“Men don’t understand the barriers military women face, the things that make service unique for us,” Lisa Jendry said. “I functioned with sleep deprivation much of the time and did field exercises with a breast pump.”

Jendry and Jacquelyn Whitehat, both female veterans from Rapid City, spoke Saturday at the Women Veterans Appreciation Luncheon in Rapid City.

Jendry enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1998 as an army photojournalist and public information specialist. Like Whitehat, she was a single parent during her military career, showing up pregnant at her first duty station at Fort Hood, Texas.

Jendry spent a year in Korea without her son and another year with him there. Then, she was then transferred to Fort Wachuka, Ariz., before volunteering for deployment to Iraq.

“Iraq was like nothing else -- mortars, rockets, never knowing what to expect. I thought about my son every day, and when it came time to re-enlist, I decided not to. I just didn’t want to leave my son again, but it was hard. I’ll never forget the day I took my uniform off for the last time,” she said.

Jendry returned to the United States in 2006, feeling lost, restless, and depressed. “I just couldn’t connect,” she said. “I’d lost a good friend in an IED explosion shortly before I left the Army, and I just couldn’t get past it.”

She said that many veterans turn to alcohol to dull the pain, and suicide is not uncommon. “We have another meaning for the acronym PTSD,” she said, referring to post-traumatic stress disorder: “party till someone dies.”

Whitehat, who served in the U.S. Air Force from 1991-2008, spoke of her childhood memories of watching honoring ceremonies for male veterans who had returned home to Rosebud.

“I was in awe of it, the honor of it,” she said. “I wanted to know how I could get to stand with them; I wanted to ask them, ‘Where have you been, and what have done?’”

Although Whitehat said her brother told her before she was deployed to Iraq that she didn’t have to be anybody’s hero, she took her role as a medic with the 728th Air Control Squadron very seriously.

“Nobody was going to die on my watch,” she said. Being a woman did not make the job any easier. “I had to prove myself. I couldn’t be average; I had to push it up,” she said. “But that was the way I wanted it. As women in the military, we still have certain things to conquer.”

When Whitehat received a medical discharge from the Air Force last year, her Native American family held a “coming home” honoring ceremony for her, too.

“When I was brought into the Women’s Strongheart Society that day, I was honored as a warrior, what I’d watched them do for men when I was a child.”

She said it greatly helped ease her transition from the military to civilian life.

Despite episodes of discrimination and other hardships that she encountered as a woman in the military, Whitehat said the hardest part of her military career was the end of it, when she came home.

“My plan was to stay in the military long term,” she said. “I had plans to teach, to help the young enlisted men and women to prepare for the challenges ahead. When that all ended, I was lost.”

She said that although her family was loving and supportive, her transition out of the military was a difficult one. 

“My family didn’t understand the depression and isolation I felt,” she said. “In my efforts to try to find someone I could relate to, I found the VA.” Whitehat said Veterans Affairs services have provided her with the counseling and support she was looking for.

“When you’re deployed, you’re there with a lot of others who are depressed and probably have PTSD, just like you do, so you manage to get along, support each other. Coming home is the hard part,” she said.

Jendry also credits the support she received from the VA with helping her get on with her life post-Army.

“It is critical that we get the help we need,” she said. “There is a tendency among women veterans to think that they’re not ‘veteran enough’ because they didn’t serve in a combat situation. Women veterans have a big responsibility to give them our support, to reach out to them, whether they served two years or 32 years.”

Jendry, too, spoke of the support that her Lakota family provided upon her return.

“When I acknowledged my feelings, the healing began,” Jendry said. “The collective spirit in our culture, the way we come together with such energy to try to an absorb some of the pain -- it was the turning point in my life,” she said. 

Saturday’s program concluded after a showing of the PBS documentary “Lioness,” about the first U.S. female force involved in direct ground combat during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Team Lioness was a team of female Army soldiers who joined a Marine combat unit doing house-to-house searches in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2004. The searched women and children in the homes despite the official Pentagon stance that women in the military are not to be placed in a combat role. The film explores the complex issues that surface when women are put in combat situations.

“When you join the military now, you are going to war. I carried a weapon, was in units where the Geneva Convention didn’t apply. Women are warriors -- they’re right in the middle of the fighting,” Whitehat said.