Helen Benedict on Sand Queen

Helen Benedict was one of the first journalists to notice that American women serving in Iraq were fighting a war on two fronts.  In the field, against enemy combatants; and back on base, where they coped with pervasive sexual harassment and assault from their fellow American soldiers.  Benedict spent 3 years interviewing women veterans of the Iraq War.  She wrote a nonfiction book, The Lonely Soldier:  The Private War of Women in Iraq.  She's returned to the same subject, this time in a novel called Sand Queen.