One Womans Army, General Janis Karpinski
One Womans Army, General Janis Karpinski
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One Woman's Army
The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story

Author: General Janis Karpinski, Steven Strasser

Narrator: Bernadette Dunne

Unabridged: 7 hr 34 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/06/2005


Synopsis

When Janis Karpinski first saw the photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, she felt the walls of her Baghdad office closing in on her. She recognized that the soldiers shown grinning over the naked, cowering Iraqi detainees serves under her command. Military justice already had swept up the seven MPs charged in the abuse case–and Karpinski soon learned that the system was about to turn on her.

Here is the inside story of the first female general ever to command troops in a combat zone, and of how the scandal destroyed her career. It traces the rise of a groundbreaking woman from the Republican suburbs of New Jersey to a commanding position in a man's army. Karpinski earned her general's insignia as a master parachutist, recipient of the Bronze Star in the first Gulf war, and as the leader chosen for a special mission to train Arab women as a fighting force in the Middle East.

In Iraq, Karpinski and her 3,400 U.S. soldier faced the biggest challenge of all: rebuilding a civilian prison system left in shambles by Saddam Hussein. She describes the ordeal of serving in a violent landscape populated by U.S. commanders flailing at a growing insurgency, and by the specter of the captive Saddam, who showed surprise at meeting a female general and refused to believe that Karpinski could be in charge of his incarceration. In the end, Karpinski accepts her share of responsibility for the abuses, but raises larger question: why was she the most prominent target of the investigations?

Reviews

Goodreads review by Eleanor on December 21, 2020

Karpinsky's story of being set up is not an uncommon one. When the pope needs to explain the pedophilia of a priest, the misuse of funds, or the reason women cannot become priests, etc. it's usually an upstanding, devoted, religious, blond-haired white woman who represents the firm. Ever notice that......more

Goodreads review by Mare on November 07, 2015

Though this book does many things: defends her role in AG scandal, tells the events of her entire military career, overwhelmingly, it seeks to inform readers (particularly male readers who served in the U.S. Armed Forces and those who see the U.S. Armed Forces as for men only) of women’s roles and h......more

Goodreads review by Erik on December 26, 2010

Partly a defense of her role in the human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib and partly an account of her rise to becoming a one star general serving in wartime, this is a surprisingly readable account and memoir. It seems clear that the military made her a scapegoat but her rise through the ranks serves a......more

Goodreads review by Debra on June 19, 2021

I gave her a three because I feel like the book gave a good account of the policies that impacted the detention operations throughout Iraq. She missed the mark on giving an in depth account of how those policies impacted the ability of soldiers that were "boots on the Ground" at Abu Ghraib. I did no......more

Goodreads review by Louise on September 05, 2012

Karpinski was the general in command of Abu Ghraib, the infamous Iraqi torture prison. The book is an honest look at what went wrong at Abu Ghraib but more than that it is the story of what it's like to be a female in a male dominated military. Karpinski tells all about her struggles to keep her fem......more