When Burke taught at the U.S. Naval Academy, students gave her lyrics and stories, initiating her into their world of military lore and chants. It's not hard to see why: Burke has worked hard to understand how women fit — or could fit — in to the military. She notices what others don't, like when pockets on women's uniforms were removed to de-emphasize breasts. Nerve spoke with Burke in her office at U.C. Irvine. — Colette LaBouff Atkinson

Until women serve in combat units, you explain, the military can't be fully integrated. The argument for keeping the sexes apart seems to circle back to, "Women get periods."
I call it the Leviticus argument: you have to segregate. I think that in male military culture there's a real, basic fear of the merging of masculine blood expended in combat with menstrual blood. It's one of those Mary Douglas things that you don't mix. I think there's this yuck reaction to that happening. What you see is some women who are out in the field — either in field exercises or actually in semi-combat situations — doing things like taking their Tampax and putting it in the strap over their helmets, as if to say, "I am here." But there is also the sense among some in military culture, and certainly in the right wing groups who are advocating against women in combat — and that's Phyllis Schlafly and her clones who now head the Center for Military Readiness, which can be decoded as the Center for Women Will Not Go Into Combat — that there is a bequeathed social structure.

You say Jessica Lynch functions as "the mute female body upon which the story of the war in Iraq could be written." What's Lynndie England's function?
What you have are these two women who are both very tiny. One is blond and cute, pixie-like; the other is brunette, moon-faced. And I think they have both been characterized in various ways. One is the poor little girl in need of rescue, the damsel in distress. And then there's the dominatrix. I maintain they're just flipsides of the same misogynistic coin. What most people have never really commented on was the fact that this collection of photographs we saw one-by-one was really part of the in-country scrapbook of Charles Graner. On one photo he sent to people he wrote the caption, "What I make Lynndie do."

In your analysis of how soldiers loathe "Hanoi Jane," you say Jane Fonda stood in "for the girl that they had once known."
When you ask anybody who's either been in the military or is currently active duty, "Tell me what you know about Jane Fonda," eventually you'll get one of these stories. That she did these treacherous things. And she did go to Hanoi Hilton when we were at war with North Vietnam. She went into enemy territory. She posed at an antiaircraft gun and smiled, which she says to this day she really regrets. So there are reasons to be angry with her.

But why do soldiers born after the Vietnam War hate her?
She was the ingénue, the girl next door. In military culture there's a real disdain for the civilian. You even see it in the marching chants; there are thousands of these chants about "Jody." The Marine Corps and the Army even call their marching chants "jodies." Jody is the guy having sex with your woman while you're off either working in the fields or at basic training. Jody is cuckolding you. There's this deep anger: I'm doing this in the name of the nation. I am made to do these horrible things. I'm separated from home. God knows what my wife is doing. So you see, in a lot of that lore, this incredible anger toward the civilian. And so often in that folklore female equals civilian. You know:

Cindy, Cindy, Cindy Lou
I love my rifle more than you
You used to be my beauty queen
Now I love my M-16

What do chants like that mean for women in the military?
Adopting the military identity often means repudiating everything that's civilian, i.e., everything that is feminine. What do you do with all this material, then, when you have women marching along with men? It just doesn't work.

News about Haditha is unfolding. Recently there was a report of thirty photos taken by soldiers who arrived on the scene.
From a cultural perspective, this is the first digital camera war. I don't think the administration calculated this at all. Cheney was the master in Desert Storm. As Secretary of Defense, he set up a whole system to keep reporters out of access. He's said, "We didn't want to trust the story of the war to journalists." Now all the troops are over there with cheap digital cameras you could get at the PX and they've got access to laptops. You not only have photographs of everything, but you have a new kind of soldier lore: the trophy DVD. You take pictures of your kills. That's been done in every war since the Instamatic, but in the past it was a one-time representation: You take the photo home. Someone sees it. They're shocked and you throw it away. But now, you take the pictures, digitize them, put rock music to them.

And then they're reproduced?
Absolutely. I've got one. It's all about documenting what you've done. The problem comes once you bring that stateside. A Marine down at Pendleton told me that after his first tour in Iraq, he had some of his buddies over and they were drinking beer and he put in his little DVD. And his wife, with their new baby, walked in the room and she said,"What is that?" And he said that was the first time he knew he was home. One thing the military does a great job of is making the citizen into a soldier. It does a lousy job of taking the soldier and making that person back into a citizen. And that soldier knew he was back in the civilian world when he saw things from his wife's perspective.

What are you working on now?
I'm working on a story about a female soldier who went to Iraq, came back and for the last five months has been AWOL. Her unit was due to be deployed to Iraq again and she was about ready to leave the house, keys in hand, and she turned to her mother and said, "I can't go." She's been a fugitive ever since.  n°