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Introduction In 1863, the only way a woman could join the Union Army and fight the Confederacy in the U.S. Civil War was by disguising herself as a man. So that’s what a young Iowa woman did. She was nineteen when she reported to the Fourteenth Iowa Volunteer Infantry Regiment for duty and was assigned to Company H as a servant to Captain L. A. Crane. The soldier called herself “Charley,” and she escaped detection until her company attended a theater performance in the town of Cairo, in Louisa County, Iowa. As she took her seat among her fellow infantrymen, the provost marshal noticed her and walked over to her row to have a closer look. When he realized that Charley was a woman, he arrested her on the spot. Captain Crane intervened and convinced the provost marshal to release her on the promise that she would change into women’s clothes and leave the regiment. Word had already begun to spread among the servicemen at the camp that a girl soldier was in their midst, and a crowd gathered in front of Crane’s quarters, where guards had taken the woman after the provost marshal released her. She watched the men through a window, and the spectacle became more than she could bear. A revolver was in the captain’s room she grabbed it, walked out onto the parade ground, and shot herself in the chest. An investigation following her suicide found no information about who she actually was, where she was from, or why she had wanted to join the fight.1 Although the story of “Charley” took place some eighty years before the U.S. War Department created the Women’s Army Corps, it encompasses sev- eral recurring themes in the history of the U.S. military. The idea that a sol- dier is a man has deep roots in the American psyche. A woman who attempted to enter the male world of war was both a curiosity and a cause of outrage. More specific images of the American soldier feature a white, heterosexual man. Change Charley to a light-skinned black man trying to pass as white so he could serve as a gunner on a warship during World War II, or a lesbian hiding her sexuality so she could build a military career in the 1990s, and