Women Disagree on Equality in Combat

Here are some comments from and about women in the U.S. armed forces:

“I couldn’t tote a 100-pound rucksack and walk for miles, but I can fly,” said Army Capt. Alice Reinwald of Columbus, Ga., on duty near the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.

Reinwald, 28, pilots a Blackhawk helicopter and is in charge of administration at Camp LaGuardia, an Army outpost 14 miles from the DMZ that is home to the 250 soldiers of the attack helicopter battalions there.

“If we have to take off and go to war today, I’d have to be a pilot. We’d fly support, we’d be right in there, going to the front lines with whatever is needed--food, fuel, supplies,” she said.

She says she knows, however, that “there are limitations” to what a woman can do.

It’s because of such limitations that her husband, an infantry officer, doesn’t want women fighting alongside his men in the trenches and gullies of South Korea.

“I know he just wouldn’t feel comfortable with the idea,” she said.

Lt. Gen. Carl W. Stiner, the commander of the 18th Airborne Corps, says the 600 women who participated in the invasion of Panama “were all over the place” during the fighting.

“I’m just as proud of the women as I am of the men,” he said. Asked if women could have shouldered 100-pound rucksacks and jumped with the paratroopers, he said: “There are some that can.”

Lt. Yolanda Wood, crew chief aboard a tanker aircraft that refueled planes heading for the Panama invasion, said she doesn’t deserve special attention just because she’s a woman.

“I’m not any more special than the guys. We all trained hard, and it paid off. I’m a crew member just like the others,” said the young officer, based at Grissom Air Force Base in Indiana.

Marine Capt. Ellen Febonio watched closely as her female charges in officer candidate school tried to learn how to take a hill alongside their male counterparts one cold day at the Marine Corps training ground at Quantico, Va.

From the rear, it was hard to tell the men from the women as the bulky, camouflaged figures wormed their way up the muddy slope with rifles in hand.

“The women are able to train now. When I started, we’d just follow the men and watch what they’d do,” Febonio said.

Army Lt. Lisa Kutschera, nominated for the Air Medal with a bronze V for flying troops into battle in Panama under severe fire, said: “It takes a special kind of courage, but it’s my job.

“Before I entered the military, I resolved in my own mind that some day I might have to go into combat, regardless of the combat-exclusion law. I was willing to go because I’d already resolved it in my own mind . . . yeah, it was combat.”

Navy Lt. Cmdr. Jean Cackowski, now executive officer on the oiler Platte, trained at the Navy’s Surface Warfare School.

She was aboard the Dixie, a repair ship deployed to the Indian Ocean that was the first ship sent to the Navy’s super-secret base at Diego Garcia with women aboard.

Her next assignment was on the Navy’s training aircraft carrier, the Lexington, where she was the first woman to qualify as the officer of the deck and the surface warfare officer on such a vessel.

“I’d prefer to be on a ship that can shoot back,” she said.