Hell Hath No Fury (27 page)

The problem lies in the army's application of the formula. It has now developed the concept of deploying self-contained formations—“units of action”—specifically organized to undertake combat missions. The first of these formations to deploy to Iraq was the Third Infantry Division in the spring of 2005. Forward support companies (FSCs) would necessarily be an organic part of the “unit of action,” but according to the Department of Defense's officially stated policy, they cannot contain women, obliging the army to shift its ground. It claimed that there were insufficient male soldiers to fill the FSCs, which they moved into gender-integrated brigade-support battalions, from which in theory the women can be withdrawn in the event of its parent formation going into action. Critics have argued that this is a recipe for chaos and have also pointed out that the army has ignored a statutory obligation to provide Congress with advance notification of what amounts to a rewriting of the Aspin regulations.

Between 2002 and 2006, more than 155,000 women were deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, 15 percent of the active-duty force. However, not everyone welcomes the influx of women into the army. The military historian Martin van Creveld has argued that the feminization of the military is part symptom and part cause of the decline of the advanced military. Others have suggested that far from being in decline, the military is undergoing a rapid process of change in which it has to be more responsive to public opinion and must readjust to meet new demands on its skills, particularly in the field of peacekeeping. However, this is a role in which the US Army has often appeared ill at ease.

Reference: See also Lynch, Jessica, Chapter 7: England, Lynndie, Chapter 10: Hester, Leigh Ann, Chapter 7; Duckworth, Tammy, Chapter 7; and McSally, Martha, Chapter 7. Kayla Williams,
I Love My Rifle More Than You,
2006.

US Marine Corps

1950–Present

After World War II, the US Marine Corps retained a small nucleus of Women Marines (WMs) in a postwar reserve. In 1948, Congress passed the Women's Armed Forces Integration Act, which authorized women in the Regular Component of the Corps. At the time, the women's reserve made up only 2 percent of the corps, and a woman could not hold permanent rank higher than lieutenant colonel. An exception was made for Katherine A. Towle, who in November 1948 was appointed director of Women Marines, after they were reconstituted as a regular component, with the temporary rank of colonel. In 1949, the corps established a training facility for women recruits at Parris Island, South Carolina, and a women's officer-training class at Quantico, Virginia.

In August 1950, when the Women Marines were mobilized for the Korean War, the number of women on active duty reached peak strength of 2,787. Their role was to take jobs in the United States to free men for active duty. In an era when the notion of “feminine mystique” was at its height, the US military was reluctant in the extreme to encourage the women in its ranks to look and act like men. Marine Corps women were required to wear lipstick and nail polish while on duty, as hostesses in Disneyland and Disney World are today.

The first WM to report for duty in Vietnam was Master Sergeant Barbara J. Dulinsky, on March 18, 1967. In theory at least, all WMs who served in Vietnam were volunteers, since nearly all of them had expressed a willingness to go and none had objected. WMs in Vietnam normally numbered ten enlisted women and two officers at any one time. They were based in Saigon and performed clerical duties with the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) providing administrative support to marines assigned as far north as the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).

The marine corps' principal preoccupation with the deployment of WMs to Vietnam seemed to be their clothing. Mindful perhaps of the World War II ordeal of army nurses in the Pacific (see
US Military Doctors and Nurses,
Chapter 8), the corps cautioned its women to take with them a supply of nylon stockings, sturdy cotton lingerie, summer uniforms, and a dozen pairs of heel lifts: “Heels can easily be extracted with a pair of pliers and new ones inserted with little difficulty.” Vietnamese women were fascinated by the WMs, and Colonel Vera M. Jones later recalled walking down the streets of Saigon and being startled by the touch of a Vietnamese woman feeling her stockings. When two WMs visited Da Nang on an assignment, they noted that the US troops stationed there gained pleasure from the “unfamiliar click of the female high-heeled shoes.”

