Looking for a few good (wo)men

[thedrifter]

Looking for a few good (wo)men
Marines fulfill military role without regard to gender
Monday, March
23, 2009

PARRIS ISLAND, S.C. — Onlookers squint across the field in the afternoon sun, their attention focused on deciphering hand signals Marines are using to communicate details of their mission.

The civilians look from the helmet-framed faces decorated with camouflage paint and beads of sweat to the heavy rifles slung across the Marines’ sturdy frames. They watch like visitors at the zoo as these warriors complete the “Crucible,” a 54-hour training test that includes little sleep, less food and a series of grueling, virtually nonstop missions.

Only after staring for a minute or two is there an awareness the platoon is made up entirely of women.

Their tour guide, Marine Maj. Kathy Lee-Wood, isn’t surprised by the reaction. She patiently explains that femininity and strength aren’t mutually exclusive.

Department of Defense statistics show that women make up about 14 percent of active duty forces and close to 18 percent of reserve and National Guard components. Defense officials say they expect that number to increase as more military jobs open to women, and the task is to figure out exactly how to find a compromise between equal rights and national defense.

Women at Parris Island — the only place in the country where the sexes are segregated for military training — say they actually are wary of becoming one of the guys. Don’t get them wrong, cautions Maj. Lee-Wood, executive officer of Parris Island’s female training battalion. These women consider themselves Marines first and foremost, and they complete the same training and carry packs just as big and heavy as their male counterparts’.

“We pull our weight,” said Maj. Lee-Wood. “We do 100 percent.”

The only difference in training is that women are asked to complete flexed arm hangs rather than pull-ups and have slightly more time to complete their runs. The women are fully integrated with the men once they have completed training and — in accord with Department of Defense regulations — the only jobs from which they are excluded are those involving direct combat.

There are many female service members who want to change that and are lobbying for policy updates. But there are just as many women who say any more equalization of the sexes within military ranks would be impractical.

changing attitudes

Lt. Col. Katherine Estes, commanding officer of Parris Island’s Support Battalion, enlisted in 1986. She said she has seen a great reduction in the macho, sexist attitude she says once prevailed in the Marine Corps.

However, Lt. Col. Estes said she believes there are at least some jobs — including combat-related occupations — that might better be left to men.

“I used to think as a lieutenant that I could run out there with all the guys, but as I got older ... I have a different perspective on that,” she said.

There are physical and mental differences between the sexes that shouldn’t be ignored, according to Maj. Lee-Wood.

“It’s not better or worse,” she said. “But men and women have different centers of gravity and carry weight differently.”

And the Marine Corps isn’t alone in recognizing the divide, said Patty Parks, a retired Navy commander who lives in Ooltewah. In the Navy, women aren’t allowed to serve on submarines and aren’t allowed to join special forces units.

There just isn’t enough room on a submarine to install separate bathroom facilities for women and men, she said. In the case of special forces, menstrual cycles can affect how long women can hide out in the field without bathroom facilities.

In the service, she explained, women, just like men, are trained to care about the success of the group above any individual concerns.

“As soon as sexual equality interferes with the mission, then it becomes less important,” she said.

To Mrs. Parks, who helps run the National Medal of Honor Museum of Military History in Chattanooga, the integration of women in the military will progress only at the pace society allows.

“I think it’s right up there with boy babies wrapped in blue and girl babies wrapped in pink,” she said. “It almost all comes back to our society, and what our society is ready and willing to accept.”

The military actually represents a good cross-section of the American public, said Lory Manning, a retired Navy captain and director of the Women in the Military Project for the Women’s Research and Education Institute in Washington, D.C.

Attitudes toward women in military ranks vary from age group to age group, she said.

“Among the younger generations, so many of them have grown up playing sports with women and that kind of thing that it’s just not that big a deal,” she said.

Proving themselves

A lot of it has to do with women proving they can back up fellow service members in a jam, said Cadet Evelyn Hall, a three-year Army reservist and junior in the ROTC program at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

“I always gather all the females together at the beginning of the semester and say, ‘They will look at you and assume that you’ll take everything personally and cry about everything. Don’t take it personally,’” Cadet Hall said.

It’s this sense of camaraderie that helps women get through the tough times, she said. But women can undercut each other just as easily, she added.

During boot camp, Cadet Hall remembers seeing women “who would smile their way through training, and that’s very frustrating.”

Others would let men step in and help them with physical tasks such as digging foxholes, she recalled, enabling and encouraging the very gender stereotypes most military women struggle to overcome.

That’s why, if there is any difference at all in training women, it would be that female service members need a little extra boost of confidence, Maj. Lee-Wood said.

“Really, it’s all about self-confidence and self-esteem,” she said. “That kind of thread is weaved through recruit training.”


By the NUMBERs

199,000: Active duty female service members

14.3: Percent of females in active duty forces

150,588: Females in the National Guard and reserve forces

17.8: Percent of females in Guard and reserve forces

Source: Department of Defense


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Women waging war


By:
Lauren Gregory (Contact)
Sunday, March 22, 2009

By:
Lauren Gregory (Contact)


When Evelyn Hall first approached Army recruiters three years ago, they told her she’d make a great cook or maybe even a judge advocate general in an office somewhere.

She just laughed.

“I don’t want to be a secretary. I want to serve my country,” the 26-year-old University of Tennessee at Chattanooga junior said.

