"We felt we couldn't show weakness; we couldn't complain; we didn't want to talk about how hot it was or how much we missed home. When you come back from a patrol, all of the guys drop their gear. They complain about how exhausted they are; they complain about how much that patrol sucked. Of course, that was kind of our moment—"It wasn't that bad"—even though inside we're probably wanting to die . . . A male soldier told me, "You can't fireman-carry me with a full combat load"—meaning I have my Kevlar on, my flak jacket, my weapon, and my gear. He was probably 190 to 200 pounds; your gear adds another fifty to eighty pounds. I picked him up and walked across the compound, which was probably fifty meters, and came back, and he was like, "But still—would you be able to do that with your adrenaline going?" . . . That night I was the gunner, because we were short a soldier. Our convoy was about halfway to our destination when we hit a spot in the road where we have to really slow down. I have the night-vision goggle on one eye, and all of a sudden I can hear these loud snaps right by my head. I dropped down, and I was like, "Shit. Here we go." I started returning fire with my smaller weapons, and then I could see, far away in the brush, muzzle flashes. So I started unloading the .50-cal, and I just let it rock. I can't even describe that rush. Round for round, you're shooting back and forth. It was insane. Then the muzzle flashes stopped. The thing about that story is, nobody believed me. Some of the senior leadership thought I made it up just so I could shoot the gun." . . . It seemed as if a lot of these guys had really major misconceptions about female anatomy. They were like, "What about the hygiene issue?" I'm like, "What do you mean?" And they're like, "You know." I'm like, "No, I don't know." And they would never actually be willing to say, "Won't you get an infection in your vagina?" They were terrified of it. They were like, "But...but...but...periods!" We don't die without showers . . . I got off the plane, and this guy walks up to me and says, "Fuck, it's a female. We don't have females in this unit." The drive to Kosovo took three hours. Somewhere along the way he looks at me and he goes, "Females are either psychos, whores, or dykes. Which one are you?" . . . Every time I'd ever experienced any type of sexual harassment, the response from guys was always "How you going to ruin some man's career just because you can't take it?" Like, that literal phrase. They would say, "This is a man's army; how did you expect to be treated?" The subtle implication was that a man's career was always more important than a woman's . . . Finally we take off, at which point we see one of the fuel lines has ruptured. We need to land or we're going to crash. It's a hard landing. We start taking heavier fire on my side of the aircraft. One of the three patients on board, a female, is hysterical, and my gunner says to me, "This is why they shouldn't let women on those kinds of convoys." I look at him. I'm armed, I'm covered in blood, and I'm like, "Are you fucking kidding me?"