Literary Summary of Voluntary Force
A novel by Ann Thompson
The female protagonist in Voluntary Force, Ashton Sparks, and her Women Army Corps (WAC) peers are transformed into Army officers in three months instead of four years at West Point. A military novel, Voluntary Force plunges the reader into the harrowing plight of an ordinary female soldier who struggles for acceptance in the peacetime military. If you have any interest in the sexual revolution and its effect on military history, then this novel will capture your attention and take you back through a unique American experience.
By way of historical background, back in the mid-1970s, when the Army discontinued the draft and began relying on volunteers, the Army was referred to as a "hollow Army”. The first female cadets entered the military academies in 1976. Meanwhile, the Army, desperate to meet officer recruitment quotas, implemented a special Women's Army Corps (WAC) program to give direct commissions to females with college diplomas. Many books have been published about men's experiences in the military, especially their experiences during times of war -- combat and heroics -- war stories. Over the years, a few non-fiction books have been published about the elite first female cadets who entered the military academies.
A military novel “Voluntary Force” is the first military novel of its kind. It offers a glimpse into the inner reality of female soldier's experience during the massive invasion of women into the military. The story is about a young woman in uniform whose silence is her armor. Sometimes on the offense, sometimes on the defense, sometimes a winner, sometimes a loser, most of her battles cease because of impasse rather than resolution. Psychological pressures and words, not guns and bullets, were the weapons of destruction used to fight the sexual revolution. For this purpose, fiction achieves an emotional truth not possible in non-fiction.
As a work of fiction, Voluntary Force is especially interested in showing the foibles of individual officers, soldiers, and the military system itself. The characters -- strangers of different ethnic and social backgrounds -- are brought together and forced to interact in order to do their military jobs, they cannot leave wherever they are either because they are trapped, or because they're training for something important (war) to happen.
In the opening paragraphs of Voluntary Force, the reader's attention is immediately captured because it begins with the central character's quirky motive for joining the military. "She imagined herself a feminist version of the seventeenth century mathematician Rene Descartes, enchanted by the romantic benefits of a soldiering sabbatical." Ashton Sparks now has to defy the reader's expectations for her. Indeed, her instincts (and the military's qualifying prerequisites) are questionable, but she has the courage to follow them. Indecisive and incurably forgiving, Ashton Sparks has an internal problem, a powerful weakness and a potentially fatal flaw, a crisis within her soul.
Voluntary Force now takes the protagonist's internal problem and externalizes it by putting her into conflict with another character, the decisive and straightforward (male) military antagonist(s). The protagonist, Ashton Sparks, is not an accepted leader. She struggles as hard as she can to resolve her conflict with the military antagonist(s). By resolving this conflict, Ashton can also resolve her internal problem. By the end of the novel, after several successes and many setbacks, however, she becomes far less indecisive, but even more alienated from reality. The misfit protagonist is both trapped and waiting for something important to happen. Finally, she is relieved of her command. Misfortune is good when it shocks a fool to her senses -- and true suffering creates within her a healthy respect for reality. They don't give out medals for dodging cruel remarks and enduring harassment for six years. A positive heroine, Ashton Sparks is meant to serve as a role model for readers, to inspire them to accept personal difficulties as a necessary sacrifice for the advancement of the military and society in general. At last, the ordinary female soldier, past, present, and future has her own fictional heroine.
