Thirty years later, a bombing in Lebanon still echoes

FBI investigators later said the bomb that blew up the marine barracks was the largest conventional blast they had ever seen

 

On 23 October 1983, bombs exploded in Beirut, killing 241 US service members and 58 French paratroopers. Survivors describe what happened on that day - and afterwards. 

The multinational force of American, French, British and Italian soldiers was deployed to Lebanon following the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by militiamen.

Their mission: to back the Lebanese Armed Forces and help them establish and maintain sovereignty over war-torn Beirut.

The operation was intended to be brief. But in April 1983, the US embassy in Beirut was destroyed, and the situation for the multinational force deteriorated from there.

Then the US marines and the French paratroops were attacked - in two separate suicide bombings, occurring at about the same time. 

Soon afterwards US troops and other members of the multinational force pulled out of Lebanon. And the survivors of the attacks tried to get on with their lives. 

Price Troche, Hayward, California

I woke up and got dressed, brushed my teeth, shaved and started to listen to some music on my walkman. 

A half hour later I heard a loud explosion. I got out of my bunker and saw a huge plume of smoke. And then I heard people yelling that they hit the battalion. 

I saw caravans of trucks and marines racing towards the battalion. 

I was in Beirut until November. I had nightmares, anger - and pulled away. To this day my dad, mom, brother, wife and children don't know what I saw.

Jack Anderson, Kennesaw, Georgia 

I was on watch, manning communications. I was relieved from my post and returned to my bunk. 

I lay down to sleep and the next thing I knew I awoke under two huge concrete pillars. They were lodged on top of me. 

I was able to escape, and I stumbled around. Everywhere you looked, there were parts of the building or a dead marine or a body part. 

The building was gone, reduced to a smouldering pile of rubble about 60ft (18m) high.

I saw marines burned by battery acid, which had drained on to victims who were pinned with no way to escape.

I heard faint voices and cries out to God for help. There was an awful smell in the air, and I could taste dirt and grit inside my mouth. 

The experience has caused me great pain and anguish over the years and even today it continues to be an ever-present part of me. 

Robert Jordan, Lexington, Kentucky

We had rigging to hang mosquito nets, which we also used to air out our uniforms and to dry out our towels. 

That saved me from blast wounds as the shards of glass and fractured concrete whirled about.

In my underwear I picked my way through the debris to the operations centre, located down a narrow hall in the main building. Wires hung, dangling like wet spaghetti.

I spied my deputy struggling up the hill with a badly bleeding marine on his back. I asked him where he was going. 

He replied that he was taking the marine to the aid station at the Marine Service Support Group because the battalion aid station and all the battalion medical staff were buried in the basement. 

A fine grey powder of pulverised cement covered everything. 

It reminded me of a scene of the volcanic eruption of Mount St Helens in Washington three years before - debris and body parts, covered by the fine dust.

Off to one side I spied what I first thought to be a ragged tree stump - until I noticed blood oozing from the stump. It was a human leg. 

Nearby, the lid of an ammunition box was impaled up in a palm tree.

Ahead I could see the media waiting. What could I say? I didn't know what the answers were myself. 

I organised my teams to take groups of newsmen and photographers around the rubble, letting them document the 40ft-wide crater.

I live with what happened in Beirut almost every day. But I am determined to let the world know that the bombing did not defeat us. We are still here. 

Danny Joy, Jacksonville, North Carolina

I thought, "What... was that?"

To this day I can smell it, and I can hear the screams for help, I can feel the dust upon my skin. I can feel the reverberations and the concussion in my body from the explosion - and the ringing in my ears. 

I feel guilty that I lived through it. Now I stay in my "bunker" at home, a trailer where I have been living since 2001. I am at peace in my own little world - me and my two dogs. 

A wise veteran once said for those who died the war is over. For the rest of us it is only a nightmare away.

Read More

Mapping unsafe areas for India's women

"I was going to my college at Dilsukhnagar in Hyderabad. I got down from the bus and was walking forward... Suddenly a few men were coming from the front, and two of them walked by my side really close and one of them pinched my breast..."

This entry from the southern Indian city is one of the hundreds on safecity.in - a website created just days after last December's gang rape of a student in Delhi, to improve reporting and recording of sexual harassment and crimes against women.

The website offers an interactive map of the most unsafe places across Indian cities.

