When Janey Comes Marching Home: Portraits of Women Combat Veterans is a multi-media initiative - gallery show, book, and documentary film - that presents a complex portrait of service women returning from war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While women are officially barred from combat, in the current war, where there are no front lines, the ban on combat is virtually meaningless. To date, more than 200,000 women have served in Iraq and surrounding regions - nearly one in seven troops. Their jobs include working as convoy gunners, searching Iraqi homes, and conducting IED sweeps. More than in any previous war in American history, women are engaging with the enemy, suffering injuries, and dying in the line of duty. The Iraq conflict has been called “the women’s war” in the media, but the women who have been deployed since its beginning have largely been unheard and unseen. We may all have different reasons for wanting to see the faces and hear the stories of women combat veterans. Regardless of one’s perspective, these are faces we need to see and stories we need to know.

Over fifty women to date have shared their stories with us - stories that are by turns moving, comic, thought provoking, and profound. Listening to their experiences - of loss and comradeship, pride and frustration, conflict and transcendence, and hard choices about the things that matter most - will change the ways we think about women and war. These stories tell us things we never knew about women in combat: not just what it’s like to be under fire, but also how women deployed to Iraq cope with motherhood, marriage, sexism, sacrifice and duty.

Although soldiers have long been the subjects of documentary photographs and films, it is rare that the public has seen the images - and heard the voices - of women who have experienced combat. Listening to these women, these mothers and wives, these soldiers and veterans, will unsettle our fixed ideas about Americans at war and add dimension to the often flawed or fragmentary pop culture depictions of women in the military: as novelties, but not as real soldiers.

It is our hope that through each of the initiative’s media we can bring together broad audiences- military and civilian, young and old, liberal and conservative - to foster dialogue, broaden public understanding, and undermine stereotypes and preconceptions to reveal a more diverse, honest portrait of women veterans and their wartime experiences.