War is a potent site for the production and reproduction of gender identities. As Elshtain argues, ?wars destroy and bring into being men and women as particular identities by canalizing energy and giving permission to narrate.?1 This paper is concerned with the dominant messages about female gender identity that have emerged from the US?s 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. Specifically, I am looking at the discourse surrounding Pfc. Jessica Lynch and Pfc. Lynndie England, the female poster girls of American involvement in Iraq, and the focus of much wrangling and hand wringing over what the war has said about women. Ultimately, I argue that the predominant female gender images that were reproduced during and after the Iraq War are of the Woman in Peril (Lynch) and the Ruined Woman (England), and that these images crowded out justice feminist-style arguments that Lynch and England demonstrated that women are every bit as good and as bad as men, and are thus no less or more fit for combat and/or military service. I suggest that this occurred because the justice feminist argument for gender equality faces an already entrenched set of counter-arguments in the American discourse, while the Woman in Peril and Ruined Woman tropes are themselves deeply entrenched in the American discourse, and operate at a less explicit?and thus harder to contest?level. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]