New York Daily News
October 25, 2004

A Nurse's Call To Duty

By Clem Richardson

There are several of Consuelo Dungca's myriad accomplishments for which we should all be thankful. Any soldier serving in Iraq whose life is saved in field hospitals in Kuwait owes his or her good fortune partly to Dungca, and not just because she wrote the manual on how those units should be set up.

She also wrote "U.S. Army Nurse Corps Standard of Nursing Practices," a text for training Army nurses, and co-authored "Standards of Critical Care," a text used by health professionals in and out of the armed forces.

That's kind of appropriate because Dungca, a colonel in the Army Reserve's 8th Medical Brigade, is also the city Health and Hospitals Corp.'s senior assistant vice president for clinical affairs.

That means she oversees, among other things, nursing operations at the city's public hospitals.

And though her two roles sometimes clash, Dungca said she's sure to render unto HHC that which is HHC's.

"I'm careful to work for HHC when I am here," she said in her Worth St. office. "I do my work for the Army when I get home."

She has traveled to Germany, South Korea and other locales to consult and advise on medical unit deployment. When the war in Iraq began, it was Dungca who instructed the Reserves' medical unit, stationed at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn and deployed to Kuwait, what equipment would be needed for each field unit, from beds to lights.

She has traveled to South Korea three times this year, helping to write grim feasibility studies of how medical needs would be met if North Korean troops stormed across the 51st parallel. That meant deciding, among other things, what injuries could be treated at the site or in Army facilities in Japan or Hawaii.

"When people see me, if they don't know me they don't believe what I do," she said.

A native of the Philippines and a graduate of the University of the Philippines, Dungca earned two master's degrees and a doctorate in nursing education from Columbia University's Teachers College. Her doctoral dissertation was titled "Leadership Behavior Style and Job Satisfaction," and Dungca can easily rattle off the difference between transactional and transformational leaders.

She said she always has been picked for leadership positions because "I'm not afraid to work hard. Anything I don't know how to do, I'll learn how to do.

"My philosophy is you don't learn from your mistakes, you learn from your successes," she said. "As you succeed, you keep on succeeding. You make it a building block."

Dungca, who stands under 5 feet and brims with energy, knows how to be tough when she needs to be.

"I have an open-door policy in my office," she said. "If you don't agree with how I want it done, you are free to leave at any time."

Dungca was a clinical nurse specialist when she wrote "Standards for Critical Care" with Brenda Crispell Johanson, Denise Hoffmeister and Sara Jeanne Wells in 1981.

Dungca said she joined the Reserves in 1977 because "I was tired of school." By 1981, she was transferred to the Pentagon, where she was tapped by Surgeon General Everett Koop to write the "Army Nursing Corps Standards" book.

She said she takes great care in her Army work to "look out for the guy in the trenches because they are the ones defending us.

"When I'm on duty in the Army, I am a totally different person," she said. "I'm an officer and a soldier. It's a different kind of camaraderie than civilian life. You want to make sure that when you go to battle, that person will want to save your life. We only see each other once a month but it is always like we saw each other just the day before."

Consuelo Dandy is an expert marksman with a .45-caliber pistol. She can fire it standing, sitting, kneeling and lying down.

Women veterans tell what Veterans' Day means to them


by Rudi Williams
American Forces Press Service


Five women, one from each service, including the Coast Guard, told an overflow audience at the Women in Military Service for America Memorial's theater what being a veteran means to them during a special Veterans Day observance.

"Being in the military is an honor," said Maj. Ladda "Tammy" Duckworth of the Illinois Army National Guard, who lost her leg when an insurgent's rocket-propelled grenade slammed into her Black Hawk helicopter in Iraq. Doctors managed to save part of her right leg.

When Soldiers say, "I am an American Soldier and I serve the people of the United States," it captures the spirit of what it means to be a veteran and what an honor it is to wear a military uniform.

"So many have come before me who gave in their own way, whether it was being injured or the ultimate sacrifice," she said. "Whether you gave your son, your husband or your daughter, or whether you gave of yourself, it's always an honor to serve the United States."

Duckworth said the country is better when everyone pulls together and serves in whatever way they can. "Not everybody can put on the uniform. Not everybody has the capability or is afforded the opportunity to do so," she said. "What's important is that each one of us gives something back for all of the gifts we have for being Americans."

She received a standing ovation when she said she wouldn't hesitate to strap on her new, titanium legs and return to Iraq. "I, along with the rest of the Soldiers at Walter Reed [Army Medical Center] would strap on our new limbs, pick up our weapons and go right back, if we could," she said.

To those who say today's military members aren't on par with those from past generations, Marine Corps Master Gunnery Sgt. Rosemarie Weber had an impassioned response.

"They're wrong! Young men and women today are just as willing to serve as any ever were," she said. "And they're doing a fine job of it, all day, every day, right this very second in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places too numerous to mention."

Veterans Day isn't all about pride and honor, she said. "It's also about giving thanks -- thanking a military veteran for what they've done and what they're doing and for what they will do in the days to come," she said.

Ensign Vanessa L. Franada, a Naval Reserve nurse for the past year and a half, said she's quickly come to appreciate what it means to be a veteran.

"In that brief time, I've gained the experiences of being away from home, serving my country and humanity, enduring a deployment and regretfully, the loss of a friend and fellow shipmate," said Franada. She was deployed in the hospital ship, USNS Comfort, providing relief following Hurricane Katrina.

Franada said walking the halls at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda reinforces the pride she feels in her military service. That comes through whether she is serving long-retired veterans of past wars, or new veterans just returned from Iraq, she said.

Today's newest veterans defy the misconception that veterans are all "elderly, gray and male," she said. "Both men and women are serving with honor all across the battlefield, in all parts of the world," she said.

"Veteran's Day has always been a special day to me, because it's also my birthday," said Col. Linda McHale of the Air Force Reserve.

She said only after deploying to Iraq last year did she come to fully appreciate what it's like to serve in a war zone and the sacrifices veterans make.

Lt. Cmdr. Holly Harrison, the first Coast Guard women to be awarded the Bronze Star, said that less then three years ago, she didn't know what it meant to risk her life in defense of the nation.

"But that all changed as my shipmates and I steamed up the Khawar Abd Allah River into Iraq," Harrison said. "I now know what it means to be a veteran and with the insights I've gained, I've developed a much deeper, much more personal respect for those who've served."

Harrison said she's gained particular respect for her family members who served before her. Both of her grandfathers and father were in the military, but never talked much about their wartime experiences, she said. Now Harrison said she understands why. "When I got back from Iraq, all my friends and family wanted to hear stories about what it was like over there, but I wasn't in the mood to tell stories," she told the audience. "I figured it was because I was burned out, yet even now I still hesitate to tell stories about what happened in Iraq."

USA Today
April 28, 2005
Pg. 1

Women share dangers of combat

Female Amputees Make Clear That All Troops Are On Front Lines

Reality in Iraq has overtaken long-running debate at home

By Dave Moniz, USA Today

WASHINGTON — On June 19, Lt. Dawn Halfaker and soldiers from her military police platoon were on a reconnaissance patrol in Baqouba, Iraq, when a rocket-propelled grenade exploded inside their armored Humvee, grievously wounding two of the soldiers inside.

Dazed and covered in blood, Halfaker mustered the energy to give an order to her driver. “Get out of the kill zone!� she shouted. Halfaker's right arm was loosely connected to her torso.

In the front passenger seat, Staff Sgt. Norberto Lara was in worse shape. His right arm, Halfaker remembers, was severed, a devastating but not mortal wound.

Six days later, Halfaker was a patient at Walter Reed Army Medical Center here, about to lose her arm to a life-threatening infection. Today, as she completes her rehabilitation, Halfaker is considering several job offers in Washington and planning to attend graduate school at Georgetown University after leaving the Army.

She is one of five American military women at Walter Reed who have lost limbs from combat injuries in Iraq, a war that marks the first time large numbers of female troops have faced prolonged exposure to daily combat.

A decade ago — in the midst of a heated national debate over which military jobs women should occupy — Halfaker's story might have ignited a battle over whether women should experience the hazards of ground fighting. Today, she and other severely injured female soldiers say, reality has overtaken that debate.

Since the ambush that nearly took her life, Halfaker, 25, has done about 30 interviews and appearances, including segments on MSNBC and CNN, and has counseled cadets at West Point. She says she is sometimes asked, often by people her parents' age, whether women should be so heavily involved in fighting.

“Women in combat is not really an issue,� she says. “It is happening.�

Although women are eligible to fill most jobs in the military, they are barred from some of the most hazardous positions, including infantry troops, special operations commandos, tank crews and others that would place them in front-line ground combat.

But they can fly most aircraft, including fighter jets, and serve as MPs and in other jobs that put them in harm's way.

Guerrilla wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — where front-line and rear-echelon troops often share the same dangers — have rendered the military's efforts to regulate risk difficult if not impossible.

“Everyone pretty much acknowledges there are no rear battle areas, no forward line of troops,� Halfaker says.

Since the Iraq war began two years ago, 35 U.S. women have died and 271 have been wounded. Although several hundred American women lost their lives in previous wars, the vast majority of them were nurses or auxiliary troops assigned to rear areas, many of whom died of disease and injuries unrelated to combat.

During Vietnam, the last prolonged ground war, a total of eight American women — all nurses — died.

U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson, a New Mexico Republican who served as an Air Force officer in the 1980s, says the Iraq war seems to have largely answered questions about how Americans would react to seeing women return home in bandages and body bags.

“There have been casualties, men and women, and we grieve for them. But I think we have gotten beyond the point where losing a daughter is somehow worse than losing a son,� Wilson says.

To fly again

The most severely injured of the amputees is Maj. Ladda “Tammy� Duckworth, an Illinois Army National Guard pilot who lost both legs when a rocket-propelled grenade slammed into her Black Hawk helicopter near Balad on Nov. 12.

Duckworth says doctors told her she survived because the heat from the explosion cauterized her leg wounds. That prevented her from bleeding to death after her co-pilot landed the aircraft.

Normally, Duckworth says, someone with her injuries might have died from blood loss in a matter of minutes.

Five months after the attack, Duckworth, 37, is recuperating at Walter Reed and learning how to perform life's most basic chores. She lost her right leg close to the hip and her left leg below the knee and is just now learning to walk with artificial legs.

For most who lose limbs, the recovery time — including physical and occupational therapy — is about one year.

Duckworth, a supervisor for Rotary International in her civilian job, says she hopes to resume flying helicopters someday, a plan that once would have seemed unimaginable. Her husband, Army National Guard Capt. Bryan Bowlsbey, supports her decision.

A number of severely wounded servicemembers have returned to active duty after losing limbs. One, Air Force Lt. Col. Andrew Lourake, resumed flying last fall after doctors amputated his leg following a motorcycle accident.

Lourake, who flies military VIPs on Gulfstream jets, says it will be difficult but not impossible for Duckworth to resume flying as a double amputee.

“The big thing is what your capabilities are. This is not the same Department of Defense as the Vietnam era,� he says. “If you lost a limb then, you were automatically discharged.�

Duckworth says she hopes to return to helicopter simulators sometime within the next year, the first step toward making it all the way back to the cockpit. She says it's unclear whether the Army will let her return as a pilot. If not, she will try to fly as a civilian.

She says she chose to fly Army helicopters for a simple reason: “I wanted to take the same risks as the guys.�

'Double clutch' for women

The public has long since gotten used to seeing men return home without arms and legs or otherwise mangled.

In the 1946 movie The Best Years of Our Lives, Harold Russell, a real World War II vet who lost his hands in a training accident, portrayed a young sailor who fought to overcome self-doubts when he returned to civilian life as a double amputee.

Russell was not trained as an actor but won an Oscar for his performance. Other male actors, including Tom Cruise (Born on the Fourth of July), Jon Voight (Coming Home) and Gary Sinise (Forrest Gump), have played disabled war vets in the movies.

But seeing images of severely wounded women is another story. Duckworth says she was told that some of the doctors and nurses treating her were unnerved when they saw what the explosion had done to her body.

“I think they had not seen a female that badly mutilated,� Duckworth says. “I've been told it was emotionally difficult for them.�

Besides her legs, Duckworth lost most of the back of her right arm. Doctors were able to save it by transplanting skin from her stomach to make her arm whole.

Jack Farley, a Vietnam War leg amputee and retired federal judge, says those who lose limbs go through adjustments that most people can't imagine.

One of the most difficult, he says, is getting used to people staring at you, something he suspects may be even more difficult for Duckworth and the other women.

“I think you do a double clutch when you see an amputee who is a woman,� says Farley, who visits Walter Reed often to counsel men and women amputees.

Juanita Wilson, an Army staff sergeant, lost her left hand Aug. 21 when an improvised bomb exploded near her Humvee on a convoy mission north of Baghdad. Wilson says her hand was “blasted wide open,� leaving only bones and tendons.

During eight months of recovery and rehabilitation at Walter Reed, Wilson befriended several of the other women there, including Duckworth.

The women seem to have a special bond, she says, and it has helped her cope with the difficulties of learning to dress and eat with one real hand and one artificial one.

“When Tammy came in, my heart dropped,� Wilson says, recalling how badly injured her friend was. “I went right up to see her.�

At the time, Duckworth was despondent. Wilson took sympathy cards lying around the room and arranged them on the wall. Then she washed Duckworth's hair.

Wilson's family — husband Charles and daughter Kenyah — has joined her at Walter Reed.

Wilson says the injury has motivated her to attend nursing school and one day, perhaps, return to Walter Reed as an Army nurse to “take care of soldiers.�

Wilson, 31, says she has observed one major difference among amputees at Walter Reed. The men, she says, care much less about their appearance and will often move about without their artificial limbs.

She won't.

“I just don't think America is ready to see a woman without an arm,� Wilson says.

The new reality

Connie Halfaker, Dawn's mother, says her daughter is doing remarkably well adjusting to her injury. She has learned to snowboard with one arm and even does backflips on a trampoline.

Halfaker, who was promoted to captain after returning from Iraq, is writing a first-person account of her experiences. Her mother says she is proud of her daughter, if surprised by what happened.

“I never worried about her. We have a son, and growing up in the Vietnam era, in the back of my mind, I knew it was a possibility that I would need to give up my son for a war,� Connie Halfaker says.

While women account for about 2% of all combat deaths in Iraq, they play a larger role in the all-volunteer military. About 15% — nearly one in six — of all active troops are female, nearly double the percentage from 1980.

Some critics of the military's gender rules say the pendulum has swung too far and women are doing too much.

Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, a public policy organization in Livonia, Mich., says Defense Department rules needlessly put women at risk.

“I have nothing but admiration for those women who've been injured,� Donnelly says. “But I am critical of the Pentagon policymakers.�

Donnelly says the Army, wanting to create more opportunities for women and make them more promotable, is bending rules to push those in support units close to front-line combat in Iraq.

Pentagon: Rules are clear

The Pentagon denies that. Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, an Army spokesman, says military rules are clear: Women are barred from units “whose primary mission is direct ground combat.�

Donnelly and those who don't agree with her point of view do concur on one thing. Servicemembers who have been killed or seriously wounded in Iraq — men and women — are often obscured from public view.

The Pentagon has barred cameras from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where caskets carrying the bodies of U.S. troops arrive back in the USA.

Connie Halfaker says the numbers of women killed or seriously wounded — compared with the numbers of men — are so low that they remain largely off the public's radar screen.

“I don't think the people realize what is happening. It's one of the reasons that Dawn has chosen to do some of the interviews,� she says.

Heather Wilson, the New Mexico congresswoman, says the military faced large hurdles in opening up jobs such as fighter pilot and military police to women. Within American culture, she says, there is a deeply rooted belief that women should be protected rather than be protectors.

“It's a moral and social argument about the role of women in the society,� Wilson says. “I think Americans have accepted that women make all kinds of contributions, as police, as astronauts.

“Those who are called to serve do it in a variety of ways, including protecting this country from its enemies.�

But many do Msladycop.

I have worked with hundreds of female military members from Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines.

They have my respect.

Times change only relunctantly and slowly.......but they DO change.

San Diego Union-Tribune
September 9, 2005

Female Soldiers In Equal Danger

Women serving in convoys see as much combat as infantrymen

By Richard Chin, Knight Ridder News Service

FORWARD OPERATING BASE SPEICHER, Iraq – Here's what happens when a nice woman from Minnesota – "Minnesota Nice" as the locals say – gets a .50-caliber machine gun and goes to war.

"I was not an aggressive person. I was the most passive person: 'It's OK, you go first,'" said Michelle Maxwell, who works in a nursing home in Austin, Minn.

Then eight months ago, the Army National Guard specialist, 21, was sent to Iraq, taught to operate the heavy machine gun turret of a Humvee and told to shoot or run over anybody who threatened the truck convoys she was assigned to protect.

"I said, 'There's just no way.' I put old people to bed. There's no way I could run over a kid," Maxwell said.

That was before she saw fellow soldiers in her transportation unit getting blown up on the roads of northern Iraq.

Now she talks about the "rush" of confronting insurgent attacks, forcing civilian traffic out of the way and stitching the pavement with her machine gun if another vehicle gets too close.

"You get here and you see what's going on. You see IED (improvised explosive device) holes, people sent to (the hospital in) Germany. You've got to clear the way. You have to. You just have to," she said.

In Bravo Company, 50th Main Support Battalion, Maxwell finds herself in a conflict with no front line, where the enemy's weapon of choice is the improvised roadside bomb. The once-safe rear echelon job in a truck company is now one of the most dangerous, and female soldiers see as much combat as infantrymen.

Newly armored vehicles are saving lives, but the soldiers still face danger from a determined enemy using deadlier bombs that engulf their big, slow-moving trucks in flames.

Bravo Company describes itself as the wheels of the 42nd Infantry Division, its truck convoys moving food and prisoners, even tanks, to about two dozen forward operating bases throughout northern Iraq.

The company has about 250 soldiers, mostly from the Minnesota National Guard. About a fifth are women. The dozens of trucks that make up a convoy are inviting targets to insurgents.

"It is what a lot of people say is the most dangerous job in the division," said Maj. Jeff Howe, a St. Cloud, Minn., resident and the company commander. "The infantry division, they are the ones doing the hunting. We kind of feel we are the hunted."

A bomb killed one of the unit's soldiers this summer, Sgt. Manny Hornedo, 27, of Brooklyn, N.Y. About a dozen have been wounded.

The company's most dangerous route is a 170-mile round-trip run from its home base at Forward Operating Base Speicher near Tikrit to Forward Operating Base Warrior near Kirkuk.

That's where a bomb caught Spc. Anne Hanson's truck on Aug. 6.

"It started on fire almost immediately. It blew the fuel tank and both sides were on fire. My window broke and flames came in," said the 24-year-old Litchfield, Minn., nursing student.

"The heat inside the cab was so intense you couldn't breathe," said her fellow driver, Sgt. Matthew Perrier, 45, a school bus driver from Richfield, Minn.

Perrier got shrapnel in his foot and suffered burns to his face. Hanson got shrapnel in the foot, burns to her leg and a broken arm.

Hanson is believed to be the first woman in the history of the 42nd Infantry Division to get the Purple Heart.

"I wish like I had a dollar for every time I heard that," Hanson said. "It's an honor, but I don't think they should make such a big deal about it."

The truckers said many of their vehicles had only "hillbilly armor" – improvised metal plates – for the first six months of their deployment.

They started getting improved armor on all their trucks in June, just as "it started getting nasty, real nasty," Howe said. "It has saved countless lives."

On a recent trip back from Warrior, Spc. Jessica Klein, a 20-year-old nursing student from Litchfield, Minn., drove the first big truck in the convoy, a gigantic vehicle called a Heavy Equipment Transport.

"When you first start, the trailer is hard to get used to, but after that it's fun to drive," she said, waving at a kid by the side of the road.

The convoy owns the road. Truckers drive aggressively, right down the middle of the highway. Despite the morning rush hour, the Humvees force all the civilian traffic on both sides to the shoulders. They don't obey traffic laws and stop moving only if a bomb is detected.

