COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Service: Women
Should Women Be In Combat?
Mary Delach Leonard, the Post-Dispatch
July 10, 2005
For 13 months, Sgt. Jennifer Lien saw Iraq from the windows of the22-wheel flatbed tractor-trailer she drove, hauling supplies to U.S.
soldiers. Sometimes, she slept on the ground under the hulking semi,
her
"home on wheels."
"We were on the road for a day to 10 days at a time," Lien said.
"Everything I owned was in the bottom of our truck."
Lien, 23, of St. Louis, served with the 1221st Transportation Company,
Missouri National Guard. From June 2003 to July 2004, the 1221st drove
1.5 million miles, delivering tons of food, water and equipment to
infantry units such as the 101st Airborne and the 82nd Infantry.
Lien and co-driver Sgt. 1st Class Shannon Andrews, 36, her platoon
leader, put 40,000 grueling miles on their truck. During those long
hours on the road, they would pass the time by discussing all sorts of
issues — including women in the military, Andrews said.
Lien believes it is time to put the gender debate to rest.
"The question should be: Is a person capable of doing the job?" she
says. "Aren’t we past this yet?"
Andrews said that some male soldiers have a problem with the fact that
physical testing standards are lower for female soldiers. But he said
that wasn’t an issue with Lien because he found her to be an
exceptional
soldier who could handle the rough life on the road.
"She was one of the most self-sufficient soldiers I’ve ever met,"
Andrews said. "She wasn’t afraid to get in the middle of it. We had
to
be pretty aggressive drivers over there, and she fell into that role."
The debate over the role of women in the military has been going on for
more than half a century, since the Women’s Armed Services
Integration
Act of 1948 first allowed women, other than nurses, to serve on active
duty in peacetime. The arguments have remained consistently familiar:
Some believe women should be allowed to be all that they can be. Others
say it is wrong to put women in harm’s way. With 22,000 women
currently
deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is clear that they are vital to
the
war effort. The question that remains is whether women should be
allowed
to serve in direct ground combat units — infantry, artillery and
armor —
and that’s a wall that Americans don’t appear as eager to cross.
According to a CNN/USA/Gallup poll taken in May, 72 percent of
respondents said they approve of women "serving anywhere in Iraq." Just
44 percent said they would support women being assigned to ground
combat
units that "are doing most of the fighting."
But the issue is clouded in Iraq, where insurgents are as likely to
attack support units as combat units. "The front line is the highway,"
veterans of the war often say, and support units, such as the 1221st,
travel that line every day. In policy, women aren’t allowed in combat
units, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have to fight. When a
Marine
convoy was ambushed in Fallujah last month, three of the dead and 11 of
the wounded were women.
Lien remembers one particularly close call.
She was driving the lead truck in a convoy that had just left the town
of Najaf when a bomb exploded there, killing a Shiite cleric.
"There are always attacks on the road," she said.
*For the history books*
These are historic times for women in the military, and first-woman
stories have been making the news since the war started.
In June, Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, 23, of the Kentucky National Guard
became the first female soldier to be awarded the Silver Star since
World War II. She killed three insurgents who attacked her convoy near
Baghdad.
In October 2004, Spc. Jessica Cawvey, a single mother of a 6-year-old
daughter, was the first military mother from Illinois to die in Iraq.
An
explosive device exploded next to her truck.
And, of course, there was Pfc. Jessica Lynch, the first rescued
prisoner
of war.
Women make up about 10 percent of the 230,000 U.S. troops serving in
Iraq and Afghanistan. They are medics and military police, truck
drivers
and helicopter pilots. Since 1994, 95 percent of military jobs have
been
open to women, according to Pentagon policy.
Of the 1,731 U.S. troops who have died in Iraq, 39 have been women;
nearly 300 women have been wounded. Six women have died in Afghanistan.
From time to time, the issue of women at war is revisited by public
debate, as was the case with the ambushed female Marines.
On his new cable TV show "The Situation," political commentator Tucker
Carlson demanded to know why the U.S. military wasn’t taking
precautions
to protect servicewomen; he referred to the situation as "barbaric."
And on military.com, a Web site for current and retired military
personnel, the forum chatter about women in the military is always
heated.
"How many lives are you willing to lose for equality?" asked a recent
contributor.
*A political skirmish*
Command Sgt. Maj. Cynthia Pritchett, the senior enlisted adviser in
Afghanistan, was clearly miffed as she took off her desert camouflage
jacket before she would answer a question from the audience at a
conference in Washington in May on women in the military. She had been
asked about an amendment in Congress to limit the role of women in
combat, backed by Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., the chairman of the
House Armed Services Committee.
"This is Cindy Pritchett’s personal reaction, not Sgt. Maj.
Pritchett’s
reaction," she said, speaking to a roomful of career military women. "I
think it could set women back years from all we’ve accomplished.
First
of all, we always tell little girls you can grow up to be anything that
you want to be, and then we get into the military and we say, all
except
for what you’re going to do in the Army, Navy, Air Force and
Marines."
The amendment, which was later withdrawn, would have made combat
exclusion of women the law. Top Army leadership and Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld opposed the proposal. So did feminists and lawmakers
from both parties who charged that it would have sent the wrong message
to female soldiers and caused confusion on the battlefield.