The Hyderabad entry continues: "I was shocked... I couldn't talk to anyone. I did not report it to the police as I could not see the face of the person who pinched me. There have been similar incidents in this area."

In India, sexual assault of women occurs every three minutes and data from the government's National Crime Records Bureau suggests that a woman is raped every 20 minutes. And these are crimes that have been reported to the police and are registered officially.

Thousands of incidents like the one at Dilsukhnagar are never registered and do not get into the crime records - something that safecity.in wants to change. 

'Cat-calling, groping'

Founded by Surya Velamuri, Else Disilva, Saloni Malhotra and Aditya - a group of four young professional men and women - the website has created a "crowd-sourced" map of sexual harassment, covering safe and unsafe places across India. 

And anyone, from anywhere in the world, can report an incident of sexual abuse on safecity.

"As women in the group, we asked ourselves what is it that has troubled us in various ways all through these years," says Surya Velamuri. 

"Our aim was to customise it to Indian behaviour so we included categories like cat-calling, touching and groping, sexual invites, indecent exposure, et cetera." 

Since its inception last year, safecity.in has received more than 962 reports of sexual abuse from across India with the capital, Delhi, recording the maximum number of complaints with 781. And the numbers are consistently growing.

"The map on our site can help in many ways. If you are a woman travelling to a new city, a look at the map will instantly tell you about the safe and unsafe locations," Ms Velamuri says. 

"Also, if we see lots of reports coming from a specific area in a city, it can actually help the police and administration nail the possible reasons that make it unsafe, like poor lighting, insufficient patrolling or the presence of rogue elements," she adds. 

'Scared and shy'

What makes the website popular with its women users is the anonymity they enjoy.

"We realised that women in India are usually scared and [too] shy to report sexual abuse. They do not like their names and identities to be revealed, but here you can post as an anonymous user."

There have been huge protests against rape in India in recent months 
 

But that creates a problem of a different kind. As most women visitors to the site do not leave their names or contact details, it makes it difficult to verify the reports, says Ms Velamuri.

Safecity has recently joined hands with Goa police and any user willing to make a formal complaint in the Goa region can disclose their identity to the police and get their case registered.

Ms Velamuri says the group is working on more such tie-ups with police in other cities and towns.

The group at present is working on a project to map the 100 most unsafe places in the capital, Delhi, and its surrounding areas. 

A team of volunteers is collecting - and plans to upload - more than 100,000 reports of sexual crimes from Delhi residents.

The next step, Ms Velamuri says, will be to take up these reports with the police and local authorities.

Success, however, is still far away. 

In a country of 1.2 billion people, India has only 130 million internet users and with limited internet penetration in rural India, safecity.in has a long way to go before it can map every corner of the country.

Read More

Maid to entrepreneur: Rising out of poverty in Brazil

Lucineide do Nascimento was born into a large family in rural north-eastern Brazil

 

Lucineide do Nascimento has come a long way from her birthplace near Natal in the poor north-east of Brazil.

Had things gone according to her father's plans, she would have been married as a teenager and followed a traditional rural lifestyle - living off produce grown on the family farm. 

But she decided to move south and live a different life.

"I was a rebel and went against my parents' wishes," says Ms Nascimento, now aged 44. 

She is a small entrepreneur - and her story illustrates the recent social change that has transformed the lives of millions of people in Brazil - many of them women.

Her journey was not easy. 

She left her family home at 17, moved to Rio de Janeiro and became a maid, a popular job among poor Brazilian women who have little education.

She says she faced prejudice and was so naive she thought she did not have the right to be paid a regular salary because she lived in her employer's home.

Ms Nascimento soon grew tired of the job and its uncertainties. She moved to the vast sprawling city of Sao Paulo, where she sold domestic supplies.

By then, she was already thinking of ways of fulfilling her dream of having a business of her own. It was 2007, and eco-friendly products were all the rage in Brazil.

Ms Nascimento spotted her opportunity. She rang the local Greenpeace office to ask what would be the best material for replacing plastic supermarket bags.

"And it turned out to be raw cotton, which was precisely one of the things we used grow on my family farm up north," she recalls. 

She started crafting the bags at home, after a full day working as a saleswoman, and sold them to other small companies. 

'Inspiration'

Her business grew steadily, and today she makes about 10,000 bags per month, employing four people in her small factory in Sao Paulo - including her husband and older son. 