If a civilian car ventures too close, Klein will swerve right at it until the driver decides not to play chicken with a truck capable of hauling a 70-ton M1 Abrams tank.

"She makes me feel safe," said Spc. David Wolfley, 33, a St. Cloud resident who rides with Klein.

I have never been able to understand why this society values a womans life more than a mans. If we are to continue to live as free people, conflicts will arise which necessitate protecting our freedom. Thus, why shouldn't women share in the responsibility since we also benefits from being a free people. I don't care to touch the "picture issue" other than to say that this in no way demeans the sacrifices these woman have made, including losing their lives. Some people still just don't get it.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer
March 15, 2005

Women In Armed Forces Saluted

By Helen Thomas, Hearst Newspapers

WASHINGTON -- Women in uniform are doing their share in the Iraqi and Afghanistan war zones -- and taking their hits.

A Pentagon spokesman said that 23,409 women were deployed in the two countries in support of U.S. operations as of last Dec. 31.

A total of 31 servicewomen have given their lives, and 254 women have been wounded in those theaters of action.

Women in uniform are bravely taking their chances. They are not fighting on the ground, but they fly planes for the Air Force and Apache helicopters for the Army. Women have helped in all previous wars. Even Gen. George Washington called for women nurses to assist doctors in the Revolutionary War. The Army officially established a nursing corps in 1901.

Women also served in both world wars as clerks, radio operators, electricians, chemists, accountants and telephone operators.

Two women who served in Iraq -- both from West Virginia -- became high profile for different reasons. The Pentagon hype on the rescue of Jessica Lynch gave new meaning to the expression that truth is the first casualty of war.

Lynch, of Palestine, W.Va., was a clerk with an ordnance maintenance unit that was ambushed. Nine of her comrades were killed, and Iraqi soldiers took her to a local hospital. Reports that she had stab and bullet wounds turned out to be false, though she suffered shoulder and leg injuries and trauma in the melee.

The Iraqi doctors insist she was well treated at the hospital, a claim that Lynch later confirmed. The Pentagon says U.S. Special Forces troops staged a dramatic rescue.

The other woman -- whose name also became a household word -- is Pfc. Lyndie England of Fort Ashby, W. Va., who was photographed holding a leash on a naked prisoner at Abu Ghraib, the notorious prison near Baghdad. That memorable picture was published worldwide. She is facing court martial charges.

Both women are victims of war.

The Alliance for National Defense, a non-profit, non-partisan organization representing women in the military, keeps tab on women in the military.

In its most recent newsletter, the Alliance asked for special remembrances for two other women.

One was Sgt. Jessica M. Housby, a motor transport operator, who was killed last month when an explosive device was detonated near her convoy while on the way to Baghdad Airport.

Lt. Archie Rose of the Illinois National Guard said Housby was at the top of her class of 187 troops because of her "hard work, enthusiasm and responsibility." She received an award in 1999 after taking part in a training exercise at Fort McCoy, Wis.

Among the more recent casualties was Pfc. Megan Adelman-Tenning of Alliance, Ohio, who was in the final week of paratroop training at Fort Benning, Ga., when both her primary parachute and the back-up failed to open.

The Alliance also paid tribute to the recent passing of Army Col. Mary A. Hallaren, 97. She was the legendary pioneer who commanded the first battalion of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) to serve in Europe in World War II.

She was another reminder of today's unsung heroines.

The much-decorated Hallaren headed the largest unit of women to serve overseas in World War II.

She lobbied to win the Women's Armed Services Integration Act, which made women part of the regular armed services.

A schoolteacher when World War II broke out, the diminutive Hallaren decided to join the Army in 1942 after her brothers enlisted. She stood on her toes to meet the height requirement.

The recruiter was doubtful but she won him over when she told him, "You don't have to be 6 feet tall to have a brain that works."

Women were formally taken into the service when Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels asked in 1917 if there were any regulation that specified that a Navy yeoman had to be a man. Of course, there wasn't, and within months women were enlisting in the Navy for non-combat jobs.

Some 90,000 women served in World War I and more than 400,000 in World War II.

In a speech in England in 1945, Hallaren told the WACS that everyone had bet they could not endure Army discipline.

"Everyone who voted against you lost," she said.

I think I remember all of the warfighters that The Big Irish posted were part of my team in Vietnam. That's why our morale was so high, and most of us earned the Navy Cross.

Prepared for battle

I joined the National Guard when I was 23 years old, with a 3-year-old daughter at home, and a college degree. For the writer of “Sending women to war wrong� (Aug. 15) to say that I “didn’t know what I was getting myself into� is infuriating.

I did not join the Army to sit behind a desk somewhere and read about “real soldiers� getting killed, while I’m safe and sound. I did not join for college money; I already had my degree. I did not join for an extra paycheck, because, quite honestly, when I enlisted I didn’t realize we get paid for drill weekends in the National Guard.

I joined to be a soldier, to defend my country and kill bad guys, just like the men.

I am currently serving in Iraq, where the battlefield is all around us. Wherever the Army takes me, I am prepared to fight. Sure, the dangers in Iraq can be scary, and I don’t intend to come across as a hard-core 11B wannabe; I’m just a communication troop in a small unit. But I would not turn tail and run when faced with danger, because I’m not made like that.

The American government has not forced me into harm’s way. I eagerly sought it out. I would not change the fact that I joined, I would not change being in Iraq, and I would support any draft that included females, as we are capable of sharing the load and should do our part to defend freedom just as males have all these years.

With all the stories of soldiers getting killed over here, I would not be able to look at myself in the mirror if I was not over here, doing “my fair share to keep alive the principles of freedom for which this country stands.� It’s only fair.

Spc. Donna J. Smith
Camp Cooke, Iraq

Woman’s place in Army

In response to “Sending women to war wrong,� the writer should fast forward to 2004. Women are capable of much more than cooking, cleaning and looking good. I am an anti-feminist with the firm belief that women do have their place, but men have their place, too.

I love to clean, shop and play with children, but there is much more to me than that. I am also capable of shooting just as well as a man, running just as fast, and fighting just as hard. But is this really about that? I am not a female in the Army, I am a U.S. soldier.

When I got deployed to Iraq, I came when I could have gotten out of it — and I know countless males who found ways to go home. I knew what I was getting into when I joined the military. My first reason to join had nothing to do with the educational benefits. It had everything to do with me being a fighter, loving the thrill of a challenge, and wanting to serve my country. Women are not as naïve as the writer makes them out to be. College money was just a great added bonus. I, along with countless other women, would give my life freely to protect my country, or to protect the soldier next to me.

We are in 2004, where terrorists attack people based on their origin, not sex. Bullets know no gender. Let women defend themselves as men do, let us fight for our country. If you don’t like it, leave the United States.

And for the record, women were not sent here because of a severe manpower shortage. We were sent here because our nation is at war and we answered the call.

Laura Johnston
Al Taqaddum, Iraq

America’s finest

After reading “Sending women to war wrong,� I was left speechless by the author’s comments. I am a five-year veteran of the U.S. Army, currently serving in Iraq. During my time in the Army, I have had the distinct honor and privilege of serving with some of this nation’s finest females.

Females have served and died for their country during times of conflict in every war we have fought. From being nurses during the Civil War to fighter pilots in today’s battles, women have bravely put their country above themselves. They serve a vital part in our nation’s armed forces and have done so long before this “severe manpower shortage.�

The author says that we have a national policy that purposely places women in combat. While the vast majority of jobs in today’s military are open to women, they are still restricted from combat arms units. I have served with women who, if given the chance, would jump at being in combat units. In an age when women have made great advances to be considered equals with men, we should allow a woman to serve her country in any way she sees fit.

Before the letter writer says women have no business being placed in harm’s way, I suggest he first face harm himself. Then I would suggest that he stop and ask these women who willingly volunteer to face danger.

Don’t trash the dedication these fine Americans show when they serve, and certainly don’t blemish the sacrifices they make when they give their life in combat. Having served with one, Pfc. Karina Lau, who gave her life in Iraq in November 2003, I can tell you firsthand that these women know the risks that they take, and are very willing and proud to face them.

Sgt. Troy Ward
Camp Cooke, Iraq

Sisters in arms

To the writer of “Sending women to war wrong� I ask: Is it wrong for a woman to want to defend her own freedom, or that of her family and friends?

I am not only a proud military spouse, but also the mother of a young female solider and a female JROTC cadet who plans to join her sister in the military.

The women of the U.S. armed forces are proud to serve their country, and I should think that anyone living in the United States would be just as proud to have them serve, whether it be on the battlefield or the parade field. I know I am.

And while it is a great loss to our country to lose any of our servicemembers, the life that we live wasn’t given to us. It has been paid for, and will continue to be paid for, with the sweat and, yes, the blood of those who answer the call of freedom — male and female alike.

What bothers me most is that it took the loss of a female solider from the writer’s home state to bring this war “closer to home� for him, while there are so many Americans who live and breath the war every day.

Those of us living in and around the armed forces don’t see male and female, but simply the camouflaged uniforms of the soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guard members who wear them. We stand behind them all 100 percent, and we mourn when the ultimate price is paid by one of them, regardless of their sex.

Cindy Bell
Heidelberg, Germany

Birmingham (AL) News
September 24, 2004

First Black Female POW Soldiers On

By Jeff Hansen, News staff writer

All Shoshana Johnson wanted to do was be a soldier. Put in her 20 years just like her dad, then retire with honor.

She didn't get the 20.

She got a bullet in the ankle, 22 days in captivity as a prisoner of war in Iraq, three medals and a medical discharge from the Army. She also gained widespread renown as the first black woman to become a prisoner of war.

Johnson came to Birmingham Thursday to tell her story at a fund-raising dinner for the Birmingham Association of Black Journalists. At a news conference before the dinner, she said that retelling her story is hard.

She remembers the fear of the ambush in Nasiriyah, and also those in her unit who died that March day in 2003.

"It does take a toll on me," she said. "Every time I tell it ... All of the people who gave their lives that day went down with honor. We were a support group and I think we did pretty well."

Johnson was a cook, and her unit was trained to change tires and repair vehicles. They were not supposed to be in combat.

But after they ended up in the wrong place, an ambush led to 10 soldiers killed, nine wounded and six captured, including Spc. Johnson and Pfc. Jessica Lynch. Spc. Lori Piestewa also was captured, and later died of her injuries. One of the dead was Pfc. Howard Johnson Jr. of Mobile, the first Alabama soldier killed in the war.

Piestewa was the first female soldier killed in the war. Like Johnson, she was a single mother.

The three women caught in the ambush and vaulted into world attention were a cross section of America. Piestewa, from Arizona, had Hopi Indian heritage. Johnson, from El Paso, Texas, was black and Hispanic - her family moved to the United States from Panama when Johnson was 5. Lynch, white, hailed from a small town in West Virginia.

Lynch was rescued from an Iraqi hospital. Later, Johnson and six other POWs were rescued in the city of Samara.

Unwelcome fame

Johnson, 31, has now won a measure of fame. She has appeared before small groups and large, the Congressional Black and Hispanic Caucuses, major league sports events and the like. She has been interviewed by U.S. and international major media. She's been on shows such as "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno," and she appeared with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in January to drop the ball at Times Square that counts down the seconds to the New Year.

"I hate it," she said of the recognition. "It's very nice sometimes but this is not the life I planned. I had planned to do 20 years."

But Johnson needs to tell the story for her unit, in her plain-spoken, firm voice, and with her direct, calm gaze.

She said that during the ambush she thought she was going to die. She said her captors treated her with more respect and dignity than she expected. She said her sister is still in the Army, and two cousins also served in Iraq.

"They had close calls," she said. "One survived two ambushes. My family is very lucky."

Asked about leaving a child behind when she went to war, she said, "You sit down with your children and tell them to the best of your ability. ... I remember being a child left behind when my daddy went to the first Gulf War."

‘Not my job’

Johnson also sets limits in what she says.

Asked Thursday about possible political solutions in Iraq, she replied, "I'm not a politician. That's not my job. I was a soldier in the United States Army."

Johnson cannot stand for long periods, and she receives payments for a 50 percent medical disability. But being a POW has taken her to places and people she never expected.

Last November, she and her friend, fellow female POW Lynch, were named as women of the year by Glamour magazine. The magazine sent them to the Golden Globe movie awards early this year.

They got to sit for a photo with Queen Latifah. Later, Johnson looked around and spotted Sarah "Fergie" Ferguson, the Duchess of York.

"Lynch, look," she said to her quiet friend, standing near her side. "We're with royalty!"

Jack Kelly is an idiot.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
April 17, 2005

G.I. Jane Is Here To Stay

There is no longer any doubt that women can serve in combat

By Jack Kelly

On the outskirts of Salman Pak a little southeast of Baghdad on March 20, a convoy of 30 tractor-trailers driven by third-country nationals was attacked by a force of 40 to 50 insurgents armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades.

The convoy was escorted by three Humvees. But one was in the kill zone, and the three soldiers in it were wounded immediately. The soldiers in the other vehicles were pinned down by heavy fire. Insurgents with handcuffs moved toward the wounded soldiers, intending to take them prisoner.

But a squad of 10 MPs in three Humvees had been shadowing the convoy, and arrived in the nick of time. The MPs drove across the kill zone, shielding the convoy from enemy fire, turned up an access road at a right angle to the main road, and stopped next to a field across which a squad of insurgents was advancing. In front of them was a line of seven sedans with doors and trunks open, the insurgents' getaway cars.

The second vehicle in the squad was hit immediately by an RPG which knocked the gunner unconscious. All three soldiers in the third Humvee were wounded by machine gun fire.

The driver of the middle vehicle sprinted to the third to take up the machine gun from the fallen gunner there. The squad leader, in the second vehicle, revived the dazed gunner and then, with the team sergeant from the first Humvee, moved into a ditch in which many of the insurgents were hiding. The two sergeants fought their way up the ditch, throwing grenades and firing their carbines.

The two sergeants cleared the ditch. The team sergeant had five confirmed kills, the squad leader two. The gunners on the three vehicles also were effective. The 10 MPs together killed 26 guerrillas, and captured another in what was the biggest battle in Iraq since the assault on Fallujah the preceding November.

The first thing to note is the MPs were from the 617th MP company of the Kentucky Army National Guard. Our "weekend warriors" fight just as well as our regulars, who fight very well indeed.

The second thing to note is that the team sergeant who took the lead in clearing the ditch was Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, 23, who sells shoes at a store in Nashville in civilian life.

Nearly as courageous as Sgt. Hester was Spc. Ashley Pullen, who treated the wounded under fire.

Sgt. Hester and Spc. Pullen pretty much close for me the debate over women in combat. No, I'm not in favor of lifting the restrictions in the Army and Marine Corps that keep women out of infantry, armor and Special Forces units. The combat arms exclusion exists for sound reasons which ought not to be ignored to please a few feminists who would never dream of enlisting themselves. But anyone who says women can't pull their load on the battlefield should take it up with Sgt. Hester. But not when she's mad.

Neither the Army nor most women who serve in it have any desire to lift those restrictions, but Elaine Donnelly, who heads the Center for Military Readiness, is in high dudgeon over the chief of staff's plan to collocate support units in which women do serve with infantry and armor battalions.

I think her objections are foolish. In this war, women already are in combat. Insurgents in Iraq are far more likely to attack support units, in which women serve, than the combat units in which they do not. The reorganization that Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker has proposed makes enormous tactical sense, and ought not to be sidetracked because women might serve in forward support companies.

We cannot do without women in the military. The Army has missed its recruiting goals for two consecutive months, and is likely to fall short again this month. There'd be no hope of meeting goals without female recruits. And women soldiers are a big reason why soldiers have higher IQs and more education than the youth population as a whole.

The Army does some silly things with its women. Coed basic training is a foolishness imposed during the Clinton administration which lowers the readiness of both male and female soldiers. The Army would be wise to follow the lead of the Marine Corps, which segregates the sexes during boot camp. But G.I. Jane is here to stay, and that's mostly a good thing.

Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio

Woman Soldier Receives Silver Star for Valor in Iraq
By Sgt. Sara Wood, USA
American Forces Press Service


WASHINGTON, June 16, 2005 – For the first time since World War II, a woman soldier was awarded the Silver Star Medal today in Iraq.

Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester of the 617th Military Police Company, a National Guard unit out of Richmond, Ky., received the Silver Star, along with two other members of her unit, Staff Sgt. Timothy Nein and Spc. Jason Mike, for their actions during an enemy ambush on their convoy. Other members of the unit also received awards.

Hester's squad was shadowing a supply convoy March 20 when anti-Iraqi fighters ambushed the convoy. The squad moved to the side of the road, flanking the insurgents and cutting off their escape route. Hester led her team through the "kill zone" and into a flanking position, where she assaulted a trench line with grenades and M203 grenade-launcher rounds. She and Nein, her squad leader, then cleared two trenches, at which time she killed three insurgents with her rifle.

When the fight was over, 27 insurgents were dead, six were wounded, and one was captured.

Hester, 23, who was born in Bowling Green, Ky., and later moved to Nashville, Tenn., said she was surprised when she heard she was being considered for the Silver Star.

"I'm honored to even be considered, much less awarded, the medal," she said.

Being the first woman soldier since World War II to receive the medal is significant to Hester. But, she said, she doesn't dwell on the fact. "It really doesn't have anything to do with being a female," she said. "It's about the duties I performed that day as a soldier."

Hester, who has been in the National Guard since April 2001, said she didn't have time to be scared when the fight started, and she didn't realize the impact of what had happened until much later.

"Your training kicks in and the soldier kicks in," she said. "It's your life or theirs. ... You've got a job to do -- protecting yourself and your fellow comrades."

Nein, who is on his second deployment to Iraq, praised Hester and his other soldiers for their actions that day. "It's due to their dedication and their ability to stay there and back me up that we were able to do what we did that day," he said.

Hester and her fellow soldiers were awarded their medals at Camp Liberty, Iraq, by Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, Multinational Corps Iraq commanding general. In his speech, Vines commended the soldiers for their bravery and their contribution to the international war on terror.

"My heroes don't play in the (National Basketball Association) and don't play in the U.S. Open (golf tournament) at Pinehurst," Vines said. "They're standing in front of me today. These are American heroes."

Three soldiers of the 617th were wounded in the ambush. Hester said she and the other squad members are thinking about them, and she is very thankful to have made it through unscathed. The firefight, along with the entire deployment, has had a lasting effect on her, Hester said.

"I think about it every day, and probably will for the rest of my life," she said.

When it comes to standing behind our female troops...I'm there.

San Diego Union-Tribune
May 18, 2005

Women In War

Restrictive legislation is not the answer


In one capacity or another, American women have served their country on or near the battlefield since the Revolutionary War. During the Civil War, some women even disguised themselves as men and served as soldiers.

By World War II, women serving as nurses were killed by Nazi and Japanese warplanes. In the first Gulf War, women died in missile attacks. Eight military women died in the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the Pentagon.

Women's roles have evolved in our military and in the wars they fight. In the current war in Iraq, 35 had died and 279 had been wounded as of last week.

Military leaders have been highly supportive of women in Iraq, where they are serving in a range of roles, from truck drivers to explosive ordnance disposal experts. Under a 1994 law, women still are prohibited from direct combat roles such as special forces, the infantry, armor, artillery or attack helicopters.

To accomplish their missions, some military leaders have bent the rules on women in combat, and it goes without saying that policies should be obeyed. But Congress may be about to go too far in overruling its military leaders. It is seeking to bar women from thousands of jobs they now perform, in the process placing obstacles in their paths to advancement. Last week, a House subcommittee approved a bill that would ban women from certain support units in an effort to keep them further from combat. The legislation has the backing of influential House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-El Cajon.

The measure has particularly angered many of the 20,000 women serving in Iraq, and a number of the men serving with them. They say the realities of the insurgency there make it impossible to keep women out of harm's way.

If Congress wants to prove a point with military commanders, the proposed legislation may achieve that goal. If, however, Congress wants military leaders to effectively carry out their assigned missions, perhaps the best thing to do is work together to formulate workable and fair policies on women in combat.

