Canada Puts Women on Front Line : Combat: Many governments send women into combat during war. Canada, however, is recruiting women during peacetime.

CANADIAN FORCES BASE WAINWRIGHT, Alberta — Army Pvt. Pasqualina Petruzzi’s eyes were riveted on her drill instructor. “This is how to take out a sentry!” bellowed the instructor, using a husky young private for the demonstration. “Legs in front. Arm around neck until he chokes or until you break his neck. If you don’t have a knife, kick him in the back of the head. It takes three kicks to kill.”

“I love this part,” Petruzzi said later, sitting on the grass outside her field tent. “My friends were worried about me leaving the good stuff in civilian life. They said, ‘You’ll always have dirty fingernails.’ It didn’t bother me. I was never into makeup.”

The Montreal native--”Truzzi” to her buddies--was training to become a combat infantry soldier in the Canadian armed forces, a pioneer on the front lines of a political and military revolution that has stirred controversy in her country and attracted worldwide attention.

Canada, in a bold move that has pushed it to the leading edge of equal-rights movements, has abolished laws barring women from combat and earlier this year opened all military jobs, except on submarines, to females. Women now can serve as infantry troops, fighter pilots and sailors on navy destroyers.

Canada, like Norway, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands, thus has taken a political, military and social leap so radical that even the most ardent supporters of women’s equality in the armed forces of the United States hesitate to emulate out of fear of the reaction by Congress and the American people.

While many governments have sent women into combat during war or national crisis, the unusual peacetime initiatives in Canada and other nations to welcome women to front-line duty are the result of a wave of anti-discrimination laws and a declining pool of male recruits available for military service.

In Canada, a wave of new laws beginning with the 1978 Human Rights Act forced liberal new mandates on employers nationwide, from the private sector to the military. The law’s application to the issue of women in combat has proven the most difficult. There were dire predictions of rampant sex among the troops, a sudden decline in military readiness and a female force unable to survive the rigorous demands of a combat environment.

“I simply do not believe you can take a mixed ship’s company of young healthy Canadians off for several months without sexual relationships being formed, or for that matter an army formation in the field,” wrote retired Vice Adm. D.N. Mainguy, in the military journal, Legion. “When does the desire for a man or woman to protect their love start to interfere with combat performance?”

In response, the Canadian military plodded through a seemingly endless battery of studies, surveys and experiments to scrutinize the impact of women in combat units. Canada has an all-volunteer military of about 82,800 enlisted and officers in all three services--less than half the size of the U.S. Marine Corps. But it also claims the second-highest percentage of women members in the world--10%, exceeded only by the U.S. armed forces, which are 10.7% female.

“We can’t just pluck a few servicewomen into an infantry battalion, or post a few female sailors to a destroyer, drop in a year later to ask the commanding officer how it went and submit our findings,” said Brig. Gen. D.E. Munro, director general of the Combat Related Employment of Women.

The considerations in opening combat assignments to women were numerous: Scientists studied the effects of gravity forces on women fighter pilots, and psychologists designed elaborate counseling programs for men who would be working alongside women for the first time.

Finally, when the military believed it was ready to experiment with its first women combat troops last year, the plans almost fizzled. The military spent $500,000 trying to recruit 249 women for the three-year field tests. The effort attracted only 26.

Editorial writers had a field day. The Spectator newspaper, in an editorial headlined, “The 26-woman Army,” scoffed: “Militant feminists demanded equal access for women in army combat units. . . . The feeble response to the army’s very expensive recruiting campaign suggests it’s time to stop wasting time and money trying to beat reality into the shape of a feminist ideal. Even the army can’t defeat human nature.”

Last fall the first batch of women infantry candidates arrived at Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry Battle School here on the rolling plains of central Alberta for their first 16 weeks of intensive training.

The men braced for the worst.

“We thought there would be all kinds of female problems,” said Col. Hap Stutt, commander of the training camp. “Some of the officers thought we’d be doing candy Boy Scout exercises because of the women. The first couple of weeks everybody came to work thinking everything would be different. Everything was the same.”

In fact, after a few weeks, Stutt dispatched a report to his superiors titled, “The Sky Isn’t Falling.”

There was, however, one serious problem. Even the most vocal supporters of the effort to train women for combat were stunned by the women’s shortcomings in physical ability and stamina.

Of the 60 women recruited for the Canadian infantry since last year, only one has successfully completed the 16-week training program and is serving in the infantry, according to Cmdr. Judith Harper, director of CREW.

Here, where all the women infantry recruits have trained, the evidence of the problem was obvious up and down the obstacle course of high walls, thick ropes--and aching muscles.