Her family in the north-east used to think of her as the "black sheep", she recalls.

Now she is their pride and joy, as well as a role model for the whole family.

"We are a big, humble family of seven siblings. Growing up, we didn't even have electric power. My father was worried about us moving to big cities, he wanted me to marry young and lead a quiet rural life. 

"But my parents always trusted me, so I thought it was my responsibility to grow in life," she says.

"Back then, there was little education in my family; their only plans for the future was to have children of their own. 

"But I kept telling them that it was important to get an education. Now they all live in the city and many are starting university."

With Ms Nascimento's help, her sister's small business selling home-cooked meals has turned into a fully fledged churrascaria - a traditional Brazilian meat restaurant.

Changing times

Ms Nascimento's experience is becoming more common in Brazil, a developing nation where the gap between rich and poor has been narrowing. 

The changes have been particularly marked for Brazilian women. Falling birth rates mean mothers have smaller families to care for and often do better in their chosen professions. 

According to Sebrae, a body that promotes entrepreneurship, the number of Brazilian women who became business owners grew by 21% in the past decade, at twice the rate of men.

Still, gender inequality persists in the Brazilian labour market. According to official figures, the average Brazilian woman makes almost 30% less money than her male colleague. 

Ms Nascimento plans to triple her sales in the next few years at her business, Edilu Eco-bags. 

"Women still face some prejudice, but it's changing. And it's up to us to break the cycle," she says.

And her concerns are now those of a typical urban Brazilian woman.

"I've learned to delegate tasks to my husband and kids, they help me with the company and with the dishes and handle their own school work.

"Now I want to make more time for girly things, for chatting with my girlfriends. I've learned that life is more than work and family!"

Read More

The four sisters who took on Botswana's chiefs and won

Edith Mmusi: "We can finally rest - I sleep so well I even drool"

In many countries across Africa, the right of the firstborn male, or closest male relative, to inherit family property - is still standard practice. Women are denied the right to inherit the family estate purely because of their gender, a custom that is upheld by some traditional leaders.

But four sisters in Botswana did something that no-one there thought was possible - they took on tradition and won.

Last month, a five-year legal struggle ended with a landmark victory to Edith Mmusi (80) and her three sisters Bakhani Moima (83), Jane Lekoko (77), and Mercy Ntsehkisang (68). 

Inside her modest home in a village in Kanye, a small town south of the capital Gaborone, Ms Mmusi has a wry smile as she speaks of the lengthy case.

"It took resilience and courage to get this far. It was a stressful time for the family that gave me many sleepless nights. I am glad it is finally over," she says.

 The house at the centre of the row was built near the ruins of Edith Mmusi's old family home
 

This is the family's ancestral home - a compound of some eight concrete houses in various sizes, built on the Ramantele family plot. 

Over the years it was sub-dived to accommodate members of the family who wanted to live close to the elders. The house at the centre of the row was built on the land where Ms Mmusi's old family home once stood.

What remains of that house is a wall of mud, bricks and mortar, the only reminder of the house Ms Mmusi and her sisters had lived in with their parents as young girls. 

"This is the only home we've known here. We helped to build one of the first mud houses in this big yard," she tells me, a big smile on her face.

It is easy to see that this place means a lot to them, as they share their childhood memories of growing up here.

When their father died, Ms Mmusi and her sisters contributed to the upkeep of the homestead and looked after their mother until her death in 1988.

In court the sisters argued that they were entitled to the family home as they had used their own finances to renovate the property.

Belittled culture?

The Appeals Court agreed, finding that denying them this right went against the constitution.

 

But this was not an easy victory. 

Traditional values are held in high regard here, as in many rural areas in Africa. 

Tswana custom prescribes that the family home is inherited either by the first-born or last-born son, depending on the community. 

As a result, their nephew had earlier won the case at the Customary Court of Appeal which found that under his ethnic group's customs, women could not inherit the family home. 

That court had ordered that Edith and her sisters be evicted from the family home.

As a last-ditch attempt to avoid eviction, the sisters took the matter to the High Court and later the Appeals Court, which both ruled in the women's favour.

But this has been a bitter-sweet time for the family, and the matter has caused divisions in the family. 

Some male members feel the women belittled their culture by challenging it, Ms Mmusi tells me. 

Something she says she hopes will change with time. 

