Hell Hath No Fury (26 page)

The army could not come up with a definition of “combat” that satisfied Congress, and as a result the army secretary was given statutory authority to establish policy appropriate to the needs of the service while supporting Congress's intention of keeping women out of combat.

In practice, the 1948 act signally failed to meet the congressional target of 112,000 women. By 1952, the second year of the Korean War, only 46,000 had been recruited, and throughout the 1950s recruiting remained stagnant. In a booming economy, the services could do little to attract women. Uniformed women trained on their own bases and, in the main, acted as secretaries, cooks, telephone operators, and aides for uniformed men.

By the middle of the 1960s, 93 percent of the women in the services worked as secretaries or in military hospitals. Of the approximately seven thousand women who served in Vietnam, some 70 percent were nurses (see
US Military Nurses and Doctors,
Chapter 8). One army woman who served in Vietnam, Evelyn Foote, later a brigadier general, recalled the surreal conditions:

When I was in Vietnam in 1967, I was not weapons-qualified. In fact we were not permitted to carry weapons. I was up along the Cambodian border once with a field artillery battalion. The only thing I could do was run around with a purse—I called it my M-16 purse. I was wearing a baseball cap, no helmet, no flak jacket, no weapons, nothing. I was a liability to that unit.

It was the war in Vietnam, however, that marked a turning point in the history of women in the US armed services. In November 1967, two months before the Vietcong launched the Tet offensive, the 2 percent cap on the number of women in the armed services was lifted, along with the restrictions on the rank they could attain. Two years later the US Army boasted its first two female brigadier generals, Anna Mae Hays and Elizabeth Hoisington. These measures, encouraging though they were, came too little and late to have any effect on the course of the war in Vietnam, where the American will to “finish the job” was dealt a fatal blow by the Tet offensive.

Five years later President Richard M. Nixon ended the military draft and reintroduced an all-volunteer professional force. This presented two problems: it necessarily resulted in a force smaller than the pre-1973 model, and it immediately created a shortage of male, college-educated volunteers.

Although the military remained reluctant to expand the role of women in the army, it was obliged to explore the possibility of taking in more women in a wider range of military specialties. Another major event that concentrated the minds of the service chiefs was the bitter battle for the Equal Rights Amendment in the early 1970s, which focused attention on sex discrimination and the status of all women in the United States.

The army found a silver lining in this scenario. Drawing from experience in World War II, it anticipated that female recruits would be better educated (see
Women's Army Auxiliary Corps,
Chapter 6) and would pose fewer problems of discipline. World War II continued to cast its long shadow over the army's deliberations. The incoming women were intended to free male soldiers for combat, just as they had in the war years. No thought was given to placing women in the line of fire or considering their career ambitions.

Meanwhile, the number of military occupational specialties (MOS) open to women rapidly rose, although many were “blue collar” jobs. Nevertheless, the ground had begun to shift. By 1976, one in every thirty recruits in the US armed services was a woman. In the same year the military academies were opened to women, and the US Military Academy at West Point accepted its first female cadets. In the American courts there was a landmark judgment,
Crawford
v.
Cushman
(1976), which enabled pregnant women to remain in the service and return to duty after giving birth.

During the presidency of Jimmy Carter (1977–81) the US high command came under considerable pressure to sell the integration of women and the increase in their numbers as an unalloyed success story. Dissent was frowned on. Repeal of the combat exclusions was the order of the day; to enable the absorption of greater numbers of women, “combat” was redefined. Distance from the enemy was ruled out of the equation; the determining factor was the primary duty or mission of the individual or unit concerned.

In the late 1970s, in the sour aftermath of the Vietnam War, the US Army found it hard to recruit men. It was also shrinking in size, and the place it had once occupied in American life had grown correspondingly smaller. The Reagan administration, which took office in 1981, sought to spend its way out of the crisis. The defense budget was boosted, as was pay for servicemen and -women, and a massive rearmament program was initiated. Some critics detected an “anti-feminine” thrust to this program; the immediate result was an increase in the number of male recruits.

