Kayla Williams on Misconceptions of Military Service

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Transcript:

June 10, 2019

MARK HANNAH: What does that mean? Combat exclusion policy?

KAYLA WILLIAMS: When I was in the military, women were still not allowed to serve in direct ground combat arms jobs or units. And we've now had—

HANNAH: Why did that policy even exist in the first place?

WILLIAMS: Because sexism.

***

HANNAH: My name is Mark Hannah, and I'm your host for None of the Above, a podcast from the Eurasia Group Foundation. I'm talking today with Kayla Williams about the misconceptions and misperceptions of the U.S. military. She's the director of the Military Veterans and Society Program at the Center for New American Security. She's the author of a phenomenal book, Plenty of Time When We Get Home: Love and Recovery in the Aftermath of War. She joined the military in 2000 to challenge herself, get some money for grad school, and get paid to learn a new language. She learned Arabic and went to Iraq and is intimately familiar with the issues that veterans who have returned from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are facing. Kayla, thanks for joining None of the Above.

WILLIAMS: Thanks for having me.

HANNAH: You finished up college, if I understand correctly, when you were twenty years old, and then you went straight into the military.

WILLIAMS: Not straight into the Army. I do everything a little bit backwards, I guess. So, yes, I wanted to go to graduate school but had no idea how I was going to pay for it. I had also grown up in a family of very modest means. We'd been on food stamps a few times when I was a kid. I felt like I owed something to the society that had invested in me when I was a child. Military service presented itself as an option that would scratch all of those itches at once. It would really take me outside of my comfort zone, provide me with access to the G.I. Bill so I could continue my education, and they were also willing to pay me to learn a foreign language instead of me having to pay somebody else to teach me one. So all these motivations coalesced, and I joined the Army in 2000.

HANNAH: And you said it wasn't going to be easy. You wanted to challenge yourself. I don't think you realized how much you were going to challenge yourself, because like you said, it was 2000. This was before 9/11, which was obviously 2001. And you were just kind of coincidentally learning Arabic. This is a language you chose just by chance.

WILLIAMS: I did not choose. It was Needs of the Army, a random computer-generated number, that I ended up in Arabic as opposed to Korean or Chinese. So on 9/11, my entire class knew our military careers were going to be very different than we might have otherwise expected.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: Tell us more about what it was like to be a soldier putting your life on the line for a war that essentially, as you admit in your book, you had some doubts about.

WILLIAMS: When I went to war, I understood very clearly that I had sworn an oath to the Constitution and to obey lawful orders and that my personal beliefs about whether or not the war in Iraq was justified did not make sense as long as it was lawful and lawfully elected officials had approved this. And so off we went. To me, the reasons we were given seemed disingenuous at best. Weapons of mass destruction were mentioned, and yet we ignored North Korea. Genocide was mentioned against the Kurds, but we had not intervened in, say, Rwanda. So it just didn't necessarily seem like there was adequate justification to back what we were doing. However, that's not your decision to make as a low-level soldier.

HANNAH: And you're talking about an inconsistency with the application of the logic of war that the United States might deploy. What effect do you think that has, if any, on recruiting?

WILLIAMS: I don't fully know. We do see surges in enlistment in the aftermath of major events. There was a surge in enlistments right after 9/11. On the other hand, when the economy is bad, more people are willing to consider military service than when jobs are plentiful and high paying. The military is a risky job. And so it's not one that everybody is willing to consider. I think another really important consideration today is that only one in four young people is even eligible to access the military. A lot of folks I encounter still operate under this misconception that we're in this era of, “join the Army, or go to jail,” or that the military is recruiting from among the poorest people. That we’re exploiting those who grow up in poverty. The reality is that because of societal trends, those who are in the poorest quintile in the United States are more likely to be disqualified due to obesity, lack of a high school diploma, or having a criminal record. So it's really the middle three quintiles that the military is drawing from. The richest quintile enlists at very low rates as well.

HANNAH: Unless they want to run for office, I suppose. But can you just talk to me a little bit about some of the other misconceptions, specifically about veterans themselves, that you think are particularly pernicious?

WILLIAMS: We see a lot of media coverage about the challenges that some veterans face—unemployment, homelessness, suicides—and those are all very real challenges. But when we think about how frequent they are, the amount of media coverage doesn't necessarily align fully with the magnitude of the challenges. And for some, military service is actively beneficial. So many members of ethnic minorities who are veterans have lower unemployment rates than their peers who are not veterans.

HANNAH: So basically veterans are employed at the same rate as non-veterans. And if you come from a racial group or an ethnic group—if you're Black, for example, or Hispanic or Latino—and you join the military, it's good for your career prospects.

