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"  Helen Thorpe&amp;#039;s first book, Just Like Us (Scribner, May 2011), investigated the lives of Mexican immigrants&amp;#039; daughters. Her latest, out August 5, continues to explore female friendships under pressure\u2014against the backdrop of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In Soldier Girls, Thorpe sheds light on the many reasons why women enlist in the U.S. National Guard. The women she interviewed have distinctly different motivations: Michelle Fischer signed up to finance college and escape home; Desma Brooks balances multiple jobs and weekend drills with caring for her three kids; and Debbie Helton, a salon manager, envisions herself as a first responder. We talked with Thorpe about what inspired her and why their stories needed to be told. Edited for length and clarity. I read that a speech inspired you to start researching Soldier Girls.  I&amp;#039;d been invited to speak about Just Like Us at a gathering of social workers in Fort Collins, Colorado. It&amp;#039;s about four young women, very close friends, split down the middle in terms of their legal status: Two of them could get college scholarships and work legally, and two of them couldn&amp;#039;t. Social workers were running into situations like that all the time. I was looking for a new book idea and thinking about interviewing veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. It just so happened that [a social worker named] Steve Price won an award, and he spoke about his work at the Veterans Administration. It felt like confirmation that my idea would be meaningful. Related: Why Graceful, Type-A, Adrenaline-Junkies Make the Best Pilots (and Tend to Be Women) Your new book also deals with paying for college and finding a good job.  In different ways, they&amp;#039;re both about the challenges of trying to find opportunity in American society if you start off nearer to the bottom. [All these women] started off with fewer advantages and were trying to figure out how to live the American dream. They&amp;#039;re different facets of the same story about social inequity. You describe how the uniform glosses over their differences, but the three women you interviewed had plenty in common. Each used her initial National Guard paycheck to buy her first car, for instance.  I loved that they had huge political differences, big age differences, different life circumstances\u2014Michelle having no children, Desma having three young children, Debbie becoming a grandmother. No one of them had to stand in for every female soldier. But those differences paled in significance once they were in Afghanistan. They&amp;#039;d all chosen to join the Guard, they were all deployed for a year, and they used black humor to keep themselves going. They enjoyed bucking authority a little bit. Related: Soldiers Protest Army&amp;#039;s Racially Biased Grooming Regulations I loved it when Desma tries to requisition a Clydesdale to boost her unit&amp;#039;s &amp;#039;morale and welfare.&amp;#039; [Laughs] I know, it&amp;#039;s unbelievable. My coworker said, &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a lot in here about their love lives!&amp;quot; You don&amp;#039;t expect that from a war book.  When I was first interviewing them, those were not the stories they were telling me. At the outset, I didn&amp;#039;t know they&amp;#039;d had affairs with men who were married\u2014in one case, a married man who was a superior officer. I thought readers who might not be able to imagine themselves serving in the military could identify with Michelle, and I really liked the way Desma represented single moms. Desma also represented the shift in how women were used and what kind of work they did\u2014the way in her second deployment she was in a far more dangerous situation, driving a gun truck and hitting an IED. And I loved how Debbie was a complement to Michelle, in terms of being more gung-ho, more obviously patriotic, more pro-military. That&amp;#039;s how I chose them, and then as I got to know them better, maybe a year or six months in, they started to open up. I thought it added drama and excitement in an otherwise difficult story, made the book more readable, and definitely made them more human. And it helped illustrate what it was like to be a woman in a largely male culture. You write that &amp;quot;eventually as many as one third of the women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan would report having been subjected to a sexual assault of some kind during their deployments.&amp;quot; Knowing that, did their stories still shock you? I had heard some of those statistics, but when you hear them in a vacuum it&amp;#039;s hard to understand how they could be true. I had to dig a little bit to get them to tell me those things. But when they described the environment, it all became more explicable. There are so many more men, women are viewed as commodities, they&amp;#039;re very scarce, the men are competing for them, there&amp;#039;s illicit drinking going on sometimes, and everybody&amp;#039;s under a lot of stress. They didn&amp;#039;t think to tell me they needed a buddy to go to the shower: That&amp;#039;s just the way it was. You start to understand how these awful statistics could get so high. Now seemed like the perfect time to talk with you, with President Obama sending hundreds of noncombat troops to Iraq.  It&amp;#039;s been amazing to listen to the news. The cities ISIS is capturing are the cities that Desma would drive through. It&amp;#039;s been wild, just knowing Desma and the effort she put into the time she spent there, then multiplying that by all the soldiers who were there, and then watching these cities change hands. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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