The Tet offensive of January–February 1968 provided less agreeable experiences. At the time, enlisted WMs were still quartered at the Plaza Hotel dormitory, which took incoming enemy mortar fire and confined the WMs to their quarters. One of them wrote on February 3, 1969: “It's hard to believe that a war is going on around me. I sit here calmly typing this letter and yet can get up, walk to a window and watch the helicopters making machine gun and rocket strikes in the area of the golf course which is about three blocks away. At night I lie in bed and listen to the mortar rounds going off.”

In 1974 the commandant, the most senior marine corps officer, authorized WMs to serve in specialized rear-echelon elements of the Fleet Marine Force. However, these women were prohibited from deployment with combat units or units that might be engaged in combat. Women were banned from all infantry, artillery, and armored units and could not serve as aircrew.

In May 1978, Brigadier General Margaret Brewer became the first WM to reach general grade in the role of director of information. In 1992 Lieutenant General Carol A. Mutter assumed command of the Third Force Service Support Group, Okinawa, the first woman to lead a fleet marine force at the flag level. Four years later, Mutter became the first WM, and the second woman in the history of the US armed forces, to be awarded three stars. She later became a member of
DACOWITS
(see Chapter 6), the body charged with advising on the role of women in the US armed forces.

During the Persian Gulf War, approximately one thousand WMs were deployed to the Gulf for Operations Desert Shield(1990) and Desert Storm (1991). In 1993, the marine corps accepted women into naval aviation pilot training, and in July 1993 Second Lieutenant Sarah Deal became the first WM to begin training. She graduated with her Golden Wings in April 1995 and went on to pilot one of the corps' heavy-lift CH-53E helicopters. She later served as adjutant for the commanding officer of the Marine Aircraft Group 16 at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar at San Diego. In 2003, in Operation Iraqi Freedom, WMs flew close-support and attack AH-1W helicopter combat missions for the first time. The corps also saw another first in Iraqi Freedom, when one of its enlisted women gave birth in a war zone aboard a combat ship.

The marine corps remains the only US armed service that maintains separate boot camp training units for men and women recruits. Basic training remains separate and, in theory at least, equal. Women in the marine corps serve in 93 percent of military occupation specialties and make up some 6 percent of the corps's strength, the lowest percentage in the US armed forces and possibly the result of the corps's well-earned reputation for toughness. Two more reasons are that a significant number of the corps's rear-echelon services are provided by the US Navy, and the marines spend much of their time aboard ship in forward deployment.

US Navy

On August 7, 1972, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt issued one of his famous “Z-grams,” No. 116, whose subject was “Equal Rights and Opportunities for Women” in the US Navy. Zumwalt opened with a bold statement of intent:

There has been much discussion and debate with respect to equal opportunity for women in our country over the past few years. My position with respect to women in the Navy is that they have historically played a significant role in the accomplishment of our naval mission. However, I believe we can do far more than we have in the past in according women equal opportunities to contribute their extensive talents to achieve full professional status.

Zumwalt's response to the imminent arrival of an all-volunteer navy was to be ring-fenced with qualifications. In 1976 women were admitted to the US Navy's academy at Annapolis, but they were still barred from being assigned to duties on all seagoing vessels, both combat and noncombat. In 1978, in the case of
Owens
v.
Brown,
a number of navy women successfully brought a class-action lawsuit against the navy, arguing that the prohibition violated their due-process rights under the Fifth Amendment. However, the judgment noted that in certain circumstances, such as on transport vessels or in combat postings, the navy's position might be justified. In the aftermath of
Owens
v.
Brown,
Lawrence Korb, assistant secretary of defense during the first Reagan administration (1980–84), claimed that the issue of women in the navy took up more of his time than any other.

The navy's immediate response to the
Owens
decision was the Women in Ships Program, in which 54 female officers and 367 enlisted women were deployed on a number of support ships. The program was expanded in 1983 and was seen as a qualified success. Further impetus toward the concerted integration of women in ships at sea was given by the Tailhook scandal (see below), which exposed systemic harassment of women in the US Navy.