Washington Times
October 22, 2004
Pg. 1

Female Soldiers Eyed For Combat

Army seeks end of 1994 ban

By Rowan Scarborough, The Washington Times

The Army is negotiating with civilian leaders about eliminating a women-in-combat ban so it can place mixed-sex support companies within warfighting units, starting with a division going to Iraq in January.

Despite the legal prohibition, Army plans already have included such collocation of women-men units in blueprints for a lighter force of 10 active divisions, according to Defense Department sources.

An Army spokesman yesterday, in response to questions from The Washington Times, said the Army is now in discussions with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's staff to see whether the 10-year-old ban in this one area should be lifted. The ban prohibits the Army from putting women in units that "collocate" with ground combatants.

"When that policy was made up, there was a different threat," said Lt. Col. Chris Rodney, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon. "We imagined a more linear combat environment. Now, with the nature of asymmetrical threats, we have to relook at that policy."

Col. Rodney cited the fighting in Iraq as typifying the new threat whereby all soldiers, support or combat, face attack by rockets, mortars, roadside bombs and ambushes.

"Everybody faces a similar threat," he said. "There is no front-line threat right now."

Since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the Army has suffered 793 combat deaths, including 24 female soldiers.

The Army is not seeking to lift the ban on women in direct combat units, such as infantry or armor.

What is being examined is the part of the exclusion rule that says mixed-sex support companies may not be positioned with ground combat teams.

In the disputed instance, the transformation plan of Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, calls for creating Forward Support Companies, which are made up of men and women. These companies would collocate with reconnaissance squadrons, which are combat units and are part of larger brigade "units of action."

The problem is a 1994 ban signed by then-Defense Secretary Les Aspin that excludes women from land combat units. Mr. Aspin added an additional restriction. Women could not serve "where units and positions are doctrinally required to physically collocate and remain with direct ground combat units that are closed to women."

Some Pentagon officials, who asked not to be named, said the proposed Forward Support Companies are at the least "skirting" the existing ban if not violating it. They suspect the new units are a way to inch women closer to land combat despite Congress' prohibition against it.

Elaine Donnelly, who leads the pro-military Center for Military Readiness, says Congress needs to be informed of the Army's plans.

"There is a law requiring notice to Congress that has not happened, and there are regulations that forbid the Army from taking infantry units and collocating gender-integrated units with them," said Mrs. Donnelly, who opposes women in combat. "If they are doing this, putting women in land combat units would be a violation of law and policy."

The Pentagon long has banned women from combat roles. In the early 1990s, the new Clinton administration changed the rules by allowing women for the first time to serve on combat ships and pilot combat aircraft, such as jet fighters and helicopters.

But the Pentagon retained the ban on women participating in direct combat and issued the new Aspin rules.

Mr. Aspin said in a January 1994 memo to the services that "women should be excluded from assignment to units below the brigade level whose primary mission is to engage in direct combat on the ground." The policy then defined direct combat as "engaging an enemy on the ground with individual or crew-served weapons, while being exposed to hostile fire and to a high probability of direct physical contact with the hostile force's personnel. Direct combat takes place well forward on the battlefield while locating and closing with the enemy to defeat them by fire, maneuver, or shock effect."

Mr. Aspin then went further in denying collocation of mixed-sex and combat units. The Army accepted the limitation, documents show.

The 3rd Infantry Division, which played a major role in the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, is scheduled to return to Iraq early next year. It would be the first division to be reconfigured into "units of action" that would contain the new mixed-sex Forward Support Companies.

In all, Gen. Schoomaker is increasing the number of combat brigades from 33 to 48, and naming them "units of action." The brigades are being married up permanently with support units so they can move out more quickly to war zones, instead of waiting for the additional personnel to arrive.

Early in the Bush administration, Mrs. Donnelly successfully persuaded the Pentagon to restrict female soldiers from certain reconnaissance units after Army planners had penciled them into those new units.

No problems here Matt w/ those pics....

Washington Post
May 13, 2005
Pg. 1

For Female GIs, Combat Is A Fact

Many Duties in Iraq Put Women at Risk Despite Restrictive Policy

By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post Staff Writer

MOSUL, Iraq -- Jennifer Guay went to war to be a grunt. And the 170-pound former bartender from Leeds, Maine, with cropped red hair and a penchant for the bench press, has come pretty close.

It was mid-February and Guay, 26, an Army specialist who was the first woman to be assigned as an infantry combat medic, was spending 10 hours a day on missions with the 82nd Airborne Division, dodging rockets and grenades in the crowded streets of Mosul.

"Break-break-break: U.S. soldier down!" a hard-edged voice came over the radio. A gun battle had just broken out.

In less than five minutes, Guay was at the scene. She dashed to Sgt. Christopher Pusateri, 21, who was lying on the ground, a bullet through his jaw. "I was in charge of this man's life," she recalled. Pusateri had "a massive trauma injury, and I had to get him off the middle of the street."

Day after day, Guay has faced situations that would test the steel of any soldier. And female soldiers like her -- as well as Army officers who support them -- are seizing opportunities amid Iraq's indiscriminate violence to push back the barriers against women in combat. As American women in uniform patrol bomb-ridden highways, stand duty at checkpoints shouldering M-16s and raid houses in insurgent-contested towns, many have come to believe this 360-degree war has rendered obsolete a decade-old Pentagon policy barring them from serving with ground combat battalions.

"The Army has to understand the regulation that says women can't be placed in direct fire situations is archaic and not attainable," said Lt. Col. Cheri Provancha, commander of a Stryker Brigade support battalion in Mosul, who decided to bend Army rules and allow Guay to serve as a medic for an infantry company of the 82nd Airborne. Under a 1994 policy, women are excluded from units at the level of battalion and below that engage in direct ground combat.

"This war has proven that we need to revisit the policy, because they are out there doing it," Provancha, a 21-year Army veteran from San Diego, said from her base in what soldiers call Mosul's "mortar alley." "We are embedded with the enemy."

Dozens of soldiers interviewed across Iraq -- male and female, from lower enlisted ranks to senior officers -- voiced frustration over restrictions on women mandated in Washington that they say make no sense in the war they are fighting. All said the policy should be changed to allow, at a minimum, mixed-sex support units to be assigned to combat battalions. Many favored a far more radical step: letting qualified women join the infantry.

But Congress is moving in the opposite direction. A House subcommittee, seeking to keep women out of combat, passed a measure this week that would bar women from thousands of Army positions now open to them. In Iraq, female soldiers immediately denounced the vote.

"I refuse to have my right as a soldier taken from me because of my gender," Guay wrote in an e-mail. "It is my right to defend my country. . . . I am well aware of the danger. . . . Let me (us) do our job."

For many inside Army camps, the disconnect between Washington officialdom and the reality that female troops confront in Iraq was epitomized by President Bush's Jan. 11 declaration of "No women in combat."

"That's an oxymoron!" said Sgt. Neva D. Trice, who leads a female Army search team that guards the gates of Baghdad's Green Zone, where many U.S. and Iraqi government facilities are located. "If he said no women in combat, then why are there women here in Iraq?"

Several male Army officers also dismissed Bush's statement as woefully uninformed. "The president got blindsided. The president didn't understand what the policy really was," said one officer, who requested anonymity because he was questioning the commander-in-chief. He and others urged Army leaders to push for new policies that reflect women's expanded role.

"I'm ashamed," he said, "that the Army has not taken this on."

Valor Under Fire

In sheer numbers, women are essential to the American military effort in Iraq -- where tens of thousands have served -- and are playing a bigger role than in any previous U.S. conflict. Historically, women's involvement in the military has surged in wartime. Today, that pattern is amplified by the all-volunteer U.S. military's growing share of women, which has steadily expanded in recent years to 15 percent of the active duty force.

Moreover, in contrast to their roles in past wars, women are serving in a widening variety of Army ground units -- from logistics to military police, military intelligence and civil affairs -- where they routinely face the same risks as soldiers in all-male combat units such as infantry and armor.

"We live and work with the infantry," said Maj. Mary Prophit, 42, who heads a four-person civil affairs team with a Stryker battalion in Mosul. An Army reservist and librarian from Glenoma, Wash., Prophit handles security duties from the hatch of a Stryker armored vehicle, watching houses during searches and returning fire when shot at. "Civil affairs teams have to be prepared to perform infantry functions, because at any time we could be diverted," she said.

In January, Prophit was delivering kerosene heaters to a Mosul school when insurgents detonated a roadside bomb as her convoy passed, fatally wounding three Iraqi soldiers. Prophit moved to shield the medic treating the wounded, firing at insurgents who were shooting at them from a mosque across the street. "Women in combat is no longer an argument," she said matter-of-factly at her camp near the Mosul air field. "There is no rear area."

At least as often as insurgents attack all-male infantry forces, they strike targets such as military supply convoys, checkpoints and camps where U.S. servicewomen are often present. As a result, hostile fire in Iraq has taken a proportionally larger toll on servicewomen than in any prior U.S. conflict, killing 35 and wounding 279.

"You can't tell me I'm not being shot at. You can't tell me I can't handle combat," said Provancha, who has nearly been hit by road bombs, rockets and the chow hall suicide bombing that killed 22 in December. "That was pretty frickin' direct fire if you ask me," she said, holding up a piece of shrapnel.

Far from shrinking from the fight, women in Iraq are winning medals for valor under fire.

Spec. Shavodsha Hodges, 29, of San Antonio, says she joined the Army because her GI husband encouraged her to. She is a veteran of the 2003 Iraq invasion and well into her second year in a war zone. She and about 100 other women make up 20 percent of Provancha's logistics battalion in Mosul. They serve as truck and Stryker drivers, medics, mechanics and supply soldiers like Hodges who conduct between 50 and 70 convoy missions a month. Ferrying critical goods from Mosul to outlying bases on the precarious roads of northern Iraq, Hodges has developed keen instincts.

On Oct. 29, she was in a supply convoy heading out of the hostile town of Tall Afar, near the Syrian border. "We were told to watch out for an Iraqi national in black," she recalled. "Within seconds we were hit with an IED," or improvised explosive device, the military's term for a roadside bomb.

As her Humvee began to roll over, Hodges reached over and grabbed the legs of Pfc. Gregory Burchett, who was manning a .50-caliber machine gun. She pulled him down from the hatch and into the vehicle just before it flipped, saving him from being crushed.

Burchett was disoriented and moaning in pain. His face was bleeding from multiple shrapnel wounds and he couldn't move his arm. Hodges helped him out of the vehicle, but almost as soon they climbed out they came under small-arms fire from insurgents 200 yards away.

"Stay down!" Hodges yelled. Cradling Burchett's head in her lap, she lay forward over his upper body to shield him from the bullets. "Don't get up!" she said, twice sheltering the gunner from enemy rounds.

Meanwhile, the Humvee's commander, Staff Sgt. Armando Mejia, had his hand trapped under the vehicle. After the shooting stopped, Hodges and other soldiers pushed it up enough to free him. Only later did she realize that she, too, was injured.

For her quick thinking and bravery in the ambush, Hodges became the first woman in her brigade to be awarded the Army Commendation Medal with "V" device, for "valorous conduct" that "saved the lives of her fellow soldiers."

Between missions at her camp in Mosul, Hodges said she had no doubts about women's abilities in the war zone. "I think a woman is just as capable of dealing with this as a man," she said. "You think fast, and you react fast," she said, her tone confident but sober. "You have to be prepared at any moment, for anything."

'Attached,' Not 'Assigned'

Many commanders in Iraq say they see a widening gap between war-zone realities and policies designed to limit women's exposure to combat.

Although the Army is barred from assigning women to ground combat battalions, in Iraq it skirts the ban with a twist in terminology. Instead of being "assigned," women are "attached in direct support of" the battalions, according to Army officers familiar with the policy. As a result, the Army avoids having to seek Pentagon and congressional approval to change the policy, officers said.

"What has changed? Nothing," said Lt. Col. Bob Roth of the 3rd Infantry Division. "You just want someone to feel better by saying we don't allow women in dangerous situations."

A debate over the policy erupted in Washington last year. As the Army began reorganizing its combat brigades, the 3rd Infantry attempted to assign mixed-sex forward support companies to combat battalions. Capt. Christine Roney was on the verge of taking command of one of those companies when a soldier in her unit e-mailed Congress and opponents of women in combat. The Army reversed itself.

Eventually, the Army sidestepped the problem by making the forward support companies "attached" instead of "assigned," officers said. But Roney was nonetheless denied the job.

"A week before I was supposed to take command, they pulled me into the office and told me I couldn't be assigned," said Roney, of Loudonville, Ohio, now in Baghdad. "It was very disappointing." Instead, she was given a company in a noncombat battalion.

Roney and other Army officers interviewed in Iraq agreed overwhelmingly that the Army's ban on locating female support soldiers with combat battalions was meaningless and should be lifted. The bigger question raised by the Iraq conflict, they said, is whether women should be allowed into combat units such as infantry and armor.

"I'm for it, because I think we can do it," said Pfc. Laura Springer, 20, of Odessa, Tex., one of only three women in her brigade licensed to drive the Army's Stryker vehicle. "At first all the infantry guys were staring at me. But I'm a good driver -- I haven't hit anything -- the same or even better."

Male and female soldiers said many women in Iraq were performing well in risky jobs that require infantry skills -- from military police and civil affairs troops to female search teams that go on raids with Army and Marine infantry units. On raids, a woman is "as much infantry soldier on the ground doing the duties as anyone else," Roth said. "She may not have been the person who knocked the door in, but she's with the next stack getting ready to come in."

Most soldiers and officers interviewed also agreed that women need tougher physical fitness standards to perform well in infantry jobs, but that many could meet those standards. For some, the impact of pregnancy on readiness was a concern. Commanders of mixed-sex units in Iraq said that from 5 percent to 15 percent of their women became pregnant and did not deploy to Iraq, but one said health and family issues kept a similar percentage of men home.

From Mosul to Ramadi to Baghdad, women such as Guay, who spent three months with the 82nd Airborne, have shown that they can be valuable players in combat units.

Guay was a student, engrossed by the moral dilemmas of war, when she decided to enlist in the Army in September 2002 to test her beliefs. "I called an Army recruiter. I wanted to be as grunt as possible," she said.

She lifted weights and studied combat medical skills. Once in Iraq, she actively sought missions "outside the wire" of the Mosul camp. When the 82nd Airborne arrived and needed a medic, Guay wanted to go. Provancha, whose team of medics is 40 percent female, assigned her.

"She wanted to be part of breaking the barrier down," Provancha said. Provancha took full responsibility for her decision, informing superiors rather than asking permission.

"Think of the fallout if she had gotten wounded or killed," Provancha said. "I probably would have been brought up on charges for defying Army policy." But that didn't happen. Instead, she said, Guay "did magnificently."

Initially, the 82nd questioned the move. At first, the grunts watched Guay. Then, in a casual sign of acceptance, they began calling her "Doc." A few firefights later, she became their "kick-ass medic." She was one of them.

"I was always working out and being strong and proficient," said Guay, proud of the fact that she could "out-bench some of the guys." She lived, ate and went on daily missions with the paratroops, bonding with the men whose lives could at any moment be placed in her hands.

When the soldiers fell, as Pusateri did in the firefight that gray day in February, Guay gave them her all, even when hope was slim. Recalling how she knelt at the mortally wounded sergeant's side, she said she would never forget being the last person with him, and the profound respect it engendered.

She quickly inserted an IV and ran a tube into his throat, pumping a bag every five seconds to put precious air into his lungs.

"Squeeze my hand," she told him. He did. She pumped the bag again. Pusateri was stable, but slowly losing consciousness. "You're so brave," she said, rubbing his head as everything around them faded into a blur. "You're amazing."

Washington Times
May 17, 2005
Pg. 18

Women On The Front Lines?

By Robert L. Maginnis

"I just don't think America is ready to see a woman without an arm," said Juanita Wilson, an army staff sergeant who lost her hand to an improvised explosive device that destroyed her vehicle while on a mission in Iraq. Despite this statement, it seems that many in the United States have been coarsened to the killing and maiming of young women and are ready for more of the same. Thirty-five women have died and 271 have been wounded in Iraq.

Sgt. Wilson is one of five American military women at Walter Reed hospital who have lost limbs during combat in Iraq.

The sight of young women maimed in combat will become more common unless action is taken. Military bureaucrats, members of Congress and the media seem to be lusting for a more-women-in-combat policy that could lead to conscripting our daughters if a draft becomes necessary.

Rep. Heather Wilson, a 1980s Air Force veteran and New Mexico Republican, suggests the killing and maiming of young women in combat is now accepted by Americans. She told The Washington Post, "We have gotten beyond the point where losing a daughter is somehow worse than losing a son."

But Connie Halfaker, the mother of one of those women at Walter Reed recovering from a lost limb, trusted the Army's promise to keep women out of direct combat and never worried about her daughter going to war, although she told a reporter, "I knew it was a possibility that I would need to give up my son for a war." Lt. Dawn Halfaker, who lost her right arm on a military police patrol last year in Ba'qubah, Iraq, explained, "Women in combat is not really an issue. It is happening."

Although President Bush has said, "No women in combat," the enemy doesn't discriminate. Insurgents target every American, whether male, female, combatant or noncombatant.

The fact is that the war in Iraq is unlike a conventional war. It is a struggle against well-armed insurgents with no clearly defined battle lines. It is a classic example of guerrilla warfare where no participant is safe.

Today, 15 percent of the active army are women. They pepper the ranks of all but direct combat units. Though as of 1994, women were barred from "units and positions required to collocate and remain with direct ground combat units assigned to direct ground combat missions," the Pentagon policy actually increases the danger for servicewomen.

Recently, Army Secretary Francis Harvey told Congress his women-in-combat policy doesn't need to be changed to comply with the 1994 provision. Perhaps, but the Army is assigning women to forward combat companies, which are in direct support of the 3rd Infantry Division's new brigade combat teams now serving in Baghdad. This potentially makes them increasingly vulnerable to attacks by insurgents.

Even though women are not supposed to serve in combat they do fly Army helicopters in hostile areas. Maj. Ladda Duckworth lost both legs when a rocket-propelled grenade downed her Black Hawk helicopter last fall. Women also serve in multiple-launch rocket, reconnaissance and Stryker units. The line defining combat is getting very fuzzy.

The only way the United States can eliminate women from dying or being maimed in direct combat is to remove them from the battlefield. "That would be politically untenable," said a powerful congressman to this writer, and besides, it would force male soldiers to serve more frequent combat tours. The Army is dependent upon the large female force to perform global missions.

That fact sheds light on a hard reality. Our Army is straining for more soldiers to sustain operations across 120 nations with more than 303,000 forward deployed. The global war on terrorism is expected to last many years. Even though no one wants to conscript young people, the seriousness of the threat and the military's faltering recruiting efforts may intersect and lead inevitably to the drafting of women. The legal stage for such a scenario is being set as more and more women become engaged in combat. Conscription has always been an emergency provision to fill the military's ranks with combatants.

The coarsening of the United States on this issue is pitiful. Our young women are no longer valued as the bearers and nurturers of future generations -- they are now interchangeable with men and expendable. I am pessimistic that Congress, which is constitutionally responsible for military personnel issues, will listen.

Congress didn't listen when it was warned that introducing a small number of women into military units would cause disruption, lower morale and damage unit cohesion. Sexual misconduct in mixed-sex units has become the elephant in the living room for the modern military, but don't ask the PC brass.

Congress didn't listen when it was warned that young women have two-thirds the cardiovascular fitness and half the upper body strength of the average man. Our elected representatives allowed the Pentagon to gender norm physical requirements, producing a less ready force.

This nation should be ashamed it has bowed before political correctness and allowed the removal of barriers that protect our young women. There is no compelling national security reason for our daughters to serve in combat. There are many compelling reasons to deny them this deadly "opportunity."

Robert L. Maginnis is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, a national security and foreign affairs analyst for both radio and television networks, and a senior systems analyst with BCP International, Ltd., in Alexandria.

