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MWSA Review
Sirens: How to Pee Standing Up by Laura Colbert is an incredible true story of life during a military deployment. This should be required reading for every politician and higher-ranking officer who has forgotten what it’s like on the front line.
Colbert’s writing style takes you to Iraq, where you experience the discomfort, homesickness, and fear alongside her. Without bogging down on too much detail, she packs a lot of information into her description. Added photos bring her words to life.
I enjoyed and appreciated her honesty in portraying the good with the bad, the things she is proud of as well as the things she’s not so proud of.
I highly recommend Sirens to anyone who is considering joining the military, so they can go in with eyes wide open. I also recommend it to civilians who need to understand what military men and women give up to protect America’s freedoms that are so easily taken for granted.
Review by Dawn Brotherton (April 2020)
Author's Synopsis
There's a steep learning curve for every American soldier who deploys to the Middle East war zone. Much of that involves culture shock, and the excitement and confusion also applies to female soldiers. And when that female soldier is also a Military Police Officer, the curve gets bent way out of shape. Laura Colbert was heartland-bred and tough enough when the Army sent her to an MP unit in Baghdad, but she quickly discovered soldiering in Iraq involved a lot more than she expected.
How to establish her military cop cred? How to deal with chauvinistic soldiers? How to deal with Iraqis--men who disrespected her and women who initially distrusted her? How much military law applied in a lawless land? And dealing with even the simplest things, like how to pee standing up. Laura managed it and survived, but the learning curve just bent in another direction when she came home from war suffering with stress and anxiety that eventually bloomed into Post-Traumatic Stress.
Reviews:
"...Since she got back, Naylor has been on a new mission, one she believes also serves her country: She shows...what the war is really like for the soldiers who have to fight it."
--Dee J. Hall, Wisconsin State Journal
"Colbert...has told her story...in the hopes of relating the reality of her war to people half a world away who experienced it only through increasingly small TV news clips and articles in print publications."
--Nathan Phelps, USA TODAY Network
About the Author:
As a daughter of a Vietnam War Military Police officer and a sister to an Army Infantry Medic, Laura joined the Army National Guard as a Military Police officer in 2001 during her freshman year of college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and received her Honorable Discharge in 2009. She served 16 months on active duty, spending over a year in Baghdad, Iraq. Laura's love of travel, living abroad, and serving others brought her to her current position as a middle-school principal. She treasures spending time with her husband and three children. Nature is her oasis. She also loves to read, socialize, remodel homes, and learn, as attested to in her two master's degrees: Experiential Education and Educational Leadership.
ISBN/ASIN: ASIN B07YZ75LQ9, ISBN-10: 1944353275, ISBN-13: 978-1944353278
Book Format(s): Soft cover, Kindle
Review Genre: Nonfiction—Memoir/Biography
Number of Pages: 294