'Formation: A Woman's Memoir of Stepping Out of Line' shows the military's blatant disregard for...

From the very first sentence —"A few hours before I am raped, two officers in a bar try to corner me and steal my panties" — Ryan Leigh Dostie, a Persian-Farsi/Dari Linguist in Military Intelligence, grips the reader in an emotional and viscerally personal account, detailing the exhilarating highs of finding a sense of belonging in an institution like the Army, to the crushing lows of feeling that same institution turns its back on one of its own. The memoir follows her from her childhood in a strict Christian cult and her pre-9/11 enlistment, to her days of basic training and deployment to Iraq, which she calls "the perfect place for rage."

In an excerpt from Formation, published in June 2019, Dostie has reported being raped by a fellow soldier and is meeting with an investigator from the Army Criminal Investigation Command two weeks after the attack.