Women are 7.4 percent of the Armed Forces of Liberia. Pvt. Tamar J.W. Tarr, 24, a clerk at headquarters, is aiming at the office at the very top of it.
Running was the one thing she could not do.
Every physical fitness test at basic training brought Pvt. Tamar J.W. Tarr back to the same weakness. She had come into the Armed Forces of Liberia as a university graduate, confident in a classroom, sure of herself on paper. None of that helped on the road at first light, with the distance stretching ahead of her and nobody on the sideline to talk her through it.
"One of the biggest challenges I faced during military training was the running and the physical fitness test," she said. "Running is my weakness from day one."
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Civilian life had always come with a cushion. Parents. Friends. Somebody to call. Training took all of it away.
"In training, no one is there," she said. "You don't have family. You only have your guides and your DIs," using the shorthand soldiers use for drill instructors.
She finished anyway. Today, at 24, Tarr is a clerk at Armed Forces of Liberia headquarters in Monrovia, a graduate of African Methodist Episcopal University, and the soldier her superiors sent abroad last year to represent the AFL at a United Nations training program on women in peace operations, where she finished first in her class.
She also has an ambition that most young soldiers keep to themselves.
"My career goal is to become the next general, the next chief of staff," she said. "By God's grace, I can and I will."
No woman has held that post. Since the force was formed in the early 1900s, every professional head of the Liberian military has been a man, and the job has almost always carried the rank of major general or brigadier general. The gap runs deeper than the top office. Women make up 7.4 percent of AFL personnel, according to the Ministry of National Defense, which this month began a nationwide campaign to recruit more of them, starting in Gbarnga and reaching all 15 counties by 2030. The ministry wants women to make up 20 to 25 percent of the force by the end of the decade, and 30 percent after that.
That is the arithmetic behind Tarr's sentence. She is one of roughly 150 women in a force of about 2,000, and she is talking about the office at the very top of it.
For her, the ambition did not start with the uniform. It started with a child's idea about her country.
"It was a childhood dream," she said. "I always told myself that I want to be part of the few women that would change Liberia."
By the time she was old enough to act on it, she had options. She chose the one that pays least and asks most.
"I could have chosen any country to be a military personnel there, but I chose Liberia," she said. "I want to be part of the few women that will change Liberia from the security sector."
Training tested that. So did faith, which is the thing she returns to whenever the story turns hard.
"God carried me through," she said. "He strengthened me to go through the process and I was successful."
What she came out with was not muscle. It was a way of ordering her days.
"The military has shaped my character and my values," she said. "I have become very self-disciplined."
The discipline paid. Sometime last year, the AFL nominated her for the United Nations training on women in peace operations, an area Liberia has been under pressure to strengthen since a 2022 assessment found that institutional barriers were keeping AFL women out of peacekeeping deployments. Tarr went, competed against soldiers from other countries, and came back at the head of the class.
"I came first in the training and I was so proud of myself," she said.
Not every door has opened. She was slated for another course and lost the seat because of her age.
"There was a time I was supposed to go for one course, but I was underage," she said. "They wanted an older person to go."
She did not appeal it. She prayed about it.
"I just talked to God, because I always talk to Him when I'm overwhelmed."
Ask her why more Liberian women do not enlist and she does not pretend the barracks is neutral ground. She says women in the force are challenged precisely because it is a man's institution, and that plenty of young women read that as a closed door. She reads it as an opening.
"But if you're educated and focused, trust me, you'll be at the top," she said.
There is at least one proof of that in her chain of command. Liberia's minister of national defense, Geraldine J. George, is a career soldier who enlisted in the restructured AFL in 2006, rose to brigadier general and served as deputy chief of staff before her appointment to the Cabinet. Tarr is not aiming at a theory. She is aiming at a path someone has already walked part of the way.
For now, the work is headquarters work, Monday through Friday, with weekends given back to the people who put her there.
"My parents motivate me to keep going. They're my motivation," she said. "When I think of them, I remind myself that I have to be successful, because I'm carrying their name on my uniform."
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Her ambition is not about the rank itself. Pressed on what she would do with a seat at the table, she talks about readiness, about a country that has learned the hard way what happens when its security institutions are hollow.
"We have to stand out and be many, because you can't tell what day something is going to happen," she said. "So we have to be ready and equipped, because there's a saying that says in time of peace you have to prepare for war."
To the young women watching, she offers no recruitment slogan. She offers the truth as she found it.
"You don't have to sacrifice anything to join the AFL, but being there is so tough," she said. "You just have to be patient, really patient, through training, and trust me, it's worth it."
And one warning, which is really the whole story compressed.
"To any young person that has a dream of joining the military, you have to be ready for what's ahead. Not because of the uniform, or people, or even the money, but because it's what you want. You have to have passion for the work."
Tamar Tarr is a private. The chief of staff's office is a long way up from a clerk's desk, and the odds are written into the personnel figures. But the force she joined is now openly hunting for women like her, and she has already outrun the thing she said she could not do.
