What does resilience really look like? What does it mean to live a life of courage?

At a certain point, the word “service” takes on a whole different meaning—a meaning each of the female Veterans profiled in this book know well.

Each chapter in Wonder Women shares the story of a different female Veteran, written in her own voice. As you read them, you will learn so much about gratitude, about what sacrifice really looks like, about strength, about duty. You’ll follow them from bootcamp to deployments, from West Point to 9/11 response sessions, from caring for wounded civilians and comrades to middle-of-the-night missions, from walking away from your crying children in the airport headed to a who-knows-where deployment to what it’s like when your own adult kids do the same, this time, walking away from you. You’ll learn about what it’s like both during active duty and what it’s like to come home and try to cope, rebuild, and heal.

At the end of the day, a Wonder Woman isn’t the one who does it all. She’s the one who learns what actually matters and has the courage to build her life around it. These women did just that with unwavering heart and a whole lot of grit.

It is an honor to know them. It is an even bigger honor to be able to share their stories with you so that you may know them, too.