Kirsten A. Holmstedt grew up in Mystic, Connecticut.  She graduated from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1985 with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Journalism and from the University of North Carolina Wilmington in 2006 with a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Creative Nonfiction Writing. Over the past twenty years, Ms. Holmstedt has written for newspapers, business, academia, and magazines. She has won awards for her writing at the regional and national levels.

Ms. Holmstedt was finishing her first year of graduate school in the spring of 2003 when the war in Iraq started. Living in Jacksonville, North Carolina, near Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, Ms. Holmstedt was in an ideal location to initiate her research of women serving in combat for the first time. Over the next several years, she traveled throughout the United States and spent hundreds of hours interviewing female soldiers, Marines, airmen, and sailors.

As part of her research, Ms. Holmstedt flew to an aircraft carrier off the coast of Florida to interview a woman who worked on the flight deck of the USS Harry S. Truman and to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to meet a soldier who had been wounded by IEDs. She also traveled to Pope Air Force Base in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, South Carolina, and other military installations. She talked to the women in person, by phone, and through e-mail as they traveled back and forth between Iraq and their home bases.

For Band of Sisters, Ms. Holmstedt explored the different roles that women were performing in combat, as well as their challenges and accomplishments on the battlefield. She learned through their actions that women can excel in combat. They can return fire when they are fired upon, rescue wounded soldiers, drive trucks on the most dangerous roads, provide security on convoys, and search Iraqi women and children. When they were shot down or wounded, many asked not to go home but instead to return to their troops.
Eventually, most of the women would come home—though more than 100 American women have been killed in combat—when their deployment was over. The more she talked to returning female veterans, the more she realized that for some, the war began and ended on the battlefield. But for most, especially those who have gone to Iraq and Afghanistan multiple times, the war followed them home. Still others felt the war didn’t even begin until they came back to the States.

The same curiosity and commitment that drove Ms. Holmstedt to write about one of the greatest experiments to come out of this war—women in combat—would also inspire her to find out what battles these female warriors faced on the home front. Having followed the progress of women on the battlefield, she now felt compelled to find out how they were doing when they came home. She had to finish what she started, what they started. In Band of Sisters, you heard their voices from the battlefield; in The Girls Come Marching Home (published July 2009 by Stackpole Books) you will hear their voices when they came home.

Since a relatively large number of women were entering combat for the first time, a similarly large number of women would return home after surviving combat. That reality was counterbalanced by a limited number of resources—such as counselors and doctors—who were trained to work with women traumatized by their battlefield experiences. Neither our female warriors nor their support systems were prepared for their return. Family and friends, and the agencies that were supposed to take care of our soldiers, were taken aback by this new and surging phenomenon. Who would be there to help them? As one female Marine told me, “The transition back home is never as joyful as the ticker tape showering down on Broadway.”

We know that women have made a major contribution to the war effort, yet when they come home, many don’t speak up.  Instead, they keep quiet and do their jobs until someone else turns the spotlight on them. The Girls Come Marching Home is that spotlight.