Female gunners protect Iraq convoys
By Spc. Jennifer Fitts

May 18, 2005

BAGHDAD (Army News Service, May 18, 2005) – Three Humvees cruised slowly down a Baghdad street, and disinterested neighborhood residents merely glanced at them, until one of the turret gunners abruptly shouted and gestured. Immediately heads snapped around and jaws dropped when the residents heard the sound of female voices and noticed the feminine features of the Soldiers behind the machine guns.

With an increased operations tempo, female Soldiers are stepping up to take on some of the roles traditionally filled by males such as providing unit and convoy security.

Some units, including military police, are using an increasing number of females for patrols outside the wire. Despite this, there’s often only one female gunner in a particular convoy or patrol at a given time.

Women man all turrets for civil affairs unit

What makes the New York-based U.S. Army Reserve unit, A Company, 403rd Civil Affairs Battalion different is that it doesn’t have just one female turret gunner, but three. In fact, all of the turret gunners for this particular 10-person civil affairs team are females.

“They point, they look, they’re very surprised to see females,� said Spc. Amanda N. Godlewski, a chemical observation specialist assigned to the civil affairs unit, recounting the reaction many Iraqis have to seeing a woman in the turret.

“They (the Iraqis) used to get really confused,� said Spc. Robyn L. Murray, a civil affairs specialist from Niagara Falls, N.Y. “I was the first. I volunteered on the second day we were here.�

The civil affairs team that Murray was assigned to needed a gunner who knew how to use a squad automatic weapon. Murray said she jumped at the opportunity to “man� the machine gun in the turret.

Soon after volunteering to take the gunner’s position, Godlewski, from Syracuse, N.Y., said she enjoyed being up on top of the humvee, shrugging off the thought of feeling exposed.

Fellow female gunner Spc. Lilly R. Withers, the unit’s mechanic, agreed with Murray and Godllewski.

“I wouldn’t do anything else,� she said.

Gunners get positive reactions

Withers said the reactions from other U.S. Soldiers occasionally mirrors the initial confusion of the locals. She said most of the other troops she’s encountered are receptive to the idea of female gunners and have voiced their support to her.

“I do get a few questions,� Withers said. “The infantry thought it was strange they (the unit) chose to put us on the guns.�

The women’s presence in the turrets has had a positive effect during their civil affairs missions.

“They turn a lot of heads, civilian and military,� said their team chief, Capt. Timothy H. Wright, of Jamestown, N.Y. “They get a positive reaction from the civilian populace.�

Withers said Iraqi women have been very friendly toward her and by judging from their reactions and gestures, she feels they are supportive of female Soldiers. She said after the women figure out she’s not a man “then, they want to come talk to me, see my eyes and hair,� said the blonde Cortland, N.Y. native.

The reactions the female gunners get from the public can be very helpful in stressful situations since they get a lot of attention, said Wright.

“They get the point across and people listen to their voices,� he said.

`Outside wire’ in 43 muhullahs

Wright’s 10-person team is larger than a standard civil affairs team since it consists of two teams combined into one due to the team often being outside the relative safety of the forward operating base. Venturing outside the wire is something the female gunners accept.

“I get kind of scared sometimes,� said Withers, “but I like to be in control to keep my team safe.�

“People call us when they need to go somewhere,� said Wright.

With mission tempo in full swing, going “somewhere� is merely a moment away. This means that Wright’s civil affairs team covers a lot of ground. Patrolling an area that covers nearly 70 square miles, the Soldiers are out on a daily basis, sometimes running more than one mission a day.

“We have the largest operating area in the al-Rashid district,� said Wright. “We are helping out in 43 ‘muhullahs’ or towns.�

Team assesses projects, attitudes

The civil affairs team stays very busy performing such diverse tasks as identifying and assessing needed projects in their area, helping coordinate U.S. Army work efforts with key Iraqi leaders and collecting data on local attitudes.

Wright said the overall positive reactions resulting from the female gunners’ presence has contributed to the success of their missions.

Although the civil affairs team may get a few sideways looks at times, the unit commander has nothing but praise for his female Soldiers.

“I’m proud of them,� said Wright. “They listen well and they react when it’s needed. They’re as motivated and dedicated as any male Soldier I’ve ever worked with.�

(Editor’s note: Spc. Jennifer Fitts serves with the 100th MPAD.)

Washington Times
January 12, 2005
Pg. 1

Despite Pressure, Bush Vows 'No Women In Combat'

By Rowan Scarborough and Joseph Curl, The Washington Times

President Bush's policy on women in ground combat takes just four words to articulate: "No women in combat."

Despite extended tours of duties in Iraq for soldiers and an Army examination of women's roles, the president told editors and reporters of The Washington Times yesterday in an interview in the Oval Office that he has no intention of sending women into ground combat, a mission for which they are banned under Pentagon policy.

Some retired generals and commentators have called on the president to increase significantly the 150,000 troops in Iraq. Mr. Bush said he is relying on his generals not the pundits to dictate the makeup of the force.

"The troop size in Iraq is not driven here in the White House," he said. "It is driven by the decisions and the recommendations the recommendations of John Abizaid and Gen. George Casey . And it's really important that that's how a war be fought, that and I would hope it brings great comfort to you as a concerned citizen the commander in chief makes the military decisions based upon the recommendations from the field."

The active force is about 1.4 million troops. The Army has added 30,000 soldiers, using emergency powers, to exceed 500,000.

"As far as the overall force structure and the relationship between the active-duty unit and the Guard and reserve, for example, that's part of the transformation of our military," Mr. Bush said. "In other words, transforming our military to meet a whole new set of threats. And the debate I hear is not overall size, necessarily, but the relationship between the Army to the Air Force and the Navy."

Asked about reports of putting women closer to land combat, the president said:

"There's no change of policy as far as I'm concerned. No women in combat. Having said that, let me explain, we've got to make sure we define combat properly: We've got women flying choppers and women flying fighters, which I'm perfectly content with."

The question came up in light of the Army's transforming its 10 active-combat divisions and re-examining women's roles. Instead of the normal three brigades per division, each division will have four or more "units of action." They are being designed to train and deploy as one modular unit, with combat and support units as one.

Therein lies the potential problem. Pentagon policy not only bans women from direct combat brigades, such as infantry or armor, it also says they cannot join support units that collocate with those units.

But The Washington Times has reported on internal Army memos that show some officials are pushing the Pentagon to lift the ban so that mixed-sex forward support companies (FSC) can collocate with armor and infantry battalions within a "unit of action."

A Nov. 29 briefing for senior Army officers at the Pentagon stated, "The way ahead: rewrite/eliminate the Army collocation policy."

An Army spokeswoman said, "It is my understanding that the November 29 briefing was predecisional. There are a number of Army policies under review."

An earlier Army briefing in May, labeled "draft close hold," stated that one option putting FSCs outside a combat brigade in an organizational chart "could be perceived as subterfuge to avoid reporting requirements."

Congress requires that any change in women-in-combat rules first be presented to lawmakers.

The May briefing portrayed the Army as in a bind. If it collocates FSCs with combat teams and keeps them men-only, then it "creates potential long-term challenge to Army; pool of male recruits too small to sustain force," the Army documents stated.

In 1994, after reports of women excelling during Operation Desert Storm, the Clinton administration lifted bans on women in combat aircraft and ships. But it retained the prohibition against women in ground combat units and collocation.

Any change is opposed by Elaine Donnelly, who heads the Center for Military Readiness. In a letter to House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter, California Republican, Mrs. Donnelly said, "Female soldiers, including young mothers, should not have to pay the price for Pentagon bureaucratic blunders and gender-based recruiting quotas that have caused apparent shortages in male soldiers for the new land-combat brigades."

USA Today
July 25, 2005
Pg. 8

Army Women Defy Insurgents, Taboo

General says Iraqi military needs female soldiers, but they face opposition from foes — and even family

By Rick Jervis, USA Today

BAGHDAD — When Sondos' sister was murdered by insurgents for working with the Iraqi army, the 30-year-old exacted her revenge: She signed up for the military.

“We can't walk the streets anymore. When you sleep, you know you're not safe,� she says. “I have four kids. That's not the life I want for them.�

Sondos is part of a class of 29 female recruits who recently completed the Iraqi army basic training course at Camp Justice in Baghdad, home to the Iraqi army's 1st Brigade, 6th Division.

The women — mothers, widows, divorcees and housewives — have joined the army despite death threats by insurgents and cultural taboos discouraging Muslim women from joining the military.

Sondos asked to be identified only by her first name to avoid reprisals by family, neighbors and insurgents.

Although female soldiers have previously completed the two-week course and joined the army, Saturday's graduating group was the first all-female class of recruits trained by female trainers on an Iraqi-run base.

Smaller groups of women have trained in Jordan and held military police jobs.

The new training reflects a growing role for women in Iraq's armed forces.

“The Iraqi army is actively recruiting women,� said Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, spokesman for Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in charge of equipping and training Iraqi security forces. “They need them. There are certain jobs absolutely necessary to women.�

The Khawla Bint al-Azwar Class — named after a female warrior in the time of the prophet Mohammed who disguised herself as a man to fight in Muslim wars — will join 120 other female soldiers attached to different units at the 1st Brigade.

They represent a small step toward the future look of the Iraqi army, says Brig. Gen. Jaleel Khalaf, commander of the 1st Brigade and top commander of Iraqi troops in Baghdad.

The women will take on a number of roles, including administrative, medical and public affairs duties, he says.

They'll also go on combat missions, particularly cordon-and-searches, where they'll search females in suspected insurgents' homes. And they'll interrogate and look after female suspects in the brigade detainee facility.

Like U.S. forces, the Iraqi army generally bans women from combat units such as infantry and artillery.

But in Iraq, there are no front lines, and female troops are often in harm's way.

They earn the same starting salaries as male soldiers, about $330 a month.

“This is the reality: We need female soldiers,� Khalaf says. “If I have a female prisoner, what do I do? If I have to search a female and can't do it with a male, it'll be a catastrophe.�

Under a broiling morning sun recently, the women lined up and saluted as Khalaf read their names and handed out certificates. Nearly all the women's faces were shielded by handkerchiefs to avoid their images being broadcast by the local media.

The U.S. Army's 256th Brigade Combat Team, which advises the Iraqis, sent a contingent of female soldiers to the ceremony in a show of support.

After the ceremony, the U.S. soldiers congratulated their counterparts and snapped pictures together.

“This is a huge step,� said 1st Lt. Taysha Deaton, a public affairs officer with the 256th Brigade Combat Team. “How many years did it take us to reach this level?�

Under Saddam Hussein's regime, women had a smaller role in the military, mostly relegated to the medical corps or administrative positions in the Defense Ministry.

Female soldiers joined the Iraqi army as early as 2003, shortly after the collapse of the regime. In July 2003, under the guidance of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the Iraqi military hired the first squad of 20 female soldiers, says Lt. Col. Waleed Majeed, an early Iraqi recruiter.

“Some of them died, some of them quit, some of them transferred out because the Iraqi officials didn't treat them very well,� he says.

Khalaf says Iraq's Shiite-dominated government has been reluctant to recruit large numbers of female soldiers. The Defense Ministry tried to ban females from joining the army, Khalaf says.

Female recruits were turned away at recruiting stations, which are run by the ministry, he says. And the ministry imposed a 9 a.m.-3 p.m. curfew on females on bases, he says.

“They're really trying to stop these women from joining my brigade,� he says. “If I had the power of hiring, I'd have a female battalion.�

A Defense Ministry spokesman denies allegations that officials are discouraging female participation in the army.

The curfew was mandated “for the bad security situation and because we do not have places to keep women at night and because there is no need for their staying for a long time,� spokesman Maj. Salih Sarhan says.

U.S. Central Command declined to comment on Defense Ministry policies.

Sondos, the recent graduate, says her neighbors and some relatives have stopped speaking to her since she joined the army. She plans to stick with the military regardless of any resistance — from relatives, colleagues or insurgents.

She's been assigned to administrative duties but hopes to be involved in cordon-and-search missions soon, she says.

“I want to fight alongside the men,� she says. “I want to fight against the terrorists who are taking over my country.�

Washington Times
January 19, 2005
Pg. 1

Army Affirms Its Ban On Women In Combat

Questions raised whether policy will be enforced

By Rowan Scarborough, The Washington Times

Army Secretary Francis Harvey has told Congress that the service will keep the Pentagon's ban against female soldiers in ground combat, including no assignments to units that routinely embed with war fighters.

The Army had been reviewing the 1994 ban to see whether changes should be made to coincide with a sweeping transformation plan for combat brigades. Some officers at the Pentagon advocate lifting the ban on embedding, or collocating, sex-integrated support units with infantry, armor and other combat units.

Elaine Donnelly, who heads a pro-military group, said yesterday that it is still not clear whether the Army is telling Congress one thing, while in actual operations, it plans to mix integrated Forward Support Companies (FSC) within combat units.

"It's disappointing that official information from the Army seems so difficult to come by," Mrs. Donnelly said. "If they say the FSC will be all-male, and historically they have been, that would be true compliance with law and policy. However, if there are female soldiers being trained for the FSCs, that would be something else."

Mr. Harvey sent a memo to four senior members of Congress on Thursday, a day after The Washington Times reported that the president had said in an interview that he opposes any move to change the ground combat prohibition. The president was emphatic: "No women in combat."

The Army, for months, has been reviewing the role of female soldiers. Confidential briefing papers obtained by The Times showed that senior officers advocate lifting the so-called "collocation rule." This would have allowed women to serve in support units, such as Forward Support Companies, that normally embed with combat units such as armor or infantry and are in fact combat troops.

Mr. Harvey last week notified the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees that he was retaining the ban. The Stars and Stripes newspaper first reported on the memos.

Mrs. Donnelly, who heads the Center for Military Readiness and has been working to expose the internal Army debate, expressed suspicion and asked why the Army is reluctant to explain its decision in full.

She questions whether the Army intends merely to assign co-ed Forward Support Companies outside a combat unit's organizational chart, even though they will have to embed with those units to do the resupply mission.

The Army in November gave a private briefing to House military staffers that showed FSCs attached to brigade support battalions, a move the Army did not consider to be collocation. Mrs. Donnelly disagrees.

"The issue is not where they put them on paper, but the reality," Mrs. Donnelly said. "If they put gender-integrated FSCs with the brigade support battalion, then they would be violating the collocation policy."

Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, is spearheading a major transformation of Army brigades by turning them into "units of action" that train and deploy as one. To fully achieve these rapid deployment brigades, some inside the Pentagon have advocated changing the collocation rule so that mixed-sex FSCs can be embedded with them.

The Times has reported on two sets of briefing papers circulated at the highest levels of Army headquarters. One states that the Army does not have enough male soldiers to keep the FSCs all-male and should therefore consider the change.

A second Nov. 29 briefing from the director of the Army's Human Resources Policy Directorate states: "The way ahead: rewrite/eliminate the Army collocation policy."

With the Harvey memo, that idea appears, for now, to be dead.

Reporters and editors of The Times asked Mr. Bush in a Jan. 11 Oval Office interview whether he supported internal Army proposals to change the land-combat rules.

"There's no change of policy as far as I'm concerned," Mr. Bush said. "No women in combat. Having said that, let me explain, we've got to make sure we define combat properly: We've got women flying choppers and women flying fighters, which I'm perfectly content with."

The Clinton administration in 1994 lifted the ban on women in combat aircraft and ships, but left in place the prohibition on direct land combat and collocation.

Advocates of lifting the collocation cite a need for deploy-as-one brigades, and note that in Iraq there are no clear lines of battle. Islamist terrorists attack support units about as often as they strike all-male units that are clearly combat units.

Marine Corps Times
August 9, 2004

Band Of Sisters

Army 'Lionesses' hit streets with Marines on combat ops

By Gordon Lubold, Times staff writer

RAMADI, Iraq — When Marines on the hunt for insurgents here kick in the door, Spc. Shannon Morgan isn’t far behind. She’s part of “Team Lioness,� a small group of women proving itself in one of Iraq’s hottest combat zones.

Women are serving throughout the war zone, but the soldiers in this band of sisters are unique. They’re joining male Marines and soldiers on offensive ops, taking part in raids, security patrols and vehicle checkpoints.

The women are not walking point or leading infantry squads in the assault, but their secondary role is no less important to the success or failure of a mission here. They accompany the infantrymen to conduct body searches of Iraqi women, allowing U.S. forces to hunt for insurgents while not offending the citizens they seek to win over.

These women are helping to win the peace in this still restive city, but the significance of what they’re doing goes beyond the war zone. By joining men on the offense, they are blurring the traditional lines that have kept women in combat-support roles and out of harm’s way.

But in the counter-insurgency fight now being waged in Iraq, a war with no front lines and no traditional “rear,� just about anywhere outside the wire qualifies as “harm’s way.� And the women here are in the thick of it.

Take Morgan. She’s considered the best squad automatic weapon gunner in her battalion. She can kill the bad guy — and has — and has accompanied a unit during a 21-mile foot patrol in full combat gear on a day when temperatures pushed above 100 degrees.

When the bullets fly, she runs — toward the fight.

Morgan is not literally kicking in the door on raids. She leaves that for the Marines or soldiers in the “stack teams.�

But figuratively speaking, Morgan says she’s opening the door a bit wider, helping to redefine this man’s Army.

“I think it’s a breakthrough for females in combat,� said Morgan, a vehicle mechanic from Mena, Ark. “Putting women out there on the front lines with Marine [fire] teams is letting people know that women can hold their own.�

A woman’s touch

Team Lioness, a group of about 20 women with Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 1st Engineer Battalion, was born of necessity less than a year ago, when commanders saw a troubling situation during their raids and other missions.

The men they sent charging into the city, often into private homes, made Iraqi women uneasy. Searching the women proved difficult, as Muslim culture dictates that men are not to touch women they don’t know.

Some women refused to be searched, a stance the enemy exploited. Insurgents took to hiding weapons and other illicit materials under women’s dresses, knowing they probably wouldn’t be found there.

So Army commanders added female soldiers to the mix and watched as the tension of the Iraqi women eased.

The Iraqi women became so comfortable with the female soldiers — often clutching their arms or handing them their babies during house searches — that the Lionesses were able to collect intelligence from them that the men wouldn’t have been able to get.

It’s the soldiers’ hair that does the trick, said Sgt. Brandi Burns, a 30-year-old construction equipment operator from Roswell, N.M.

“They see all that masculinity, they see these people coming in their lives, then they see that itty-bitty bun and that eases them,� she said.

Most of the women with the 1st Engineer Battalion company are construction vehicle drivers or mechanics who are certified on the .50-caliber machine gun. Seeing an opportunity to join the fight, they jumped at the chance to go on raids. Many have seen more action than their male counterparts.

“Our Army guys would love to put a wig on and go out and do this stuff,� said Staff Sgt. Ranie Ruthig from Wentworth, S.D. “And we like to rub it in.�

Marines learned the value of bringing a Lioness to the fight when 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, arrived here in March. In the months since, 2/4 has become one of the team’s biggest customers.

The leathernecks were decidedly skeptical when the Lionesses first appeared, because women aren’t supposed to be assigned to combat-arms units below the division level.

They took them in anyway.

“The Marines just throw you out there and expect you to do it,� Ruthig said.

Mixed reactions

Although assignments to certain Army and Marine combat-arms units have been closed to women, more combat-related jobs such as explosive ordnance disposal technician and combat engineer were made available throughout the 1990s. That doesn’t necessarily mean many women are filling those jobs yet, however, according to a recent study by the Rand Corp., a California-based think tank.

The reasons women are underrepresented in many combat-related jobs could be due to a number of factors, such as personal choice, systemic problems or the fact that not much time has elapsed since the jobs were opened to women. Those with less experience than their male colleagues in such combat-related jobs may still be in the training pipeline, according to the study.

It’s too soon to tell the effect of Team Lioness and other efforts to involve women in combat operations, but the practice will likely improve the image of female service members, said retired Navy Capt. Lory Manning, director of the Women in the Military Project for the Washington-based Women’s Research and Education Institute.

