War brings out best — and worst — in women as well as men

BOSTON — This is the latest entry in the Lynndie England photo album. A portrait of the 22-year-old private, sober, downcast and guilty as charged. Guilty of conspiracy. Guilty of mistreating detainees. Guilty of an indecent act. Guilty — although there is no official crime for this — of shaming her country.

It's been nearly two years since Pfc. England became the face of Abu Ghraib, the icon of the abuse scandal. The first snapshot in the Lynndie England album showed a small, jaunty soldier in T-shirt and fatigues, with a haircut invariably described as "pixielike," holding a leash. At the end of the leash was a naked Iraqi.

The second snapshot showed her smiling, cigarette dangling from her lips. Her right hand signaled thumbs up, her left hand pointed at the genitals of naked Iraqi men. It was taken on her 21st birthday.

These photos not only shook and shattered the image of Americans in Iraq. They were gender-bending to the breaking point. A country barely used to the idea of women in war was suddenly confronted with the portrait of a woman as an equal-opportunity abuser.

We were also appalled by Charles Graner, the ringleader of the abuse, a former prison guard from Pennsylvania run amok. But it was the femaleness of the young reservist that prompted a rash of stories titled "Explaining Lynndie England." It was woman-as-torturer "angle" behind the profiles describing her as a "hell-raiser" from a trailer park family who first married at 19 and joined the reserves to get money for college and a career as a meteorologist.

If the first two images were breathtaking, the third was no less unsettling. By the time the legal proceedings began last September, the slight, smirking woman had been transformed by eight months of pregnancy. What female archetype did that fit? A defendant in a maternity uniform? A madonna as sexual abuser?

As for the fourth portrait, turn the page to last May. In a military courtroom Lynndie England held her 7-month-old baby. Nearby sat Graner, convicted ringleader, father of her child, and — to add to the soap opera — newly married to another defendant in the Abu Ghraib case.

It's no wonder that her lawyers in the final trial went photo-shopping through the available female images for their last-gasp defense. Tough-as-males soldier or pregnant defenseless woman? Wrong woman or wronged woman? "When all else fails, you try 'the girl defense,' " says a disdainful Lory Manning, a retired Navy captain and advocate for women in the military.