By 1991 women made up 10 percent of navy personnel, and the high command was now determined to champion their integration into the service. The result was the Defense Authorization Act of 1994, which included the establishment of “specific gender-neutral physical requirements for any job specialty requiring strength, endurance, or cardiovascular capacity.” Integration was not uniformly easy, and in the early months of the new era many women initially experienced physical and verbal harassment. One female surface warfare officer (SWO) recalled that the commanding officer on her ship offered the commander of a cruiser ten movies in exchange for the women serving under him.

Nevertheless, the barriers to career advancement that had existed twenty years earlier were coming down. The combat ban for women was repealed in 1991, but it was not until 1993 that Kara Spears Hultgreen enrolled in the F-14 Tomcat program at Naval Air Station Miramar in San Diego. Hultgreen qualified in 1994 as the first female carrier pilot and was assigned to the Black Lions of VF-213, who were preparing for a tour of duty in the Persian Gulf. On October 25, 1994, Hultgreen was killed when her F-14 crashed on approach to the carrier USS
Abraham Lincoln
after a routine mission in the waters off San Diego.

Hultgreen's death sparked a heated debate about the role of women in the navy. An exacerbating factor was the Tailhook scandal and the controversy this had stirred. The term “tailhook” derives from the arresting device used on the decks of US aircraft carriers to hook a landing aircraft. It also became notorious in 1991 after women attending a Tailhook convention in Las Vegas, a number of whom were serving officers in the US Navy, were subjected to assault and sexual harassment by gangs of drunken naval aviators. The navy launched a subsequent investigation that led to the resignation of the navy secretary H. Lawrence Garrett III and the early retirement of Rear Admiral Duval M. Williams, the commander of the navy's investigative service, which had dragged its feet over the affair. The reverberations of the Tailhook controversy rumbled through the debate that followed the death of Kara Spears Hultgreen. Her detractors cited the crash as evidence of Hultgreen's incompetence, while supporters argued that she was the victim of engine failure. The argument generated more heat than light.

Thereafter naval aviation moved relatively quickly to enable female pilots to fly combat missions. One who attracted much media attention in 2001 was a fighter pilot on the carrier
Carl Vinson,
who was American-born but the product of an English girls' public school and was flying daily bombing raids on targets in Afghanistan in Operation Enduring Freedom. In Afghanistan, navy women could fly combat missions under a policy approved by President Clinton but were not permitted to engage in direct ground combat, particularly the insertion and extraction of special forces, a prohibition that prompted a protest from
DACOWITS
(see Chapter 6). General Charles R. Holland, heading the Special Operations Command, did not agree, pointing out that these operations inevitably involved aircrew in close “collocation” (contact) with ground units, which often led to direct ground combat. The number of women flying combat missions from aircraft carriers remained small. In 2002, during the war in Afghanistan, there were only two on board the carrier
Theodore Roosevelt
out of a female crew component of 500 (total crew 3,600).

The US Navy's first gender-integrated warship was the
Eisenhower,
with 415 women among the crew of 4,967, which sailed in 1994. The arrival of the women necessitated expensive modifications to the carrier's living quarters: gynecologists were brought on board to treat specifically female conditions; the ship's barbers were retrained to cut women's hair; menus were modified; and
Eisenhower
stocked up on contraceptives. Elaborate care was taken to anticipate every eventuality except, it would seem, the most obvious one. Before
Eisenhower
set sail, twenty-four women were deemed “nondeployable” because they were pregnant, and another fifteen were evacuated once the carrier was at sea. The navy was adamant that this did not affect operational efficiency.

In May 2003, The US Marine Corps brought a female marine back home after she had given birth on a navy warship in the Persian Gulf. She told her superiors that she did not know she was pregnant.

One exception to the US Navy's policy of allowing women to serve on warships applies to submarines. The high cost of converting submarines, as opposed to that for surface ships, is usually advanced as the reason, although this calculation is based on the assumption of semi-segregation of the male and female crew and the considerable structural changes this would entail. At present the US Navy retains the tradition of “hot bunking,” in which each sleeping berth is used by more than one man on a rotating basis.