RG wrote: “I believe the U.S. armed forces restricts women from direct (ground) combat thankfully…”
I walked past the television at work the other day and saw an advertisement for a special on VA hospitals. It showed wounded veterans working out in a physical therapy gym. What jumped out at me were the several female veterans in the shot who had prosthetic arms and legs.
I do know for a fact that women served at FOB’s (forward operating base) in Iraq. FOB’s are subject to constant bombardment from rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, and small arms. Also, many female soldiers are Military Police, which is still considered by some to be a combat arm.
I think you’ve done very well in pin-pointing the dichotomy of the modern American military: a very conservative tradition of service shot through with modern liberalism. The fact that the soldiers themselves, male and female, tend to be overwhelmingly conservative is, I think, a stumbling block in the way of real critique for the conservative establishment. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that many female “conservative” commentators would like to serve in combat, or see other women do so.
What struck me most about your article was this: “She and her husband seem completely calm and matter-of-fact about her injuries. How can the husband stand that this happened to his wife, to a woman?”
It’s very possible that the husband is himself a feminist, and supports his wife’s almighty “right” to do anything that he could do. It is also possible that he has strong feelings of guilt and shame, not just over what happened to his wife, but that she was sent into a combat zone at all, and that in our modern climate he does not feel comfortable in taking a stand against what he feels to be a travesty (assuming that he has even articulated his feelings). I see this war giving us a generation of hardened, grizzled girl-veterans, and I feel great shame. I am ashamed that there are female soldiers who saw more action than I did, killed more of the enemy than I did, and I am ashamed in seeing the female form mutilitated and that I couldn’t have somehow been there to stop it from happening. I am not the only one; this was a frequent topic of discussion after my unit came back from the gulf (curiously, only among the white male soldiers). It is hard-wired into every true Western man to want to put his own body between a woman and the war’s desolation. This is a shame that we will have to carry around with us the rest of our days.
A few more observations.
“She wants to continue serving in the Illinois Guard Why? ‘The explosion didn’t change who I am. I believe we should all give something back to our community…’”
But it did change her ability to kill the enemy, or to support combat troops in doing the same. War is not a game, and the service isn’t (or rather shouldn’t be) just another job opportunity. It’s interesting that she mentions the National Guard as a way to give back to the community. I think this feeds into the modern misconception of what the National Guard and Reserve really are. Both of these branches of the service have deployed in nearly every single overseas conflict America has ever seen. On the camouflage Battle Dress Uniform (BDU’s) there is a identifier tape over the left breast pocket, opposite a similar tape with the soldier’s last name. This tape says U.S. Marines for the Marine Corps, U.S. Air Force for the AF, and U.S. Army for the Army. The tape for the Army Reserve and NG says U.S. Army, not NG or Reserve. When you join either of these you are joining a branch of a belligerent organization. The Army has, to my knowledge, never told anyone that National Guardsmen will be staying home in the event of a war (barring some degenerate recruiters).
Also, Maj. Duckworth was a helicopter pilot, which brings me back to female service in the combat arms. The CA are defined by the Army (somewhat rigidly) as Infantry, Artillery, and Armor. Helicopter pilots fall within the Aviation Branch, a good portion of which falls into non-combat, support missions, so that the Army doesn’t feel it can bar females from the entire branch. Here you see how the Army, instructed by its liberal policy makers, has achieved an end-run around its own policy of having no women in the CA. You no longer have to be in a CA to serve on the front line; the Army can simply put you wherever it wants, made much simpler by the fact that we are in a war with no fixed front line.
If I were in charge of Army policy, my policy toward females in the military would be very simple:
1) Females would only be allowed to serve in the Administration and Medical branches (and in the case of the latter, they will not serve in the job of field medic).
2) No female of any stripe, be they military, DoD Civilian, or contractor, will serve overseas.