Hell Hath No Fury (31 page)

Much of the credit for Lynch's rescue was later given to Muhammad Odeh al-Rahaief, a local lawyer, who insisted that his wife was a nurse at the hospital, a claim the hospital later denied. Muhammad was also to assert that while he was in the hospital he had seen an Iraqi colonel physically assaulting Lynch and was so shocked that he felt impelled to reveal her whereabouts to the Americans. Lynch has no memory of this incident.

Muhammad seems to have been one of a number of Iraqis who told American troops that Lynch was in the hospital. It is possible that he was also the so-called agent who was briefed by US intelligence and sent back into the hospital to film its layout with a concealed camera, revealing the route to Lynch's room, where she occupied the only specialist bed in the facility.

On the night of April 1, 2003, while US Marines staged a diversionary attack, a team of elite special forces, including members of the US Navy's counterterrorism formation (DEVGRU), the Air Force pararescue men, and a security unit of US Army Rangers, launched a successful raid to extract Lynch; the raid was filmed from start to finish. Staff at the hospital later accused the special forces of behaving with excessive zeal, particularly as they were quick to inform the American troops that the site had been abandoned by the Iraqi military twenty-four hours before their arrival, and Lynch was not under guard. It is safe to say, however, that while conducting an operation like this, the special forces do not necessarily take bystanders, whether innocent or not, unquestioningly at their word.

What is more questionable is the subsequent handling of the story by the US military, which, at a difficult moment in the prosecution of the war, felt it needed a broad-brush, “feel-good” item to cheer American audiences at home. Rushing a swiftly edited version of the rescue onto American television screens mattered more than scrupulous adherence to the facts. Thus Lynch was credited with having fought on after the ambush until she was wounded, a claim that she denied months later during a television interview in which she stated: “They [the Pentagon] used me to symbolize all this stuff. It's wrong. I don't know why they filmed [my rescue] or why they say these things.” She also said, “I did not shoot, not a round, nothing. I went down praying to my knees. And that's the last I remember.”

The Pentagon has also been criticized for the contrasting treatment of African-American specialist Shoshana Johnson, another member of 507th Maintenance Company, who was one of four soldiers who had also been taken prisoner near An Nasiriya on March 23. Johnson was the first American female POW since the lifting in 1994 of the so-called risk rule, allowing women to undertake duties in combat that exposed them to hostile fire or capture.

Johnson was shot in both legs and held prisoner for twenty-two days, during which she appeared, tearful and distressed, on Iraqi television. She was released the day after Lynch's dramatic rescue. Lynch was released from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., on July 22, was awarded the Bronze Star, and on August 27 was given an honorable medical discharge with an 80 percent disability benefit. In August 2005, Lynch announced that she would be attending West Virginia University on a full scholarship stemming from her military service.

By contrast, there were no television movies, ghosted books, and military scholarships for Johnson, who received a benefit of only 30 percent. This prompted the Reverend Jesse Jackson to accuse the US Army of double standards, since Lynch was personable and white, while Johnson was less articulate, less newsworthy, and black.

Reference: Rick Bragg,
I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story,
2004, an unreliable source.

McGRATH, KATHLEEN

US Navy Captain, b. 1952, d. 2002

The first woman to command a warship of the US Navy, Kathleen McGrath attracted much media attention when she took command of the frigate
Jarrett
in 2000 to conduct maritime interception operations in the Persian Gulf.

The daughter of a USAF pilot, McGrath was born in Columbus, Ohio, and raised in military bases around the world. She studied forestry at California State University, Sacramento, and after a stint with the US Forest Service joined the navy.

She earned a master's degree in education at Stanford and underwent training at the Surface Warfare Officers (SWO) School. In 1987 she became operations officer on the USS
Cape Cod
and subsequently on the USS
Concord.
These assignments took her to the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Red Sea, including stints on Operations Sharp Edge and Desert Shield.

