A Woman’s Journey Of Self-Discovery In The Military-Nicole Waybright’s Long Way Out

A Woman’s Journey Of Self-Discovery In The Military-Nicole Waybright’s Long Way Out

Book Review

By Frank Jackman

Long Way Out: a young woman’s journey of self-discovery and how she survived the Navy’s modern day cruelty at sea scandal, Nicole Waybright, SpeakPeace Press, 2016

No question as the extended title of the book under review, Long Way Out: a young woman’s journey of self-discovery and how she survived the Navy’s modern day cruelty at sea scandal, suggests everybody can appreciate, and probably has done so since childhood, a good if in the end troublesome sea story. Especially troublesome since it involved a villainous ship’s female commanding officer who acted like something out of an old-time sea novel. Add into that mix some details about what life is like on a modern warship and the now important factor of women being integrated into the life of naval ships and you have the skeleton of the story that the author, Nicole Waybright, wants to tell in this lightly fictionalized version of her trials and tribulations as a gunnery officer on naval warships in the 1990s. But there is more than that here, and what makes this a such a good, if long at five hundred pages, read worth the effort is her transformation from a “go along to get along” upwardly mobile naval officer to an active peace and justice activist through her five years of service which ended in 2001 with her resignation from the Navy.     

That transformation for warrior to peacenik part is the hook for those of us, mostly male, maybe also mostly older, who also have had doubts about the value of their military service both to society and to themselves can relate too. That the writer and main character is a young woman serving in peacetime aboard ships far from active combat makes the read more compelling. What we have here is a thoughtful mix, or maybe mix-up, about duty, about honor, real honor, and about the very facile way these days young men and women can get caught up in the “glory” of war.

As Ms. Waybright pointed out in her introduction she wanted to, and has, written a very compelling account of what service in the modern weapon and technology-driven military is all about. There has certainly been an overload of books about men’s experience in combat, fiction and non –fiction, one thinks of the classic Norman Mailer novel The Naked and The Dead, and certainly since the Vietnam War there have been a fair range of books about men’s transformation from gung-ho combatant to seeker of peace. This woman’s take on that process breaks some new ground here and will become the benchmark that future writers who write about their military service, female and male, will have to consider.

This review would not be complete though if I didn’t include the fact that Ms. Waybright also gives, in great detail, how life about a modern ship, really a modern sea-going weapons platform goes when the crew is out to sea for extended periods. How men and women relate, the physical problems on ships for women, the eternal officer-enlisted relationship question that always gets more play when a woman is in charge, and how being up close and personal on a warship, even if no shot was fired in anger can lead one into a far different place. But also of the solidarity among the crew, the gripes large and small, and the long term friendships and comradery as well. Get in on the ground floor of this emerging sub-genre and read this book.