HOW SHE SEES IT Women prove they can handle combat

By ROBYN BLUMNER
TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES
America's first GI Jane was Deborah Sampson, who at 21 bound her breasts and enlisted in the army under the name Robert Shurtleff, claiming to be a 15-year-old boy. The year was 1782, and Sampson fought alongside men in the Revolutionary War until a fever forced a trip to the hospital where her gender was discovered. She was granted an honorable discharge and later a veteran's pension.
Today, women don't have to go all "Yentl" to join the military. According to Maj. Elizabeth Robbins, an Army spokeswoman, 91 percent of all Army jobs are available to women. Yet, more than 200 years since Sampson, women are still legally barred from the infantry and other ground combat posts. Call it the khaki ceiling.
Conventional thinking says women are not supposed to face the enemy on the battlefield. Women soldiers are thought to harm the morale of men by undercutting unit cohesion due to sexual competition -- women must pay the price for male lust. And they are considered at a physical disadvantage due to a lack of upper-body strength -- although carrying an M-16 and wearing bulletproof Kevlar goes a long way toward compensating for a lack of bulging biceps.
But despite all the carefully written laws and official rules intended to keep women out of land- based combat, the reality on the ground is that women soldiers are increasingly confronting the enemy and taking fire. The terms thrown around for the war theaters of Iraq and Afghanistan are "nonlinear" or "360-degree" battlefields. Whatever the nomenclature, women in U.S. Army uniforms are getting shot at and bombed in the course of their duties. So far, more than 30 women have been killed in Iraq, with at least 23 combat-related deaths.
But rather than applaud the bravery of the 17,000 women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, Republican members of the House Armed Services Committee are trying to throw a roadblock in the path of women's expanding military roles.
As part of the legislation approving the next fiscal year's military programs, the committee added an amendment that would limit the jobs women can perform. The Army would have to report to Congress any time it wanted to expand combat-related assignments for women soldiers. The effort was pushed by Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., chair of the committee, who said through a statement that "the nation should not put women into the front lines of combat."
President Bush said essentially the same thing in January, when he stated flatly that there should be "no women in combat."
Dangerous work
These must be laughably out-of-touch statements to the women soldiers serving in Iraq, where the jobs assigned to them are some of the most dangerous.
Women soldiers patrol the streets as military police, entering homes to search for insurgents and weapons stashes. They are assigned to highly vulnerable checkpoints, so that female Iraqis can be searched by a woman. And they move supplies in large convoys, where IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, are a constant danger. Bush's and Hunter's exhortations indicate they have little understanding of the fight we're in. There are no front lines in a battle against an insurgency. Virtually every posting involves mortal danger and the risk of live-fire engagement with the enemy.
Just ask Elizabeth Vasquez, who told the Sacramento Bee that every convoy mission she was on in Iraq took hostile fire. "We had a gun truck on every run, with a machine gunner sitting half in and half out of the top of the Humvee," Vasquez told the Bee. "And sometimes those gunners were women."
Maj. Mary Prophit told The Washington Post how in January, after a roadside bomb detonated as her convoy passed, she placed herself -- while firing -- between the medic treating the wounded and the insurgents who were shooting at them.
Back in the 1970s, when the Equal Rights Amendment was being considered, the bogeyman trotted out by the likes of Phyllis Schlafly and other opponents was the specter of women in combat. Since then, women soldiers have proved their bravery and valor in just those circumstances. It is time to acknowledge, accept and even celebrate the women in uniform who -- regardless of what the rules say -- are standing shoulder to shoulder with men, putting their lives on the line.