a teacher, while their father was an elementary school principal.

Seeking a college scholarship, Barrett joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps at Tufts University and planned to serve in the Army for a few years before joining the Foreign Service. She discovered she loved the military. Barrett said that after leading soldiers during the Persian Gulf War, accruing valuable experience and meeting her now-husband, she decided to stay.

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“It’s a confluence of a whole bunch of things coming together,” Barrett said. “And you go, ‘I think I can serve my country a different way than I had originally planned.’ ”

Many of the women in combat roles whom Barrett met told her they were dissatisfied with the limits placed on their contributions, while she said the women who worked in thecommunications field generally felt more fulfilled. So Barrett said she followed the latter path, which took her to assignments in the United States, Kuwait, South Korea, Germany and Saudi Arabia. She became a general in December 2015.

When she was roughly 8 years old, Lodi watched a documentary about the first women to attend the U.S. Military Academy. She said she felt drawn to the Army’s leadership, athletic challenge and notion of service to country, she said, so she later joined ROTC at Rutgers University.

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After she was commissioned into the Army, Lodi said she attended officers’ basic training in San Antonio and then deployed to her first assignment in Germany — a humanitarian assistance mission called Operation Provide Comfort during the Persian Gulf War. Lodi planned to work in