‘It Was Exactly Like the Movies!’ The Media’s Use of the Feminine During the Gulf War

Abstract

A few weeks after the invasion of Kuwait, ITN ‘News at Ten’ from London carried an item on 26 September 1990 about 25–year-old Katherine Lambert, a British woman serving in the Gulf with the American Marines. As a lance corporal, married to a fellow officer, she and her American husband were forced to leave their four-year-old son Zach when they were assigned to Saudi Arabia in September 1990. Lambert’s son was taken from their home in Hawaii to stay with his grandparents in county Durham while his parents were on active duty. On camera, a video of Lambert was played to Zach who excitedly exclaimed, ‘Here’s my Mummy… I kiss her lips’. Katherine was quoted as saying about her decision to join the military, ‘I wanted [to do] something I wouldn’t ever do in the civilian world. There are some limitations strength-wise but other than that I feel men and women are equally capable’.¹ However, British journalist Rachel Trethewey asked in a London Daily Express article about Lambert the following day, ‘If a woman decides to have a child shouldn’t she realize that concessions will have to be made in any career? Wouldn’t it have been understandable four years ago if Katherine Lambert had switched to a less active part of the army?’² Zach was thus portrayed as yet another victim, not of war but a woman’s selfish desire for professional advance.