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A reporter accompanies the 101st Airborne during the Iraq War and turns the experience into a book.
My book was conceived in the days leading up to Christmas 2002 at Fort Benning, the vast Army installation in west central Georgia, just across the Chattahoochee River from Alabama. U.S. military officials consider Benning the world's premier training ground for infantrymen, but there I was, with 59 other journalists, huffing and puffing my way through "media boot camp," a Pentagon program designed to make reporters, photographers and broadcasters combat-ready.
There were 10 women in my class of 60, and we had what was regarded as a mark of distinction or pain in the rear: a documentary crew representing an Academy Award-winning documentarian was trailing our every move.
It puzzled me that they found women correspondents training for war so out of the ordinary; I didn't think I was special. I'd been to some hot spots around the world, but so had many people in the class. The focus on the women trainees made me feel sorry for the men in the class, since they were being slighted, just as all of us were being pushed and prodded.
But after enduring the camera, the lights, and the microphone for five days, I had one overarching thought: If this is so interesting, I'll tell my own story. It's estimated that only roughly one in 10 of the 700-plus embedded journalists were women.
During the war in Iraq, I was assigned to the Army's 101st Airborne Division, writing stories and shooting photographs for my paper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and phoning my reports to its affiliated television and radio stations. After 45 days in the field, I returned home and launched into a book, the provisionally titled "Sister in the Band of Brothers: Bringing the War in Iraq Home to America." As this was the first war to feature a large number of embedded journalists as well as popular use of the Internet, my stories were read coast to coast.
When I left for the war late in February, I had no idea whether I'd see any action-or so much bang-bang that I wouldn't make it home alive as, sorrowfully, was the fate of 17 of our professional...