Women recruits, familiar with society’s stereotype of “the weaker sex,”
often arrive doubting whether they’re equal to the task. Posey won’t hear of
it: “Women learn weakness. We can also unlearn it.” By the end of training,
Posey says, most female marines are confident in their abilities “and know
that they’re just as capable of contributing” as men.
Josephine Muhawenimana, a Rwandan mother of two, became a police
officer because she admires “the way they are strong and ... inspire others.”
Now she’s a chief sergeant in a UN peacekeeping force in South Sudan,
a nation bloodied by civil and ethnic conflicts. “I remember what hap-
pened,” Muhawenimana says of the 1994 Rwandan genocide she escaped;
she hopes peacekeepers can help prevent such a bloodbath in South
Sudan. That country’s women seem proud of the job she’s doing, she says;
mothers have thanked her for showing their daughters an alternative to
getting married when they’re barely past puberty.
In Colombia a fighter known as Comandante Yesenia has spent two
decades with the ELN, a left-wing guerrilla group fighting the nation’s gov-
ernment. She gave birth to a daughter in the forest and carried the nursing
baby along with her for months. Yesenia says she’s fighting for equality
for poor people, indigenous people, and women. “Every person brings her
grain of salt,” she says. “From different spaces, we all fight.”
In the Syrian desert, as the captured ISIS fighters wait to be taken to
detention camp, a YPJ fighter named Nuda Zagros is imagining the future.
“Wherever there is oppression against women, we would like to go there,”
she says. “We want to fight for equality. We don’t want to be superior, and
we don’t want to have superiors. We are all the same.” j
united states
USMC recruit Dannelle
Kallmes, 19, awaits her
next orders in the
grueling Parris Island
training finale. Each
recruit knows that if
she makes it to the
closing ceremony, she’ll
be handed her eagle,
globe, and anchor
emblem—and will be
addressed, for the
first time, as “Marine.”
Lynsey Addario has
covered most major
conflicts and humani-
tarian crises in the past
15 years, including
those in Afghanistan,
Iraq, Libya, Syria,
Lebanon, Somalia, and
South Sudan. She’s
the author of the New
York Times best-selling
memoir It’s What I Do:
A Photographer’s Life
of Love and War.
140 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC