By Max O’Connell

Emily Yates plans to take over the world. How? With a ukulele, some songs and a whole lot of vulgarity.

The Syracuse native continues her “Eventual World Domination Tour with a stop at the Westcott Theater this Friday, Aug. 16. It will be the ukulelist’s first gig in her hometown.

Those attending will have the chance to hear Yates’ mixture of gentle music with profane, irreverent and often poignant lyrics. It’s an unusual juxtaposition, but a purposeful one.

“People don’t really listen or understand when you say things in a scary way,” Yates said. “If you say it with a smile and a ukulele, your chances are better.”

Yates didn’t start playing music until 2 years ago, when she went on a trip to Ghana with her husband, Erik Yates, also a musician. There, she learned she had better rhythm than she thought, and upon her return home learned to play her husband’s ukulele.

Music has given Yates an outlet to process many of her experiences and emotions. One of her most formative experiences was a six-year stint in the United States Army, which influenced her song “Smoke Break”, about the traumatic experiences of the war.

She says she spent years struggling after her time in the army. Her music, however, gave her a voice.

Since returning from Iraq, Yates moved to Oakland, CA and joined the local chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War. Her music is saturated with themes of her time in the army and various social and political messages.

“It’s been my habit to use my experience in the military to make my civilian life richer,” Yates said, “To be a better person, help those who are struggling.”

Few of Yates’ songs are as somber in tone as “Smoke Break,” in which she describes taking a smoke break before going “back to war.” But others are just as pointed. Titles include “I Don’t Want to Have a Baby” and “Foreign Policy Folk Song.” And Yates isn’t afraid to offend people.

“If the worst thing I do in my life is piss someone off, I’m OK with that,” she said.

Yates categorizes herself as a folk-punk singer. Her songs are short, to the point, and more aggressive than many folk songs. She cites influences as diverse as Bob Dylan, Jonathan Richman and Eric Idle of Monty Python.

Her sense of humor comes through in songs like “Good Ol’ Passive Aggressive,” a direct song about indirect anger, and her signature song “Try Not to Be a D**k,” which gives advice like “cover your mouth when you sneeze,” and “stay out of the fast lane if you are driving slow.”

Yates also wrote an extra verse about police brutality after a friend was hurt during an Occupy Wall Street protest.

“This is what I’m trying to say,” she said. “Don’t shoot people in the head!”

Yates is doing her part to turn the song into a global movement, advocating that people “at the very least use words instead of fists.”

Oakland, Calif. –  Sometimes it’s as subtle as an arched eyebrow. Other times it’s a full-on, in-your-face confrontation. No matter how the message is delivered, it grates on Emily Yates:

You are not a “real” veteran.

“I want to be given credibility where credibility is due, that’s all,” said Yates, an Oakland resident and UC Berkeley student who served two tours in Iraq during her six years as an Army public affairs specialist. “I’m not asking for anyone to put me on a pedestal. I just don’t want anyone to discredit me when I haven’t done anything to earn it.”

Upon her discharge in 2008, Yates hopped in her car and embarked on meandering cross-country journey. She hasn’t slowed down since. In addition to her education — her major is Near Eastern Studies — she has immersed herself in activism, music, photography and writing.

But to her, the coming-home experience is diminished when her military service is dismissed as something less than legitimate. She has some theories why that is sometimes the case — why some have trouble reconciling her anti-war stance with her Army career, or why people in the VA office look at her “like, so who’s your father?”, or why she was told during a heated debate at a recent Cal Veterans Group meeting to “get the (expletive) out” if she didn’t like the way the group was being run.

First and foremost: She’s a woman.

Second: She was in public affairs. “They’ll go, ‘OK, maybe you’re a vet, but you’re not bad-ass like I am,’ ” she said.

Third: She loves to discuss politics (she belongs to the group Iraq Vets Against the War).

And fourth: “There is my reluctance to ever back down from a debate,” Yates, 29, said laughing.

Yates, who freely admits she resisted authority — not always gently — while in the Army, finds it disheartening that her veteran status is challenged most stridently by other vets. She finds it ironic that she would take so much “blowback” at UC Berkeley, an academic environment in which free speech historically has been celebrated.

“I didn’t expect that kind of mentality from people of above-average intelligence seeking higher education,” she said.

But that’s what she got at a Cal Vets meeting when she wanted to know why her posts to the group’s Facebook page were being deleted, and what the posting guidelines should be going forward.

“Two guys just got in my face and started yelling and cursing at me,” Yates said. “I did not get the sense that if I were 6-foot-2 and 250 pounds, they would be talking to me that way. They weren’t talking to anyone else that way.”

Dottie Guy served in Iraq in 2003. As an Army National Guard MP, she came face to face with high value prisoners at Camp Cropper. Currently a student at San Francisco City College, Guy describes herself as nonconfrontational.

Though she may differ from Yates in her service and sensibilities, she shares the frustration of meeting people who “have trouble grasping that I went to Iraq.

“They say, ‘What did you do? Administration? Cook? Supply?’ ” Guy said. “I say, ‘No, MP.’ I don’t feel like they treat me like the others. It’s weird having served my country, handled terrorists and people don’t even think of me as a vet.”

That’s not unusual, said Mike Ergo, a former Marine who served two tours in Iraq and now counsels veterans at the Concord Vet Center.

“In my experience, women’s military experience is typically not seen as legitimate as men’s,” Ergo said. “Although we still don’t allow women in the infantry, they’re still manning 50-caliber machine guns. In those situations, they fight the same battles.

“Also, people can be dismissed as well for having anti-war positions, which I think is a mistake. I think it takes a lot of courage to stand up for your convictions. (Yates) has earned the right to have her opinions.”

Yates knows she provokes some of the negative reaction that comes her way. When she encourages veterans groups to participate in political advocacy, she understands she is aggravating vets seeking primarily a social experience.

What she doesn’t get is the conclusions some people draw about her military service based on her civilian avocations — conclusions she doesn’t think would be drawn if she were a man.

“I worked my ass off in the military,” she said. “It pisses me off when that is written off because I’ve said one thing that somebody doesn’t agree with.”

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

*Not, in my opinion, a completely accurate headline, but whatever.

One of Emily Yates’ favorite spots on the UC 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 many interests and a boundless passion with which to pursue them.

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 will soon release the 12-song album “I’ve Got Your Folk Songs Right Here.” She is a photographer whose work was recently displayed at a female 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 at 19. “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.

“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. Though she was removed from the front line, there were enough explosions from insurgent ordnance near her post to underscore that death was a way of life in the 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,” then-Sgt. 1st Class 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.”

Yates felt constrained in her public affairs 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 — and her 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 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 at Twitter.com/garyscribe.