At the same time, the army continued to chew over its definition of “combat.” The body charged with analyzing the issues and coming up with answers was the Women in the Army (WITA) Policy Review Group. It concluded that the overall effect of army policy had been to limit job opportunities for women while still exposing them to danger. Women were forbidden to serve in any MOS whose principal task was the killing of the enemy but could serve in positions that exposed them to the risk of being killed. The army could either admit that women were already in combat roles or take the drastic step of removing them from positions in which they were now well established.

The result of WITA's deliberations was Direct Combat Probability Coding (DCPC), in which “direct combat” fell into the same category as “close combat”: the engaging of the enemy with individual or crew-served weapons while being exposed to direct enemy fire; a high probability of direct physical contact with enemy personnel; and a substantial risk of capture. Factoring all the elements into a number of scenarios enabled the army to come up with a sliding scale of combat probability running from P1 (the highest probability of direct combat) to P7. Women were to be excluded from all P1 scenarios.

The first occasion in which women in the US Army were placed in harm's way came in 1989 when, in Operation Just Cause, 800 women soldiers joined the 18,400-strong expeditionary force that invaded Panama. One of the small number of women in combat support was Captain Linda Bray of the 519th Military Police Battalion, who led a platoon of military police against a Panamanian Defense Force (PDF) compound near Panama City.

Under fire, Bray's unit secured the compound, ostensibly a group of dog kennels but actually a weapons store, and forced its defenders to flee. Bray became a heroine overnight, until the Pentagon remembered that by commanding under fire Bray had breached its ban on women in direct combat. The Pentagon backpedaled, to the evident bewilderment of the gallant Bray, who had gone from twentieth-century Amazon to military footnote in the blink of an eye. She left the army because of stress fractures she had sustained, which she blamed on the extra weight she claimed to have carried on road marches to prove her stamina to her skeptical male colleagues.

An unforgiving fact of military life—and another problem addressed by WITA in the 1980s—is the physical difference between men and women when it comes to the rigors of combat support, a role in which women have served since the Persian Gulf War and which can involve much lifting and loading. On average a female soldier is about five inches shorter than her male colleagues, has half the upper-body strength, lower aerobic capacity, and nearly 40 percent less muscle mass. In addition, she cannot urinate standing up, a factor in route marches that absorbed the attention of an entire army research study devoted to enabling women to urinate in a standing position in locations where there is sparse cover.

Since 1994 the US Army has introduced gender-integrated training programs designed to take into account—or ignore, as some critics suggest—the physical differences between men and women. The aim has been to weed out the “white male” as the norm. Those who oppose this approach argue that the lowering of physical standards and the encouragement of cooperative skills like map reading and first aid—at which women often excel—can compromise the integrity of integrated training programs that have been modified to accommodate women.

In 1987, an Army Research Institute Survey concluded that women are more likely than men to report that insufficient upper-body strength interferes with their job performance. In the case of light-wheel-vehicle mechanics, for example, 26 percent of the female soldiers interviewed for the survey found their work “very difficult” as opposed to 9 percent of the men in that MOS. It is too much to expect women soldiers to be Amazons in the mold of the Russian former blacksmith Klavdia Konovaluva (see
Red Army Women Soldiers,
Chapter 6), and as many critics of the US Army's policy in this area have contended, it is unwise to ignore the problem in the hope that it will go away.

Another fact of life in an integrated army is women's childbearing capacity. In 1995–96, during the crisis in Bosnia, every three days one US servicewoman had to be evacuated from the theater because of pregnancy. An army spokesman blithely commented that it was no “different than appendicitis” (see also
US Navy,
Chapter 6). In such circumstances, women who wish to remain in the army receive six weeks' maternity leave.

The problem of sex in an integrated army has furrowed some brows. In the initial deployment to Bosnia and Herzegovina, which involved some fifteen hundred female troops, men and women shared tents with room for up to ten. Ranks were mixed, and privates occupied beds next to superiors. The troops were not allowed to drink alcohol or eat in restaurants, but if they were single, they were allowed to have sex provided that it was not with a subordinate or superior in their chain of command. A spokesman explained that the army does not prohibit heterosexual relations between consenting single soldiers, but it does not provide facilities for sexual relations. The lack of official facilities proved no obstacle to human nature.