In 1993, McGrath took command of the rescue-and-salvage ship USS
Recovery.
In 1998, four years after the opening of warships to women, she became chief staff officer of a destroyer squadron serving in the western Pacific and Persian Gulf. That year she became the first woman to command a US warship when she was appointed to the USS
Jarrett,
a frigate with crew of 262. She completed one deployment with the
Jarrett
as it patrolled the Persian Gulf to intercept oil smugglers.

McGrath then transferred to the Institute for Defense Analyses in Alexandria, Virginia, for what turned out to be her final tour of duty. She died of cancer at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

Reference: Susan H. Godson,
Serving Proudly: A History of Women in the US Navy,
2003.

McSALLY, MARTHA

US Air Force Combat Pilot, b. 1966

In her career with the USAF, McSally has scored two notable firsts. She was the first woman to fly combat operations and subsequently became the first woman in the service to command an air-combat unit. She later recalled: “In 1984 I was attending the US Air Force Academy and told my first flight instructor that I was going to be a fighter pilot. He just laughed, but after Congress repealed the prohibition law in 1991, and I was named as one of the first seven women who would be put through fighter training, he looked me up and said he was amazed I had accomplished my goal.”

McSally graduated from the US Air Force Academy in 1988 and studied for a master's degree at Harvard University's School of Public Policy. In 1993 she was one of the first seven women to be trained as fighter pilots by the US Air Force. In 1995–96, during a tour of duty in Kuwait, she became the first woman in the service to fly a combat mission, piloting a Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt close-support attack aircraft over southern Iraq to enforce the no-fly zone. In 2001, while based in Saudi Arabia, McSally was embroiled in a dispute with the US military over a directive requiring female service personnel to wear an
abaya
—an Islamic head-to-toe robe—when not on duty. McSally, a devout Christian, deemed the dress code “ridiculous and unnecessary” and argued that women serving in the military in Saudi Arabia should be able to wear their uniforms on official business and dress in long pants and long-sleeve shirts when off duty. She would not back down and successfully argued her case in the US Supreme Court before accusing the USAF of discriminating against her for rocking the boat in an admittedly sensitive policy area.

In 2004 Lieutenant Colonel McSally was vindicated when she took command of 354th Fighter Squadron, based at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona. Characteristically, McSally said of her new command, “We are the pointing end of the spear. I understand the marching orders, and we will be prepared to deploy…with an aggressive attitude that we will win.”

McSally subsequently served in Afghanistan, where her squadron flew some 2,000 missions, accumulated more than 7,000 combat flight hours, and expended more than 23,000 rounds of thirty-millimeter ammunition. She became a full colonel in December 2006. She reflected, “I hope I am a role model to both men and women because we are a fighting force and should not be concerned with the differences between us.”

Reference: www.defenselink.mil/

MIXED ANTIAIRCRAFT BATTERIES

United Kingdom, World War II

During World War II, women of the
Auxiliary Territorial Service
(ATS, see Chapter 6) played a vital role in the nation's Anti-Aircraft (AA) Command. The idea had first been taken up in 1938 by General Sir Frederick Pile, the wartime commander of AA Command, who had taken advice from Caroline Haslett, a distinguished engineer, on the suitability of women for this role in home defense. Training for mixed-AA batteries began in the spring of 1940, to meet an estimated shortfall in AA Command of some eleven hundred officers and eighteen thousand men, and the first mixed battery was deployed on August 21, 1941, in Richmond Park, on the outskirts of London. The first German aircraft to be shot down by a mixed battery crashed near Newcastle on December 8, 1941.

At full strength a mixed battery contained 189 men and 229 women, including officers. At the outset, each battery had eleven male and three female officers, the latter performing administrative and welfare duties. However, in 1943 the first female technical control officers began to assume operational responsibilities on gun sites in Home Command.

