Debate Persists Over Women’s Place in a War Zone

Diane Evans’ parents had four sons and two daughters. It was Diane who went to war.

“No place in Vietnam was safe,” the former Army nurse recalls. “We were in a combat zone and we were subject to attack.”

It saddens her that two decades later, America still is coming to grips with the prospect that women may die in war alongside men.

If there is a war in the Persian Gulf, for the first time in history American women may be injured or killed in significant numbers.

The Pentagon will not say how many women serve among the 240,000 U.S. troops in the gulf, only that they make up somewhat less of the gulf contingent than their 11% share of the overall U.S. military.

Images of women soldiers feature prominently in news reports from Saudi Arabia. And the role played by women has expanded, allowing them to serve in a range of support positions that were off limits in days past. Many argue that makes them more vulnerable if fighting breaks out.

“Although women don’t fill combat positions, the roles that they are serving in will expose them to hostile fire,” said Meredith Neizer, head of the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Service.

No one is sure how the nation would respond to female casualties.

“After all we’ve said about how far women have come, Americans are not ready to have their women go out there and get maimed and killed in combat,” said Bill Taylor of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Taylor said the number of women killed or injured in a gulf war probably would be low because women do not serve in tank and armored infantry units.

But even the possibility of casualties among women is generating debate about the expanding role of women in the military and the accompanying risks.

“There’s been a wake-up call on what wartime military duty might entail,” said Martin Binkin, a military analyst with the Brookings Institution. There is less discussion about scrapping the military’s ban on women in combat jobs, he said.

Women are barred by law from serving on combat ships and planes in the Navy, Air Force and Marines. The Army bars them from serving in combat-related fields such as infantry, tank and some artillery units. But women serve in many of the support and supply units that could be caught in battle.

Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.) is pushing legislation to require a 4-year test to see how women would perform in combat-related jobs. She argues that excluding women from combat jobs does not insulate them from danger but does deny them career-advancement opportunities.

Women, she says, often handle the communications for maneuvers, and communications centers are considered prime targets for attack.

“Women would be the first hit in a strike,” Schroeder said.

She rejects arguments that Americans are not ready to see women wounded or killed. Female police officers face life-threatening dangers daily, she notes. And a few women “came home in body bags” from both World War II and Vietnam, she said.

Eight women nurses and more than 58,000 men died in Vietnam. More than 200 women and more than 400,000 men died in World War II.

Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Wilma Vaught, president of the Women in the Military Service of America Foundation, believes the public has overcome any special qualms about the wartime loss of women.

“We’ve progressed far from where we were,” she said. “People don’t want their women killed any more than they want their men killed. They’d like for them all to live.”

And yet, Binkin cautions, “you still have many people with traditional views that war is not a place for women.”

The question of women in combat is “a very emotional issue and it could very well be reopened” by the gulf operation, he said.

Some critics believe the public has been conditioned to accept the expanding role of women in the military and the risk that they could die in war.

“We’ve become numbed to a point,” said Brian Mitchell, author of “The Weak Link,” a book critical of the “feminization” of the military.

“We’ve had enough propaganda about how great this is that women can go over there and fight and die like men,” he said. “The American public has been conditioned . . . to think that this is just the way things are nowadays.”

A New York Times-CBS News poll taken in January, 1990, after military women served ably in the U.S. invasion of Panama, found that seven of 10 Americans thought women should be allowed to serve in combat units if they wished.

Opinion could quickly shift if hostilities result in images of women returning to U.S. soil in caskets, Binkin said.

“If we get into a combat situation that brings home the point of what war is all about, you might get different answers,” he said.

For Diane Evans, the Army nurse who served in Vietnam, the key to accepting the risks that women face in today’s military lies in acknowledging their contributions in past conflicts. She directs the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project.

“We could have casualties in the gulf even before we have a memorial built to women who died in the last war,” Evans said. “We want the women who go off to the next one to know they will not be forgotten.”