“When this has settled down, I think the male Marines will have learned a lot about women’s abilities,� Manning said. “It will open up a lot of doors for women Marines. In history that’s how it’s worked … out of necessity.�

Leathernecks who have worked directly with the women of Team Lioness say they perform a valuable service the Marines can’t do without. The motto here is “first do no harm,� so having female soldiers available to help during missions involving Iraqi women is a good idea.

“When they’re there, it helps us out a lot,� said Cpl. Jared McKenzie, an assaultman with Weapons Company, 2/4, from Bon Aqua, Tenn. “It gets us out of searching the women, so it won’t get us in trouble.�

But predictably, other Marines aren’t big on women in combat, saying the female soldiers on the Lioness missions they’ve seen are sloppy and make them feel uncomfortable. Another Marine said he doesn’t think the American public is ready to send women into combat.

“It’s hard enough sending their sons off to war and watching them get killed,� said Lance Cpl. Phillip Scoggins, 24, who was sent to 2/4 as a combat replacement. “I don’t think they’re ready to see a woman get killed.�

Ready or not, 23 American service women have died in war zones since Sept. 11, 2001, the most American women to die in a war since World War II. There is no obvious outcry against the deaths of women compared to their male comrades.

Soldiers are more used to working with women, partly because there are more women than Marines in the Army and partly because they work more closely with men.

Overall, about 73,000 of the Army’s 485,000 soldiers, or 15 percent, are women; about 10,600 of the nearly 178,000 active-duty Marines are women, roughly 6 percent.

The greater percentage in the Army is due to the service’s higher number of job specialties, Manning said.

Soldiers are also more used to seeing women in their barracks, where they sleep, change clothes and watch television together. The nearly 20 women in 1st Engineer Battalion’s headquarters company live with the men in their platoons, a nod to unit cohesion that’s important if women are going to play a worthwhile role, commanders here said.

Even soldiers not familiar with the role Team Lioness is playing have open minds, since any woman stationed in Iraq is vulnerable, serving in capacities beyond her usual stateside roles.

“I think as far as putting them at risk, they’re at risk anyway,� said Army 2nd Lt. Alex Graziano, a 25-year-old native of Athol, Mass., who is with a transportation unit working near Baghdad.

Some women end up in combat by accident. But others seek out jobs that will put them in harm’s way. Women serve in military police units, and in Iraq, Army MPs have been doing many of the same jobs Marine infantry perform. They patrol some of Iraq’s meanest streets.

If there were any doubt about how they would perform in combat, four female MPs blew them away the night of Oct. 16, 2003, in Karbala.

In an intense firefight that killed three other MPs, it was women manning machine guns in the turrets of armored Humvees along with the men in the unit who allowed the soldiers to fight their way free of the ambush. A fifth woman, a medic, braved enemy fire during the attack, running from wounded soldier to wounded soldier. For their bravery, those five women were awarded Bronze Stars or Army Commendation Medals, all with combat “V� devices. Two got Purple Hearts. Army historians believe that is the most valor awards ever given to women for a single action.

Putting women in the fight is a good opportunity for them and it helps get the mission done, said Lt. Col. Dave Brinkley, commander of 1st Engineer Battalion and one of the architects of the lioness program. When he is planning a mission, he looks at his unit and sees soldiers, not men and women, Brinkley said.

“If they’re not suited for it, they’re pulled off,� Brinkley said.

‘I am going with you’

Although the raids are sometimes low-key missions, things can heat up quickly.

During a mission that quickly grew into an intense gun battle with insurgents, a company commander told some Team Lioness members to get into a Humvee and sit tight. Reluctantly, they did.

After his unit left, a squad of Marines appeared, and the women got out to continue the patrol as the fight raged.

“We’ll take care of you,� Ruthig recalls the Marines telling her.

Morgan went on another mission with Marines from 2/4, a house-to-house search leathernecks call a “bug hunt.�

As the unit walked through downtown Ramadi, they could hear speeches from mosque loudspeakers urging the people to rise up against their American occupiers, and the Iraqis began shooting.

“We moved from section to section, and every section we moved to was a bigger battle than the last one,� Morgan said.

As rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire flew overhead, a commander asked Morgan if she wanted to stay back.

“Hell no; I am going with you,� she recalled saying. On another patrol, she shot and killed at least one insurgent, an act that she declined to talk about in detail.

Detroit Free Press
April 8, 2005

U.S. Military Women Prove Combat-Worthy

By Dogen Hannah, Knight Ridder Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Army Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester bolted from her Humvee, took cover behind a berm along the road and began firing at the swarm of insurgents ambushing a U.S. military convoy south of Baghdad.

"Bullets were flying everywhere," said the 23-year-old from Bowling Green, Ky. "I could hear them pinging off the truck in back of me. I could hear them hitting the ground next to me. It was pretty crazy."

For almost a half-hour, Hester and nine other Kentucky National Guard soldiers, including another woman, Spec. Ashley Pullen, fought off 40 to 50 attackers armed with assault rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. When the shooting ended, 26 insurgents lay dead and seven were wounded.

The midday March 20 firefight -- at the time the largest battle in about four months -- demonstrated that female soldiers aren't strangers to combat in Iraq. Despite military policies banning them from combat units, women have been exposed to fire and are firing back like never before as insurgents wage an unconventional campaign against U.S. forces.

"It's more that the women have killed in this war, rather than that they've been killed," said Lory Manning, a retired Navy captain who directs the Women in the Military project of the nonpartisan, Washington-based Women's Research and Education Institute. "The nature of the engagement over there is such that the women have had to learn how to fight back. And that's been a mighty, mighty big change."

The change refuels a long-running debate about whether women should serve in combat units. Those opposed to the ban say it shows that women can hold their own. Those favoring the ban worry that the nature of the fight in Iraq will make it more likely that the military will sidestep or ease the rules.

Among supporters of the ban on women in combat is Elaine Donnelly , the president of the Center for Military Readiness, a socially conservative advocacy group. The Army should reassess whether women should serve in units such as Hester's 617th Military Police Company that can end up so close to the action, Donnelly said.

"I think there's some military police roles that women can do and do well," Donnelly said. "But when they start doing things very similar to what the infantry does, that, I think, is a whole different position."

Women are permitted to pilot just about any aircraft, to ship out on almost any vessel and to serve most roles in the Army and Marine Corps. In the Army alone, they constitute about 15 percent of 500,000 active soldiers and about 25 percent of 212,000 reservists.

Women remain barred from infantry, armor, special forces and certain artillery units. Defense Department policy also excludes them from units smaller than a brigade -- 3,000 to 5,000 soldiers -- with the primary mission of engaging in direct combat on the ground.

That still leaves room for them to serve in police, supply, maintenance and other units that closely support combat troops. Those units are vulnerable in Iraq, where conventional front lines don't exist and insurgents target relatively lightly protected patrols and supply lines.

"We've always operated under the assumption that there were such things as frontline troops," said Michael O'Hanlon, a military expert at the Brookings Institution. "It's obviously not true in an insurgency or stabilization mission."

Danger knows no gender

One female soldier was killed in the war before President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat on May 1, 2003. Since then, 19 more female soldiers and two female civilian military employees have been killed in hostile action, according to the Pentagon.

At least 261 women in the military, most in the Army, have been wounded in action since the war's March 19, 2003, onset. Like their male counterparts, female troops have fallen prey to homemade bombs, mortars, rockets, gunshots and vehicle crashes resulting from hostile action.

"The fact is that in Iraq now, everyone is in danger," said Martha Rudd, an Army spokeswoman.

Neither Pullen, 21, nor Hester was wounded in the March 20 fight. Four soldiers of the Nebraska National Guard's 1075th Transportation Company, which had been traveling with the convoy and helped repel the attack, and three Kentucky soldiers were wounded.

Donnelly said the courage of Hester and Pullen is admirable. "But the danger of ambushes or the experience of being in an ambush is not the same as what a combat soldier is trained and dispatched to do: to deliberately engage in offensive action against the enemy."

Others see the firefight as evidence that women can handle combat assignments. It rebuts arguments that female soldiers will break bonds among male soldiers in combat units and that women can't stand the rigors of living in the field, said Manning.

Military leaders "are certainly learning an awful lot from this about women, in general, as far as how they function in this type of environment," Manning said. "What they are learning is that ... women can deal with all that stuff and deal with it very well."

New York Daily News
December 14, 2004

The Women Of War

In Iraq, death knows no front line, nor gender

By Richard Sisk, Daily News Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON - America's women in uniform have been fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan in ways never foreseen under the restrictions on women in combat.

Through last week, 27 women had been killed in Iraq and five in Afghanistan and more than 230 had earned the Purple Heart for wounds inflicted by the enemy, according to Pentagon records.

Among those fatally injured in Iraq was Army 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment Sgt. Linda Jimenez, 39, of Brooklyn, who fell into a bomb crater on patrol in November last year and later died at an Army hospital.

The military's 1994 rules limit women's exposure to combat by barring them from serving in front-line infantry, armor and most artillery units, but the enemy's ambushes and terrorist tactics have altered the rules.

Women driving a truck in Iraq or walking a beat as a military policewoman in "support" units in Iraq have instantly taken up the role of the combat grunt, engaging in running firefights with hit-and-run insurgents.

"I think what changed is that Iraq is different," said Army airborne Capt. Kellie McCoy, who shot her way out of an enemy ambush in September 2003 to earn the Bronze Star with combat "V" for valor under fire.

"Our doctrine [on women in combat] was suited for wars with front lines," McCoy said. "In Iraq, the front line is everywhere. Once you leave the [base] camp, you're on the front line," she said.

The new reality of war - and the performance of women in the field - has prompted the Army to examine whether it should formally change its 1994 rules.

"The assignment of women is one of several issues under review" as the Army converts its heavy divisions into lighter and faster combat brigades, said Maj. Elizabeth Robbins, an Army spokeswoman.

"We're not at the point of reaching a decision" on whether mixed military units of men and women would be put on the battlefield alongside all-male land combat units, Robbins said, but the possibility will be discussed with Congress.

But with the concept of the front line erased, the current roster of 224,000 women who make up about 16% of the active-duty military of 1.4 million has taken up duties never envisioned by the 1.8 million women who preceded them in uniform since the American Revolution.

In Vietnam, only eight of the more than 58,000 troops killed were women, and they were all unarmed Army and Air Force nurses, according to the Women in Military Service for America (WIMSA) Foundation.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the women carry weapons. They have been killed and wounded by roadside bombs, mortar attacks and small-arms fire.

Women such as McCoy have led men in battle, and women have flown war planes off carrier decks to bomb enemy positions.

The most recent death was that of the Army's 202nd Military Intelligence Battalion Sgt. Cari Gasiewicz, 28, of Depew, N.Y. Gasiewicz's convoy was hit by two roadside bombs near Baghdad on Dec. 4.

"With each conflict, women are used more than in the previous conflict," said retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Wilma Vaught in assessing the evolving roles of women in uniform.

"In Vietnam, we were restricted on where we could go, we didn't go out on convoys," said Vaught, a Vietnam vet and president of the WIMSA Foundation.

"More than ever before, the military is accepting that women are there to do a job," Vaught said. "If the job takes them in harm's way, well, that's the way it is."

Time
February 27, 2006
Pg. 36

Crossing The Lines

Though barred from combat, female troops in Iraq often find themselves in full-fledged battle. An intimate look at the lives of the real G.I. Janes

By Tim McGirk, Baghdad

For Captain Shonnel Makwakwa, it was a rare assignment "outside the wire": a chance to break the monotony of life on the base and get out onto the streets of Baghdad. But it didn't take long to realize that this was no routine mission. Minutes after Makwakwa's humvee pulled out of Camp Liberty last December, bad news crackled over the radio: a supply convoy of six 18-wheel trucks was ambushed at Checkpoint 50, a freeway cloverleaf that is a notorious shooting alley for insurgents. Makwakwa, a bright, fit New Orleans native, handles medical logistics for the U.S. 10th Mountain Division--the kind of deskbound job often assigned to women G.I.s. Now she found herself wearing a first-aid kit on her belt, gripping an M-4 rifle and crawling on her stomach as enemy fire rained down. "I could hear the rounds pinging all around me," she says. "It was surreal." The scene was horrific. Flies were everywhere, and so was blood. "I'd dealt with people dying in the hospital, but it was nothing like this," she says. Makwakwa and another soldier kicked in the bullet-shattered windshield of the lead vehicle, but the driver was already dead. The driver of the second vehicle was screaming in agony from his wounds; he later died. Makwakwa and the patrol were able to save three other wounded drivers, but the memories of Checkpoint 50 are hard to erase--a constant reminder that while the military officially bars women from combat, the insurgency makes no such distinctions. "In Iraq, female soldiers are in combat," she says. "We're out there."

American women have served in every U.S. military conflict since the Revolution, usually as nurses or spies, but the country has never been comfortable with sending them into harm's way. Congress bars women from engaging in offensive warfare with the enemy. In response to dwindling military-recruiting numbers and demands by women's groups for more equality between the sexes, the Pentagon in 1994 loosened the ban and allowed women to take on "supporting" combat roles. In Iraq, that can involve anything from piloting combat helicopters to accompanying infantrymen and Marines on house-to-house raids and searching Iraqi women suspects for pistols and suicide belts. As the insurgency has grown more diffuse, increasing numbers of women are finding themselves in the teeth of combat. Says Lory Manning, a former Navy captain who is now a policy analyst at the Women's Research and Education Institute in Arlington, Va.: "This is the first time in U.S. history that women are allowed to shoot back."

It is also the first time they are suffering substantial casualties. Women troops make up nearly 15% of active-duty service members. Since 2003, 48 women have died in Iraq--just 2% of the total number of U.S. troops killed but far more than the 8 nurses killed out of 7,500 servicewomen in the Vietnam War. Three hundred have been wounded in Iraq. Few female troops are out of the line of fire. While military police patrol Baghdad with Iraqi cops who skirmish almost daily with insurgents, women clerks and cooks inside U.S. camps are vulnerable to rocket and mortar attacks by militants. Such hazards underscore the threats to life and limb that still confront all U.S. troops in Iraq, even as the military attempts to turn over more combat responsibility to Iraqi forces. First Sergeant Michelle Collins, 38, who waits anxiously every day for "her kids" to come back to Camp Liberty from patrol, says, "An IED [improvised explosive device] or a bullet doesn't have the gender marked on it."

To get an idea of how much the lines dividing male and female roles have blurred--or vanished--TIME joined a unit of U.S. military police from the 10th Mountain's 1st Brigade on patrol along the reedy canals and palm groves outside Baghdad. This is a favorite route for insurgents streaming in from Fallujah. As the troops load into their humvees, Sergeant Lenore Swenson, 25, from Colorado Springs, Colo., who dreams of leaving the Army someday and buying a horse ranch, tucks her flaxen hair under her helmet. Her friendly grin vanishes beneath a black fire-retardant mask with goggles. She trained as a driver, but her superiors switched her to gunner. "We need maturity behind the gun," says squad leader Darren Horve. "And she's got it."

As the humvee leaves camp, Horve yells out to her, "Hey, Swenson! Keep an eye open for triggermen hiding along the road." She nods. In the gunner's hatch, she is armed with a 240 Bravo machine gun that fires 950 rounds a minute, but she is more vulnerable than the men inside the humvee's armored shell to sniper bullets and shrapnel from roadside bombs. As the convoy rolls down the back roads, Swenson and the guys in her humvee keep up an easy, comradely banter, joking about the Iraqi kids they see along their patrol: one boy moves like a hip-hop dancer, another like a ninja fighter. Swenson says, "What I'll remember isn't threatening Iraqis with my machine gun but seeing the children wave as we go by," and then adds that "sometimes they do throw rocks." And so she remains vigilant. The roads are peppered with hidden land mines and bomb craters. After steering around one huge, blackened hole, Swenson says, "Boy, that one sure woulda woken me up." When they roll back to camp safely, the relief among the soldiers on patrol is palpable. They were lucky that dayno attacks, no IEDs. "I'm no hero. I don't want no Purple Heart," she says. "I just want to make it back without a scratch."

The common dangers facing service members in Iraq have helped close the gender gap. In today's Army, nobody gallantly holds the humvee door open for a female, and a woman is expected to carry as much (Swenson's full gear weighs 115 lbs.) and to shoot as well as a man. Women service members refer to themselves either as "combat Barbies"--those who fight the losing battle of trying to look pretty in Iraq's sandstorms and winter sludge--or "hooah girls," named after the motivational grunt of obedience that soldiers give their superiors. "We females do combat ops," says Sergeant Brandy Everett, 25, a self-confessed hooah girl from Rocky Mountain, N.C. "And you know what? I enjoy it." Still, some women in the military--and a good number of men--admit that the dangers of serving in Iraq have been jarring. Many enlisted before the Iraq war, when military life for privates was much the same as working in, say, McDonald's, only you had to salute your bosses. "I thought I'd be working in a hospital," says medic Sergeant Dywata Reynolds. "But then this war started." While on patrol recently, Reynolds, the mother of a baby, survived a fusillade of insurgent gunfire. Says Collins: "We didn't expect to be as close to combat as we are, but you can't get much closer than this."

Military officers say that the performance of female soldiers in Iraq offers little evidence to back a common argument against the use of women in combat: that they are more likely than men to panic under fire. Marine Colonel Bob Chase, who oversees the training of new Marine officers in Quantico, Va., says that last June, hours after a roadside bomb near Fallujah killed four Marines, including three women, and injured 11 other women, a female Marine officer pulled him aside. Standing with her were more than a dozen other female Marines. "We want to take their place," the officer told Chase.

And yet despite such displays of mettle, acceptance from some of the guys is grudging. Says a military-police sergeant in Baghdad: "I've got nothing against them. But they're slower and weaker"--and therefore would be a liability in hand-to-hand combat. Some commanders grumble about the loss of personnel in their units as a result of shipping home pregnant women. When Collins brought a group of female soldiers--assigned to search women during raids on suspected insurgent hideouts--to the 10th Mountain infantry's camp, she says, "the men all had one big frown, as if to say, 'What the hell are you doing here?'" She angrily demanded the infantrymen give her female soldiers breathing space so they could prove their worth. Usually in such circumstances, the men oblige, says Collins, but that doesn't spare women some awkward moments. "Even when I take off my helmet, the Iraqi women don't believe I'm a female," says Sergeant Elizabeth Ricci, 20. "They'll come up and tug my hair." And Iraqi men? "One man saw a ring on my finger and asked who I was married to," she recalls. Joking around, Ricci pointed to a male soldier beside her. "Next thing, the Iraqi opens his wallet and is over there trying to buy me," she says.

Such light moments provide only fleeting relief from the rigors of life in Iraq and the longing for family. More than from the perils of combat, women soldiers suffer from the trauma of separation from their children, according to Captain Kyle Bourque, an Army social worker at Camp Liberty. It's particularly trying for new mothers like Sergeant Reynolds, who was sent to Iraq when her baby was only 4 months old. Reynolds, a petite 25-year-old, tries to maintain contact by singing to her baby over the phone and staying up until 2 a.m. so that she can hook into the military's webcam service and watch Ariana crawling around at the baby sitter's house in New York. With older kids, the split is painful too. Warrant Officer Ena Gomez, 30, a single mother, is trying to raise a teenage daughter via e-mails and phone calls. Gomez works behind a desk but can hear insurgent mortars and rocket shells screaming over her trailer. "It's funny, but if I weren't here, I wouldn't tell my girl that I love her every day," Gomez says. "What if a rocket falls? I want her memories of me to be nice."

The exposure of women to combat isn't going entirely unchallenged by those who oppose the military's drift toward "co-location" of male and female troops. Led by Representative Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Republicans won passage of an amendment to last year's defense-spending bill that requires the Pentagon to issue a report this year showing that the military is following congressional restrictions on women in combat. But given the strains on the military, the need for women to take on expanded roles is likely to grow. In Iraq's danger zones, officers say, female MPs, medics and pilots have earned the right to be treated as equals. Major Tim Parker of the 10th Mountain Division says it's still hard for men to conceive of sharing a foxhole with their women comrades, but he acknowledges that change is inevitable. "There still needs to be a line," he says. "But in the future, I'm sure we'll cross that." Many women in Iraq would say they already have.