"Customs and culture have no place in the modern world because women are still oppressed in the name of culture." 

"What makes men [especially the staunch traditionalists] think they have power over us? We are all equal in God's eyes," she adds, the smile now gone.

Tradition vs modern society

But why are some people against women inheriting the family home? 

In its broadest sense, traditionalists argue that the only way of preserving family wealth is by passing on the inheritance only to the males, arguing that women may take that wealth to another family after they marry.

But African cultural expert Moses Twala, of the Kara Heritage Institute, believes this ruling should compel traditional leaders to take a closer look at what they are doing. 

"Culture is not static, culture is dynamic because it conforms to the times, especially with the fact that people are getting more and more modernised with the times," he says.

He says inheritance should not be seen as something that will benefit one person, but rather as something that will see to the wellbeing of the entire family once the head of that home has died. 

He argues that women are as capable of carrying that responsibility as males. 

"A family is not one person only who is a male. Females also play a very big role also in uniting the very same family even when males are present,"

But Botswana is largely a conservative country. While a handful of chiefs in Botswana are for promoting gender equality, they say this should be done in a manner that still shows respect to age-old traditions. 

"Yes culture is dynamic but tradition is important, the role of tradition is to preserve our identity. We would like to preserve our culture and live in the way that our great-grandfathers lived," says Chief Gaseintswe Malope II. 

As head of the Bangwaketse people, the third biggest community in Botswana, he says it is his responsibility to make sure his people honour their traditions. 

Modern law and African culture are in many instances still poles apart and sometimes in direct contradiction, according to women right's activists. 

Women's Inheritance Now, a group advocating the inheritance rights of women, believes the judgment will go a long way to bring change to Botswana. 

Back in Kanye, Ms Mmusi is hopeful that the case will inspire other women to stand up for what they believe in. 

"It will give them motivation and comfort that they are not the only ones going through that, where they are. We hope they will say: 'These women took action and they won' and do the same too. We are overjoyed," she says.

Read More

How did ancient Greek music sound?

The music of ancient Greece, unheard for thousands of years, is being brought back to life by Armand D'Angour, a musician and tutor in classics at Oxford University. He describes what his research is discovering.

"Suppose that 2,500 years from now all that survived of the Beatles songs were a few of the lyrics, and all that remained of Mozart and Verdi's operas were the words and not the music.

Imagine if we could then reconstruct the music, rediscover the instruments that played them, and hear the words once again in their proper setting, how exciting that would be. 

This is about to happen with the classic texts of ancient Greece.

It is often forgotten that the writings at the root of Western literature - the epics of Homer, the love-poems of Sappho, the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides - were all, originally, music. 

Dating from around 750 to 400 BC, they were composed to be sung in whole or part to the accompaniment of the lyre, reed-pipes, and percussion instruments. 

Finding the pitch 

But isn't the music lost beyond recovery? The answer is no. The rhythms - perhaps the most important aspect of music - are preserved in the words themselves, in the patterns of long and short syllables. 

The instruments are known from descriptions, paintings and archaeological remains, which allow us to establish the timbres and range of pitches they produced. 

And now, new revelations about ancient Greek music have emerged from a few dozen ancient documents inscribed with a vocal notation devised around 450 BC, consisting of alphabetic letters and signs placed above the vowels of the Greek words. 

The Greeks had worked out the mathematical ratios of musical intervals - an octave is 2:1, a fifth 3:2, a fourth 4:3, and so on. 

The notation gives an accurate indication of relative pitch: letter A at the top of the scale, for instance, represents a musical note a fifth higher than N halfway down the alphabet. Absolute pitch can be worked out from the vocal ranges required to sing the surviving tunes. 

While the documents, found on stone in Greece and papyrus in Egypt, have long been known to classicists - some were published as early as 1581 - in recent decades they have been augmented by new finds. Dating from around 300 BC to 300 AD, these fragments offer us a clearer view than ever before of the music of ancient Greece. 

The research project that I have embarked on, funded by the British Academy, has the aim of bringing this music back to life. 

Folk music

But it is important to realise that ancient rhythmical and melodic norms were different from our own. 

Temple of Poseidon: The music might have sounded unfamiliar to modern ears

 

We must set aside our Western preconceptions. A better parallel is non-Western folk traditions, such as those of India and the Middle East. 

