U.S. Military’s Forgotten Women

Women on the Frontlines in Iraq
by Lizette Alvarez The New York Times

Lieutenant Emily 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, Iraq. 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 U.S. military to be killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.
 
Eight died in Vietnam.
 
Despite longstanding predictions that the United States would shudder when its women were killed in action, 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 deaths of the nearly 2,700 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 do not 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 in Evanston, Illinois, who has closely studied national service. “They would rather have someone else’s 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 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, Perez, who is to 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 as 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 on 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 are 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 do not clear insurgents from Falluja or drive tanks. They are barred 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” or accompanies a unit on the front line, like an infantry unit.
 
In reality, though, co-location is taking place, analysts said, although it is unclear how widespread it is. The Pentagon has stretched the language of the policy, mostly because there are not enough troops, male or female.
 
“It says you can have female medics, but they can’t see combat,” said Captain Megan O’Connor, who served in Iraq 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.”
 
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.
 
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 of 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 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.
 
None of this has come to pass. “They are pulling their own weight and performing as well as men,” Manning said.
 
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?