With reporting by Sally B. Donnelly/Washington

Washington Post
May 24, 2005
Pg. 17

The Woman Warrior

By Ruth Marcus

Heather Wilson, a New Mexico Republican, is the only female military veteran in Congress, and on meeting her you might well guess at that background without being told. Third-generation Air Force and a member of the third class of female cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Wilson has the erect posture of a member of the armed services. She speaks briskly, her voice low and, on the day last week that I saw her, full of controlled fury.

It was Friday morning, a time when Wilson would ordinarily have been on her way home to her family in Albuquerque. She'd stayed behind to fight a provision, inserted in a defense authorization bill that will hit the House floor this week, to keep female service members out of combat. Seated behind a desk decorated with a bumper sticker proclaiming "We Love Jet Noise," with pictures of her children flashing on a computer screen-saver behind her, the 44-year-old Wilson took unusually direct aim at her colleagues.

"The people who are pushing this policy change intend to close positions, not open them," she said. "I think it's offensive. We've got women thousands of miles from home doing dangerous work and for the first time in history the Congress is going to pass a law restricting how the Army can assign its soldiers? But not all of its soldiers -- just women. What are they thinking?"

Under current policy, women aren't assigned to ground combat units. Proponents of the change Wilson opposes argue that it would simply codify those rules. Wilson isn't pressing to lift the restriction on women in combat, but she contends that enshrining the current limits in law would send the wrong signal (women aren't equally valued) at the wrong time (in the midst of a recruiting shortage and when commanders in the field need more flexibility, not less).

If there is an issue that evokes even more passion than gays in the military, it is women in combat. The arguments are couched in the dry language of upper-body strength and unit cohesion, but at its core the debate is over whether women belong at war. Do Americans feel differently about female soldiers being killed and wounded and held captive in Iraq than men? If so -- and the focus on Jessica Lynch suggests that for many Americans the answer is yes -- then what roles are permissible for women in a conflict with no front? After all, as Wilson says, "A woman driving a water truck or flipping burgers in the mess tent can come under attack."

Perhaps no two members of Congress -- certainly no two Republicans -- better embody the nation's unresolved and conflicting attitudes toward women in the military than Wilson and Rep. Duncan Hunter, the San Diego Republican who chairs the House Armed Services Committee. Like Wilson, Hunter has the military in his blood: His father was an artillery officer in the South Pacific during World War II; Hunter himself was an Army Ranger who flew helicopter combat missions in Vietnam; his son enlisted in the Marines after Sept. 11 and later served in Iraq.

When it comes to women in the armed forces, Hunter, 56, is from the old school. Five years ago, for example, he backed a provision to bar the Navy from opening submarines to women. "The morale of Navy wives already has suffered from allowing women to serve on Navy ships," he warned.

In the current debate, he argues that the fact that female service members can be killed flipping burgers doesn't justify putting them deliberately closer to combat. In an interview yesterday, he cited the "egregious wounds suffered by personnel in combat, the ability of the soldiers or Marines to deal with those wounds and continue to work and continue to fight, the total lack of privacy you have on the front lines where there are not separate locker rooms. "

Wilson, a relative moderate, is removed from Hunter by dint of her generation, gender and branch of service. She spent her military years not in the heat of battle but as a Rhodes scholar, earning a doctorate in international relations, writing a book on international law, and working on arms control issues in Europe.

In Congress, she served on Armed Services until this year, when she was forced to quit because the chairman of the Commerce Committee refused to let her continue to serve on two top-tier panels. (The chairman had wanted Wilson off his committee altogether after she sided with Democratic demands for cost estimates on the Medicare prescription drug bill.) Wilson tangled with Hunter, too; last year she criticized him for closing a hearing on abuse of prisoners in Iraq. She can be "a little obstinate," Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said this year.

In the latest manifestation of that trait, Wilson read to the group of reporters assembled in her office from the language of the provision she has in her sights. The amendment defines direct combat in part as being "well forward on the battlefield." In this war, Wilson asked, "Which way is forward?" That question, with its layers of potential meaning, is at the essence of what the House is being called on to decide.

USA Today
May 26, 2005
Pg. 6

Majority Of Americans Approve Of Women Serving In Iraq

But not in combat, poll respondents say

By Dave Moniz, USA Today

WASHINGTON — Americans overwhelmingly favor the use of female troops in Iraq, including having them serve in support jobs that often put them in or near combat, according to a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll. A majority of those polled, however, oppose women serving as ground troops.

The results seem to support Pentagon policy that limits women to support roles on the ground.

An attempt to further limit the jobs military women can hold was defeated Wednesday in the House of Representatives. Lawmakers added an amendment to a defense bill that would require the Defense Department to give Congress 60-day notice of any policy change. The provision was approved as part of the $491 billion defense bill.

The Iraq war, which has lasted more than two years, has blurred the distinction between front-line and rear areas. Though women are prohibited from serving in ground combat jobs, the unpredictable nature of attacks has increased the danger to many support troops, including truck drivers and military police.

By 72%-27%, respondents said women should be able to serve anywhere in Iraq. By 67%-32%, respondents said they favored women serving as support troops for all-male ground combat units, the current policy. By 54%-44%, Americans oppose women being assigned to jobs where they would do “most of the fighting� such as in infantry units. That's a drop from a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll in 2001 that showed 52% favored women “serving as ground combat troops.�

Thirty-five U.S. military women have been killed and 279 wounded in action in Iraq. Eight American women — all nurses — were killed in the Vietnam War.

Several hundred U.S. women were killed in World War II, the vast majority of them nurses or auxiliary troops in rear areas. World War II lasted nearly four years and involved a significantly larger military force of 16.1 million, compared with about 1.4 million today.

Overall, 1,642 U.S. servicemembers have died in Iraq. The vast majority of the casualties are men, but the Iraq war has resulted in a number of serious injuries to women, including five Army soldiers who lost limbs.

Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, sought to re-examine the role of women after questioning whether the Army was violating Pentagon policy, established in 1994, by moving female support soldiers alongside combat units during a reorganization.

Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, a public policy organization in Livonia, Mich., that opposes Defense Department policies in Iraq, said the Army has needlessly put women at risk.

The Army says it follows policy and leaves women behind when combat units go to fight.

The poll, taken Friday to Sunday, surveyed 1,006 adults nationwide. It has a margin of error of +/-3 percentage points.

Christian Science Monitor
June 1, 2005
Pg. 9

GI Janes Caught In Culture Wars Crossfire

By Erin Solaro

SEATTLE --Why did he do it? In mid-May, Rep. Duncan Hunter, a California Republican and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, sponsored an amendment to a defense appropriation bill to close the Army's Forward Support Companies to female soldiers. Had the House not abandoned the issue last week, the Army could have been forced to withdraw or reassign thousands of young women currently serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

According to one Hill staffer, "the adults" - presumably Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Army's senior leadership - got Mr. Hunter to dilute the amendment into a recommendation that the secretary of Defense review the issue. Others within the Beltway have taken to calling Hunter "American Taliban" for his opposition to American women going in harm's way.

This is unfair to Hunter, an astute and staunchly pro-military politician who is neither a child nor a terrorist. But the Army is increasingly and irrevocably dependent on women, who are now routinely serving - and serving well - in combat environments and situations. To remove them would be to cripple an Army facing a serious recruiting and retention crisis. So if Hunter did something so utterly at variance with military reality and necessity, there must be other motivations at work.

There are. The women-in-combat issue is now part of America's cultural wars as well as its shooting wars. But the real question isn't about women or war; it's about the 2006 election.

To explain, I borrow a bit from cultural historian Philip Gold, author of "Take Back the Right." According to him, Culture War I, a 1960s-to-1990s affair, ended in a conservative rout but also in the burnout of the left. This is hardly surprising. Most revolutions burn out, and the farther you advance, the more vulnerable you become to counterattack. And now it's Culture War II.

Under President Bush, the right has counterattacked in a complex "Take Back America" campaign involving an array of "hot-button" issues, from abortion and gay marriage to judgeships and, now, women in combat. Indeed, last February, in an Oval Office press conference, Mr. Bush stated his opposition to women in ground combat, giving his supporters carte blanche to work the issue. In May, after several months of preparatory publicity in the standard conservative publications, Hunter did just that.

But why? The answer is that conservatives have discovered an effective political tactic. The well organized, well funded, and well motivated cultural and religious right saved Mr. Bush in 2004 by emphasizing "values" over substantive debate. It worked, but just barely, over a lackluster opponent in an election boycotted by 40 percent of the electorate.

This is small comfort, when the Republican Congress must face what Dr. Gold calls the "Year Six Curse" - the last president to serve six or more consecutive years without a major disaster or scandal was Teddy Roosevelt. Given the situation in Iraq, the hemorrhaging of jobs and mounting debt, the porous border, and myriad other issues, 2006 may prove a nasty year for the incumbents.

Conservatives know this. So what better way to immunize themselves by pushing "values" over reality. No need to disavow or even criticize the president as the results of his policies become apparent, let alone offer serious, workable solutions. Just change the subject.

But for those at war, reality can't be wished away so easily. During the two months I spent in Iraq and Afghanistan as a journalist embedded with combat troops and as an author researching a book on military women, I met, talked, and went on missions with a variety of women soldiers.

Some of these women accompanied Army and Marine infantry to interact with Iraqi women; others went with Army Special Forces and Navy SEALs on multiweek patrols in Afghanistan's rugged terrain. A handful of them lived under austere conditions at Forward Operating Base Ghanzi amongst a battalion of infantrymen - men who did not assault or harass them, but said things like, "I trust them with my life."

They were, in every sense of the word, soldiers: brave, competent, and accepted by the men who depended upon them. For these soldiers - male and female - are members of a generation accustomed to equality since birth and, like all good soldiers, aware that when stuff starts flying, all that matters is whether you can depend upon each other.

And yet, I can't avoid the impression that the right is willing to do - indeed has started doing - to these women what the left did to Vietnam veterans: steal their valor, despise or trivialize their accomplishments, and ignore their pain or use it to score political points.

Duncan Hunter is a Vietnam veteran who served in two legendary Army units. He certainly remembers what his brothers endured, there and at home. I cannot believe that he now wishes to do the same thing to his sisters. No one should.

Erin Solaro is working on a forthcoming book, "Beyond GI Jane: American Women, the War on Terror and the New Civic Feminism."

Los Angeles Times
July 3, 2005
Pg. M5

In Defense Of Women In Combat

By Rosa Brooks

The deaths of five female soldiers in Iraq this month have fueled a new surge of opposition to allowing women to serve in the military in combat roles. But it's based on some pretty dubious claims.

"Women aren't big and strong enough for combat." I'll buy this when someone explains why the Marine Corps will cheerfully accept a 4-foot-10 male recruit who weighs 96 pounds.

Sure, the Marines will make a man out of him, but even if they water the guy with Miracle-Gro, they won't be able to turn him into a 6-footer. The average man may be bigger and stronger than the average woman, but plenty of women are bigger and stronger than many men. Why discriminate based on gender when you could have straightforward, task-specific strength requirements?

In any case, in a war that mixes high-tech weaponry with low-tech hazards, being big and strong isn't all it's cracked up to be. You don't need to be big and strong to fly a modern combat jet, and size won't help when you're up against suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices. Why do we believe that bigger people make better soldiers? In Vietnam, an army of big, strong American men fought an army of small, slender Vietnamese men — and lost.

"Allowing women in combat will hurt military morale, cohesion and readiness." On the contrary, studies suggest that the presence of women has a neutral or positive effect on military morale and cohesion. Maybe that's why support for women serving in combat positions is stronger in the military than in the general population: Two-thirds of military personnel support allowing women to serve in combat, compared with roughly 50% of the general population. The more familiar people are with the military, the more they support full participation for women — which ought to tell us something.

"We can't let women into combat because they might be taken prisoner and raped." Male prisoners can be raped too. And how exactly is rape worse than the numerous other horrors (such as beatings and torture) to which prisoners of either sex might be subjected? Anyone who volunteers for combat needs to be prepared for possible mistreatment if captured. If women understand and accept the risk of rape, that should be the end of the debate.

"We can't let women into combat because they might get killed." They surely will, but so what? Women die in car accidents and from heart attacks, but though these deaths too are cause for sorrow, we still let women ride in cars and super-size their fries. And contrary to near-universal belief, even if we allowed women to participate in the full range of combat positions, women in the military would probably be no more likely to die than women in civilian life.

In 2002, the death rate for full-time military personnel was 64.4 per 100,000, a rate substantially lower than for civilians with the same age breakdown. (Why? Military personnel get good healthcare and keep fit). The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have increased the military death rate, but not by as much as most people assume. Crunching available numbers from the last three years suggests that the current death rate of military personnel deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan is roughly 150 per 100,000.

Whether you consider that high or low depends on what you compare it with, but here are a few data points: the 2002 civilian death rate for 15- to 24-year-olds was 171 out of each 100,000 in Washington, D.C., 131 per 100,000 in West Virginia, and 119 per 100,000 in Louisiana. For 25- to 34-year-olds in those same states, the death rates were, respectively, 158, 173, and 134 per 100,000.

In contrast to the bogus arguments against women in combat, there are strong arguments in favor. Locking women out of combat positions makes it harder for women to advance within the military, limiting their opportunities to attain more prestigious jobs and higher salaries. This in turn hurts their families and increases gender inequalities in society as a whole.

Denying women the opportunity to take on combat roles also reduces their future ability to shape national policy. In the post-9/11 world, credibility on military and security issues is increasingly necessary for those who hope to succeed in important public positions — and if only men can occupy combat roles, that gives them a substantial edge.

With the rise of terrorism and asymmetrical warfare, the distinction between "front" and "rear" has eroded. In Iraq, women in noncombat military jobs, such as escorting cargo convoys or serving as military police, are in harm's way. And here at home, hundreds of women lost their lives in the wreckage of the twin towers.

Locking women out of combat positions may help a few American men maintain the illusion of gallantry, but it's time to acknowledge reality. Women will die alongside men in any terrorist attack on U.S. soil, and women, like men, are affected by our national defense policies. It's time to give them the right to fight for their country.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer
March 15, 2006

Thunderbirds Are Ready To Make History

By James Wallace, P-I Reporter

Air Force Capt. Nicole Malachowski, fresh off a four-month combat assignment in Iraq, was on a cruise-ship vacation with her husband when their cabin phone rang.

Their ship was just leaving Oslo, Norway.

A four-star general was calling, the head of the Air Force Combat Command.

"I'd like to offer you a job," he told the fighter pilot.

She had been selected as one of the six demonstration pilots for the Thunderbirds, the 53-year-old crack flying team for the Air Force that flies around the country each year thrilling thousands at air shows from Florida to Washington.

On March 25-26, in the skies over Fort Smith, Ark., Malachowski will make aviation history when the Thunderbirds give their first performance of the 2006 season. She is the first female pilot ever selected for either the Thunderbirds or the Navy's Blue Angels.

The Thunderbirds are finishing four months of intense training at Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas. One of their stops this year will be Fairchild Air Force Base near Spokane on July 29-30. In 2007, the Thunderbirds, including Malachowski, should return to McChord Air Force Base.

"I'm an Air Force officer first, a pilot second and then Nicole," the 31-year-old said Tuesday in a phone interview during a break from training. "The female part is last. ... My job is to be the best right wingman that I can be.

"The most important thing for all of us is to represent all the men and women wearing Air Force blue out there. I understand the uniqueness of my situation. But it is important for people to remember that for those of us on the team, it is just operations as normal."

She flies the No. 3 jet, or the right wing pilot in the four-jet diamond formation. There are two solo pilots.

Also with the Thunderbird team this year is Maj. Jeremy Sloane, 36, who was born and grew up in Federal Way. He flies the No. 7 jet and is not part of the six-jet demonstration team. But he is the squadron's second in command and is responsible for overseeing each 2006 flight demonstration and grading each performance. He also gives rides to media members and others before each air show.

Sloane, who attended the Air Force Academy after graduating from Federal Way High School in 1988, watched the Blue Angels when he was growing up. He knew he wanted to fly when he took an early commercial jetliner ride to San Francisco for a basketball camp.

The Thunderbirds fly the Lockheed Martin F-16. The Blue Angels, who perform each year at Seafair, fly the Boeing F-18 Hornet.

Malachowski had wanted to be a fighter pilot since her father took the family to an air show at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. She was only about 4 years old but remembers watching an F-4 Phantom fly that day.

Born in nearby Santa Maria, Calif., Malachowski said her family moved to Las Vegas when she was about 12. She was a member of the Civil Air Patrol in high school and attended the Air Force Academy.

She met her husband, Maj. Paul Malachowski of Buffalo, N.Y., while stationed as an F-15 pilot at Lakenheath, England. He was an F-15 weapons officer, meaning he flew in the back seat.

Every year, half of the six-pilot Thunderbirds demonstration team is replaced. So are the four support officers who make up the team, which also includes 115 Air Force enlisted men and women.

Around December, the Air Force sends out a general invitation to apply for the Thunderbirds. Pilots must have at least 1,000 hours in a fighter and have no more than 12 years in the service. In addition to a letter explaining why the pilot wants to be a member of the Thunderbirds, each candidate must submit five letters of recommendation, flight history and every annual evaluation report received while in the Air Force.

The Thunderbird team at Nellis reads through those applications and narrows the list to about 10 pilots. These semifinalists meet with the Thunderbirds while they are on the road doing shows. Top Air Force brass interview the candidates. Afterward, five finalists are selected and there are more intensive interviews at Nellis, where each candidate must demonstrate flying skills.

Finally, three pilots are picked.

Malachowski was on assignment in the Middle East, flying F-15 combat support missions in Iraq, during the time she was being considered.

She made several flights between Iraq and Nevada during the selection process.

Then that call came from the general in June.

"When you are on a wonderful cruise ship in the middle of summer and you get a call to be a Thunderbird, well, life does not get much better than that," she said.

Once picked, she was assigned to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, where the Thunderbirds were formed in 1953, to train on the F-16. It took only one flight to get the feel of the Lockheed Martin fighter, which has a side stick controller rather than the center stick of the F-15.

Sloane was training F-16 pilots at Luke when he was selected two years ago to be on the team.

Malachowski said the training at Nellis started with only two jets flying far apart and high above the desert. One by one, the other jets were added to the formation.

"It was very different than what I was used to," she said. "The amount of mental stamina and mental endurance that is required is just amazing."

But now she's ready for that first public show above Fort Smith.

Since word got out that the Air Force had picked its first female Thunderbird pilot, Malachowski has been inundated with messages from supporters and well-wishers. She figures she has answered about 2,500 e-mails and nearly 1,000 letters,

"I may be a catalyst for discussion, but Americans understand what the real story is," she said. "The real story is not having a girl flying with the Thunderbirds. The real story is the people wearing Air Force blue who are in there fighting the global war on terrorism right now. And that's what we have to keep America focused on. That's what (the Thunderbirds) are trying to remind people of, that there are men and women in blue sleeping in the desert in harm's way."

USA Today
August 18, 2005
Pg. 5D

Stress Equal For Female Soldiers

Women do no better, no worse than men

By Marilyn Elias, USA Today

Army women in support units exposed to combat don't have higher post-traumatic stress or depression rates than their male counterparts a few months after leaving Iraq, according to a pilot study due today.

It's believed to be the first research comparing the mental health of men and women in violence-prone support jobs — medics, mechanics, drivers — in Iraq, says Army Lt. Col. Carl Castro, chief of military psychiatry at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. Castro was scheduled to report his results to the American Psychological Association meeting in Washington, D.C.

“If the argument is women can't handle the stresses of combat as well as men, we see no evidence of a sex difference in these units,� Castro says. Women can't serve in front-line combat, “but truck drivers in Iraq have the dangerous jobs,� he says, and Army women fill about 10% of such support jobs.