WILLIAMS: That's what the data shows. And for women veterans, while we do not earn as much as our male veteran counterparts, we out-earn civilian women by a fairly significant amount. We're less likely to live in poverty. We're much more likely to have college degrees. So in many measures, we're actually thriving. There's other research that indicates veterans volunteer at higher rates than non-veterans, that we vote at higher rates than non-veterans, that we're more likely to be engaged in various civic associations and really participate in our communities at quite high levels. And all of these are parts of the overall veteran experience that I think are really important to not lose track of. So when we talk about the challenges a minority of veterans are facing, we understand that in the broader context and don't get bogged down in a misconception that all veterans are struggling.

HANNAH: Tell us a little bit more, for people who have never served in combat, what is it like to transition between military service to reentering society and reentering civilian life? Are there any kind of universal experiences former service members share?

WILLIAMS: When I first got back from the war, I was really hyper vigilant to potential threats. And when you think about what helps keep you alive in a combat zone, it makes a lot of sense. If you are at risk of being killed on a daily basis, to be extraordinarily alert to threats and ready to respond with violence helps keep you alive. And when you come back to the United States, where you are not living in that constant danger zone, it takes some time to dial your reactions back down to a normal setting for a non-threatening environment. And for me, like for the vast majority of veterans, that process took somewhere between three and six months. And that's relatively normal as an amount of time it takes to just reset your threat meter.

HANNAH: Your now-husband, Brian, suffered from a traumatic brain injury during the war. You seemed almost dumbfounded in the book about the fact that the Army, which had sent this young man to defend the United States and its interests around the world, just kind of disappeared when he came back to the U.S. Talk for a minute about your experience with the VA and the military regarding his care.

WILLIAMS: It's really important to bear in mind that he was hurt in October of 2003, very early in the war. And just as we were not as a nation, perhaps, well-prepared to handle the aftermath of the war in Iraq, in the same way the Army was not prepared for the number of soldiers who came home wounded or for the severity of the injuries they had sustained.

Interlude featuring archival audio

WILLIAMS: My husband sustained a penetrating traumatic brain injury, an injury that would have definitively killed him in any previous conflict. He was evacuated to Landstuhl, Germany, and then back to Walter Reed. And I'm assuming, because of the need to have more beds available at Walter Reed, when he had recovered to the point that he no longer needed inpatient care, they sent him back to Fort Campbell. And Fort Campbell had absolutely no idea how to deal with somebody who had sustained such severe injuries. There was this real confusion about how to provide him with the right amount and type of care and support. He wasn't getting it at Fort Campbell at the 101st. And so his mother and I pushed to get him sent back to Walter Reed to get a higher level of care until he was medically retired and transitioned into the VA system. The failings I witnessed when we first came home, and watching Brian get lost in the cracks and struggle to get the care he needed in the system—that's what drove me to advocacy. The desire to improve systems and services so that nobody coming home after us would encounter the same gaps and barriers we did. And that ended up also being very beneficial for me.

HANNAH: A lot of conservatives criticized the VA for alleged inefficiencies, and there's now a movement to privatize it. In your opinion, do those ideas have any merit? Is there room to reform the VA?

WILLIAMS: I'm a little bit of a nerd. I worked at the RAND Corporation for eight-and-a-half years. I care a lot about data and facts. I still believe in a fact-based universe. And I use VA partly because of the research that I've done. The data shows VA provides higher quality evidence-based care to an older, sicker population at lower cost. And that story is one that the VA has not been able to get out. And I'm not discounting the problems that do occur. There are very real challenges in serving millions of veterans all around the country. But in side-by-side comparisons of the VA to other sectors of care, the VA outperforms other sectors on a number of key outcomes, both for inpatient and outpatient populations. VA even does this for gender specific issues. The VA has the highest rates of breast cancer and cervical cancer screenings of any health care system in the country, despite the fact that women vets are only about seven-and-a-half percent of their population. I really believe very strongly in the need to maintain and strengthen the VA health care system, which is where I get my care. I get great integrated, comprehensive, culturally competent care, which is something I think a lot of folks don't understand. When I go to a civilian doctor, they're not going to ask me if I was sexually assaulted in the military. They're not even going to think to ask me if I was in the military because I'm a woman. And they are not necessarily going to realize they should be screening me for toxic exposures and asking whether or not I was exposed to burn pits and be thoughtful about what health risks I may have because of that. These are things we'll lose if we don't have a strong VA that has knowledgeable providers in-house. And I think it's just really important to bear that in mind when you hear folks who have a specific agenda pushing their political philosophy without regard for the data. Again, if what we care about is providing the best care for veterans, we need to look at what systems are able to do that, not just make decisions based on headlines or inaccurate guesses about what might be best for folks.

HANNAH: We're going to do a little lightning round question.

WILLIAMS: Fun. Do I get a buzzer?

HANNAH: Yes. What do you do when your kids have a half day from school?

WILLIAMS: I usually don't do anything different when my kids have a half day from school. My husband is on the hook for primary parent patrol.

HANNAH: In the military, did you encounter a lot of mansplaining, and if so, what was your favorite response to it?

