Turning women into cannon fodder

You couldn't help but be elated upon hearing that Pfc. Jessica Lynch was rescued. But it was a little like the relief that parents experience before the anger sets in after junior has done a death-defying stunt and lived to tell about it.

Many brave men risked their lives to save Pfc. Lynch following an Iraqi man's report that a woman soldier was being tortured at a hospital. We still don't know what the Iraqis did to her. The two broken legs and spinal injury indicate torture. No word on whether she was sexually assaulted as well. Her comrades, most of them men, did not fare as well, with nearly a dozen bodies found.

Instead of shaking off our '60s feminist hangover and vowing to end the lunacy of sending young women like Miss Lynch into harm's way, you'd think her brutalization was actually a good thing.

Gen. Wilma Vaught, the harridan who wants to draft our daughters and put them into combat, gushed that Miss Lynch reportedly took out some Iraqis on the way to being captured, so this proves women ought to be in the front lines.

Liberals like the terminally grimacing Patricia Schroeder echoed the call, saying it is time to end all combat exemptions for women, since, in our enlightened way, we are not supposed to care that wives and daughters are turned into hamburger by enemy troops.

Liberalism has a remarkable record for worsening any situation. Are welfare programs destroying black families and creating poverty and crime in the nation's cities? Throw more money at them to snag even more people into a failed system! Does gun control exacerbate crime by disarming innocent citizens? Press for tighter controls!

On the military front, the armed forces have been in full retreat from liberal feminists. If the Navy's Tailhook sex scandal during the '90s proved anything, it is that men and women mixed tightly together will create spontaneous combustion. Instead of admitting this simple truth, feminists used Tailhook to "out" recalcitrant traditionalists who opposed putting women closer to combat. Naval officers who could fearlessly face down enemy fire cowered before the, uh, ladies.

The same folly was at work recently at the Air Force Academy, where several female cadets reported sexual assaults by male cadets. The Academy's response? They took down the big letters over a stone arch that read: "Bring Me Men." That's right, men. Real men. The kind that don't assault women and who think that protecting women from harm is one of the duties that God assigned them. Let's opt for androgyny instead.

The more that we buy into the fiction that women are indistinguishable from men, the more we sleepwalk into an unfolding disaster.

Forget about Miss Lynch for a moment. How about Pfc. Lori Ann Peistewa, the first U.S. servicewomen killed in Iraq? She left behind two preschool kids, aged 3 and 4. Her body was found at the site where Miss Lynch was rescued. Or how about Shoshana Johnson, a single mother of a 2-year-old? We have not heard anything about her since the Iraqis released a haunting photo of her frightened face, along with those of some male comrades.

"Jessica was a clerk, essentially a secretary, doing yeoman's work, I might add," said Martha Kleder, a Culture and Family Institute policy analyst who served with the Air Force in Alaska. "Shoshana Johnson joined the Army to be a cook. Today, no woman is safe in the military. There are no more rear-support jobs. All women should expect to be made cannon fodder. Thanks, Pat Schroeder, thanks for your utter glee that these women who only wanted to serve their country in rear-support jobs are now facing hostile enemy fire."

Political correctness at the Pentagon hangs in the air like Napalm smoke. At the press conference announcing Miss Lynch's rescue, the spokesman lauded her as a "brave woman," and then turned to give credit to her rescuers. "We have to remember" – and then he paused ever so slightly – "the brave souls" who risked their lives to save Miss Lynch. Had he used the term "brave men," it would have clarified the absurdity of putting Miss Lynch near the front lines in the first place.

Americans are probably largely unaware that women are prohibited from being on the front lines, a policy increasingly being broken by our gender-neutral military.

The practice of turning women into cannon fodder got a huge boost when the Clinton administration largely dispensed with the "risk rule," which exempts women from jobs in which they are likely to face enemy fire. Although women are still not technically in combat, it sure looks like they are.

Take 2nd Lt. Sarah Ewing Skinner, for instance. With her "finger on the trigger of her M-16, [she] gives the order to move forward as troops under her command prepared to storm 20 derelict buildings where die-hard Iraqi defenders may have taken refuge," the Associated Press reports in an article headlined "Not for men only." Now isn't that special? Women are supposed to be exempted from combat, and yet they are going house to house just like the grizzled Vic Morrow and his squad in the old "Combat" TV show.

The loophole is that they are serving as military police, and those squads have been ordered to do dangerous cleanup work that looks a lot like combat. In fact, it is combat.

"In Iraq, this stuff includes escorting supply convoys through ambush-prone areas, sweeping villages for weapons, arresting Iraqis hostile to U.S. forces and handling prisoners of war," AP said. Pvt. Kristi Grant, a military policewoman, told AP, "I guess the only thing is that I can't lift some of the same things males do, but I try." How would you like to be her comrade, wounded and in need of being dragged to safety? A good try wouldn't cut it.

There are some other key physical differences between the sexes, but you would never know it from the AP report. Sex means nothing: "She quickly got over her initial anxiety about being squeezed into a tent with male soldiers and discovered 'we were much like one family.'" Nothing about the jealousy, broken marriages and fights that erupted during the Gulf War when men and women were billeted together. Do any parents really want their 20-year-old daughter sleeping in a tent with a bunch of men?

"Women are treated like trash, they're objects in the service," said former Marine Cpl. Carmelo Torres. "They may talk PC, but it's a different story behind closed doors. Women are treated like dirt."

Torres recalls being stationed at the Quantico Marine base in Virginia and seeing staff sergeants picking out attractive young women and declaring them off-limits to other men. "In the women's barracks, the women were being sexually harassed by the lesbians when they weren't being hit on by the men," he said. "Two of the lesbians got new recruits drunk so they could gang-rape them in the women's barracks."

This is not about military women's willingness to serve their country, which is commendable, or their bravery. America owes much to its women service members.

But they shouldn't be in combat. First, they are the bearers of life and the heart of family life, an utterly indispensable role. When America sends young women off to war, watching them kiss their toddlers goodbye, we are making a moral choice that children are just not important anymore. It is much more important to drive a military truck. This callousness is an outgrowth of the abortion culture in which human life itself is cheapened. Any job those women do could be done by a man, but nobody else can be a mother to her children. It is bad enough for children to lose their father, but it is utterly unnecessary for them to lose their mother. Raising children is the most important job in society, and yet it takes a back seat to feminist ambitions to pursue sameness in the name of equality.

Second, women lack the upper-body strength, endurance and speed of men, which, despite all the talk of "push-button wars," can be crucial in battle. As Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness has said, "Women don't have an equal ability to survive on the battlefield."

Third, although some feminists claim that they have a right to serve if they want to, military service is a privilege and a duty – not a right. The armed forces bar numerous classes of people, regardless of individual ability, because they could have a negative impact. Homosexuals are a case in point. Putting women into combat endangers all of our daughters because in the 1986 case Rostker v. Goldberg, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that women could not be drafted because they did not serve in combat, and that Congress had the power only to raise armies to fight wars. A few feminists in the front lines could destroy that exemption.

Fourth, women have a profound effect on men. In 1948, the Israelis put women soldiers into the front lines, but had to pull them after a few weeks. Discipline broke down, morale plummeted and men ignored orders, rushing instead to protect the women. Some men lost their sanity when they saw women being blown apart. These men must have been chauvinist pigs.

The Israelis quickly grasped that women have no business being in combat, and that is their policy to this day. They train women for emergency situations, removing them if combat begins. But we have brushed aside that lesson. We are actually training men to ignore their noble impulse of being protectors. The Navy introduced a program a few years ago in which men were conditioned to endure the cries of women being tortured. The other services have adopted these programs as well. This is progress?

Imagine what these men will be like when the war is over and they return to civilian life. Do we really want thousands of men among us who are indifferent to women's cries of pain? That's a recipe for domestic violence and rape. The floodtide of pornography only makes it worse. But liberals like porn. It's religion they despise. As C.S. Lewis said, the social goal of liberals is to make religion private and pornography public.

It is barbaric to allow pornography to permeate our entire culture, and it is barbaric to put women in combat, even if they are fool enough to want to go.

We're glad that Miss Lynch made it to safety, but we would like to see the larger question addressed. What was she doing there in the first place?

There have been over 145 combat related deaths in Iraqi Freedom. All were volunteers, all knew what they were getting in to, and all were tragic. Why is the loss of Pvt. Piestawa's any worse the men's? I would rather none of them died in the service of their country. But I value the service of the women and mourn their loss exactly as much as their male counterparts.

You reveal that you want women to die on the front lines because you are too much of a craven coward to do the job yourself. If I could get my hands on you, you'd shed plenty tears for them.

No, it is not that I am a coward, but that I am a bitter young white man who sees no true happiness or success in the future thanks to political correctness, socialist schools/colleges, socialist/government supported and created anti-white/anti-male laws (including the draft), and increasingly higher taxes (mainly social-security) which I will be forced to pay so that some old geezers can live it up without working.

And to top it all off all the stress created by all this will probably send me to a early grave, via a heart-attack. I doubt I will live to see 40.

Now taking all this into account, I could careless about women who WILLINGLY join the military and know the risks that job brings.

What part of orders don't you understand? Your choices end when you join the military.

Which they know when they VOLUNTEER for military service. Only about 11% of the military is women. Which means that the vast vast vast majority of women don't VOLUNTEER for military service. The ones who do volunteer know the risks, as do the men.

What part of orders don't you understand? Your choices end when you join the military.

"But if you raise the standards to be equal between the sexes"

The standards are lower for women so more women can pass basic training.The services have quota's to fill too, you know.And of course they don't want to be accused of being sexist for not allowing females to pass just because of the pesky fact that most aren't up to standard.(the male standard that is)
My husband sends home at least 15-20 guys a cycle for not measuring up to standard in basic infantry training here at FT.Benning.
It would be great if the females were tested as rigorously and held to the same high standard as males, instead of being allowed to slide just because they're "a girl".

Perhaps I failed to initially grasp the depths of subtlety of your sarcasm, or perhaps I felt that the item in question should have been obvious.

It should be obvious to all that if married men were excluded from the military there would be virtually no military; and if there were, it would definitely be a Junior Varsity.

I want women in the military, the more, the better. The more non-combat jobs they can fill, the more men are freed up to go to combat. Combat support units count as combat.

There most certainly are some very rare women who could be just as capable as almost any man in combat, and I would not be so presumptuous as to say I could set that standard. But a vast majority of women do not have the physical or emotional make-up that men have for combat.

I have never seen a man(though I have heard of it)cry in front of everybody when criticized sternly, but every woman I have seen has cried. If you have not noticed the difference in physical characteristics between men and women, you need to get out more.

"Take 2nd Lt. Sarah Ewing Skinner, for instance. With her "finger on the trigger of her M-16, [she] gives the order to move forward as troops under her command prepared to storm 20 derelict buildings where die-hard Iraqi defenders may have taken refuge," the Associated Press reports in an article headlined "Not for men only." Now isn't that special? Women are supposed to be exempted from combat, and yet they are going house to house just like the grizzled Vic Morrow and his squad in the old "Combat" TV show"

I agree with everything you posted. It seems in all of these articles the writers never ask the women soldiers their opinion. Why? Let's find out what Lt Skinner thinks.

They probably don't want to hear the answer.

When one enlists, he/she is under orders for anything doing. I agree that a woman going into the military is volunteering but should know that at this point she can be "ordered into harms way" just the same as the man who volunteers. If either disobeys orders, then military discipline comes along and separates them from the service under less than honorable conditions.

The women in the support units in Iraq were ordered into harms way.

Chivalrous men regret the loss of female life moreso than male life. We are not ashamed of this. We are proud.

Professionals recognize other professionals, regardless of gender, and regret their loss equally. I had the privilage to serve with a number of women in the service, officers and enlisted alike. The overwhelming majority were competent, dedicated individuals capable of performing their duties as well as their male counterparts. I didn't believe that they needed any special protection, quite the contrary.

"Every soldier, male or female, in any combat arms or combat support unit should have a primary MOS of 11b. If you can't make the forced march with full ruck and gear, you can't be in those units.

The Army can learn something here from the Marine Corps."

Good Point! As I understand it, the revision to the "Risk Rule" as changed by Clinton/Aspin allowed women to be put in many combat support/combat service positions previously denied to them. This meant that women could be placed in such units at Division/Separate Brigade, units which by function are in combat areas. Along with this move came the pressure to have C0-ED basic in the services; pressure the USMC has wisely resisted. As denied by some here, there ARE separate standards for women in basic and throughout their service.

As has been proven in many situations, combat support and service support troops have been forced to fight as infantry. I agree that CS/CSS troops at division/brigade levels should be primarily trained as 11B.

There is a definite place for women in the military, but not in units where their presence interferes with combat/potential combat roles.

Regarding those who claim that Bush has done nothing about the status of women in combat: This administration has been rather busy since 9/11 to deal with all details. One promising move has been Rumsfield's action to redefine DACOWITS (Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Service) which has in the past been a notoriously feminist organization in the Shroeder tradition.

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