Pvt. Michele (Shelly) Harris, rifle slung over her back, was doing the commando crawl, hand over hand across a thick rope suspended above the hard dirt. Suddenly her face reddened, her eyes squeezed shut, and she slipped, dangling awkwardly above the earth. She hit the ground with a thud.

Harris, a copper-haired private dubbed “Duracell” by her colleagues, clambered to her feet and hoisted herself back onto the rope. Another grimace, another thud. The crowd of privates sitting on the sidelines chanted, “You can do it! Duracell--energize!”

A third failed attempt, and a sympathetic drill instructor sent her back to the sidelines. She sank to the ground, eyes brimming with tears of frustration and humiliation.

“The women aren’t in as good a shape as the men,” said Pvt. Kirby Maciver. “At almost every obstacle, the man gets up first to help the women over.”

A few hours after her failed attempt at the commando crawl, Harris, 20, seemed undaunted. She joined the army because “I wanted something better in my future” than staying home working at a menial job in her native New Brunswick. “It’s a big challenge,” she said. “But this is what I joined for.”

In the end, Harris never graduated from the program and now is an army truck driver. Her colleague, Petruzzi, who relished tough training and life in the field, also flunked and was reassigned to the military police.

Pvt. J.D. Burtch, who went through training with Harris, complained: “I don’t think women should be here. I feel they should be in the army, but not in the infantry. They slow us down. I wouldn’t feel confident with them in combat. . . . I’ll admit it--I’m a chauvinist.”

Military leaders see another problem. Harper, at Canadian national defense headquarters in Ottawa, said some military officials are concerned that the high cost of infantry training for women has yielded such poor results. The high failure rates also hamper the military’s efforts to set useful recruiting goals, she said.

To screen out enlistees who have no chance of success in the strenuous combat infantry program, according to Harper, the military is developing physical standards for male and female infantry recruits.

In most other combat fields, women have fared as well as, or better than the men, Canadian officials said. But because the integrated programs are so new, the number of women who have applied is too small to draw concrete, general conclusions. Ten women have entered artillery training and seven have graduated. Four women currently are training for tank crews, officials said.

In the Canadian navy, 60 women sailors and officers are serving on replenishment ships and a tender vessel, and many of the women are scheduled to be transferred soon to a destroyer that is being modified to bunk a mixed-gender crew.

The Canadian air force now has the first two women fighter pilots in the world assigned to potential combat missions in fighter squadrons.

The Canadian government has said it hopes to fully integrate its forces within the next 10 years. The number of female recruits already has increased to 13% from 9% of all new enlistees in the last two years.

And many problems raised by opponents of the integration program have not materialized. To the endless speculation over potential romances in the barracks, the women of the mixed-gender infantry training platoon at Camp Wainwright roll their eyes and respond: “We call the army-issue boxer shorts the men wear ‘passion killers.’ ”

At this remote buffalo-reserve-turned-military-training-camp, the men and women of Ypres Platoon (Canadian platoons are named for great battles rather than the numbers assigned to U.S. platoons) share a Spartan barracks. Long rows of metal bunk beds line each side of the building. A thin, blue-and-white plastic shower curtain separates the last few beds in the row where the women sleep. Inside the communal bathroom, another plastic curtain is drawn around the men’s urinals.

The etiquette of sharing such close quarters has created mostly minor problems. At the end of their third week together, platoon leaders said the men and women were quarreling so much in the evening--over such things as the women taking too long in the showers, men leaving the barracks too messy, or everybody chattering too much after lights out--that it was affecting their daytime performance on the training field.

Sgt. Patrick Lawler came up with a quick solution: extra training and no leave on the weekends. The bickering volume quickly lowered.

The women remained unwelcome anomalies to some men at this previously all-male outpost. The camp’s civilian barber, after years of shaving male heads, refused to clip the locks of women recruits. Base officials scrambled and found another civilian barber in town who was willing to do the job.

In the mess hall, the men and women move through the chow line, heaping their plates with starchy military fare, then cluster at tables in separate groups.

“We’re still trying to figure out how to make them think they’re all together,” Harper said.

Back out on the training fields, army Pvt. Tana Fix, 20, of British Columbia had more immediate concerns. She sprawled on her belly in the dust, fighting a helmet that insisted on slipping over her eyes and a rifle that refused to hit the bull’s-eye on the paper target downrange.

“You’re all over the place,” groused the rifle instructor, squinting at the bullet holes sprinkled across the target circles. “Concentrate!”

Fix, face smudged with dirt, clutched her C-7 rifle and groaned, “Oh, man. If Mom could see me now.”