Castro gave mental-disorder screening tests to a random sample of men and women in such posts — 50 women and 300 men — three months after their deployment ended. He says there wasn't a statistical difference between the two sexes: About 6% of men and 8% of women had depression, and 11% of men and 12% of women had PTSD symptoms.

“It's possible that sex differences could develop later on,� Castro says, “but right now we don't think women need any more mental health help than men.�

He had no mental health reports on the soldiers before deployment, so he could not say how combat affected any pre-existing emotional problems.

Not everyone says it's a good idea to put women in positions that could come under fire. “It's not because women don't have ‘the right stuff.' Women are very tough mentally,� says Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America, a public policy group that favors traditional family values. “But the best-trained women still can't keep up with the best-trained men physically. If we're putting men in harm's way, we owe them battle colleagues who are just as strong as they are.�

Although front-line combat is not permitted for women, “the military has skirted that by putting them in these ‘support' roles. It's tantamount to having them in combat,� Crouse says.

Says Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women: “There is no job that women should be excluded from because of their gender. If you can do the job, you should have an opportunity to get the job. If you can't, you shouldn't be there, male or female.�

By the numbers

Women in suport roles:

95% knew someone seriously injured or killed.

85% faced incoming artillery or mortars.

70% were attacked in ambushes.

45% experienced a threatening situation but were unable to respond.

44% shot or directed fire at the enemy.

Mideast Stars and Stripes
December 21, 2005

Female Soldiers Relishing Action In Combat Operations South Of Baghdad

By Anita Powell, Stars and Stripes

FORWARD OPERATING BASE STRIKER, Iraq — They’re not your average infantrymen.

To begin with, they’re not men.

But the women soldiers of Company F, 526th Brigade Support Battalion work shoulder-to-shoulder with their male counterparts, conducting regular raids and operations in the grisly, insurgent-heavy area south of Baghdad.

Since arriving in Iraq in October, the women, whose battalion is part of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division of Fort Campbell, Ky., have begun accompanying infantry soldiers on raids and missions. The intent, said company commander Capt. Alexander Garcia, is so women soldiers can perform searches on women at the scene.

But, he said, the women have seen a little more action than they bargained for — a point he mentions with pride.

“They’re doing very good,� he said. “One is being put in for a [Combat Action Badge]. She has seen more action than a male.�

Company 1st Sgt. Jimmy Dennis says the decision to send women soldiers into combat — a fairly new, and historically controversial, idea — has been embraced by women in the unit.

“Our females are one of the first ones to go in side by side with combat soldiers,� he said. “We have yet to have a female say ‘I don’t want to go. …’ This is my first unit with females. I think they’ve done an outstanding job. They’re pulling their own weight. I have them arguing about who’s going to go next.�

The Pentagon dismisses the notion that such missions contradict its stated policy of not having women in combat roles.

“All of Iraq is dangerous. But women soldiers are not utilized as front-line troops, particularly for offensive actions. We can tell the difference between sending combat troops into close combat (women soldiers did not lead assaults into Fallujah) and having troops encounter a combat situation during routine operations,� Army spokeswoman Lt. Col. Pamela L. Hart wrote in an e-mail response to questions.

“We have a lot of females who are really hard-core,� Dennis said with a smile.

Two such soldiers, Pfc. Phillisha Darby, 24, and Pfc. De’Cassalyn Sanford, 26, say they have relished their experiences.

“I think every female should get that experience,� said Darby, a former professional heavyweight boxer from South Philadelphia. “I think everybody should get a chance to get that experience.�

During her mission, she said, “They treated me like one of the guys. The first sergeant out there knew me, so he knew I could hold my own, that I was a pretty tough female.�

Both soldiers have been nominated for the Combat Action Badge, given to those who personally engage with or are engaged by the enemy during a combat operation.

“It’s not like I went out there and did anything special,� said Sanford, a native of Houston’s Fifth Ward.

Sanford said that she did find, however, that her skills came in handy on the battlefield.

“The male [soldier] who was out there helping me interview [a detained woman] wasn’t catching as many things as I was,� she said. “I guess that’s women’s instinct or something.�

The two have also had precious insight into a well-hidden corner of Iraqi society: the inner lives of its women.

“One lady said she wanted a divorce because her husband beat her,� Sanford said. “She had to marry this guy. But she was hiding this man. Eventually she said, ‘I hope you catch him and kill him.’�

Both said that their presence was initially jarring — both to Iraqis and to their fellow Americans.

“The [Iraqi] men were afraid of me,� Darby said. “The people in the village wouldn’t even look at me. They weren’t used to a woman having so much power.�

As for the women, “When I came into the room, they looked at me like I was going to get them,� she said. “I had to take off my Kevlar, let them touch my hair.�

Sanford, between fits of laughter, relayed her accidental run-in with a soldier having a private moment during a mission.

“I saw a guy out there [urinating] in the bushes, and I said, ‘Don’t forget to flush.’ And he said, ‘What the —?’ I guess he wasn’t expecting to see me out there.�

In the future, she said, she hopes her presence on the front lines will be better received.

“I am infantry,� she said. “If you were to question us females in Foxtrot Company, nine out of 10 of us would say we’re an infantry company.�

Washington Post
February 27, 2006
Pg. 1

Female Pilots Get Their Shot In The Iraqi Skies

Men Say Women Are Proving Skills in Direct Combat

By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post Staff Writer

TALL AFAR, Iraq -- Buzzing over this northern Iraqi city in her Kiowa scout helicopter, a .50-caliber machine gun and rockets at the ready, Capt. Sarah Piro has proved so skillful in combat missions to support U.S. ground troops that she's earned the nickname "Saint."

In recent months of fighting in Tall Afar, Piro, 26, of El Dorado Hills, Calif., has quietly sleuthed out targets, laid down suppressive fire for GIs in battle and chased insurgents through the narrow alleys of this medieval city -- maneuvering all the while to avoid being shot out of the sky. In one incident, she limped back to base in a bullet-riddled helicopter, ran to another aircraft and returned to the fight 10 minutes later.

"They call her 'Saint Piro' -- she's just that good," said her co-pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Todd Buckhouse, a 19-year Army veteran who has worked with Piro on two tours with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq.

"There was no one I wanted to hear more on a raid than her. She's a spectacular Army aviator," said Maj. Chris Kennedy, executive officer of the regiment, which is returning home this month.

Female helicopter pilots like Piro are demonstrating their valor in Iraq in one of the few direct combat roles women are officially allowed to perform in the military. Their missions often put them at risk of being hit by enemy machine-gun fire and rockets, and require them to shoot back. Piro's unit, Outlaw Troop, lost three of its eight Kiowas after insurgents shot them down over Tall Afar, and four or five others were hit by enemy fire, U.S. officers said. On Piro's first tour in Iraq, her wingman hit a wire and crashed into the Euphrates River. She and Buckhouse made an emergency landing and jumped into the water to try to save the two aviators, but they had already perished.

Despite the dangers, a growing number of women have chosen the job since the 1990s, and today about 9 percent of women in the Army are aviators. There are four female pilots in Piro's troop of 33 soldiers. "I didn't want to be a staff officer. I wanted to be an operator," said Capt. Monica Strye, 29, of San Antonio, commander of Outlaw Troop. "I wanted to have more of a combat role."

But while proving their competence in the air, female aviators say they still face obstacles from the predominantly male military on the ground. "It's far better than when my mother was in the military, but we still have a long ways to go," said Strye, whose mother was an Army nurse in Vietnam. "I know I constantly have to prove myself."

And even as the 360-degree battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan are exposing women to combat as never before, policies excluding women from ground combat units have not been eased, but instead face increased scrutiny in Congress.

Under a law signed last month, the Defense Department must submit to Congress this year a report on the assignment of women, particularly in the Army, to ensure compliance with existing Pentagon policy, which was also codified by the law. The law requires that before opening any new positions to women, the Defense Department must tell Congress what justifies the change and observe a 30-day waiting period.

The legislation, while greatly watered down from earlier versions that would have rolled back opportunities for women, still limits the Pentagon's flexibility in adjusting to new wartime realities, critics say. It was passed over the objections of Pentagon leaders, including Army Secretary Francis Harvey, who said the change was not necessary. "We have opinions on the law, but it's now the law and we will abide by it," Harvey said in an interview last month.

Congressional critics say the change sends the wrong message to women in the military, especially the thousands now serving in Iraq. Women make up about 15 percent of the active-duty members in the military. Tens of thousands of women have served in Iraq; 48 have been killed and more than 350 wounded in action, according to Pentagon figures.

At Outlaw Troop's base outside Tall Afar, the flight line hummed with aircraft coming and going around the clock. Piro, Strye and other pilots fly demanding six- to eight-hour missions in full body armor.

In between flights, Piro and Strye explained that they prefer the Kiowa over other helicopters because it offers them a combat role, plus greater freedom to maneuver. The aircraft, which carries Hellfire and 2.75-inch rockets and has a .50-caliber machine gun, is designed to work "at the tip of the spear" with small units such as tank, Bradley Fighting Vehicle and infantry platoons. "I chose the Kiowa because it works directly with ground units in the combined arms fight," said Piro, a graduate of West Point, where she set a home run record.

The Kiowa's reconnaissance role also appeals to the pilots because it gives them more autonomy. "I have freedom to maneuver on the battlefield and I pick a target," said Strye, who flew hundreds of hours in combat with the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq, including heavy fighting in Najaf, Karbala and Hilla. "I suppressed enemy mortar teams, called in indirect [fire] on buildings, using artillery or the Air Force to drop bombs on targets I identified."

When Outlaw Troop arrived in Tall Afar last spring, the city was an insurgent stronghold and Army helicopters were constantly threatened by antiaircraft weapons set up by former Iraqi army air defense officers, regimental commanders said. "Flying fast over the city, you were guaranteed to be hit by small-arms fire," said Strye.

One morning last summer, as dawn broke over Tall Afar's labyrinthine Sarai neighborhood, Piro and Buckhouse were watching a building for an imminent raid. They spotted lookouts on a nearby school. "You get that little tingle in the back of your neck that says something isn't right," recalled Buckhouse, of Racine, Wis.

On the ground, assaulting U.S. ground troops were ambushed from the school and began taking heavy casualties. The fire had the GIs pinned down, and medics couldn't evacuate the wounded. "Outlaw, we need a gun run south of the city," came the radio call.

With Piro at the controls, the Kiowa swooped in from the south to attack with its machine gun. The aircraft was breaking away when suddenly it was hit by a barrage of fire. "We're taking fire left," Buckhouse called out. Piro heard the popping of bullets and felt the helicopter lurch. A round had hit the fuel cell, igniting it. An alarm bell went off in the cockpit.

"We're losing fuel!" Piro said, as the Kiowa started to drop. Buckhouse thought they were about to crash when at the last minute the fuel cell sealed itself, keeping them aloft. Flying low and fast, they made it back to the base. When they landed, they saw the fuselage was split. Piro jumped out and rushed to prepare another aircraft for flight. Ten minutes later, she and Buckhouse took off for another five to six hours of combat.

"We needed to get back out there," Piro said. "We were going to save a guy's life."

Such determination has won the female aviators kudos from cavalry troops on the ground, who said they're glad to hear the women's call signs. But women still face greater scrutiny and restrictions than their male counterparts, according to both men and women in Outlaw.

Soldiers who didn't know the women would slight them over the radio, or defer to male aviators in mission briefings rather than the higher-ranking women, Buckhouse said. "If she had any emotion in her voice or even a crack, the guys [ground troops] would say, 'Say again, you're coming in soft.' No one would ever tell that to a guy," he said.

As an officer, Piro said, she walks a fine line between leading from the front and not offending male soldiers who want to pay her courtesies -- by opening doors for her, for example.

Over dinner in a noisy chow hall, Strye agreed that despite their skill as combat pilots, women face restrictions that make it challenging for them to integrate themselves in mostly male units. One rule bars female and male aviators from entering each other's quarters, while another policy requires escorts for women on base. While aimed at maintaining discipline, the segregation can be isolating, Strye said.

"If all the guys hang out and play poker in one of the guy's rooms, and I'm not allowed in there, I'll never be part of that group. I'll always be on the outside," which makes it harder to cope with the pressures of deployments, she said.

Implicit in the separation, Strye said, is a mistrust that grates on her as a professional. "You trust me to make combat decisions to defeat the enemy," she said, "but don't trust what I do when I go into another person's 'CHU,' " -- a containerized housing unit.

Back home, the sense of standing apart follows the female war veterans as they reenter American society. Strye recalls going out in Nashville after her first tour in Iraq and meeting men who didn't know how to react to her as a combat helicopter pilot. "There's an intimidation factor there. It's not what they're looking for," she said.

Piro is undecided on whether she will stay in the Army. Strye plans to get out in 2007. "I don't want it to be my entire identity. I don't want to be put on a pedestal," she said. "I just want to be Monica."

London Sunday Times
March 12, 2006

Twin Sisters Fly Flag For Women Warriors

By Marie Colvin

IDENTICAL twin sisters piloting Black Hawk helicopters in the danger zones of northern Iraq are on the front line of a revolution.

Back home, time is running out for the American military to respond to a congressional review aimed at limiting the role of women in combat. But Lieutenant Jennifer Robinson and Lieutenant Amanda Matthews, both 24 and both standing just 5ft 1in tall, are a startling example of how far women have come in the armed forces.

Last week Robinson, her ponytail tucked under her flying helmet, piloted helicopter missions out of Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s birthplace, as she has done for seven months.

Matthews flew her final Black Hawk mission from the army base at Taji two months ago before returning home with her husband, an Army Ranger, to Hunter Air Base in Georgia.

“I never got to see her over here,� Robinson said. “We did manage to talk when we both called home and my mom and dad put the phones together. Now I’m just happy I got her beat on flight hours.�

In Iraq, women are playing a larger role than in any previous war, although they are still banned from the infantry front line. A congressional bill, opposed by the Pentagon, proposes to restrict their role even further. Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, has until the end of the month to argue their case.

The pilot twins were black belt karate champions in Florida, where they grew up before going to different universities and joining the army. For their 16th birthday they jumped out of an aeroplane.

Their father Dick Fortenberry, 67, who flew a helicopter gunship in Vietnam, said from his home in Tennessee that both girls had a fierce sense that they were “doing a good job over there�.

Robinson — call sign Eagle Assault — starts her day at about 3am when she has an intelligence briefing on her area, a hardline Sunni region where roadside bombs have killed scores of American soldiers.

She has been trained to attack but insisted: “I personally don’t shoot people — my gunners do.�

Her love for her aircraft is clear. “You can manoeuvre that thing anywhere,� she said.

“You can hover on a pinpoint, which is amazing in itself. It becomes like a part of you.�

She takes a lot of flak — from Iraqi insurgents, whom she labels “the bad guys�, and from colleagues who tease her about her lack of height. “They’re always joking with me about how they have to adjust the seat,� she said.

However, she is respected for her skills. “Flying is not the hard part,� she said. “You have four or five radios going, different areas of navigation, and at night you are flying under goggles and that is like flying with two toilet rolls on your eyes.�

Afterwards she goes back to her room and sends e-mails to her husband, a high school teacher, or watches television. No westerner goes off base.

The life suits her: “I always wanted to be part of something bigger than me. It didn’t matter if it was a brotherhood or a sisterhood.�

Belleville (IL) News-Democrat
August 9, 2006

First Female Thunderbird Fell In Love With Flying

By Suzanne Boyle, News-Democrat

It is only two years out of her life, but for Air Force Maj. Nicole Malachowski, "it's the privilege of my life."

The 31-year-old is the first female pilot of the U.S. Air Force Thunderbird demonstration team, considered the best fliers in the world.

"It's a different kind of flying," said Malachowski in an understatement. "But not that different."

A fighter pilot who flew air support over Kosovo in 1998 during the Bosnian-Serb conflict and spent four months flying for Operation Iraqi Freedom, she knows something about maneuvering an aircraft.

"What we do is built upon the fundamentals and attention to detail."

Her first performance with the team was in March, after four months of intensive training that involved flying twice a day, five days a week.

"I'm always (aircraft) No. 3, the right wing."

And when the other pilots want to contact Malachowski, they use her call sign: Fifi.

When asked the origin of the name, the short version, she says, is "'a small person with a big attitude."

Learning to fly for the Thunderbirds is a building-block approach, she explained, where each formation is learned piece by piece, then aircraft are added and maneuvering brings jets closer and closer until wings seem to touch.

Traveling about 200 days a year, the eight pilots, six jets and about 70 other support members, equipment and supplies fly across the country -- with the help of a C-17 -- doing about 88 air shows, plus public appearances.

The one-hour precision performances are videotaped and scrutinized in two-hour debriefings after each show.

"There is no margin for error."

Until last fall, Malachowski was focused on being a fighter pilot. In the right place at the right time, she was attending the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1992 when the barrier that kept women in the military from flying fighters fell.

By 2003, she had done a tour in South Korea and then in 2004 was an instructor pilot and the supervisor of flying with a fighter squadron of the Royal Air Force in Lakenheath, England.

Being a Thunderbird was not on this Air Force Academy grad's mind until last year.

"It was my husband's idea," Malachowski said with a chuckle, giving credit to the other Maj. Malachowski, Paul. He's currently on assignment in Afghanistan. "He said I was a people person, loved to fly, loved to talk."

The Thunderbirds seemed a natural fit, and a job she has gladly accepted as a "very visible force of the Air Force."

Growing up in Las Vegas, Nicole Ellingwood at age 5 saw a F-4 Phantom at an air show and told her parents she wanted to fly fighter jets. They encouraged her to follow her dream, she said.

And she did, flying Cessnas at 12, trading in washing planes for flight time, and soloing at 16 -- before she got her driver's license.

Today, her aircraft is a sleek red, white and blue F-16 and she has traded in her olive green flight suit for a custom-made blue one with the Thunderbird patch and her name embroidered on it.

"We hang out at around 500 miles per hour," she said, laughing. "An F-16 is capable of 1,400 miles per hour, but we'd break the sound barrier and we don't want to do that. You'd have broken windows and alarms going off!"

And it's not really her jet, she's just filling the seat for two years until the next pilot comes along.

Before takeoff, Malachowski has a ritual: She looks at the crew chief, give him a thumbs up and says, "Thank you for letting me borrow your aircraft."

Going down in history as the first female pilot for the Thunderbirds and carrying that title through her career -- and likely her life outside the Air Force as well -- is not something Malachowski spends a lot of time thinking about.

"I am doing my job -- my one little role. It's about being part of a team. Every squad has a unique mission, and this is ours."

She paused.

"Somebody had to be first."

And she gladly is giving up the title as the sole female Thunderbird. In October, she'll be joined by Capt. Samantha Weeks.

New York Times
September 24, 2006

Jane, We Hardly Knew Ye Died

By Lizette Alvarez

LT. EMILY J. T. PEREZ, 23, a West Point graduate who outran many men, directed a gospel choir and read the Bible every day, was at the head of a weekly convoy as it rolled down roads pocked with bombs and bullets near Najaf. As platoon leader, she insisted on leading her troops from the front.

Two weeks ago, one of those bombs tripped her up, detonating near her Humvee in Kifl, south of Baghdad. She died Sept. 12, the 64th woman from the United States military to be killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Eight died in Vietnam.

Despite longstanding predictions that America would shudder to see its women coming home in coffins, Lieutenant Perez’s death, and those of the other women, the majority of whom died from hostile fire (the 65th died in a Baghdad car bombing a day later), have stirred no less — and no more — reaction at home than the nearly 2,900 male dead. The same can be said of the hundreds of wounded women.

There is no shortage of guesses as to why: Americans are no longer especially shocked by the idea of a woman’s violent death. Most don’t know how many women have fallen, or under what circumstances. Photographs of body bags and coffins are rarely seen. And nobody wants to kick up a fuss and risk insulting grieving families.

“The public doesn’t seem concerned they are dying,” said Charles Moskos, a military sociologist at Northwestern University who has closely studied national service. “They would rather have someone’s else daughter die than their son.”