She signed an eight-year contract with the Army Reserve in 2006 and now is training to become an officer through the school’s ROTC program.

“I still wear toenail polish under my boots sometimes when I’m not supposed to, but when it comes down to it, I’m like, ‘Let’s get down and dirty,’” Cadet Hall said.

Department of Defense and Army policy prohibits women from serving on the front lines of combat, but in the war on terror, those front lines are not clearly defined.

Cadet Hall said her job with the Chattanooga-based 212th Transportation Company is every bit as risky as being on the front lines of an infantry battalion because convoys carrying supplies are a popular target for insurgent attacks.

Army Pfc. Stephaine Patterson, a Dalton, Ga., native said though women have been integrated into wartime missions since the 1940s, the long-standing policy on women in combat reflects another time.

“I understand why they started this before, but this is a different day of age and we have better resources then we did back then,” she wrote in an e-mail from Iraq.

Pfc. Patterson is a Dalton, Ga., native and the only woman deployed with her unit, the Army Reserve’s 591st Transportation Detachment.

Evolving policy

Lory Manning, a retired Navy captain, said the concept of warfare has evolved, as well.

“The policy on women in ground combat dates back to the early 1990s, and it’s based on Cold War-era, or even World War II-era, principles of warfare,” said Ms. Manning, who serves as director of the Women in the Military Project for the Washington, D.C.-based Women’s Research and Education Institute.

“It assumes a very definitive front line, and that you’re fighting another sizable army that’s like yourself,” she said.

That makes little sense in a war in which every service member — male or female, infantry or noninfantry — is vulnerable to insurgent attacks using improvised explosive devices and suicide bombers.

The policy has become an issue primarily in the Army because that service branch now makes up most of the ground forces in the Middle East, according to Ms. Manning.

“What the Army has done to avoid getting ensnared in that political nightmare is leave it up to the ground commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan to make that decision,” she said.

In line of fire

So while a woman can’t be assigned to a combat unit, she could be “attached” to that unit if needed. In effect, she could be in the same area as a combat unit but technically reporting to a different chain of command.

A 2007 Rand Corp. study noted this discrepancy.

“Neither the letter nor the spirit of the policies is clear,” concluded Margaret Harrell, a senior social scientist at Rand and the lead author of the report.

The report stopped short of making any explicit recommendations, Ms. Manning said, but the implication is that leadership should clarify its policy. To make a change, military officials would have to notify Congress to create a new law on the issue.

Defense department officials maintain the existing policy is working fine.

“The policy has long and successfully balanced opportunities for women to pursue challenging careers, despite a clear limit on any assignment to ground combat units,” said Pentagon spokeswoman Eileen Lainez.

“Women will continue to be assigned to units and positions that may necessitate combat actions within the scope of their restricted positioning — situations for which they are fully trained and equipped to respond,” she said.

Elaine Donnelly, president of the Michigan-based nonprofit Center for Military Readiness, agreed.

“To treat (women) equally would be unfair,” said Ms. Donnelly, pointing to physical differences between the sexes. “We’re proud of the service of women in our military, but where you get into problems is when you try to pretend that the men and women are interchangeable.”

Patricia Canerdy, who deployed to Iraq with the Chattanooga-based Army Reserve 591st Transportation Detachment in 2004 but since has retired to manage the unit as a civilian, said existing rules are OK for some women, but not all.

Individual capabilities are more important than gender, according to Mrs. Canerdy, a Flat Rock, Ala., resident who said she saw just as many weak men as weak women during her deployment.

Case by case

“If I were going to rewrite the rules, I think I would open (combat jobs) up to everyone on a case-by-case basis,” Mrs. Canerdy said.

Cadet Hall agreed but said she realizes she’s still going to have to go the extra mile to prove herself to some of her male colleagues. Though attitudes toward female service members have evolved, she said, there are some men who simply “hide (sexist attitudes) in this whole facade they call chivalry.”

“We can do a lot, but there’s still a lot of red tape,” she said.

Certain jobs such as field artillery require signing a contract that essentially says a woman should understand that males probably will be promoted faster than she will, Cadet Hall noted.

“If they would give us a chance, they would be amazed,” she said.

BY THE NUMBERS

* 73,390: Female veterans in Georgia

* 38,009: Female veterans in Tennessee

* 34,155: Female veterans in Alabama

* 1,802,491: Total female veterans

Source: Department of Veterans Affairs

* 102: Women killed during Operation Iraqi Freedom

* 602: Women wounded in action during OIF

* 14: Women killed during Operation Enduring Freedom

* 18: Women wounded in action during OEF

Source: Department of Defense

WOMEN IN THE MILITARY

* 1942: The military creates women’s branches in each of the armed services.

* 1948: Congress passes the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act.

* 1973: Recruiting goals for women begin to increase with the abolishment of the draft.

* 1974: Army women become eligible for aviation duty in noncombat aircraft.

* 1980: Congress passes the Defense Officer Manpower Personnel Management Act, which abolishes separate appointment, promotion, accounting and separation procedures for women service members.

* 1988: The Department of Defense Risk Rule sets a single standard for excluding women from positions and units, allowing 30,000 new positions to open for them.

* 1994: The DOD Risk Rule is rescinded, opening 32,700 new Army positions and 48,000 new Marine Corps positions to women.

* 1998: Women aviators fly in operational combat missions for the first time.

Sources: New York Times Magazine, Women’s Research & Education Institute, www.history.com


Ellie