A Definite ‘No’ Vote on Question of Women in Combat

The Persian Gulf crisis has raised once again the question of whether women should be used in combat. I say used rather than serve because serve is a euphemism.

About 291,000 American servicemen were killed in World War II. It is more accurate to think of them as having been used, rather than as having served.

In a sense, the question of whether women should be in combat is moot. In the Arabian desert, all of it being accessible to Iraqi missiles and poison gas, there is no rear. We learned in Panama that women in uniform are likely to find themselves in combat, despite the law against it.

I know that in saying I am against women in combat I will be pilloried as sexist, although Newsweek recently noted that many servicewomen are also against it. Others are more gung-ho. “I volunteered for the Army,” said one, “not the Girl Scouts.”

There is no question of women’s courage or efficiency. I’m sure a woman could fly an F-15 in combat with as much skill and bravery as a man; whether she would do as well in hand-to-hand combat, with bayonets, is doubtful. Of course, with today’s firepower, hand-to-hand combat is virtually passe.

However, it may be that most women would embrace combat duty as the key to respect and promotion. A woman without combat experience is not likely to become chief of staff.

John F. Mann Jr. of La Habra, a consulting geologist, has sent me a page from a history of a Lancashire coal field in the middle 19th Century. The horrible conditions in which women worked are described by an observer, E. W. Binney:

“I went down numerous pits to get drawings of the women to show how they were employed. It was astonishing and wonderful to me to see the power which some of these women had in drawing the corves in which the coal was conveyed. The women went on all fours with a chain or rope passed round their necks and under their bodies and by this means they dragged the corves in something the same way as bullocks would.

“The immense power which was developed in the limbs of some of these women was indeed wonderful. It is singular to think that it is not 30 years since in this district thousands of women were employed in such work and the greater part of the coal wrought in Lancashire was conveyed along the bottom of the mines by women on all fours.”

The narrator was partly responsible for laws that put an end to “the employment of women in this degrading fashion.” However, he notes, reform brought resentment from many it sought to rescue. One day Binney met a woman coming from the pits and remarked that he thought it was now against the law for women to work in the pits.

“She said, ‘No, they dunnot, but one gets down on the sly. I cannot see that I am not so well employed there as anywhere else. I cannot see why women should not conduct themselves in pits as well as in factories. I wish those chaps that got the women taken out of the pits would pay me the 3s a week less wages which I get now. . . .’ ”

Women barred from combat duty are also denied combat pay, which might be equated with the 3s a week that 19th Century women lost when she was barred from the coal mines.

In any case, the lesson is that the armed forces tell women what they can and can’t do at their peril.

My reason for not wanting to see women in combat has nothing to do with their abilities. It is sexist in the most basic way. It has to do with men’s chivalry. It comes from my own experience with combat.

On Iwo Jima, Marines were being killed in such great numbers, and so rapidly, that our burial details did not have time to bury them. Instead, they lined the dead up on a rise above the beach. Hundreds of dead men, laid out in two rows, for perhaps a quarter of a mile. Their fatigues had been shredded or partly blown off. Their naked limbs were grotesquely stiffened. Their eyes stared uncomprehendingly at the sky. Their skin was turning yellow.

I used to have to walk past these rows on my way to a rendezvous with a dispatch boat on the beach. I could never look at those men. The nakedness. The open eyes. The twisted limbs.

It is not uncommon on battlefields for men to crack up. It is called battle fatigue. Men finally cannot stand what they see.

It is my belief that most men have a deep-seated tenderness and chivalry toward women, however out-of-date those sentiments may be, and that they simply could not see women killed and mangled in combat and remain sane.

However, I doubt that most women, like that woman in Lancashire, wish to be protected from the pits.