Women in combat: an open secret in military

As the convoy rumbled up the road in Iraq, Spc. Veronica Alfaro was struck by the beauty of fireflies dancing in the night. Then she heard the pinging of tracer rounds and, in a Baghdad moment, realized the insects were illuminated bullets.

She jumped from behind the wheel of her gun truck, grabbed her medical bag and sprinted 50 yards to a stalled civilian truck. On the way, bullets kicked up dust near her feet. She pulled the wounded driver to the ground and got to work.

Despite her best efforts, the driver died, but her actions that January night last year earned Alfaro a Bronze Star for valor. She had already received a combat-action badge for fending off insurgents as a machine gunner.

"I did everything there," Alfaro, 25, said of her time in Iraq. "I gunned. I drove. I ran as a truck commander. And underneath it all, I was a medic."

Before 2001, the nation's military women had rarely seen ground combat. Their jobs kept them mostly away from enemy lines, as military policy dictates.

But the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, often fought in marketplaces and alleyways, have changed that. In both countries, women repeatedly have proved their mettle in combat. The number of high-ranking women and women who command all-male units has climbed considerably, along with their status in the military.

"Iraq has advanced the cause of full integration for women in the Army by leaps and bounds," said Peter Mansoor, a retired Army colonel who served as executive officer to Gen. David Petraeus while he was the top U.S. commander in Iraq. "They have earned the confidence and respect of male colleagues."

Their success, widely known in the military, remains largely hidden from public view. In part, this is because their most challenging work is often the result of a quiet circumvention of military policy. Women are barred from joining combat branches such as the infantry, armor, Special Forces and most field artillery units, and from doing support jobs while living with those smaller units. Women can lead some male troops into combat as officers, but they cannot serve with them in battle.

Yet over and over, in Iraq and Afghanistan, Army commanders have resorted to bureaucratic trickery when they needed more soldiers for crucial jobs, such as bomb disposal and intelligence. On paper, for instance, women have been "attached" to a combat unit rather than "assigned."

This change has not come seamlessly, and it has altered military culture on the battlefield in ways large and small. Women need separate bunks and bathrooms. They face sexual discrimination and rape, and counselors and rape kits are common in war zones. Commanders also confront a new reality: Soldiers have sex, and some will be quickly evacuated because they are pregnant.

Nonetheless, as soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, women have done nearly as much in battle as their male counterparts: patrolled streets with machine guns, served as gunners on vehicles, disposed of explosives and driven trucks down bomb-ridden roads. They have proved indispensable in their ability to interact with and search Iraqi and Afghan women for weapons, a job men cannot do for cultural reasons. The Marine Corps has created revolving units — "lionesses" — dedicated to just this task.

A small number of women have conducted raids, engaging the enemy directly in total disregard of existing policies.

Many experts, including David Barno, a retired lieutenant general who commanded forces in Afghanistan; Mansoor, who now teaches military history at The Ohio State University; and John Nagl, a retired lieutenant colonel who helped write the Army's new counterinsurgency field manual, said it is only a matter of time before regulations that have restricted women's participation in war will be adjusted to meet the reality forged during the past eight years.

The Marine Corps, which is overwhelmingly male and designed for combat, recently opened two more categories of intelligence jobs to women, recognizing the value of their work in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In gradually admitting women to combat, the United States will be catching up to the rest of the world. More than a dozen countries allow women in some or all ground-combat occupations. Among those pushing boundaries most aggressively is Canada, which has recruited women for the infantry and sent them to Afghanistan.

But the U.S. military may be ahead of Congress, where opening ground-combat jobs to women has met deep resistance.

Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, a group that opposes fully integrating women into the Army, said women were doing these jobs with no debate and no congressional approval.

"I fault the Pentagon for not being straight with uniformed women," said Donnelly, who supported unsuccessful efforts by some in Congress in 2005 to restrict women's roles in these wars. "It's an 'anything goes' situation."

Poll numbers, however, show a majority of the public supports allowing women to do more on the battlefield. Fifty-three percent of the respondents in a New York Times/CBS News poll in July said they would favor permitting women to "join combat units, where they would be directly involved in the ground fighting."

