 "Photo: Rebecca Davis")
It wasn't easy for Margarita Jimenez's mother to let her enlist in the military.
Jimenez, an Arab language and literature senior, was the first female in her family to enlist when she began serving in the Air Force in 1995.
"She was so happy when my brother went into the Navy. She was so proud of her son. But when her daughter said something, it was difficult for her," Jimenez said. "I was so grateful for all opportunities, so I wanted to serve my country to give back."
Women make up 15 percent of the U.S. armed forces, said Laura Browder, associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Browder, author of "Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America," argues that women must have the same obligations on the battlefield as men as a part of citizenship. In the U.S., since Revolutionary War times, citizenship has been linked to the ability to serve in battle, she said.
"Women soldiers can sometimes take on jobs that male soldiers cannot. Right now, in Iraq, American women soldiers are being deployed in some ways that their male counterparts cannot be," Browder said.
She said that wars never involve only men, and they have a profound effect on civilian populations and on women and children in particular.
Jimenez, who is co-director for Student Veterans Affairs Agency and co-founder of Student's Veterans Association, started her service as an F-16 avionics technician in Arizona in 1995 and fulfilled her military commitment in 2003 at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina.
During her seven-and-a-half years of service, she experienced different cultures from a variety of countries including Korea, Japan, Italy, Germany and Turkey. "I was everywhere. It opened up my eyes," Jimenez said.
Her experience in the Middle East affected her greatly and opened a new chapter in her life, Jimenez said.
"I was in Kuwait, but when people spoke to me, I couldn't respond," she said
She said she wanted to learn Arabic to communicate with people. "They were so warm, they wanted to be my friends and they wanted to show their culture."
When she enrolled in school after leaving the military, the hardest part for her was staying in one place.
"As an F-16 technician, I had to travel a lot. But, all of a sudden, I am sitting still, and I have school. I am not packing up to go anywhere," she said.
Starr-Renee Corbin, a women's and gender studies graduate student, served as a communications officer in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Corbin said the only difficulty in coming to the University so soon after she had returned was dealing with students and even faculty who felt the need to share with her their personal views on the war.
"More often than not, their views were poorly educated and misdirected, and I didn't feel comfortable sharing my experience with them as a result," Corbin said.
She said student complacency also made her experience difficult, because many ignore national and global issues, saying they don't have time for them or those issues don't impact them.
"Dealing with those stresses was hard, because I had experienced things in a five-year time frame that many people never experience in their lifetime," she said.
Corbin said that her experience in Iraq inhibits her from sympathizing with many of her peers over their daily problems. "I have such a greater appreciation for life ever since coming home from Iraq, what stresses out the typical college student is inconsequential to me," she said.
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