WILLIAMS: Oh, mansplaining in the military. So far beyond mansplaining, I can't even. That's an entire program. But I did not have a snappy response to the casual sexism I endured in the military. No.

HANNAH: How do you deal with a project that has gone out of scope generally in your professional life? How do you deal with mission creep?

WILLIAMS: I've tended to be somebody who in my post-military career tries to bound things. At RAND, I was the person who was always coming up with schedules and deadlines and plans and setting the limits and saying things like, “No, now we have to stop.”

HANNAH: Favorite punk band?

WILLIAMS: Favorite punk band, specifically? I'll go with Dead Kenedys.

HANNAH: OK. Favorite band in general?

WILLIAMS: Overall, maybe Jane's Addiction or Morphine. But my kids and I have been listening to Billie Eillish a lot lately, and my son in particular is super into her. So that's as modern as I've gotten.

HANNAH: When you have a mission you don't believe in, how do you reconcile that with doing your job?

WILLIAMS: Well, now that I'm not in the military, I'm better able to say no. I've had examples where folks have come in wanting me to take on projects that I don't believe in.

And I have been working on saying no.

HANNAH: I want to spend a little bit of time talking about things you don't think most Americans would know or appreciate about the veteran experience.

WILLIAMS: You asked about mansplaining, but maybe more broadly… Women now make up about sixteen percent of the total force. So, still a significant minority. And I think this is also a challenge in the national security community and the foreign policy community at large: underrepresentation of women. If you have a pure focus on getting the mission done when you are not taking advantage of the full talent pool, you're losing out on a lot of creative thinking and ability to assess problems from different directions and come up with different solutions sets and even identify problems. When I was in Iraq as an Arabic speaker in 2003, I could talk to local women in a way that somebody like my husband is not going to have the same access I did, both because I'm visually less intimidating and because in a predominantly Muslim country, there were ways in which it was culturally easier for me to talk to women.

HANNAH: You were probably still intimidating with all your gear on a little bit.

WILLIAMS: Maybe…

HANNAH: No, but I take your point.

WILLIAMS: And I think it was also inspiring to little girls. I have very clear memories of when we're driving, and little girls would register that I was a woman. They could see my bun beneath my Kevlar. They could somehow pick up on the fact that I was a woman, and their eyes would get huge. And you just click with them. That I was different. And when we would go out and about, little kids were more willing to come up to me, which could sometimes get annoying. But, you know, I could talk to women. And so that ability to draw on a full talent pool and engage with folks abroad, thinking about things from different angles, having higher-performing teams, because diverse teams are more effective, even if it's harder to get there, right? The process of working as a diverse team is more challenging, but the end results are better according to lots of research. So we're missing out on that. And then, as a feminist, I also believe that inherently it's better for women to have full opportunities available to them.

If you read the reasons women weren't supposed to be in the military or in combat or in combat arms units and lay those alongside arguments for why Black people shouldn't be in the same positions, and now transgender people. The arguments are eerily similar.

Interlude featuring archival audio

WILLIAMS: We have seen improvements in how well our military functions. As we have broken down these barriers, we will get a fitter force when we don't assume that every single man is automatically qualified just by virtue of being a man, while no women are qualified just by virtue of being a woman. No, set high standards and hold everyone the same standards, and we're going to see a more successful military. And again, especially in today's era when only one in four young people is qualified to join the military, randomly saying that any person can't just because of how they were born, when it has nothing to do with their qualifications, is horribly misplaced. The Army did not meet its accession goals last year, and we really need to stay focused on how to attract and retain the most talented people for our military.

HANNAH: If you had thirty seconds to speak with a young woman who wanted to go into the military but who had concerns, what would you tell her?

WILLIAMS: The advice that I give anybody who's planning to join the military or wants to join the military is that when you cry, cry in the bathroom. Don't sleep with anyone in your unit and seek to succeed based on your talents and abilities.

HANNAH: It sounds like you did the last of those three—that you succeeded on your talents and abilities—but you didn't really do the first two, right?

WILLIAMS: Are you calling me a slut on your podcast?

HANNAH: I am not, but I know my editor is going to keep that in. No, absolutely not. I mean, well, you went on to marry him, didn’t you?

WILLIAMS: I'm giving you a hard time. He was not in my unit.

HANNAH: OK. I thought you were like an eight-person on the side of a mountain sleeping beneath the stars.

WILLIAMS: Yes, but I was military intelligence, and he was a forward observer. I was in 3-11th in my battalion, and he was in 3rd of the 3-28 Field Artillery battery.

HANNAH: I see, I see.

WILLIAMS: Totally different! How do you not know these deep, intimate details about the structure of our entire armed forces? I'm giving you a hard time again.

HANNAH: Kayla Williams, thank you very much for joining me. Thank you, everybody, for listening. This has been None of the Above. If you liked what you heard here on None of the Above, feel free to subscribe and visit us on iTunes Spotify, Google Play, and noneoftheabovepodcast.org, and thank you for listening.

(END.)

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