RAISING ATHENA’s subtitle, “A Mother and Daughter Attend West Point Thirty Years Apart,” only tells part of this memoir’s story. In 1976, women were integrated into the federal service academies. Author Mylinh Brewster Shattan’s father Donald C. Brewster was a cultural attaché in Vietnam, and was among the last U.S. personnel to leave Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. He had sent Shattan and her Vietnamese mother (who had also worked at the U.S. embassy) to America weeks earlier. Inspired by her father’s record of service, Shattan attended West Point in 1987—and then watched as her own daughter, Cara, did the same in 2017. At 348 pages, the memoir moves at a leisurely pace; but then, as Shattan would be the first to admit, there is a lot to unpack in her story.
Shattan is, as she puts it, “at war with [her] past,” and specifically with the idea of service, “whether I did enough and gave enough.” A mixed Christian-Buddhist heritage and a background helping her parents run a family business (a laundry) in a rural town informed Shattan’s teenage years in the 1980s. Military service beckoned, where Shattan had to reckon with the grueling physical demands and a deeply chauvinistic atmosphere.
Shattan writes excellently, and is very thoughtful not only about the duties and responsibilities that come with being an Army officer but also about the manner in which such officers are produced. She criticizes—but does not go quite so far as to condemn—the “honor system” that requires absolute honesty from all cadets and, therefore, holds them to “an unattainable level of human behavior” with sometimes grievous, career-ending consequences for those guilty of infractions (as it was reported in the 1970s). She writes proudly of her daughter’s time at West Point, noting the similarities between her training and Cara’s—but also the differences. Cara was one of the first female cadets who was allowed to box, for instance. Shattan, who left the armed forces early, is pragmatic about what she sees as suboptimal decision-making following graduation.
But Shattan’s memoir is most compelling for what it reveals about life at West Point during a time when women cadets were, as she puts it, “the Other, the outsider coming in.” She writes that “[s]exual harassment and assault are problems I largely avoided," but the reader winces at the word “largely.” Shattan recounts two episodes in which her gender clearly played a part in her treatment. Although this tight focus on the military may not be to every reader’s taste, RAISING ATHENA is a fascinating memoir.
Benefiting from lucid prose and thoughtful, experience-driven analysis, Mylinh Brewster Shattan's RAISING ATHENA: A Mother and Daughter Attend West Point Thirty Years Apart is an eye-opening examination of the process by which female Army officers were—and are—trained.
~ Craig Jones for IndieReader