Elaine Donnelly, whose Center for Military Readiness specializes in
military personnel issues, criticized the Pentagon for violating its
own
exclusion policy by locating mixed-gender support troops with combat
battalions that are supposed to be all-male.
Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., who fought the amendment, said it would have
severely affected support battalions by removing women from vital jobs
they are doing in Iraq. He disagreed that the Pentagon was trying to
manipulate policy; rather, it was reacting to a new type of warfare.
"The type of conflict has changed," Skelton said. "A bomb going off in
downtown Baghdad, a bomb on the road, an ambush on the road, a
helicopter going down — all those can bring about casualties of both
men
and women. They’re not on any front line, but sadly that is what
happens."
The fracas illustrates a still-deep divide between advocates who push
for advancement of women in the military and opponents who believe that
women will weaken it.
Evelyn "Pat" Foote, a retired Army brigadier general who served on the
Army task force on sexual harassment, believes the Pentagon’s
exclusion
policy is outdated.
"If we are to complete the mission successfully, the military must be
free to utilize combat support where and when they are needed," Foote
said. "Women are serving. Women are in danger. Get over it. They’re
there. They’re volunteers. They know they’re in danger. So why
can’t you
accept the fact? The volunteers accept it," Foote said.
Donnelly believes the push for women in combat is more about career
advancement than the good of the military. She believes that women have
a worthwhile role in the military, but not in combat units.
Donnelly cites studies that show that women lack upper-body strength
and
cannot carry what the average male soldier can carry, and would not be
able to rescue a fellow soldier.
She believes the issue is not equal rights or opportunity, but survival
on the battlefield.
Others argue the issue on philosophical and religious grounds. They say
it’s not whether women can go to war but whether they should go to
war.
Allan Carlson, president of the Howard Center in Rockford, Ill., a
pro-family values think tank, worries that when a nation sends women to
war, society will be weakened.
"We’re trying to break with human history," Carlson said. "I think
it’s
wrong. The whole human experience is to protect the future of your
society, and you don’t do that by sending mothers to war."
Carlson concedes that there has been little public outcry over the
issue, but he wonders if that would change should a draft be
reinstated.
The Rev. Leroy E. Vogel, a retired Navy chaplain and professor emeritus
at Concordia Seminary, is pushing churches to tackle the issue, based
on
Scriptural study.
"The church has remained silent, and I think it is evidence of
cowardice," he said.
*Can’t we get along?*
Sgt. Lien believes that if women are capable and want to serve in
combat, they should have the opportunity.
"I wouldn’t do it, but I’m sure there are women who could do it,"
she said.
Lien said that she got along well with the male soldiers in her company
because they knew she could do her job.
"I never felt like I didn’t belong," Lien said.
But some who study the military worry that mixing men and women in
combat situations won’t work.
Mackubin Thomas Owens, an associate dean of academics at the Naval War
College in Newport, R.I., believes that the presence of women in a
combat environment would increase friction and have a negative impact
on
unit cohesion.
Owens has written, "All the social engineering in the world cannot
change the real differences between men and women or the natural
tendency of men to treat women differently than they do other men."
Although the military has strict rules on sexual harassment, critics
argue that all the training in the world can’t make it disappear
completely.
Sgt. Kim Endicott, 28, of Ste. Genevieve, Mo., and Staff Sgt. Melissa
Squires, 36, of O’Fallon, Mo., who served together in Iraq with the
203rd Engineer Battalion, Company B, Missouri National Guard, were
angry
when they found graffiti that insulted female soldiers on the walls of
a
camp bathroom.
"It happens in every unit in every deployment, and there’s no way
around
it," Endicott said.
She agrees that women should be allowed to serve in combat if they are
capable, but she thinks it would be hard for some male soldiers to
accept.
"A guy soldier told me he couldn’t handle seeing a female soldier
die,"
she said. "It’s just how everybody’s been raised."
On the other hand, Staff Sgt. Bob Haug, 42, who served in Iraq with the
2175th Military Police, Missouri National Guard, said his unit could
not
have done its job without female MPs.
"They would go outside the wire with us every day. They held their
ground, and they did their job without flinching," he said.
"We have to have females in our unit — it’s part of the job of law
enforcement. When we apprehend females we need females to process them.
They have to be searched. I think anybody who’s got an issue with it
is
absolutely narrow-minded. They’re dinosaurs, and they should retire."
Sgt. Andrews said that he’s observed a tendency on the part of some
leaders to treat female soldiers differently.
"I’ve seen some poor female soldiers, but you’ve also got guys
looking
for an easy way out," he said. "When a guy does it, you tell him to get
his butt to work. But you can get in trouble if you talk that way to a
female soldier."
When the draft ended in 1973, the doors opened wider for women, who now
make up about 15 percent of the armed forces.
Natalie Skyles, 19, of Ballwin, who graduated in May from Marquette
High
School, is one of 86 female recruits who joined the Missouri National
Guard this year. She wants to be a police officer and heard that the
military police offer good training. She leaves for basic training on
July 13.
"I’m excited to go and a little nervous about leaving home," she
said.
By volunteering, she knows there’s a chance she could go to war.
"If they need me, they need me," Skyles said. "I’m not afraid to go
anywhere."
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