Served Like a Girl
Image: Bryan D. Engler
Served Like a Girl manages to inform the audience about its important subject matter in an always engaging way while also telling an entertaining story with as many twists and turns as one might find in a fictionalized counterpart. (There’s enough dramatic material here to warrant one of those doc-to-fiction adaptations.) To capture this story in such a natural and uncompromising way, while also wrapping it around a well-paced narrative, is a remarkable achievement, especially considering that this is director Lysa Heslov’s first feature-length project.
The doc’s raison d’etre is to take the long-discussed issue of women’s roles in the military and put human faces to the debate, profiling a group of female veterans from various branches of the military (who served in Iraq and Afghanistan) candidly talking about their experiences, proud moments, frustrations and tragedies, while addressing many of the questions and discussions—most of them pedantic and juvenile, to be honest—that have been hovering around their service. A recent argument regarding whether or not women are suitable to fight on the front line comes as a surprise to one of the four main veterans followed in the film, Marissa Strock, who lost both of her lower legs to an IED outside Baghdad.
While making sure never to sidestep serious issues, Heslov also has a lot of fun asking her subjects to address some of the more ridiculous questions posed by men when it comes to women serving in combat zones. How they handle their periods? The quick answer is, according to one of the film’s subjects, to step out of the Humvee and nonchalantly change your tampon in front of a bunch of male soldiers like a boss. Hey, if you’re willing to kill and get shot for your country, you should be able to handle seeing some menstrual blood. And when it comes to the all-important issue of where to conceal your vibrator in case it’s found and disposed of during a barracks search—apparently, a dildo counts as contraband; the things one learns every day—almost every one of the girls has their own foolproof hiding spot.