The voices of women participating in war and combat have been largely absent in popular culture and historical documents of war due to women’s restriction from official combat status. Yet, women have played (and continue to play) a significant role in war, largely as a result of the increasingly blurred boundaries between combat and combat support. Although there has been extensive public interest in men’s experiences of war, demonstrated by the myriad published biographies and memoirs of men’s experiences in the Vietnam War and numerous memoirs already emerging from male Iraqi War veterans, relatively little is known about women’s war experiences.
                                                          
Dr. Weber's research project serves to fill this gap by conducting in-depth interviews with women from North Dakota who have served in war and combat in various capacities.  She will focus on women who have served in recent theaters of war, including Vietnam, Bosnia, and Iraq. In addition, she plans on supplementing the interviews with an analysis of published memoirs of nurses serving in the Vietnam War and available oral histories of women’s war experiences.  Ultimately, this project will tell the story of the dangers and hardships women experienced in war and the challenges they had with reintegrating into home and civilian life.

About Christina Weber