I Look Like a Veteran Too

Women veterans deserve to be seen and honored for our service

Former U.S. Army Captain Daniella Mestyanek Young on one of her first patrols as part of a mixed-gender combat team

My first mistake was not backing in to the “Reserved for Veterans” parking spot, displayed outside Home Depot. Everybody knows “real veterans” back into their parking spaces, I thought as I saw the grumpy-looking old man put his cart away with a bang and begin to march toward me. My second mistake was shifting my frazzled, whining toddler out of her car seat and onto my hip.

“This is not the day, my dude,” I muttered as he approached. I knew he would give me the what-for: parking was reserved for VETERANS, not their wives.

I was an Army wife. Part of the reason the toddler and I were so frazzled was because Daddy was deployed, again, to war in his role as a special operations helicopter pilot. I understood the dangers he faced daily, from my own former role as an Army intelligence officer deployed twice to Afghanistan, in the famed 101st Division.

I had been out of the Army for less than two years, and often joked that, in one day, I’d been demoted from “Captain Mestyanek” to “so-and-so’s wife,” name unimportant. I’d already become so tired of being what our culture has termed “invisible veterans,” a phrase that, when we dig down just a little, is a dog whistle for “the females.” We’re the ones whose presence is erased every time another politician talks about “our boys over there” or “our guys in green.” The term largely refers to the women who have fought and died for our country in combat since the Revolutionary War, but who couldn’t serve in full capacity for centuries. The combat ban was overturned in 2013, during my service—I’d even played a tiny part in taking it down, as one of the first women integrated onto deliberate ground combat teams in Army history. Oh, I was gonna let this guy have it.

But before I could finish formulating my plan of attack, I noticed that he was…smiling through his squinting. He held out his hand. I saw his VFW-studded ball cap at the same moment I recognized that I was about to be…recognized? I’d felt sure he was coming to scold me, but was this man about to assume that I was a veteran simply because I was the one getting out of the car parked in the veteran parking spot, as he would have done without question for my husband?

“I just wanted to say,” he began, his deeply rumbling voice exactly what I had expected, “I’m in awe of your generation for volunteering the way you have. Thank you for your service.” I know I shook his hand, and I think I thanked him back. As he walked away, I buried my face into my little girl’s curly mop of hair so he wouldn’t hear me burst into tears.

While volunteering at a Veteran Service Organization, I conducted an informal, two-year-long survey. With almost every veteran I welcomed into our program, I asked the same question: “What is the first thing people say when they find out you are a veteran?”

From the men, a singular response: the-almost universal, automatic: “Thank you for your service.”

The feedback was starkly different from women and nonbinary veterans. They received a variety of responses, most along the themes of: “Really?” and “Oh, you’re way too pretty to have been a soldier,” and “You don’t look like a veteran,” along with the leering “They didn’t make soldiers that looked like you back in my day.”

Many of the women I spoke to revealed that they almost never volunteer they’re veterans outside of a “safe space,” for fear of one or the other of these degrading responses; the constant microinvalidations are the thanks we receive for our service. Many of my veteran sisters have told me that they fear entering veteran spaces because “veteran” isn’t enough of an obvious part of their identity—we’re often not still wearing the visible symbols on our sleeves, t-shirts and hats the way the men are. The wounds we carry from our service are just as likely to be termed “invisible,” too.

“Thank you for your service” is a loaded phrase for most of us. As veterans, we have different feelings about this phrase. We can debate whether it represents real gratitude, and whether or not we deserve that gratitude. But we can all agree that it is a form of recognition. Our generation all signed up voluntarily to stand in the gap between American citizens and whomever our enemies might be, a choice most Americans do not make.

Changing the narrative—changing this stereotype—is essential for our community where, according to a 2023 survey by the Wounded Warrior Project, “Women veterans, especially those with lingering military injuries, struggle more with loneliness, anxiety and reintegration into civilian life than their male peers.” The survey found that more women than men suffer from thoughts of suicide, and that almost half of us report being sexually assaulted during our service. According to the National Center for PTSD, women are more likely to develop PTSD symptoms than men, even when we are exposed to the same stimuli.  Yet even though three million women have served in the U.S. Armed Forces since the Revolutionary War, most PTSD research has focused on men. And it’s not just in the research. It’s everywhere in our society, where veterans who look like my husband get to be acknowledged and feel accepted, even with something as small and unquestionable as a parking space.

Every time my husband and I attend an event where he is thanked for his service, while I am told that “I don’t look like a soldier,” I’m forced to justify my service in a way that he is not. It can be as casual as the couple next to us at a hibachi dinner being overtaken with surprise that I’m a former Army Captain, when they expressed no surprise at my husband’s two decades of service. It can be as threatening as the time Mike, a Southwest pilot and Navy veteran, threatened to beat me up in a bar after my book event, because he didn’t think I looked strong enough to represent the narrative of what women veterans looked like and could accomplish in combat. I’m grateful to the three generations of Air Force veterans eating nearby, who did recognize me as a veteran sister and had my back. Mike stood down.

Every year on Veterans Day, it looks a lot like asking for our free drip coffee, only to be told that the freebie is only for “real veterans and not just wives,” as we think, Really? Still? The truth is veterans look like America, and we all know how varied that can be. I look like as much of a veteran as my spouse, and so do my fellow sisters-in-arms. Woman veterans are all ages and come from all walks of life. You’ll find us in your churches, your preschools, your conference tables, your neighborhood groups, your Fortune 500 companies, your bookstores and even in your Audible account. We are directors and CEOs, teachers, mothers, daughters, friends. We are here working alongside you to better our communities.

We know representation matters. And we need our culture to stop erasing us into invisibility and see us for who we are: veterans.

Daniella Mestyanek Young is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Uncultured and a scholar of cults and extreme groups, and extremely bad leadership. Daniella was raised in the religious sex cult, The Children of God. She later served as an intelligence officer for the US Army, making the rank of Captain, and became one of the first women in US Army history to conduct deliberate ground combat operations when she volunteered to serve on a Female Engagement Team, and received the Presidential Volunteer Service Award. Daniella lives with her husband and daughter in Maryland, and holds a master’s degree in industrial and organizational psychology from the Harvard Extension School. Daniella is an organizational development speaker with the Macmillan Speaker’s Bureau, and you can see her TEDx talk here. Daniella is working on a second book called The Culting of America.