater risk
The Department of Veterans Affairs medical division estimates it currently treats about 87,000 vets with PTSD, at an annual cost of $250 million. Many health care officials expect that number to more than double in coming years as troops return from Iraq.


PTSD

A study released last July by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research found that about 17 percent of vets already home from those countries reported some mental health problems, twice the rate of those who returned from the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

And studies done after the Gulf War found that female troops were twice as likely as male troops to develop PTSD, reflecting the 2-to-1 ratio of female-to-male PTSD sufferers in the general U.S. population.

Other studies have shown that the closer troops are to danger or distasteful assignments such as handling bodies, the more likely they are to have PTSD symptoms. That augurs ill for women in the military today, since more of them are put in harm's way than ever before.

'This is the first war where we have women who are truly in combat roles,' said Dr. Patricia Resick, a psychologist who directs the VA's Women's Health Sciences Division in Boston. ' ... (That) could be very significant' in influencing the number of women vets with PTSD.

Clinicians who treat women suffering from military-related PTSD say that their self-image can be an obstacle to receiving treatment. After serving in the military, many women no longer view themselves as veterans, the clinicians report; therefore they don't connect their symptoms to their military trauma.

Surveys by the Department of Veterans Affairs have found that women vets tend to feel the definition of 'veteran' applies only to males who had combat duty. They often will check 'no' on a questionnaire when asked if they are a vet, but 'yes' when asked if they have served in the military. One VA study found 57 percent of the women interviewed did not know they were eligible for VA programs.

Yet many researchers believe female troops actually have greater need for PTSD treatment programs for reasons rooted in both environment and physiology.

Physiology may play a role
Anyone who has been sexually assaulted before entering the military, then suffers more trauma, is at greater risk of developing PTSD. And women are more likely than men to have been sexually assaulted at some point in their lives.

A woman's chances of developing PTSD are even greater if she is assaulted or physically threatened while she's in the service.

'The military can be seen as a way to get away from a bad environment,' said Dr. Paula Schnurr, deputy executive director of the VA's National Center for PTSD in Vermont. 'The idea of trying to go to a place that is safe and structured, and then finding in fact that it is not ... It really makes things worse.'

P.K. Schultz, for example, vividly recalls standing in a chow line in Jordan and asking a drunken soldier of lesser rank to watch his language. When the soldier raised a fist to punch Schultz, an MP intervened. The next day, Schultz says, a colonel sharply questioned her version of events.

'You'd have thought I did something wrong,' she said.

Indications that physiological factors also play a role in female troops being more susceptible to PTSD come from the VA's Clinical Neurosciences Division in West Haven, Conn. Researchers there have found female brains may be less efficient than male brains at producing the neurosteroids that help human beings cope with stress.

Other studies have shown women deplete serotonin, a substance that helps combat depression, more quickly than men and regenerate it more slowly. And menstrual cycles may also play a role in making women more vulnerable in stressful situations.

All of which is of only passing interest to female vets like Schultz, whose post-service nadir came when her sister found her sitting in the dark in her Pocket-area home, unkempt, with no food in her cupboards or refrigerator.

Schultz just wants to feel better.

'You feel no worth. No motivation. No hope,' she says. 'It takes everything I have to try to make my lunch to go to work.'

A dive into despair
Like many young people from families of modest means, Schultz left her hometown of Petaluma at age 19 and joined the Army to get financial aid for college.

She stayed just eight months. But she felt like a quitter, and military life appealed to her. Eventually she signed up for the Air National Guard, later switching to the Air Force Reserve, which became her full-time career.

Schultz became the first woman in California certified to load weapons onto F-4 Phantom jets, and was honored by her unit as Noncommissioned Officer of the Year. She trained as a medic, and earned an associate of arts degree.

'I liked the continuity,' Schultz said. 'The uniformity. The structure.'

But more than 15 years of service in the Reserve didn't prepare Schultz for the reality of life in the Jordanian tent city of 6,000 people that served as a supply base for units in Iraq.

