In 2012, former Air National Guard pilot and Purple Heart recipient Mary Jennings Hegar joined forces with the ACLU to challenge successfully the ban that kept American women out of ground combat units. In her memoir, Shoot Like a Girl: One Woman's Dramatic Fight in Afghanistan and on the Home Front, Hegar tells the story of the career that led her to that point.
Hegar's love for flying, her commitment to her job and her bonds with other servicepeople are vivid on every page. The incident for which she received the Purple Heart--when her helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan with wounded men aboard--is a gripping story, told with skill. But Hegar's focus is the institutional and individual sexism that she had to overcome at every stage of her career.
Writing in a matter-of-fact, conversational style, Hegar details acts of casual prejudice that will feel familiar to any woman who has worked in a male-dominated field. She also recounts more harrowing experiences that include hazing and one horrifying instance of sexual assault by an army doctor during an exam--made worse by fact that his superiors took immediate action to protect him from punishment. Hegar shares feelings of betrayal, isolation and anger. She admits to tears on more than one occasion. But her strongest response is a desire to prove that everyone who told her women shouldn't be military pilots was wrong.
Shoot Like a Girl will appeal to anyone who was ever told, "Girls can't do that." --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins