Posted on 05/29/2005 11:13:11 AM PDT by Crackingham
Maggie Williams and her daughter Sam Huff had much in common. As a teenager 35 years ago, Ms. Williams joined the US Marine Corps and became an air traffic controller, directing jet fighters and helicopters in Vietnam as the war there was winding down. Back in the United States, she began a career in law enforcement, married a police officer, and raised a family.
When she was just 16, Ms. Huff told her parents she wanted to join the US Army right out of high school, and later start a career with the FBI. She toughed out boot camp last year and then joined a military police unit driving Humvees through the mean streets of Iraq. But there the mother-daughter similarity ends. On April 18, Pfc. Huff's Humvee hit a roadside bomb in Baghdad, and she was killed. Posthumously awarded a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, she was buried at Arlington National Cemetery recently. She was 18.
As Memorial Day approaches, one might say that Maggie Williams and Sam Huff are bookends for the history of women in the US military in the modern era. As a marine, Williams did a job that was very traditionally male. Huff - the 37th (and latest) American woman to be killed in Iraq - epitomizes the current debate over whether women, even if they volunteer, should be fighting alongside men. Congress has been debating the issue this week. Some lawmakers want to assert more congressional control over Pentagon policies that have opened up more and more jobs to women in recent years, including those that increasingly put them in the thick of the shooting. Of the 37 women lost, 25 were from hostile causes such as rocket or grenade attacks, ambushes, and roadside bombs.
In a way, the job expansion is a pattern that has occurred since the Vietnam War: Women demonstrate excellence in such positions as fighter pilot, military police officer, and heavy equipment operator, and then are more likely to have perilous assignments - particularly during a recruiting shortage. Some welcome the opportunity; but some do not, according to surveys of women in uniform. Here, too, the changing nature of war seems to accelerate the pattern.
"Modern wars will be fought 360 degrees, which means women will be on the 'front lines' whether the Congress likes it or not," says retired Army Col. Dan Smith, a military analyst with the Friends Committee on National Legislation in Washington.
Though many servicemen in Afghanistan and Iraq have children, it is the mothers in the war zones who seem to raise greater concerns. (Army Pfc. Lori Ann Piestewa, the first American woman to be killed in Iraq, left two small children to be raised by their grandparents.) Until recent years, if a woman in uniform got pregnant or adopted a child, she had to leave the service. Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., says his parentsare a good example of what happened in the past. His father was an Army colonel who served with Gen. "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell in China. His mother was an Army major on Gen. Douglas MacArthur's staff during the occupation of Japan. They met in Korea and married.
"Some time later I was conceived and Mom got the boot, even though she appealed her involuntary retirement all the way to the Senate Armed Services Committee," recalls Dr. Thompson.
While the general trend toward more rights for women in the United States has advanced steadily in recent decades, those gains aren't necessarily exportable - particularly in wartime. Waging a counterinsurgency war in one of the world's most traditional societies is a reminder that American values cannot be the only factor shaping military policy, says Thompson.
"The first lesson of effective counterinsurgency is respect for local peoples and their cultures, so this could become a test of American flexibility," he adds.
"This is one case where it may not be feasible to honor American values and those of the people we propose to liberate at the same time," he says. "Our attitudes toward gender equality and relations between the sexes may simply be too different."
Illustrating this point is an Army Reserve unit based in Richmond, Va., which will soon go to Iraq to train Iraqi soldiers. They will leave behind some 20 female drill instructors because of such sensitivities.
"I understand each culture has different morals and customs, and I have to respect that," Staff Sgt. Stefania Traylor told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. "But on the other hand, it's quite different from our culture, so I do have a problem with that. If you are getting experience, knowledge, and guidance from an individual, it shouldn't matter whether you are male or female."
Those who argue otherwise note the physiological differences between men and women - for example, the upper-body strength necessary to operate some heavy weapons effectively or to pull a fallen comrade out of harm's way.
"To pretend that women would have an equal capability of doing that is a dangerous philosophy, and lives could be lost as a result of it," says Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness and one of the most outspoken critics of current military policy on women in war zones.
I kind of agree with the others too. I don't think women should be in combat situations. There is this movement to defemanize women and emasculate men. You get something milk-toast like in the middle. Yuk!
define a "combat situation" please.....
Do women belong in the thick of firefighting?
Do women belong in the thick of law enforcement?
Do women belong in the thick of (insert your favorite dangerous activity here)?
I believe that what is happening here is that men are feeling very threatened by the presence of girls in the club house. In my many years of experience fighting against this mindset, I am often reminded of Lord Peter Wimsey's observation that "Three fourths of chivalry is a desire of a man to have all the fun."
If a woman is physically incapable of doing a job, she ought not to do it. If a man is physically incapable of doing a job, he ought not to do it. A man who is five feet nothing and 98 lb. is not superior to a woman who is 5'10" and 165 lb. of solid muscle, merely due to the fact that he has a penis and she has none. This is not a question of male and female. It is a matter of ability to do a job.
If you don't want girls in your club house, why aren't you man enough to say so? And if women don't wish to serve, the Army is volunteer only and nobody will hold a gun on them and force them to leave their babies behind and go off to make the world safe for those babies. I really don't see the continuing problem here.
Agree totally and I am a woman also
Response: No.
Comment: However, nothing, absolutely nothing, can resist holy equality.
Since I do hear it when woman want to use unfair treatment to their advantage , and we don't have a need for breeders as does europe, I say treat em equal and put em in full combat...
Any country that is so degenerate as to have it's women do its fighting is not worth saving.
so, more or less, you don't want them in Iraq. My experience tells me the mission, as it stands right now, would be extremely difficult, if not impossible without women being in Iraq.
Sorry.
then leave
But I know you won't leave, you just want to scream and yell and act like someone gives 2 $hit$ about what you say....
Usually you are so nice to people who disagree with you.
I have had a nap and watched a show on the food channel about the Memphis in May BBQ since my last post to you and you are still going on.
I am going to watch the race, another place that women do not belong. ( in the race car, on the track) See Ya!!
You aren't "dating" yourself. Liberals are always using the term "setting back the clock" and other such useless phrases to criticize traditional values and morality.
Their reason? Social Darwinism. Time=progress, so in whatever direction society is going, it must be good, so let's hurry it up some more.
The reality is that women are NOT equal to men in many ways, and vice versa. Women cops should be doing office work or some other duties that don't require the skills and abilities that men are more likely to have, and same thing for firefighters and military.
Except for unusual cases, men are phsycially stronger, have more upper body strength, stronger grips, bigger hands, shoulders and more. They think better under stress, don't have PMS, periods, don't get pregnant, and don't obsess about their complexions, their fat, don't have to pluck their eyebrows or shave their legs.
Uni-sex crap is harming the military and law enforcement. Remember the a**hole that grabbed a gun from a (lady) cop in Atlanta, and went on a shooting rampage recently? The lady cop was 50 years old and about 5 feet tall.
Insanity. The relatives of those murdered should sue Atlanta justice department big time.
Political correctness in the realm of "gender equity" is total crap and ruins whatever it touches. It also gives girls and boys growing up weird ideas and practically forces them to try to go against their own natures. Girls used to dream about getting married and having babies; now they're ashamed to admit, even to themselves, that that's waht they want.
And boys are shamed about natural competitiveness and natural male aggression. So their natural agggression gets twisted into unhealthy areas.
Feminism is no lightweight evil, it's a biggie.
Really? I somehow doubt that statement. How many women got pregnant to avoid deployment or even got redeployed? Are abortions In-Theatre? What are the "Sick Call" ratios? Are the women still NOT pulling their own weight?
No !
1) I'm sure that the women that get pregnant are redeployed and not offered abortions. At West Point, female cadets are given a 'pass' to get abortions .... somehow I doubt if that works in Iraq.
2) How many of the 38-40 women KIA were pregnant? (Best guess would be at least some of them were...)
3) How many other soldiers have died as an indirect response to having to do 'double duty'?
I assume that you've been there and know what you are talking about.
Well, I've been there....22 years of military service and saw the encroachment of women's lib on the military. I observed some fine female soldiers and some who couldn't carry water in a bucket. I was mostly in Special Operations so your quote "A man who is five feet nothing and 98 lb. is not superior to a woman who is 5'10" and 165 lb. of solid muscle, merely due to the fact that he has a penis and she has none" had no relevance. Most cultures will not even talk to you if you DON'T have a penis. In the type of war we are now in you have to develop male relationships that evolve into trust. Women in a lot of cultures haven't reached that level and won't for several generations if at all. No caterwauling will change that.
Most 5'10" and 165 lb. women of solid muscle I've encountered in my service have been BAMs.
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