Women in combat. Like most people, I had my opinion on the subject. 

It's an especially relevant subject for us military spouses. For husbands, those women fighting out there are the women they love. For wives, our beloved husbands are relying on those women to get their backs.

That said, the basic idea of women in combat didn't bother me. I've known women tough enough to do that quintessential man's job -- kill the enemy – just like I've known men nurturing enough to do what we think of as women's work -- nursing and child care, for example.

Still, I did think opponents of women in combat made a reasonably good point when they argued that many women don't have the upper body strength to haul heavy weapons or wounded buddies. I thought they made an even better point when they worried that either sexual tension or the male instinct to protect females would undermine a unit's ability to pull together and fight effectively.

Then I received an assignment to go out and do some reporting on women who kill in combat. (Click here to read the article.) That required me to look at the actual facts.

One of the first facts I came across is that most Soldiers have already concluded that women do have the physical strength, stamina and mental toughness to be effective in combat, according to surveys by the U.S. Army Research Institute.

This brings me to the next fact that I learned. The argument is not over whether or not women should be in combat. They already are. For example, a female MP who has to defend against the enemy while she's out on patrol -- she's in combat. So is a female pilot who attacks the enemy from the air. But in neither of those situations is she engaged in offensive operations on the ground, what's called "direct ground combat." Although the military has opened up most of its jobs to women, they're still banned from direct ground combat units: infantry, tanks, and artillery. At this point, that's what the argument is about.

So I looked at that survey of Soldiers. And I wondered: What do they know that I don't? What makes 86 percent of them so sure that females might as well be out there kicking in doors alongside their male comrades? Not too long ago, male servicemembers were among the biggest opponents of women in uniform, much less in combat.

Well, nowadays most of those guys are serving in coed units. So apparently familiarity doesn't breed contempt -- it breeds respect. I learned that the same thing happened when President Truman ended racial segregation in the military. Defenders of the status quo predicted that units would fall apart if whites were forced to fight alongside blacks. But today our military is a more effective fighting force because of integration.

Meanwhile, French, German, Danish, and Canadian women are now serving in their countries direct ground combat forces. (Click here to read about a Canadian infantry officer killed in Afghanistan.)

It's true that in coed units, good order and discipline are sometimes undermined by problems such as sexual harassment and inappropriate romantic relationships. But, the source of those problems is poor leadership, not hormone-addled servicemembers.

On the subject of physical abilities, supporters of women in combat point out that women's generally smaller size and greater flexibility give them an advantage in cramped tanks or enemy tunnels – for example in Vietnam, where the smallest guy in the unit always got the job of checking out the enemy's underground tunnel complexes. There's also some evidence that with conditioning, many women actually can achieve the upper body strength necessary for frontline combat.

Take Krista, for instance. In Somalia in 1993, during the time of the Black Hawk Down battle, she was a 21-year-old Army specialist, armed with an M16 and an aluminum baseball bat. She's five-foot-nine and comes from solid Slovak stock, 180 pounds of muscle.

When male Soldiers sneered, "What's a girl doing here?" Krista would assume the benchpress position and her friend Bob, who weighed 150 with his boots on, would go stiff and fall into her arms. Then Krista would benchpress Bob. She'd keep on benchpressing him until the other Soldiers stopped laughing.

The very restrictive rules of engagement in Somalia meant Krista relied more on her baseball bat than her M16. As her truck lumbered on food runs through Mogadishu's crowded streets, Krista stood in the truck's open bed and clubbed the mobs that swarmed up the side of the truck to steal the food. The special forces guys would request her as their driver when they went out on equipment runs. Infantry took her along when they needed to kick in the door to a building that may have women inside.

She'd plunge in with her fellow Soldiers, all male, and there would be a terrified Somali woman. The rumor was that American men would rape any woman who fell into their hands. Krista would get down on one knee, hand off her weapon to another Soldier, and pull off her Kevlar helmet so the woman could see she was a woman, too. She'd stay with the woman while she was questioned.

The issue of women in combat is a complex one. The vast majority of the data I found seemed to back up the supportive Soldiers in that Army survey. So whether or not women should serve in direct ground combat seems to come down to this question: What role do we believe women should play in our society?

How you answer that question comes down to beliefs, not facts. And, what we believe is up to each of us to decide for ourselves.