THE QUEST FOR NORIEGA : 160 Female Soldiers Joined Invasion : Combat: Many served in military police units. There were no casualties.

The United States sent about 160 women soldiers into Panama with the invasion forces--the most extensive use of armed women in any U.S. conflict, the Army said Tuesday.

Army policy does not permit women to seek out and engage the enemy in combat, but women soldiers who come under fire are allowed to defend themselves and return gunfire. And they did in Panama.

“Women have always been involved in our conflicts,” Army spokeswoman Paige Eversole said. “This is the operation where women have played their biggest role.”

She said there were no casualties among the women soldiers sent into Panama as part of the 12,000-strong invasion force Dec. 20 or among the women already stationed in Panama.

Many of “these women were serving with the MPs (military police) . . . and were highly visible. . . . They were receiving fire and returning fire. But they were not seeking out and engaging the enemy,” Eversole said.

Army Sgt. Melissa Jackson, 22, of El Paso, Texas, assigned to Panama as a supply sergeant in October, was one of those caught in the fighting. She returned to the United States on Tuesday with other U.S. troops.

“When you’re in a situation like that, there’s no way they can get you out of there,” Jackson told reporters in San Antonio. “You can’t avoid it. So if you’re there, you’re there. It was scary.”

Of the 160 women deployed on the Panama operation, 47 were members of the 16th Military Police Brigade from Fort Bragg, N.C., and 43 came from the 7th Infantry Division, Ft. Ord, Calif.

In addition, 34 women were deployed with the Corps Support Command, 28 were from the 525th Military Intelligence Brigade, 14 were from the 35th Signal Brigade, four were from Special Operations Command and two each were from the 18th Airborne Headquarters and the 18th Finance Corps.

“There was no conscious decision to send women; there was no conscious decision not to send women,” Eversole said, adding that these women were members of military units ordered to Panama. “No one got in their way.”

The four women from Special Operations sent to Panama were not members either of the elite Navy SEALs nor the Delta Force, because these are defined as combat groups, Eversole said. Women must have played a support role, she added.

Eight U.S. military women died during the Vietnam War but only one was killed from “hostile fire,” Eversole said. Some military women were in Grenada after the U.S. invasion in 1983, “but they weren’t involved to the degree” of those sent to Panama, Eversole said.