On the site, women operated all the equipment except the guns, handling the radar, predictors, and radio communications. Pile, an unlikely feminist, saw no logical reason why women should not fire the guns, but he was overruled. The wartime history of AA Command patronizingly observed of the women in mixed batteries, “They have the right delicacy of touch, the keenness and the application which is necessary to the somewhat tiresome job of knob twiddling, which are the lot of the instrument numbers. In principle, also, women will take on all the duties of mixed searchlight detachments.” The searchlight batteries had been the first operational ATS units within AA Command, a pioneer “experimental” battery having been established in April 1941 and manned by an all-ATS crew wearing male battle dress. An ATS version of battle dress was subsequently introduced in specifically female sizes and in a finer “Saxony serge.” But however finely dressed, the women on searchlight duty were still not allowed to return fire if machine-gunned by enemy aircraft.

Work on the searchlight batteries was demanding and included the shifting of tons of earth, filling and laying sandbags, renovating derelict sites, logging all aircraft, and transmitting messages between command posts and gun operations rooms. Mary Churchill, daugher of British wartime leader and prime minister Winston Churchill, was one of the first women to volunteer for duties with a mixed battery.

The idea of men and young women working together, sometimes in remote and physically arduous conditions, was approached with caution by the army. Initially, it was decided to combine ATS volunteers with men who had just joined up, on the basis that the latter's lack of military experience would not prejudice them against working alongside women. Great care was also taken in the appointment of male officers, often relatively older, fatherly or schoolmaster types, in an attempt to minimize friction.

The mixed batteries played a particularly important role between June 1944 and March 1945, when a significant proportion of the AA Command's resources was deployed to southern England to deal with the threat posed by German V-1 flying bombs.

Reference: General Sir Frederick Pile,
Ack-Ack: Britain's Defence Against Air Attack During the Second World War,
1949.

NIGHT WITCHES

Soviet Women Combat Pilots in World War II

Of the three all-women air regiments for which
Marina Raskova
(see Chapter 7) was responsible, the most celebrated was the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, known as “the Night Witches.”

The regiment's aircrew flew obsolete wood-and-fabric Polikarpov Po-2 biplanes on night operations against targets in the enemy's rear areas. The strategic importance of these missions was not high, but the psychological effect was often considerable on exhausted German formations recovering from heavy fighting. With its 110-horsepower engine, the highly maneuverable Po-2 had a maximum speed of only 94 miles per hour, lower than the stall speeds of the high-performance German Messerschmitt-109 or Focke Wulf-190 fighters, which made it very hard to shoot down as it flew along the deck to launch its bombing run. Near the target, the Po-2's pilots would cut their engines and glide into the attack, the whistling of the wind against the aircraft's bracing wires prompting the Germans to coin the phrase “Night Witches.” In a practice that recalled the early bombing operations of World War I, the bomb load was sometimes stored inside the Po-2 and tossed overboard by the aircrew. Most of the women declined to wear parachutes, preferring death to becoming prisoners of war.

The 588th Night Bomber Regiment, commanded by Yevdokia Bershanskaya, was in action from 1942, when it was deployed to the Kuban region in the southern Soviet Union, up to the fall of Berlin in 1945. In February 1943, in recognition of its outstanding service, it was redesignated the Forty-sixth Guards Night Bomber Regiment, and by the end of the war it had flown 24,000 combat missions, dropping 23,000 tons of bombs. No fewer than 23 of its aircrew became Heroes of the Soviet Union (the title Mother Heroine of the Soviet Union was reserved for women who patriotically produced large numbers of children).

Reference: Reina Pennington,
Wings, Women, and War: Soviet Airwomen in World War II Combat,
2002.

RASKOVA, MARINA

Pioneering Soviet Aviatrix, b. 1912, d. 1943

Raskova was a record-breaking pilot in the interwar years, and in World War II the driving force behind the formation of three female combat formations that flew more than thirty thousand sorties for the Red Air Force (VVS) on the Eastern Front.

Raskova was a polymath, an excellent musician, a fluent French- and Spanish-speaker, a scientist, and an airwoman. Trained as a navigator, she acquired a pilot's license in 1935 and two years later, while teaching at the Zhukovsky Air Academy, embarked on a series of record-breaking endurance flights. At the age of twenty-six she was awarded the Gold Star of Hero of the Soviet Union and was often referred to as “the Soviet Amelia Earhart.”