Eight-hour workdays became 15-hour workdays, loading and unloading planes, punctuated with sessions serving as a den mother for some of her tent mates, most of them much younger than she.

'They'd never been away from home,' she recalled. 'Some were still living with mom and dad and then they were going off to war. I saw young girls just petrified. Other girls just lived to get drunk and get laid.'

A born-again Christian, Schultz was appalled by what seemed to her the reincarnation of Sodom and Gomorrah:

Tents that reeked of alcohol, smoke and vomit. Couples standing cots on their sides to form an area for sex. Illegal affairs involving enlisted personnel, noncommissioned officers and officers.

Coupled with the assault on her sense of morality were the conversations with troops taking a break from the fighting in Iraq.

'They'd describe the smells, the sounds, the cries, the screams,' she said, 'and then they'd want to go back and just kill.'

Schultz found herself in a continual state of fear and despair, carrying her chemical attack protective gear everywhere and dreading the next blast from the warning sirens and the loudspeaker warnings to seek shelter.

'I felt dark. I felt alone. I was scared.'

In 2003, shortly after her unit returned to the States, Schultz retired from the Reserve. She sat through a mandatory, but brief, group lecture about adjusting to life at home. But unlike active duty military personnel who return to bases and are surrounded by colleagues and commanders who might notice PTSD symptoms, Schultz was on her own.

She sold her house in Southern California and moved to Sacramento to live closer to her family, and start over.

But Schultz couldn't shake her memories of Jordan. She couldn't focus enough to ride her beloved Harley-Davidson 'hog.' She went days without showering and rarely went outside. She couldn't work, and began drawing on state disability benefits, which made her feel 'like a whore on Main Street.'

It was a long fall from her days as a can-do sergeant.

'Everybody knew I was G.I. Jane,' she said. 'They knew my awards, my history.'

Schultz hit bottom the day last summer that her sister found her despondent, sitting alone in the dark, and took her to a local VA outpatient center. Workers there referred her to the VA medical facility at Mather Field, and followed her there to make sure she went.

After weeks of outpatient counseling, Schultz developed some tools to deal with her PTSD, and got a job at an in-home health care service - for half her salary as a full-time reservist. After a few months at her new job, Schultz fell behind on the rent on her Pocket home and was forced to move to a much smaller duplex near Country Club Plaza.

By her own account, Schultz was barely holding it together. Small annoyances by co-workers seemed almost intolerable. Her performance review said she lacked communication skills.

'To say that I can't communicate, that's been like my strongest gift all my life,' she said as she read over the review. 'It's like a slap in the face.

'I'm feeling vulnerable,' she said. 'I'm feeling exposed. I'm feeling frightened.'

Mobilizing to treat PTSD
By many estimates, the VA mental health care system already is grossly underfunded. The American Psychiatric Association, for example, estimated last October that while the number of VA patients with severe PTSD increased 42 percent from 1996 to 2001, VA spending on PTSD increased only 22 percent. The APA said it would take an additional $500 million a year for the next four years just to close the gap between available resources and mental health program needs.

While it copes with a crush of demands for service, the VA also is trying to figure out how best to deal with a relatively new kind of patient: female combat vets.

At the VA's PTSD center in White River Junction, Vt., researchers are completing a $5 million study of 384 female vets with PTSD. The study, the first VA cooperative research effort to focus on women, is testing two different kinds of psychotherapy treatments to determine which is more effective.

'We don't have expert therapists on this,' said Dr. Schnurr, the study's co-director, 'so we have been training therapists as we go. If this is found to be effective, it will give us more confidence that the treatment will work in large health care systems.'

While the new study is based on one-on-one therapy, a program at the VA's Women's Trauma Recovery Program in Menlo Park relies on group sessions.

The program, which started in 1992, has recently broadened its treatment to include women who have been sexually assaulted in the Iraq combat zone. It focuses on practical classes that range from managing personal finances to improving interpersonal and communications skills.