Instrumental practices that derive from ancient Greek traditions still survive in areas of Sardinia and Turkey, and give us an insight into the sounds and techniques that created the experience of music in ancient times.

So what did Greek music sound like? 

Some of the surviving melodies are immediately attractive to a modern ear. One complete piece, inscribed on a marble column and dating from around 200 AD, is a haunting short song of four lines composed by Seikilos. The words of the song may be translated:

While you're alive, shine:

never let your mood decline. 

We've a brief span of life to spend: 

Time necessitates an end. 

The notation is unequivocal. It marks a regular rhythmic beat, and indicates a very important principle of ancient composition. 

In ancient Greek the voice went up in pitch on certain syllables and fell on others (the accents of ancient Greek indicate pitch, not stress). The contours of the melody follow those pitches here, and fairly consistently in all the documents. 

Tuning up

But one shouldn't assume that the Greeks' idea of tuning was identical to ours. Ptolemy in the 2nd century AD provides precise mathematical ratios for numerous different scale-tunings, including one that he says sounds "foreign and homespun". 

Dr David Creese of the University of Newcastle has constructed an eight-string "canon" (a zither-like instrument) with movable bridges.

When he plays two versions of the Seikilos tune using Ptolemy's tunings, the second immediately strikes us as exotic, more like Middle Eastern than Western music.

The earliest musical document that survives preserves a few bars of sung music from a play, Orestes by the fifth-century BC tragedian Euripides. It may even be music Euripides himself wrote. 

Music of this period used subtle intervals such as quarter-tones. We also find that the melody doesn't conform to the word pitches at all.

Euripides was a notoriously avant-garde composer, and this indicates one of the ways in which his music was heard to be wildly modern: it violated the long-held norms of Greek folk singing by neglecting word-pitch. 

However, we can recognise that Euripides adopted another principle. The words "I lament" and "I beseech" are set to a falling, mournful-sounding cadence; and when the singer says "my heart leaps wildly", the melody leaps as well. This was ancient Greek soundtrack music.

And it was received with great excitement in the Greek world. The historian Plutarch tells a moving story about the thousands of Athenian soldiers held prisoner in roasting Syracusan quarries after a disastrous campaign in 413 BC. Those few who were able to sing Euripides' latest songs were able to earn some food and drink.

What about the greatest of ancient poet-singers, Homer himself?

Homer tells us that bards of his period sang to a four-stringed lyre, called a "phorminx". Those strings will probably have been tuned to the four notes that survived at the core of the later Greek scale systems.

Professor Martin West of Oxford has reconstructed the singing of Homer on that basis. The result is a fairly monotonous tune, which probably explains why the tradition of Homeric recitation without melody emerged from what was originally a sung composition. 

"What song the Sirens sang," is the first of the questions listed by the 17th Century English writer, Sir Thomas Browne, as "puzzling, though not beyond all conjecture". 

"The reconstruction of ancient Greek music is bringing us a step closer to answering the question."

Read More

Captain Collette: The life of a woman on the front line

Capt Ashley Collette was the only woman in her platoon of soldiers on the Afghan front line - and she was in charge. In the Canadian armed forces, unusually, every job is open to women - and both sexes live together and fight together. 

On the first day that Capt Ashley Collette and her platoon of 60 men were deployed in the remote town of Nakhonay, near Kandahar, they came under attack. 

"I don't think that the enemy liked our presence," she says with a soldier's understatement. "It's kind of in the middle of where they want to be."

That first day set the pattern for the next few months. Twice a day, Six Platoon - part of Bravo Company in the First Royal Canadian Regiment - endured enemy fire, both on patrol and directly on the camp. It was so regular that the soldiers nicknamed it "contact o'clock". 

But Collette says being shot at made a sort of sense to her troops - they could see the bullets lighting up the sky and mountains as they came towards them. It was the IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and - towards the end of their rotation - suicide bombs, that wore on their nerves. 

On 21 June, Sgt Jimmy MacNeil, an engineer attached to the platoon, was killed by a bomb while on a foot patrol.

 He was a kind, popular soldier, and a close friend of Collette's. The hours following his death were frantically busy and it wasn't till later in the day that she got a chance to reflect. Then she went and sat by herself on a sandbank in the camp.

"We still had six months to go," she says. "I remember thinking 'How am I, one, going to hold it together myself, and two, going to hold together this group of 60 people who are devastated by this event?'"

