I went to fight, because I thought I could change the world.

Perhaps I was young and naive and did not think about the consequences, but I was going to fight. 

My family wondered what made me want to do this.  I was a young woman who seemingly had everything going for her, but that was exactly why I had to enlist.  I had everything I needed so many did not. 

I knew that eventually my tour of duty would take me to Afghanistan where I would likely be met with opposition.  American soldiers were not always respected, although we were trying to help some did not see it that way.  We were murders in their eyes, but I did not know how far this hatred ran, until I got there.  In so many ways the oppression was real, women were mere property.  Women soldiers were looked at like Satan themselves.

I was an enemy in their eyes, and one day while on duty I found out just what an enemy.  I was ambushed and targeted, the only woman in my division, I was shot.  My crime, being a women in uniform.  I thought for sure I was dead, and I was left to die, until some of the men in my unit, found me shot, paralyzed, certain I was half dead.  I was shipped out after I was stabalized and transferred to a hospital in Germany until I was stable enough to go to Walter Reed, where I was cared for, for months.

Coming to terms with the fact that I could no longer walk was hard, but no harder than coming to terms with the fact that I was targetted by men who thought so little of women that they felt they had every right to just kill them.  I was a woman, and I was a Christian so I was an enemy in their eyes.

To Be Continued