'One of the first and most important things that happens is they come to realize they are understood,' said Dr. Darrah Westrup, a clinical psychologist and director of the Women's Mental Health Center, where the 60-day, 10-bed program is located.

But programs like this are likely to be inundated over the next few years.

Despite a recommendation in 1990 that each of the VA's 206 medical centers have a PTSD clinical team of psychologists and psychiatrists, fewer than half currently do. Last summer, the VA did hire 56 Iraq War veterans to serve as mental health counselors back home to other Iraq vets.

One of the new counselors works at the VA's outpatient counseling center on Howe Avenue, where requests for help are up 30 percent since the war in Iraq began.

Mike Miracle, a counselor who's worked at the center since 1980, said he's never treated as many patients a month as he does now. Because of the crush, patients can't be seen as often as they might need to be.

'Fifteen years ago I would see a vet every week,' said Miracle. 'That doesn't exist anymore. The only people I see once a week now are crisis cases.'

ecovery can be elusive
P.K. Schultz had moved out of crisis mode and was seeing her VA counselor monthly. Recently, though, she went back to once-a-week visits.

Her life is unraveling again.

She sold her truck back to the dealer because she couldn't afford the payments. And she's moving again - for the fourth time in less than two years.

The only thing that seems to endure is the depression and anxiety.

'I'm just taking it one day at a time,' she said.

Part 4: Fractured Families

For weeks after her mother left for Iraq late last year, Shaymyia Stallworth didn't sleep in her own bed. Instead, the doe-eyed 5-year-old curled up in a reclining chair in her grandmother's Del Paso Heights living room, clutching a photograph.

'She sits in that chair and holds her mother's picture,' said Joyce Smith, Shaymyia's grandmother.

Shaymyia didn't want a bedtime story either.

Instead, she asked her grandmother to turn the chair toward the front door, just in case her mother should walk through it.

That's not likely to happen anytime soon. Shaymyia's mother, California National Guard Sgt. Sharon Stallworth, 36, could be in Iraq for as long as 18 months.

That's an eternity to the single mother's six children who are living with their grandparents while Mom is at war.

'I tell the kids - 'We've just got to tough it out together,' ' Smith said. ' 'I know it's hard for you, but we've got to do it.' '

Tens of thousands of children across the nation are toughing it out while one - or sometimes both - parents are serving in Iraq. Department of Defense statistics show that 42.5 percent of all U.S. military personnel, including National Guard and Reserve members, have children, and a third of those children are age 5 or younger.

Moreover, this is America's first war where a significant number of mothers in uniform have been deployed for prolonged periods. While female soldiers are less likely to be married than their male counterparts, those who are married are more likely to have children.

And women in the military are twice as likely as men to be single parents.

Critics of the practice of using mothers to help wage wars, particularly conservative groups normally aligned with the Bush administration, argue that it borders on barbarism.

'It's wrong, it's immoral, it's not what any decent and moral society does,' said Allen Carlson, a distinguished fellow for family policy studies for the Family Research Council, a conservative advocacy group on social issues.

'You protect mothers, that's what we have an army for. You don't put them on the front lines.'

For many women, however, the war in Iraq doesn't boil down to a simple, or simplistic, moral issue. Instead, it's part of the paradox of military life.

The military has provided Sharon Stallworth with a living wage and a promising career path - both hard to find when you have six kids and no college degree.

Those factors make the military particularly attractive to African American women like Stallworth. While African American women make up about 12.7 percent of the U.S. female population, they represent 34 percent of the military's female enlisted personnel.

'I think for many black women, the military represents one of the best opportunities to get security for their families,' said Brevet Gen. (Ret.) Rosetta Burke, who spent 35 years in the Army Reserve and National Guard, and is president of the National Association of Black Military Women. 'Not only a paycheck, but educational opportunities, and medical care ... things that seem out of reach any other way.'

But the stability of Stallworth's full-time job with the National Guard also came with the potential for great instability. She knew she could be called up for a lengthy deployment when she signed up 10 years ago, but it seemed unlikely.