The successful experiences of military women in Iraq and Afghanistan are being used to bolster the efforts of groups that favor letting gay soldiers serve openly. Those opposed to such change say permitting service members to state their sexual orientation would disrupt the cohesion of a unit and lead to harassment and sexual liaisons, arguments also used against allowing women to serve alongside men. But women in Iraq and Afghanistan have debunked many of those fears.

"They made it work with women, which is more complicated in some ways, with sex-segregated facilities and new physical-training standards," said David Stacy, a lobbyist with the Human Rights Campaign, a group working for gay equality. "If the military could make that work with good discipline and order, certainly integrating open service of gay and lesbians is within their capability."

Men still make up the vast majority of the 5,000 war deaths since 2001; nearly 4,000 have been killed by enemy action. But 121 women have died, 66 killed in combat. The rest died in nonhostile action, which includes accidents, illness, suicide and "friendly fire." And 620 women have been wounded.

Despite long-standing fears about how the public would react to women coming home in coffins, Americans have responded no differently than to those of men who have died, analysts said. That is a reflection of changing social mores but also a result of the growing number of women — more than 356,000 today — who serve in the armed forces, including the Reserves and the National Guard, 16 percent of the total. Overall, women say the gains they made in Iraq and Afghanistan have overshadowed the challenges they faced in a combat zone.

"As horrible as this war has been, I fully believe it has given women so many opportunities in the military," said Linsay Rousseau Burnett, who was one of the first women to serve as a communication specialist with a brigade combat team in Iraq. "Before, they didn't have the option."

The rules governing what jobs military women can hold often seem contradictory or muddled. Women, for instance, can serve as machine gunners on Humvees but cannot operate Bradleys, the Army's armored fighting vehicle. They can work with some long-range artillery but not short-range ones. Women can walk Iraq's dangerous streets as members of the military police but not as members of the infantry.

They can lead combat engineers in war zones as officers but cannot serve among them. This was the case for Maj. Kellie McCoy, 34, who is slightly more than 5 feet tall. As a captain in 2003 and 2004, she served as the first female engineer company commander in the 82nd Airborne Division and led a platoon of combat engineers in Iraq.

On Sept. 14, 2003, her four-vehicle convoy drove into an ambush. It was attacked by roadside bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and small-weapons fire. Three soldiers were wounded. As one of the wounded stood in the middle of the road, bloody and in shock, McCoy ran through enemy fire to get him, discharging her M4 as she led him back to her vehicle. Then, she and the others returned to the "kill zone" to rescue the remaining soldiers. Insurgents shot at them from 15 feet away. But, eventually, all 12 soldiers piled into one four-seat Humvee and sped away.

McCoy received a Bronze Star for valor and, most important for her, the admiration of her troops. "I think my actions cemented their respect for me," she wrote in an e-mail from Iraq. "I worked hard to earn their respect."

As an officer, McCoy's assignment followed the letter and the spirit of the regulations.

But in other cases, the rules were bent to get women into combat positions.

In 2004 and 2005, Michael Baumann, now a retired lieutenant colonel, commanded 30 enlisted women and six female officers as part of a unit patrolling in the Rashid district of Baghdad, an extremely dangerous area at the time.

On paper, he followed military policy. The women were technically assigned to a separate chemical company of the division. In reality, they were core members of his field artillery battalion. Baumann said the women trained and fought alongside his male soldiers. Everyone from Baumann's commanders to the commanding general knew their true function, he said.

"We had to take everybody," said Baumann, 46, who wrote a book about his time in Iraq called "Adjust Fire: Transforming to Win in Iraq." "Nobody could be spared to do something like support."

Brought up as an old-school Army warrior, Baumann said he had seriously doubted women could physically handle infantry duties, citing the weight of the armor and the gear, the heat of Baghdad and the harshness of combat.

"I found out differently," said Baumann, now chief financial officer for St. Paul Public Schools in Minnesota. "Not only could they handle it, but in the same way as males. I would go out on patrols every single day with my battalion. I was with them. I was next to them. I saw with my own eyes. I had full trust and confidence in their abilities."

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Baghdad.