After six unhappy years in the Army, veteran unlocks life of many passions

One of Emily Yates’ favorite spots on the University of California Berkeley campus is the top floor of a tall building, a place so typically deserted and peaceful that she prefers not to reveal its location lest her public sanctuary become overrun.

From where the Army veteran sits, the Bay Area lies before her in a scenic panorama. You could make the case that this is life imitating metaphor, that the world is indeed at the feet of this 29-year-old Oakland resident with myriad interests and a boundless passion with which to pursue them.

Emily Yates enjoys time with her husband, Eric Yates, in their backyard in Oakland, Calif., Tuesday evening, May 29, 2012. Emily Yates saw the Army as a means to an education and a career in journalism. She served two deployments to Iraq as a public affairs specialist, the second of which was extended past her discharge date as a result of the 2008 surge. Today, even as she attends UC Berkeley on her GI stipend, she is active in Iraq Veterans Against the War, and even as she performs, on her ukulele, her own songs expressing mirthful social commentary, she is still dealing with anger from her experience in the military. (Karl Mondon/Staff)

Yates is a student, working toward a degree in Near Eastern Studies. She is a musician who performs her own songs on the ukulele (or, in a pinch, a banjo strung and tuned to mimic a ukulele), and who recently released the 12-song CD “I’ve Got Your Folk Songs Right Here.”

She is a photographer whose work was recently displayed at the Women’s Veterans Art Exhibit in San Francisco. She is a published writer and poet who posts her work on her aptly named website emilyyatesdoeseverything.com. She has dabbled in social activism, and joined Iraq Veterans Against The War.

Self-expression is a lifestyle, attributable in large part to her nature. But to fully understand her seemingly unquenchable thirst for life, you have to go back to her six years in the military, when she was trapped between her inclination to speak her mind and the Army’s insistence on circumspect obedience.

It was an ill-fated alliance from the start.

“We couldn’t believe our ears,” said Yates’ mother, Amy Danial, recalling the news of her daughter’s enlistment. “Her thing was, she never liked rules and she didn’t like to work hard.”

Home schooled until she was 16, Yates earned a GED rather than complete high school. She ran away from her family’s Liverpool, N.Y., home to pay an unannounced visit to her aunt in New York City. She was so relentlessly rebellious that her parents felt compelled to send her to boarding school.

Emily Yates collects lettuce leaves from her backyard in Oakland, Calif., Tuesday evening, May 29, 2012. Yates served multiple tours for the Army and is now attending UC Berkeley. (Karl Mondon/Staff)

“We felt it was like saving her life,” Danial said.

“I was probably a 7 or an 8 on the scale of (difficult) teenagers,” Yates said. “I was just unhappy, for some reason, with myself.”

Yates saw the Army as a place to get training for an aspiring career (since abandoned) in journalism. It was a place to go when she ran out of money for community college. It was something she hadn’t tried.

“It was going to springboard me into anything else,” she said. “I basically thought: Military — I haven’t done that yet.”

A public affairs specialist, she served two tours of duty in Iraq. If she was removed from the front line, enough insurgent ordinance exploded near her post to underscore that death was a way of life in that war-torn country.

During her time in the Army, she was married, then separated from her first husband. (She has since divorced and remarried.) She was part of the 2007 surge in Iraq, during which she was “stop-lossed” — forced to serve past her scheduled discharge date. She was ordered to attend anger-management counseling, during which she was advised by an Army doctor to “lower your expectations.”

Instead, she continued to bristle against the ritual obedience and conformity of Army life.

“I never met a person who was less cut out for the Army,” David Abrams, her direct supervisor during her first deployment, wrote in an email. “She’s a fundamentally good person. I don’t think she was able to comfortably fit herself into the cookie-cutter demands of the military. She was funny, she was lively, she questioned authority, she colored outside the lines. I don’t think she was very happy during her time in Baghdad, but she made the most of it.”

Emily Yates saw the Army as a means to an education and a career in journalism. She served two deployments to Iraq as a public affairs specialist, the second of which was extended past her discharge date as a result of the 2008 surge. Today, even as she attends UC Berkeley on her GI stipend, she is active in Iraq Veterans Against the War, and even as she performs, on her ukulele, her own songs expressing mirthful social commentary, she is still dealing with anger from her experience in the military. (Karl Mondon/Staff)

Yates felt constrained in her PA duties, ordered to report the Army’s view of the war instead of what she believed to be the truth. Eventually she was banned from writing editorials for the bi-weekly Marne 3rd Infantry Division newspaper

“I got much angrier because I then had absolutely no outlet,” she said.

So she began channeling her frustration — not to mention searing wit and sarcasm — into an anonymous blog that she made available to certain friends and family on the condition of secrecy. “The only thing that saved me,” she said.

“Her blog was a great venting place,” her mother said. “You could definitely hear her getting angry and cynical.”

Reflecting back, “I definitely had some really happy times,” Yates said of her time in the Army. “I have some great friends. I did some really cool things. But I was not a happy person for most of my time in the military.”

In some respects, however, she got exactly what she wanted from her Army experience — a springboard to something else. After her June 2008 discharge, she was able to travel the country on income she received from the Army. The Army is paying for her college education. And she emerged from her service even more committed to seeking out as many new ideas and unique experiences as a 24-hour day will accommodate.

“I was inquisitive in a way,” she said, recalling her decision to enlist. “I wanted to try everything out. I was experimental.

“Still am.”

Contact Gary Peterson at 925-952-5053. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/garyscribe