How does one define honor for women in combat? (Should mothers be marching to war as a norm)

Of course, it was bound to happen. Casualties of war are inevitable. And although we have not as a nation reached the point of actually sending women directly into combat, we now send them so close to the front that it is unavoidable that some of those captured or killed by the enemy will be young women.

Women such as 19-year-old Jessica Lynch, missing in action, an Army supply clerk whose convoy made a wrong turn into an ambush, the same ambush that led to the capture of 30-year-old Shoshana Johnson.

Every human being is made in the image of God, male or female. Every casualty of war is a tragedy, and the sacrifice of every American who serves in our military deserves public honor.

And yet the emotions aroused by our national sacrifice, made by those like Jessica and Shoshana, will not fit into a nice, neat box. Is there time, in the midst of war, to take them out and examine them?

"She really loved small kids. That's what makes it so bad," Greg Lynch, Jessica's father, told the New York Post. What makes it really bad for Dad is thinking of the children this warm West Virginia country girl may never have. Future mothers of America marching to war?

Shoshana Johnson is a mother, a single mother of a 2-year-old child. Family members describe Shoshana as a woman who loves cooking and caring for her baby girl. They were shocked to see Shoshana on television, wounded and in enemy hands: "I thought she was cooking," said one of her aunts. In war, of course, even cooks are in danger.

On the eve of the first battle, The New York Times published the photos of 12 marines -- seven of them were women. Nice try. In reality, the images shooting from our television screens affirm that in this, as in every single war known to human history, the bulk of the fighting, the killing and the dying is done by men.

But the majority of women in uniform are either single mothers like Shoshana or married to a fellow soldier. When they go to war, they make a sacrifice of a kind most men in uniform do not: They leave their babies and small children behind, with no parent to care for them. Their children are orphans for the duration; some will be orphans for the rest of their small lives. What do we make of this special feminine sacrifice?

There is the public reaction and the private one. We are all in these women's debt, because they have chosen to serve their country. I pray for their safe return, as for every American soldier. As an American and a citizen, I honor their service.

As a mother and a woman I inwardly recoil. Don't leave your babies, something within me cries, but to whom? Of course these mothers have no choice. They cannot desert their country. Yet if manly honor has always depended on a willingness to die for one's country, a woman's honor has consisted in living for her children. Where in the logic of war is there room for that reality, the deepest truth I know?

I do not know how to reconcile these two levels. A man is more manly because he does a soldier's work, but is a woman more womanly? Do I want a society in which other women admire mothers marching to war?

The battle resumes. There is work to be done. Get back in your box, warring unseemly emotions.

Bring them home, God, every son and daughter of America. Bring them home, victorious, and grant us peace

There are many lessons learned in GWII. Our support troops are trained, equipped and organized for a fixed front war where supply lines are secured in rear areas. The Army envisioned by Rumsfeld is force that fights like a soccer team. It is suppose to move and flow without rest or front line. Under this concept, rear support units must also be security/light infantry units. That means they need to be physically fit as front line infantry and need heavier weapons/vehicles as front line units. Currently they are neither. Furthermore, many of these support units have female personnel. In close combat, hand to hand combat and bayonet fighting can occur. When rear echelon troops physical standards are lowered to qualify more females, couple with light vehicles and weapons, against a fanatical irregular force, you are going to suffer from the self inflicted PC tactical disadvantages. After this war, the Dept of the Army better increase the physical standard and warfighter proficiency of the rear echelon support troops and review the need to have females accompany them on the future mobile, fluid battlefield of the 21st Century.

After this war, the Dept of the Army better increase the physical standard and warfighter proficiency of the rear echelon support troops and review the need to have females accompany them on the future mobile, fluid battlefield of the 21st Century.

Authoress Maggie Gallagher made an emotive argument -- "our children need us" -- and you made a rational one, that the battlefield doesn't. Underneath both is the same insight, that biological differentiation demands that males be engaged in this activity, and women in family formation and child-rearing.

There is a further, genetic or sociobiological argument why women shouldn't be involved in combat areas at all: society simply needs them, when they are in their physical prime, to be making babies, not making war, or holding jobs, or anything else. Parenting is a fulltime job, and it was already a compromise of children's upbringing in the 18th century when the Industrial Age started pulling dads out of the home from dawn to dusk, and sending them home dog-tired after a 12-hour day of hard physical labor. It was clearly an abuse, agreed by all but the guilty, when mine owners hired entire families and used the kids to haul sacks of coal in the narrowest seams.

The great Victorian reform commissions of Great Britain cut their teeth on rank abuses like child labor, but now "they're baaaaaack!" And women are being sucked into the workplace in their millions and billions, to the detriment of their children's upbringing. More abusive still is the likelihood that career trajectories and the hazards of military service in combat will forefend many of the "best" women's bearing children -- ever.

Women astronauts like Eileen Collins, who is the ex- Air Force colonel (high hours in transports) who is scheduled to go up next as commander in Atlantis, whenever her mission finally goes, took time in between flights to have two kids within the last five years, somehow while she was logging a fairly busy schedule as an astronaut pilot (up last year in Columbia, in its last mission but two). Astronaut Amy Fisher, an MD who served as a landing-site medico on many of the early shuttle missions, took a five-year sabbatical from astronaut training and duties to raise her family: her "mommy-track" choice is reflected in the fact that, despite being one of the senior astronauts (class of '77, IIRC) and still fully qualified on paper, she hasn't been up. Here are two different tracks for working women in a hazardous environment, but we have no data on which way of handling the career/parenting/hazardous duty juggle is better for the children. So far we've lost three female career astronauts (not slighting Christa McAuliffe), Kalpana Chawla, Judith Resnick, and Laurel Clark; of these three tremendously gifted women, only Clark left a child. That is not a good track record of posterity. I expect to see similar patterns among female military personnel, if we keep having serious conflicts every 10 or 20 years.

I hate to tell you this-those same lessons you speak of were pointed out in numerous post GW1 surveys done by DoD (I got to study many of these while doing papers on the subject of women in combat while in university). Guess what-nothing changed, and standards have continually dropped. I now serve as an officer in these rear-echelon units after serving as an enlisted infantryman right after the end of Desert Storm. The standard of general military skills (basic soldier skills, SMCT, ect...) is horribly low, and due to the type of missions that most support units do, very little time exists for basic combat skills training. Ask any leader in any support unit that is worth any salt, and they will tell you that trying to increase training and discipline standards in the most PC dominated area of the military is about as sucessfull (sp?) as trying to dig a hole to China with a plastic butter knife.
take care

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