The problem of nonconsensual sex in an integrated army was highlighted in 1997, three years after women were integrated into basic-training groups, by the scandal at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in which a number of male drill instructors were found guilty, after a military trial, of raping female trainees. The verdicts were followed by similar charges from women elsewhere in the army and led to a major investigation into sexual misconduct. In the Persian Gulf War, the army recorded twenty-four incidents it categorized as sexual assaults.

It was in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, the defense of Saudi Arabia and the subsequent liberation of Kuwait (August 1990–February 1991), that the integration of women into the US Army was put to the test. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, more than 11 percent of those on active duty in the US armed forces were women. For the first time they would be called on to demonstrate their effectiveness in positions that had in recent history been reserved for men.

In Desert Shield, an international coalition of more than forty nations assembled an expeditionary force of some 700,000 troops, 1,600 aircraft, and 200 warships. The largest single contributor was the United States, with more than 400,000 troops, the first of whom began to arrive on August 9, 1990.

The US forces in the Persian Gulf eventually included some 37,000 women: 26,000 army, 3,700 navy, 2,200 marines, 5,300 air force, and 13 coast guard. Some 7 percent came from the active forces and 17 percent from the reserve and National Guard. On September 5 the first combined force of American men and women ever to ship out in wartime conditions left San Diego for the Persian Gulf. There was a heated debate in the United States about sending women, many of whom were wives and mothers, into danger.

When the women arrived in the Persian Gulf, there was also a clash of cultures. To Western eyes, the role of women in Saudi culture is severely restricted. Initially, the Saudi authorities were most reluctant to play host to female American and European soldiers. However, the female US troops were now so vital to the military machine that it was not practical to leave them at home. To smooth ruffled Saudi feathers, compromises were made. Female soldiers had to be escorted by men when off base, but they declined to modify their work practices and, to the scandal of Saudis, shed some of their clothes in the intense heat, which often reached 100 degrees F.

In Desert Shield and Desert Storm, women were called upon, among other things, to crew Patriot missile batteries, to fly helicopters on reconnaissance and search-and-destroy missions, and to drive convoys over the desert close to enemy positions. To do that, fuel, water, and ammunition had to be brought up to armored vehicles, trucks, and troop formations as they advanced through the desert. These missions could be dangerous. On January 31, 1991, Iraqi soldiers captured their first female prisoner of war, Specialist Melissa Rathbun-Nealy of the 233rd Transportation Company, when her twenty-five-ton tank transporter got stuck in the sand on the Kuwaiti-Saudi border. Rathbun-Nealy and her codriver, Specialist David Lockett, were released on March 3. They reported that they had been held in solitary confinement in Basra and had been well treated.

In the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, the debate about female soldiers serving in combat was reignited. In the House of Representatives, the drive to repeal this remaining taboo was led by Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder, who based her case on the recommendation by the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services (
DACOWITS,
see Chapter 6) that female soldiers should be allowed to become combatants. After the Gulf War, the so-called revolution in military affairs (RMA) encouraged a widespread view that the arrival of new high technologies had transformed the battlefield. In the brave new world of “pushbutton” warfare, Schroeder argued, the button could just as easily be pushed by a woman as by a man.

However, in 1994 the restrictions on women in combat formulated by WITA had been restated by Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and applied to support units that were “collocated” that is, operating 100 percent of the time with direct ground-combat units. In these situations, the concept of a “front line” no longer exists. A bomb or rocket can strike anywhere, and in an era of asymmetrical warfare, insurgents can appear from nowhere when a convoy takes a wrong turn. Nevertheless, the Aspin formula remained in force through the war in Afghanistan, launched in late 2001 and still being fought in the summer of 2007, and the invasion and occupation of Iraq, to which there is likewise no clear end in sight.