What’s more, no one in the strained military is eager to engage in a debate about women and the risks they are taking in Iraq because, quite simply, the women are sorely needed in this modern-day insurgent conflict. As has happened many times in war, circumstances have outpaced arguments. They are sure to be taken up again at some point, only this time, the military will have real-life data on the performance of women in the field to supplant the hypotheticals.

Like most soldiers on the job, Lieutenant Perez, who will be buried at West Point on Tuesday, was focused on her mission, not on her groundbreaking role in a war that seems to have dispelled a litany of notions about women warriors.

For the first time, women by the thousands are on the ground and engaging the enemy in a war that has no front line, and little in the way of safe havens. In this 360-degree war, they are in the thick of it, hauling heavy equipment and expected to shoot and defend themselves and others from an enemy that is all around them. They are driving huge rigs down treacherous roads, frisking Iraqi women at dangerous checkpoints, handling gun turrets personnel carriers and providing cover for other soldiers.

It is not so much the job titles that have changed — the policy shift that allowed women to serve in combat support units close to the front lines occurred in 1994. Rather it is the job conditions.

“We are asking far more of our female soldiers than ever before in history,” said Elaine Donnelly, director of the Center for Military Readiness, a conservative think tank.

But a line in the Iraqi sand exists. Under the 1994 Pentagon policy, women were still barred from serving in ground combat forces — infantry, armor, field artillery — but are allowed to serve as fighter pilots and on warships. In Iraq, women were not involved in the initial invasion; they did not clear insurgents from Falluja; they don’t drive tanks or, in most cases, kick down doors in house searches.

They are also barred, technically, from “co-located units” that support combat troops. A woman can serve as a medic, for example, but not as a medic in a unit that “co-locates and remains” or accompanies a unit on the front line, like an infantry unit.

In reality, though, this so-called co-location is taking place, analysts say, although it is unclear how widespread it is. The Pentagon has stretched the language of the policy, mostly because there are not enough troops, men or women. It has done so because the language is fuzzy. An effort by some House Republican leaders last year to challenge the practice was beaten back by the Pentagon, which argued that it could not sustain the mission without women in these jobs.

“It says you can have female medics, but they can’t see combat,” said Capt. Megan O’Connor, who served in Iraq for a year and a half in the New Jersey Army National Guard as a medical operations and plans officer. “It’s all combat in Ramadi. It’s so gray. They put the rules down on paper. It looks good. It reads good. But for a commander to implement, it’s impossible.”

“The women were itching for it,” she added, and accumulating commendations and medals for bravery along the way.

Ms. Donnelly said the Pentagon was openly flouting current policy and sending women out directly with combat troops, with no debate, no hearings in Congress and, so far, no consequences. She has no qualms about women, who make up 10 percent of the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, doing the jobs they are assigned in dangerous circumstances. That is standard. But to send them out with combat troops is illegal, she said.

“I have enormous respect for these women,” said Ms. Donnelly, who opposes allowing women into ground combat forces. “My criticism is not of the women in the military. They are fulfilling their responsibility to the greatest degree, and that, too, is unprecedented. The policymakers should not be ordering them into areas that are not gender integrated.”

But the fact that the Army is successfully using women in this way is likely to lead policymakers to revisit the rule, some analysts say. “It’s that policy that when this war is over is going to have to change, even if we have to keep women out of the infantry per se,” said Lory Manning, a retired Navy captain who is the director for the women-in-the-military project at the Women’s Research and Education Institute, a nonprofit public policy group. “The next door to open is ground combat. That’s the last frontier. A lot of the social conservatives have powerful feelings about training mothers to kill.”

Conventional wisdom has long dictated that women were not suited to the battlefield — too frail, emotionally and physically, to survive combat pressure. Men, it was said, would crumble at the sight of a bloodied female soldier, or put themselves at risk to protect her. The public would not stomach women coming back in body bags or suffering life-changing wounds. And mixing men and women — with all the sexual and emotional pitfalls — would strain the unit dynamic, which can lead to deadly mistakes.

Those sorts of arguments were revived last week when the former Navy secretary James Webb, running for Senate in Virginia, was reminded of his assertions 30 years ago that women could not, and should not, fight, assertions he has distanced himself from.

None of this, so far, has come to pass. “They are pulling their own weight and performing as well as men,” Ms. Manning said. “And the American public is not any more upset about women coming home in body bags than men.”

Mady Wechsler Segal, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the associate director for the Center for Research on Military Organization, said succinctly, “If they weren’t doing a good job, we would be hearing about it.”

Certainly, women in Iraq and Afghanistan face different challenges, both at war and at home. Incidents of sexual harassment on military bases are common enough, and fending that off without offending peers and superiors is tricky. Sexual assault, while less common, only intensifies combat stress, leading to greater vulnerability. It also leads to new complications. What if your attacker is also the person you must defend, or must defend you?

A whole crop of veterans are suffering from post-traumatic stress and lost limbs, circumstances that sometimes prove more difficult for women who often fill the role of nurturers to their families.

And there are practical considerations. Women on smaller bases in Iraq often share sleeping quarters with men. Equipment in women’s sizes can sometimes be harder to come by. Some women use newer forms of birth control to make their periods less frequent. Even urinating can become a problem. The military has disbursed portable contraptions the women affectionately call a weenus, for use on long truck drives.

Women also face resistance among some male commanders, who are not keen to put women at risk, some women who have served in Iraq say. But many commanders, they added, treated them no differently.

Capt. Tammy Spicer, who commanded a transportation company for the Missouri National Guard, said women were often being watched to see if they are up to the job. Driving trucks is dangerous work in Iraq, and her company drove a million and a half miles with no enemy-related casualties.

If anything was taxing, she said, it was in 2003 in Kuwait, when she and four other women shared a tent with 45 men. The women shared showers with men, on rotation, and always got the worst hours, she said. “Their bickering, their cursing, their body noises,” she said, laughing. “They would leave their food out and we would have rats. There was no relief from men.”

Newark Star-Ledger
October 1, 2006

For Women At War, A Higher Profile Means A Higher Toll

By Wayne Woolley, Star-Ledger Staff

Lt. Ashley Henderson Huff worked hard to get the most challenging assignments the Army offers women. She earned top grades and an ROTC scholarship at the University of Georgia and then sought an extra edge by becoming a martial arts expert.

When the Montgomery High School graduate selected the Military Police corps after being commissioned as an officer in 2004, her father, Mark Henderson, wasn't surprised.

"She thought it was a challenge for her as a woman because it was as close as she could get to a combat specialty," Henderson said recently. "She felt the Army should treat men and women as equals."

With six weeks remaining in a yearlong tour of training Iraqi police in Iraq, Huff was killed last week when an insurgent in an explosive-packed car blew himself up after pulling alongside her Humvee in Mosul.

The 23-year-old newlywed -- the 66th American service woman to die in Iraq and Afghanistan -- was buried yesterday in Athens, Ga., in a small cemetery near the leafy college campus she loved.

Although women make up only a fraction of the nearly 3,000 American troops killed in those wars, they are dying at a rate unprecedented in previous conflicts, when in total, fewer than two dozen women were killed by enemy fire.

The major difference is that in past wars, women had no choice but to serve as nurses or clerks. Under a drastic shift in Pentagon policy in 1994, nearly every military specialty except those that attack the enemy -- such as infantry and tanks -- opened to women.

The policy shift allows thousands of women to serve as truck drivers, medics, pilots and military police officers in Iraq, jobs that are fraught with peril in a war zone with no front lines.

Ann Wright, a retired Army colonel and former State Department diplomat, said that with each woman's death in Iraq, the public becomes more aware of the dangers women face, but it hasn't spawned the backlash some predicted.

"There doesn't seem to be a particular outrage," Wright said. "People are accepting of the fact that women are going into the military in much greater numbers and if you go to war, an increasing number of women will be in harm's way."

In Iraq, women make up about 10 percent of the 138,000-member force. Overall, women make up about 15 percent of the Army and six percent of the Marine Corps, the two services providing most of the ground troops in Iraq.

Even if the deaths of women in Iraq caused no greater public reaction than the deaths of the men, some members of Congress are troubled.

"The American people have never wanted to have women in combat," Rep. Duncan Hunter, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said last year after failing to persuade the Army to bar women from serving in forward support companies, which bring supplies directly to ground troops. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said women were needed in such roles.

The issue did not go away, however. Congress ordered the Army to certify that women were not serving in support units "embedded" within combat units. A deadline for the certification passed in March and the Army requested an extension until December.

In the meantime, the Pentagon maintains no women are embedded among combat troops in Iraq and that female troops face no undue threat there.

Elaine Donnelly doesn't buy it.

"They're assigning female soldiers into areas that should be all male," said Donnelly, who served on a Pentagon women's advisory board during the Reagan administration and now directs the Center for Military Readiness, a conservative watchdog group based in Michigan. "They say they're in compliance with rules that women will be removed from certain areas before the battle begins. Well, that's just ludicrous. They don't have the extra helicopters or Humvees to do that."

Policy nuances aside, the fact women face danger in Iraq is clear by the medals many now wear on their uniforms. Dozens of women have been awarded bronze and silver stars for valor -- and even more wear the newly minted Combat Action Badge, which is given to troops who have been in direct contact with the enemy.

Many women say the lines of what they can do in the combat zone are blurred beyond recognition.

Capt. Megan O'Connor served 18 months in Iraq, first as a personnel officer with the 50th Main Support Battalion of the New Jersey National Guard in Tikrit and then leading an Army medical unit supporting the Marines in Ramadi.

Although O'Connor's time in Tikrit was relatively uneventful, she was under almost constant fire in Ramadi -- both on her base and every time she went out on missions.

"There were so many bad guys in Ramadi that if you were on the road, you were going to have enemy contact," said O'Connor, 30, who went to high school in Howell. "I don't get the debate about what women can and can't do. You do your job. And in Iraq, there's risk in your job, no matter what it is."

Some believe the strong performance of so many women under fire in Iraq actually calls for future consideration of opening all jobs to women.

Lori Manning, a retired Navy captain and director of the women in the military project at the Women's Research and Education Institute in Washington, D.C., thinks some women could handle the rigors of the combat specialties.

"Women ought to be able to do anything they are physically able to," Manning said. "For some women -- and I stress some women -- that means infantry or tanks."

Mark Henderson isn't sure his daughter, Lt. Huff, would have actually joined the infantry had she been given the choice.

She was just looking for a challenge and her longtime interest in law enforcement made military police a logical choice.

In Iraq, Huff's role in training the police put her in daily contact with Iraqi police officers and their commanders as well as local government officials, who were all men. She told her father these interactions gave her an opportunity to change perceptions in a male-dominated society.

"In a country that didn't respect women at all, she felt she could be an example of a woman who commanded respect," he said. "She was a very good diplomat. She could have been an ambassador some day."

Wayne Woolley covers the military.

Houston Chronicle
December 3, 2006

Sunday Conversation

She's A Pioneer For Women In Military

By John W. Gonzalez, Houston Chronicle

Twenty-seven years after joining the National Guard, Brig. Gen. Joyce Stevens of Tomball became the first female general officer in the Texas Army National Guard on Oct. 14. She's one of seven Guard generals in Texas, serving as deputy commander. The 47-year-old native of Blackfoot, Idaho, has lived in Texas for 25 years. In addition to mobilizing for Houston-area floods, Stevens was deployed to Afghanistan for a year and oversees training for Guard members assisting the U.S. Border Patrol. San Antonio bureau chief John W. Gonzalez talked with Stevens last month while she was there.

Q: Your story may be an inspiration for some young women. That must be interesting for you.

A: It is. It makes me want to do my job better. My mother was probably my role model for success. She was a "Rosie the Riveter" during World War II. She worked on an air base in San Diego where they took destroyed planes and stripped the good instruments out so they could put them in new planes. And my dad was at Pearl Harbor, and that's where they met. He was in the Navy.

My mother had a very strict work ethic. She said, "Volunteer for everything. Always do more than they ask you to do. And try to understand not just your job but the jobs that are around you." I just try to do those things.

My goal really never was to be a general officer. When I was getting into the Officer Candidate School program I wanted to stay enlisted. At the time there weren't that many female officers that set an example, and that may have been why I steered toward the enlisted side.

Some people really start out with a goal in their mind. I didn't have that goal, and each time that I've been promoted, it just felt like it was the next logical step.

Q: It's competitive for anybody to get to your position, but how did the added dimension of being female factor in?

A: I really consider the women that went into the service during World War II and later as breaking ground. When I went in in 1979, they had just started to integrate men and women in training. That was breaking ground. It's one of the best things that the Army did. It's the norm now. People say, "Oh, a woman," but the groundbreaking was way before I came.

Q: But you must have a knack for leadership.

A: I think that is probably my strength. I love people, and I know that in the Army, your people are your best resource. ... When I was a battalion commander, I lucked into a battalion that had a lot of good people in it. The battalion was very successful, which obviously made me successful. When I was a brigade commander, the people were even better than at the battalion. It was the unit I took to Afghanistan.

Q: What kind of reaction have you gotten from soldiers, especially females?

A: I get a positive reaction. They see me as a successful woman, and that gives them hope that if they do the things I did to try to succeed, they can do that as well. But it's getting very common to have senior women in the military.

Q: Is the Army wide open to females?

A: No. Legally, there are certain branches that do not allow women — infantry, armor — but there are still women in those different areas. There are certainly female MPs in Iraq and Afghanistan. They're out there doing patrols right alongside the men. The logistician females who drive the trucks back and forth and deliver supplies a lot of time are in combat, but we are not in combat specialities like the infantry.

Q: When you enlisted, did you have a civilian career also?

A: I didn't. That was one of the reasons I joined the military. I had taken some college classes, but I was a little frustrated because I didn't really know what direction I wanted to go. I thought joining the Army would be a great idea. It would get me out, because I was raised in a small town. And I wanted to see more of the world to figure out what I wanted to do.

My sister was very concerned. She's a little older than I am. She said, "Don't join the Army. Join the National Guard. If you hate it, you only have to do it one weekend a month and two weeks a year. And if you love it, you can always go active duty."

Q: Describe your experience in Afghanistan.

A: If we can just hang in there with them until they get on their feet, Afghanistan can be a success story. I'm hoping. The people are tired of war. They want education. They want infrastructure. When I first got there I was almost ashamed of all the blessings that I have compared to them. No electricity. No running water. Mud houses. Dirt floors. People say it's a Third World country, but they're starting from scratch.

There was one group, maybe a couple of groups — mainly the mullahs, their holy men — that didn't accept me well. I got a lot of strange looks. I'm a giant (5 feet 10 inches) compared to them. With my boots, I'm taller than that ... and then a woman on top of that. But generally they were very, very friendly and really respectful and pretty accepting.

Q: Do you have any special assignments coming?

A: In addition to the duties of the deputy commander on the Army side, I'll have a big role in the all-hazards operations plan, which is how to respond to natural disasters, hurricanes, fires, floods and man-made disasters if we have terrorists attack.

Q: Could you possibly achieve a higher rank?

A: I think I can make two-star. I don't think anything's a given. I would have to continue to do a good job, because there are one-stars I'd be in competition with, so to speak.

New York Times
December 16, 2006
Pg. B6

Tools For A War Zone: The Bible And A Teddy Bear

By Samuel G. Freedman

FORT BRAGG, N.C. — In the evening, after she led a workshop on combat stress, after she talked some paratroopers through the anxiety of their final training jumps, the Rev. Shareen Fischer drove home a few miles off this sprawling Army base and tended to her own soul.

She serves as both a captain and a chaplain in the 782nd Brigade Support Battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division, and next month she is to deploy with her 470 soldiers to Afghanistan. On an oddly balmy December night recently, she had arrangements to make.

She had learned the routines back in 2003, when she was sent with her fresh ordination papers into the Sunni Triangle of Iraq. Appliances would have to be unplugged, the car locked in the garage, the neighbors given a spare set of keys. Of all the material things that Captain Fischer had accumulated by age 35, she had already selected the three that could fit in her rucksack: a Bible, a book of psalms and a teddy bear.

As she had in Iraq, she would use the Bible to lead services. She read the psalms as a personal devotion, a habit she had acquired while learning Hebrew in seminary. As for the teddy bear, it ensured that for all the hugs Captain Fischer expected to dispense to her soldiers in the months to come, there would be at least the sensation of someone who could hug her back.

“There’s so much going on militarily as you get ready” was how Captain Fischer put it. “Not enough time, not enough days. So I like to have my quiet time. When David said, ‘I look to the hills’ and ‘My strength comes from the Lord,’ he was alone in the desert. And I have to remember where my strength comes from. Because if I am not strong, how can I be a strong leader for my paratroopers?”

She is, by many measures, an unlikely one, as well. Of 1,362 chaplains on active duty in the Army, only 52 are women, according to military statistics. And of these, Captain Fischer must be the only one known even in her formal duties by the candy-floss nickname she got as the sole, cherished daughter in her family. She is, as they say here, Chaplain Pinkie.

The soldiers come to her because they are drinking too much or fighting with a spouse or falling into debt or just plain feeling homesick and scared. They come to her, at least some, because confiding in a woman feels safer, less weak, than confessing to a man.

“We wouldn’t know she’s a chaplain if it wasn’t for the cross on her uniform,” said Capt. Douglas Ralph, the commander of Echo Company in the 782nd. “She is the most down-to-earth person I’ve ever met. She doesn’t make you feel like you’re being scrutinized by God. She makes you feel God is there to help you.”

Captain Fischer began her journey to Fort Bragg, Iraq and Afghanistan as the daughter of a church deacon and choir singer in Brooklyn. Devout as young Pinkie was, however, her career interests ran elsewhere. From the time she built models of the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan skyscrapers out of cardboard grocery cartons, she aspired to be an architect.

She was, in fact, on the verge of earning a degree in architectural engineering from Oklahoma State University in 1995, she said, when she impulsively switched to a Bible college. She decided to become a missionary teacher in the Philippines, and sold off most of her furniture in anticipation of leaving. But when she prayed for divine assurance, she felt only unease, and she remembered something her pastor had taught: “God leads you by peace, not by urgency.”

After a wayward year as a saleswoman, she recalled, “My spirit finally heard.” What it heard, she said, was instruction to become a military chaplain, a singularly odd course for a young woman who barely knew what a chaplain was. When Ms. Fischer called home with the news, she said, her mother fainted.

The military existence, though, suited Ms. Fischer immediately. “For the first time in my life,” she recalled, “neither the color of my skin nor my gender mattered. Being able to fire a weapon proficiently and get my battle buddy out of trouble if necessary was top priority.”

While Ms. Fischer enlisted in the National Guard in 1997, she did not receive a chaplain’s appointment until she had earned a bachelor’s degree and two master’s degrees from Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, as well as ordination in the Pentecostal movement. Thus equipped, she went with her engineering battalion to Iraq for a yearlong tour of duty.

There she had to use all facets of herself. She led worship services for Christian soldiers and helped arrange them for guardsmen of other faiths. She made sure Jews and Muslims received kosher and halal Meals Ready to Eat. She taught lessons on Bible passages that were set in Mesopotamia. After her unit was attacked, she conducted the required stress debriefing for the victims. And sometimes she simply held the men and women who were crying.

“It’s all based on experience,” she said of being a battlefield chaplain. “You cannot learn that in books. You cannot practice dealing with the emotional trauma.”

Soon after returning to the United States, she put in the paperwork to move from the National Guard into the active-duty Army. The approval took her to Fort Bragg, the 782nd, and, now, the impending deployment to Afghanistan.

Lately she had been surveying her soldiers to determine their religious backgrounds and so meet their needs. She has found Muslims, Jews, Roman Catholics, Protestants of myriad stripes, Eastern Orthodox adherents and even a few Wiccans. If there are atheists now, then Captain Fischer said she tended to believe the old line about how there were none in the foxhole.

“Sometimes praying is the last thing soldiers think of, like a good-luck charm,” she said. “But I don’t want it to be. I want it to be central in their life. Because prayer is a means of communication. It’s something private and personal. It’s a way to be more balanced. And that’s my message when a soldier comes to me struggling.”