speakers on with good reason. laura s project is when janie comes marching home. she has a new book out with the photos from that project. it was a photography and aural history project and i got to work with laura on editing some of the audio for the aural history interviews which she did which appeared in the virginia quarterly review which is here in charlottesville. laura browder teaches at virginia commonwealth university. she s the author of her best shot: women and guns in america and she s the author of ethnic characters. she s also working on a film based on one of the real life characters from that book. and it s going to be absolutely fascinating. our other speaker is karen dixon. she s the author of officer, nurse, woman, the army nurse corps in the vietnam war. she s a professor of history at bridge water college here in virginia and she s continuing to explore this topic through time now working on a project about women who entertain soldiers throughout the last
with very few preconceptions but as i found out very early on i had lots of preconceptions. the first one being since these wars are so unpopular and these combat films are so dangerous with all of the i e ds and mortar attacks that go on, i thought women would be reluctant to go to iraq and afghanistan. the first interview i had that disabuse me of this idea was a colonel in the marines, one of 50 female colonels who told me serving as a public affairs officer for the second battle of volusia was the high point of her life apart from or giving birth to her two children and i thought she is a public affairs officer. of course she will say that but then i heard this from more and more women including lot of women who volunteered to go and who volunteered to go to repeat tours of duty. .. one woman i spoke to, jocelyn parada was a marine sergeant who had been very remote chance to go to iraq and had been ducking out for deployment she said because she had a 1-year-old at home a