NORFOLK

During 30 years in the Marine Corps and reserves, Col. Jenny Holbert witnessed a revolution in women’s military service – and confronted the personal costs and professional perils of war.

When Holbert enlisted in 1978, women at Parris Island, S.C., weren’t taught to shoot – but they were educated in luncheon etiquette and how to wear gloves and apply cosmetics. They weren’t supposed to wear camouflage.

Today, Holbert finishes her post as a public affairs officer with the Marine Corps Forces Command in Norfolk. After two months at Quantico, she’ll hang up her camouflage at the end of May.

During the first Gulf War, Holbert learned what it’s like to be the spouse left behind when a parent deploys. Her husband, a Marine tank officer, was sent to Saudi Arabia after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Then a reservist, Holbert was called up to active duty and worked 14 to 16 hours a day.

“Honestly, about the first 30 days that Lloyd had left, I was very angry with him for leaving me, because I was stuck,” she said. “It was just so difficult, trying to hold everything together and you’ve got the kids wondering what’s going on.”

“Sometimes I’d come home, and the kids had been watching TV and they wanted to know if Daddy died,” she recalled.

She remembers a surreal scene at a kids’ birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese near Twenty nine Palms, Calif. There wasn’t a single man present. The entire Marine division had been sent overseas.

Holbert and her husband eventually divorced. In 2004, her children now grown, she was sent to Iraq.

“It was my first deployment ever to a combat zone. When I was a young Marine, a female officer, women didn’t deploy. You might fly in – I was a finance officer at the time – to pay Marines, but then you’d leave again,” she said.

She managed 40 embedded military combat correspondents and oversaw 70 civilian reporters during the two-month battle to regain control of Fallujah. It was the most intense urban conflict American forces have faced since Vietnam, she said.

Holbert volunteered for the Iraq job partly because she wanted to experience the sounds and smells of war. Her father, a Marine World War II veteran, came back from the Pacific campaign with deep-seated psychological wounds.

“He preferred killing with knives because he was good, and knives were quiet,” she said. “He would say never to wake him up except by his feet, because he didn’t know what he would do. My mom woke up a few nights and he was strangling her. He didn’t know who she was. He was fighting a battle, and she just happened to be there,” she recalled.

Her father was discharged after 4½ years with “anxiety neurosis” and classified as 70 percent disabled by the Veterans Administration. Her parents divorced when she was young, and her father spent the rest of his life in and out of psychiatric wards, self-medicating with alcohol and tobacco. He has since died.

“My dad thought he was a coward, getting out, because you couldn’t see physical scars,” Holbert said. She believes her father suffered from what’s now called post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

“He didn’t communicate with me for a while after I became an officer. I think it was a big disappointment on his own part – that he couldn’t succeed in the Marine Corps, and here his daughter was an officer.”

In Fallujah, her protective instincts kicked in when she sent young military photographers and writers into battle.

“On the day that they were leaving, they had their full kit, their backpack, their camera, their rifle. They’re in the office and a Humvee pulls up. That was that moment where it really felt like their parents were on my shoulders, just looking forward with me,” Holbert said quietly. “The responsibility of knowing that I was committing their sons to war, and they may not come back, that was very difficult.”

She knew from her father’s experience that even if they returned without any shrapnel, they might not be healthy.

“They all came back physically fine. But emotionally, mentally – you knew some of them were having trouble, or were going to have trouble. It was just inevitable,” Holbert said. “I talked to each one of them as they came out, and some of that was because of my father’s experience. I knew they’d have to work really hard to gain their health back: their emotional health, their conscience, their spiritual health, the stuff inside your head.”

Holbert said she wasn’t worried about her own safety. As a female colonel and public affairs officer, she remained at Camp Fallujah while the fighting raged.

Still, there were signs of war: Rockets and mortars land ed inside the wire. Injured Marines came back to base to be sewn up or airlifted out.

“When you’re over there, you really don’t think you’re in a stressful environment, because you’re just doing your job every day. I never felt like I was in panic or fearful at all. In some respects, being over there was much easier. Because all you have to do is go to work. You don’t have to cook your food, no grocery shopping, no social life,” she said.

“It is easier over there than it is back home, taking care of the family and holding everything together. That was a real learning experience – that the families back home have it exponentially more difficult. They don’t know what’s going on, they don’t know that you’re safe.”

Readjusting to life in Norfolk was harder than she anticipated.

“Seeing what the people in Iraq went through, those people in Iraq, they deserve so much. They just deserve a decent life, and it is so hard for them. It’s not about the political structure or the fight, or anything. You really feel for the human condition over there, because they have nothing.

“So when you come back, you’re like, 'We have it so wonderful here.’ We have it so wonderful in the United States. I was angry. I was angry with issues that people thought were issues. People thought that they had big issues, and they didn’t.”

Over the past year, Holbert helped plan two Virginia conferences addressing the health needs of veterans, including help for those struggling with PTSD. In retirement, she hopes to continue working with military and civilian agencies addressing the needs of combat veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Kate Wiltrout, (757) 446-2629, kate.wiltrout@pilotonline.com