All the Sisters and All the Brothers...

Coming out of Iraq, I spent one night in an open-bay transient barracks at al-Taqqadum Air Base, the only unarmed woman amid dozens of armed men. I felt—and was—safer there than I was the next night in a luxury hotel in Kuwait. At Camp Junction City, men mounted informal guard on the women's shower. At Ghazni forward operating base, so remote it might as well have been on the moon, a few women lived in safety and dignity amid hundreds of men. When the plastic covering of my windows proved not quite as opaque as I'd been told, the guys asked a sister to tell me that, while they appreciated the show, perhaps I wouldn't want to provide another. Leaving Ghazni, a young soldier told me to be careful back at Bagram because there was a serial predator there. He told me that the men didn't take kindly to his activities, and were planning to convince him to mend his ways.

Nor do the women take kindly to female misbehavior. Imagine that you're Private Susie or Corporal Debbie, carrying on with a guy or two or trying to get yourself a pregnancy MedEvac and not too particular about the sperm donor. Now imagine that a half dozen of your female comrades gather round your bunk and ask, "Why are you making our lives harder?" Then imagine that they go pay a similar visit to Specialist Jack and Sergeant Billy.

Sergeant Norwood (left), a medic, accompanied the 1st Platoon, Alfa Company, First Engineers, on a cache search near Jazeera, Iraq. Many riflemen will identify with this picture—the smallest person on the patrol has the biggest pack. In this case, however, it contained her medical supplies.

Now it's time for the Defense Department and the services, the Army and Marine Corps especially, to accept this reality, especially given current recruiting and retention problems. Before the military can face the future, however, it must come to terms with the past.

In the early 1970s, a confluence of forces influenced the beginnings of gender integration. Conscription was ending; good men were hard to come by. The Defense Department decided to increase the use of women. Equality, however, measured by everything from stern prosecution of sexual offenses to repealing the combat exclusion rule, was neither desired nor intended.

Then came a 30-year feminist assault: a devastating combination of political pressure, vicious scandal-mongering, and hype. The military was, in the feminist view, the last bastion of machismo, to be toppled for the sake of the toppling. The feminist view was wrong, but so was the military response. The feminists opened or, more aptly, forced open the doors. They did not determine how the new generations of servicewomen would be used or treated by the system, or how the men would be affected.

There is no nice way to say this. Faced with the political pressure to integrate and expand the roles of women, the military reacted in classic bureaucratic manner, doing enough to satisfy the politicos while covering its own posterior. Perhaps it is not too much to wonder whether the military handled the integration in a way designed to alienate as many men as possible. Feminism did not mandate decades of micro-management of individual behavior, unnecessary relaxation of standards, mass polygraphs, moronic sensitivity training, the wrongful destruction of careers and reputations. This the military did to itself, and everyone who experienced those years has stories to tell about the injustices.

But that was then. Thirty years ago, the military could have instituted a rational, orderly, long-term plan for full integration. It didn't happen that way. It happened grudgingly, but it happened, and now the realities of war and personnel shortfalls are finishing the job. We now have three decades of lessons-learned, and a 30-year database showing that women, properly trained and indoctrinated, can do the job. What remains is to codify the following:

• Repeal what's left of the combat exclusion rule, specifically the barriers against holding ground combat and special operations billets and submarine service.
• Institute full and equal training and equal adherence to militarily-meaningful standards, including physical capability, which has far less to do with brute strength than with low-grade endurance. Thanks to modern women's athletics, we now have a far better understanding of female conditioning, and far more young women playing sports than ever before. As a retired colonel, now a respected defense analyst, told me: "The Army sure ain't what it used to be. But neither are girls." Personally, I favor intense pre-entry fitness programs for women and boot camps that are sex-segregated and a couple of weeks longer.
• Enforce a zero-tolerance attitude toward all forms of genuine sexual harassment and assault. Stern prosecution of sexual offenses, within the context of unit good order and discipline. Sexual crimes are not a separate category of offense, to be condoned as "Boys will be boys" or "She was asking for it." If a male service member attacked another man and put him in the hospital, his commander wouldn't just shrug it off. Nor would he if one of his men raped a civilian woman.
• Finally, craft a new provision in the Uniform Code of Military Justice that addresses pregnancies, which, in the military, come in three varieties: Congratulations!, Oops!, and Get Me Out of Here!

This is a professional force, older and often married, no longer a mass of unencumbered conscripts and men with stay-at-home wives. Pregnancy is a normal part of most women's lives.

Most military women, I've found, attempt to schedule their pregnancies with their husbands, often during non-deployable assignments. Not everyone, male or female, can be "good to go" all the time and it's going to be a long war; they'll get their chance. Besides, we all know there's no better place for morning sickness than the Pentagon. Nothing more need be said about such pregnancies than Congratulations!

Oops! pregnancies are just that. Sometimes they affect unit readiness; sometimes they do not. They range from a Military Police sergeant I was told about, who achieved a long-hoped for pregnancy just after being informed of a very short notice deployment to Djibouti (she left their child with her husband to take her troops into Iraq), to the junior enlistee who has been overwhelmed by a certain tonnage of male attention. These women should be treated on a case-by-case basis by special boards of senior officers and non-commissioned officers, with attention given to circumstance, prior service record, and desire to remain in the military. Punishment is very rarely appropriate: for good soldiers, evacuation is punishment enough.

As for Get Me Out of Here! pregnancies—these constitute deliberate malingering and worse, and should be handled by the military justice system. It should be hard, very hard, to get a court-martial conviction: as hard as trying to prove desertion. But in flagrant cases, the servicewoman—and the father, if a serviceman—should receive, at the very least, a discharge under other than honorable conditions. The soldier at al-Asad Air Base who told me she'd gotten pregnant by her fiance because she was tired of being deployed does not deserve the same kind of consideration as the Marine who was so determined to deploy that she gave birth on a warship.

In sum, it's time for policy to catch up with reality. But any military is more than the sum of its policies, and people deal with each other in myriad ways, not all of which can or should be micro-managed or regulated. Sociologically, the military is far more a "shame" society than a "guilt" society. Loss of reputation and acceptance, fear of shunning and ostracism, often determine behavior far more effectively than fear of punishment. When treating female comrades with anything other than the respect and dignity they've earned becomes a matter for shaming and of shame, equality—equality earned and equality lived-will be real. And the national security will be much improved thereby.

Erin Solaro is a Seattle-based writer. This is from her book in progress, Beyond GI Jane: American Women, the War on Terror, and the New Civic Feminism.

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