All the Sisters and All the Brothers...
Erin Solaro
Sergeant Danielle Dolph, Specialist Carol Russell, and Specialist Jessica Schramm, assigned to a Military Police unit, augmented the infantry in Afghanistan—particularly when it came to dealing with Afghan women.
All the sisters are not brave and strong. All the brothers are not virtuous. But so many of them are, so much of the time, that the Department of Defense and the armed services must now make a decision. When reality conflicts with policy, one or the other must yield. In the matter of American women in ground combat, and the larger issue of full equality under arms: Which shall it be?
In the spring of 2004, I received a grant from the Tawani Foundation of Chicago, a Pritzker family philanthropy (James Pritzker, the foundation president, is a former Army infantryman and a retired Illinois National Guard colonel) for a book on American servicewomen. I'd been pondering this subject, and living it, for 20 years, as an ROTC cadet, Army reserve officer, Marine wife, graduate student in military history, occasional defense analyst, and journalist. Now I was going to war.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer accredited me. I spent June and a bit of July in Iraq, embedded with combat troops in the Sunni triangle: the Army's First Brigade Combat Team (1st BCT), First Infantry Division, at Camp Junction City outside Ramadi; and Echo Company, Second Battalion, Fourth Marines (E/2/4), in the city. I spent February 2005 in Afghanistan, working with Provincial Reconstruction teams (PRTs) and combat troops out of Bagram Air Field near Kabul and the Army's forward operating base at Ghazni. In both countries, I went on raids, patrols, convoy security, and other operations. I lived with the troops.
My purpose here is neither to tell war stories nor to push a political agenda. My goal is to report on two emerging realities, indeed two new moral norms; to suggest that it's time to face a couple facts about the past and the probable future; and to conclude that women's full equality under arms is no longer a matter of individual or group "rights." It is a military necessity, and in this case the policies and practices that ensure rights also contribute to effectiveness.
The first new norm is that, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the women are fighting and fighting well. Increasingly, they are accepted by the men on the basis of the only standard that counts in combat: can they be counted on? Women do perimeter defense, convoy security, and all those moments when the war decides to pay you an unscheduled visit. But they do more. Some medics of all-male combat units are women. The 1st BCT called women combat volunteers "lionesses"—women who accompanied the men outside the wire specifically to deal with Iraqi women and children. They were also expected to fight.
Captain Anastasia Breslow, 1st Engineer Battalion, 1st Infantry Division, said of her first tour in Iraq: "I never expected to find myself in combat. As a signal platoon leader, as an officer and a female, I always expected to be in rear areas, with echelons above combat units." Of her first lioness mission: "I was terrified and excited, I felt obligated; if I didn't [go], someone else would. It was a rare opportunity and scary to leave the relative safety of the base: improvised explosive devices (IEDs), sniper fire, any number of things, but I was most worried about the explosives. Everything that wasn't just [on the] road scared me, but I would never turn down an opportunity to go on a mission. I kept thinking, I'll be contributing something, I won't just be sitting back here."
The Marines in Ramadi made a point of borrowing these lionesses whenever they could (women Marines were kept on the other side of the Euphrates); some Marines wanted to attach the lionesses permanently. On 6 July 2004, I interviewed then-Brigadier General Richard S. Kramlich, U.S. Marine Corps, commanding the 1st Force Service Support Group at al-Taqqadum Air Base. He told me, emphatically, that the Marines would abide by the wishes of the American people and not send women into combat. Only the desire to keep my hosts out of trouble kept me from asking if he knew what was going on in the rifle companies.
The same held in Afghanistan, where I also encountered women who had been on multi-week missions with the SEALs and Army Special Forces. Command Sergeant Major Lynette Harper of the Joint Logistics Command at Bagram Air Field, told me: "The combat exclusion rule did not start becoming an issue until I realized that I could do anything the Army had to offer. . . . The reason I want to talk about this now is the great things I see and read about women doing with men. They're on patrols, they're out front. They're searching females, and with males on combat patrols here and in Iraq. Part of what bothers me is that I'm not sharing the risks of my male counterparts in those infantry battalions. When I hear Elaine Donnelly (President of the Center for Military Readiness) saying, women shouldn't be killed or wounded or raped . . . I ask, what about men—is this okay for them?"
In the very early morning of 23 February 2005, I went on a raid with U.S. soldiers of the 3-116 Infantry Battalion, 29th Infantry Division, the "Blues and Grays" of the Virginia National Guard, and 1-25 Military Police Company. There were three women in the MP platoon of 27 soldiers, one of whom, Sergeant Danielle Dolph, helped out that day by dealing with the Afghan women. To my knowledge, there have been no combat failures directly attributable to the presence or the performance of women. The anecdotal evidence and, I suspect, the data, indicates the opposite.
But if the women are proving they can fight, what about non-combat matters, especially prolonged integration under austere conditions and worse? Again, a new norm is emerging. Familiarity may breed contempt, but it can also breed respect. What you lose in privacy, you gain in modesty. More than once, I encountered men who weren't that unhappy to share an open-bay barracks with women; it cut down on some of the guys' more undesirable habits. Total integration also enhances female safety. Male harassers and predators, it seems, tend not to target women in their own units, perhaps not wanting to go into combat with an armed woman they've annoyed or attacked. The guys in a unit can be very protective of their sisters against outsiders. For that matter, they can be pretty protective of visiting women.
I note here that there has been no post-9/11 spike in what I've come to think of as "Get Me Out of Here!" pregnancies. As of press time, although the Pentagon offered me comprehensive pregnancy statistics, it has not released them; in the past, it has told me that comprehensive statistics were impossible to compile, being held at the unit level. It did release to me pregnancy discharge statistics: 2,136 in Fiscal Year 2002, 2,643 in 2003, 2,691 in 2004, declining to 1,227 for the first half of FY 2005. Without pregnancy statistics, especially from Central Command, these numbers may indicate anything from the shaking-out of unwilling or unsuitable troops to women who have already done their bit facing the fact they cannot put their children through another deployment.
In sum, I suggest here that, among the younger generations of troops and officers, new norms are emerging. To a great extent, they're making it up as they go along, driven by the exigencies of war. But it's happening. It's happening because they grew up accustomed to equality; because they're professionals; and because they're good people. It's happening because commanders and leaders at all levels are setting and enforcing high standards. Units with men-women problems usually have other woes. The GI Janes of the 507th Maintenance Company, Abu Ghraib, and Camp Bucca are not the new norm. Nor are the rapists and harassers. The new GI Jane, armed, modest, competent and accepted by her male comrades, is the norm; the same can be said for their brothers.
Pages 1 2