The Korean War had been the last major call-up of reservists where soldiers served more than a few months. Relatively few reservists and National Guard troops served in Vietnam. And actual fighting during the 1991 Persian Gulf War lasted less than six weeks.

Still, Stallworth's family begged her not to join up. She dismissed their fears: 'We do floods and fires,' she told her mom.

For years, her duties were even more mundane than that. Stallworth worked for the Guard full time for most of her career, doing administrative work at the 2668th Transportation Company's armory on Meadowview Road in south Sacramento. The job was like many other civilian administrative positions, with regular hours save for the monthly weekend warrior sessions and two summer weeks away for additional drills.

It also provided a solid income for a woman raising her children without a spouse. ('He cheated. He's gone,' are the only words Stallworth offers about the breakup.)

But the family's stability began to crumble last fall when Stallworth's unit received new orders.

Mom was going to Iraq.

No special treatment

Following the Gulf War, which was the country's first major post-draft military conflict, then-President George H.W. Bush appointed a commission to study the issue of deploying parents, especially mothers, to war zones. The panel recommended that single parents with preschool-age children not be allowed to deploy in times of armed conflict, and that in two-soldier families, only one of the parents be allowed to go overseas.

The administration successfully opposed those recommendations. In a letter to congressional leaders, then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell said that barring single parents, or one parent in a military couple, from war zones would 'weaken our combat capability by removing key personnel.'

'It's important for us to remember that what we are asked to do here in the Department of Defense is to defend the nation,' Cheney said in 1992. 'The only reason we exist is to be prepared to fight and win wars.

'We're not a social welfare agency.'

Since then, the military's growing dependence on women has further cemented the Pentagon's policy of no special consideration for mothers.

Military parents are required to have plans approved by their unit commanders for the care of their children if they are assigned duties that prevent them from doing the job themselves.

The plans are supposed to include designating legal authority to someone to care for the children and make medical, educational and other decisions, as well as financial arrangements, for them.

In Stallworth's case, her mother holds legal authority over the soldier's offspring. Should that arrangement fall apart, Stallworth has designated her siblings to step in. If the siblings can't handle the kids, they'll go to Stallworth's grandmother back East. That's plan C.

In some cases, the military will offer a hardship exemption should a tour of duty pose an undue burden on a soldier's family. Exemptions usually are granted when a child or caretaker is ill, or becomes ill while the soldier is away.

Stallworth said she did not even apply for a hardship exemption, figuring she would not be eligible.

The day of reckoning

It is late November, the day before Stallworth will have to say goodbye to her children. The family is sitting in Grandma's living room. Some of the children, dressed neatly, sit quietly side by side on the couch.

Shaymyia sits on her mother's lap, twirling Stallworth's long, thin braids. She doesn't smile. She doesn't talk either, as Mom describes the seemingly endless discussions she has had with her kids lately about her military career, discussions tinged with pain and guilt.

'They don't want me in the military anymore. They say - 'Quit. Quit your job.' But I can't,' says Stallworth, who plans to re-enlist when her term is up in 2007.

Speaking quickly in a strong voice, she tries to explain her love for her military career by comparing it to their love for playing sports.

'I wouldn't ask them to quit basketball,' she says. 'So they shouldn't ask me to quit the military.'

The children have their own perspective. They rattle off the major life events their mom will miss during her tour in Iraq: an entire basketball season for four out of the six kids; two graduations - one for a sixth-grader, the other for an eighth-grader; Christmas; at least six birthdays.

And the kids blame themselves for driving her away.

'After you left I felt guilty for all of the times I was bad,' says daughter Nikeal, 14, describing how she felt when her mother was in pre-deployment training at Fort Lewis, Wash.

'If you hadn't of had us, you wouldn't be in the Army,' Nikeal adds, implying that her mother wouldn't have joined the military if she didn't have to support so many kids.

'No,' Stallworth replies firmly. 'I wanted to do it since I was in high school.'