Then, two of her men came and sat next to her, one on either side. Neither said anything - and she knew that she didn't need to say anything, that they understood how she felt.

Collette did hold it together. After returning from her tour, she was awarded the Medal of Military Valour, one of Canada's highest military honours, for her leadership in Afghanistan. (She is keen to attribute the accolade to the work of her whole platoon.)

Around 12% of soldiers serving in the Canadian Forces are women and they have been integrated into combat positions since 1989. 

The US and Brazil are currently in the process of working out the best way to place women in combat roles. The UK, which has not yet taken this step, will review its policy in the next five years.

Those who argue against putting women into combat sometimes say that a woman would not be able to carry a wounded fellow from the battlefield. Collette says she was tested every year in "soldier carry" and "soldier drag" exercises. Although she was paired with someone of a similar weight to herself, lifting bigger people using the "fireman's carry" is not as hard as you might think when you know how. 

A priority in any infantry unit is to develop team cohesion. The traditional way to do this is to train, eat and sleep as a unit. But when Canadian female soldiers were first placed on the front line, they were segregated from the men. 

It didn't work. Now they are mixed in together, and sleep in the same dorm.

The soldiers constructed a raised platform to give themselves more space

 

This does present some logistical challenges, but Collette took pains to be modest. While the men slept in boxer shorts, she would wear pyjamas.

 While training in Canada, she would climb into a cupboard to change, or pull her sleeping bag around her and change underneath. 

"Normally this would be a successful endeavour," she says wryly, before going on to describe a sleeping bag malfunction in which somehow the thing slipped from her grasp and she was left standing in electric blue knickers and bra. Someone shouted "Look at Ashley!" and all the men turned to laugh.

"I laugh with them because what can you do? I pull the sleeping bag up and change my clothes and everyone carries on, because you have way bigger things to worry about."

In Afghanistan, she shared a room roughly 3m x 4.5m (10ft by 15ft) with up to 10 people. But if anybody needed privacy they would just ask for it.

When you share a small space with a group of men for a length of time, they become like your brothers, she says. When men from other units came to her platoon and made the mistake of commenting on her appearance, her own soldiers cut them down.

"Soldiers from my platoon would look at those attachment soldiers and say, 'That's really irrelevant in this scenario. Keep your comments to yourself - that's our platoon commander.'"

Where do women fight?

• Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Romania, Spain, and Sweden all permit women in all combat units
• France, Israel, and the Netherlands permit women in combat positions but they are barred from some units
• The US and Brazil are currently looking at how to include women in combat positions, and Australia is already phasing them in
• Many other countries including the UK send women to the front line in non-combat roles, or permit women to be fighter pilots

After her return from Afghanistan, some of her men approached her with a confession. 

"They said, 'In the beginning we were wary of you, but now we would follow you anywhere,'" she says. But then, she believes it's natural for soldiers to be wary of a new commander, regardless of the gender. "They always want to feel out your style of leadership."

She describes her own style as compassionate - "I believe in second chances" - and perhaps a little more democratic than some, prepared to listen even to the lowest ranks. But she quickly adds that she is authoritative when she needs to be.

A particular concern to her before her rotation was how she would be received by the Afghan village community - whether her sex would prevent her from establishing vital links with local leaders. 

"I thought that they wouldn't even listen to me, I thought that they would poke fun at me," she says. "But they didn't care at all." And this was in Panjwaii district, the Taliban's birthplace.

She was very popular with the village children, especially the girls, who would run after her with gifts of jewellery - but Collette says this was because she was kind, not because she was a woman. 

Although the village chiefs accepted the fact of Collette's gender, their wives were incredulous. After she had been in Nakhonay for about a month she was summoned to have tea with them and was quizzed about everything from what she liked best about Afghanistan to when she was going to settle down with a nice Muslim boy. 

The occasion was made even more surreal by the fact that her interpreter was not permitted in the room because he was male. Consequently, they were forced to make small talk at the top of their voices, so they could be heard through the walls.

Since her deployment, Collette has married and is currently taking a break from active service to complete an MA in social work. But she has every intention of returning to uniform, as a mental health specialist.

She is passionate that people see her as a soldier, rather than a "woman soldier" and describes the whole debate about whether women can handle a combat job as "null and void".

"In my experience," she says, "there's no reason why a band of brothers cannot be a band of brothers and sisters."

Read More