When asked whether it's harder to have a mom go off to war than have a dad go off to war, Willie, 11, quickly offers an answer.

'A mom keeps the house up and a dad don't care,' he said. The other children remain silent.

'It's hard,' Willie said later. 'When my mom is here I just do better. I just feel more comfortable. I feel safe.'

The next day, while Shaymyia lies disconsolately on the couch, Stallworth bundles up the other children for school. She is leaving this morning for Fort Lewis. From there she will go to Kuwait, and then to Iraq, where she will be an '88 Mike' - military jargon for truck driver.

Stallworth has rented a car to take the kids to their new schools, where they transferred when they moved in with Grandma. But everyone is overwhelmed with emotion when they arrive at the first campus, so much so that they can't go in. Stallworth takes them back to Grandma's house.

She leaves them, sobbing.

Single mothers feel the heat

Critics of the Pentagon's policy on parent deployment contend that children, particularly preschoolers, suffer more when it's Mom, rather than Dad, who is sent off to war.

Social scientists say there is only skimpy empirical evidence to support that contention so far, since this is the first prolonged conflict where large numbers of mothers are being deployed to the combat theater.

'I think that whether there is a difference is going to depend on how the child-care duties are divided when both parents are home,' said Shelly MacDermid, director of the Military Family Research Institute at Purdue University. 'If Mom did the cooking and most of the child-related things, then the day-to-day lives have the potential to change a lot more.'



But MacDermid and other researchers acknowledge there are other issues at work when the mom involved is a single parent, particularly because children sometimes form stronger emotional bonds when they live with only one parent.

For Air Force Tech Sgt. Karen Foster, that issue takes the form of her youngest daughter, Megan. Foster, who joined the military in 1987, left for Iraq in late January. 'She doesn't like to be too far away from me,' Foster says of her 12-year-old during a pre-deployment interview at the family's home in Davis.

Asked about her mom's looming departure, Megan says four words: 'I wasn't expecting it.' Then she breaks down in tears.

While Foster views her separation from her two daughters as part of the job, other moms say that price has proved too high.

For Rebecca Humbard, the final straw, after 20 years in the National Guard, came when one of her two teenage sons nearly dropped out of high school while she was in Iraq.

'I'm getting out,' the Antioch woman said during a cigarette break from post-Iraq training at Camp San Luis Obispo. 'I can't leave my kids again.'

The spouses and children left behind when Mom is off to war have their own war stories to tell. They tell tales of juggling basketball, soccer, taekwando and doctor's appointments with only one adult available to drive - usually an adult working full time.

Teenagers tell tales of nearly flunking out of school because their mother wasn't around to nag them to do their homework.

Dads talk of scurrying across the room to shut off the television to spare the children from yet another bombing in Iraq.

And they tell stories of trying to grapple with a young child's depression, when the child has no words for his pain or his fear.

A mother's love

Sharon Stallworth has plenty of words to express her pain and fear. But a few days before she leaves for Kuwait, then Iraq, she's not interested in using them.

Sitting on her bunk in the women's barracks at Fort Lewis, she talks instead about how she spoils her children. As evidence, she takes two stuffed bears out of a box.

The bears, for her two youngest, are dressed in military uniforms. If you squeeze their paws, a tape-recorded message of Stallworth's voice plays.

'It's Mommy Boo,' the bear says. 'When you go to sleep at night and when you wake up, Sharvy and Nikeal will come count the days for you until Mommy will be back.

'I love you. Good night.'

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Renée C. Byer

Renée C. Byer born in Yonkers, New York. ZUMA Press Contract Photo-Journalist. Senior photojournalist at The Sacramento Bee since 2003. Worked on dozens of Reportages for ZUMA Press's award winning online magazine zReportage.com and been featured in DOUBletruck Magazine. Byer’s ability to produce photographs with profound emotional resonance and sensitivity earned her the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for 'A Mother's Journey' as well as honored as a 2013 Pulitzer finalist. Renée work is published in books, magazines, newspapers, and on websites worldwide.:204