Needed: Less Than ‘Zero Tolerance’ of Harassment

After reading up on the Navy’s Tailhook sex scandal, I’ve become convinced that two facts of military life are hopelessly entwined:

* Service women are excluded from combat roles.

* Because they are excluded from combat, service women are second-class citizens, which makes them easy targets of sexual and other kinds of harassment.

If the first fact is not changed, there is not much hope for the second.

Ten days ago, when four of the nation’s military chiefs testified before the House Armed Services Committee, they expressed “zero tolerance” for sexual harassment, yet not a single one supported allowing women in combat positions.

“Even though logic tells us that women can (fight) as well as men, I have a very traditional attitude about wives and mothers and daughters being ordered to kill people,” said Air Force Gen. Merrill McPeak.

And Gen. Carl Mundy Jr., commandant of the Marine Corps, offered that the common links found among combat pilots are not found in women--”a warrior spirit . . . male bonding.”

The culture of combat aviators, he said, “typifies the derring-do, the ‘drink tonight, gentlemen, because we launch at 0500 again tomorrow morning and all of us aren’t going to come back.’ ”

A rather insensitive comment, considering that five American service women never came home from the Persian Gulf.

Indeed, women put their lives on the line every day in all kinds of work. They are police officers, firefighters, miners.

In fact, there is no longer any legal obstacle to women being assigned combat roles. Last year, Congress repealed those laws, leaving the matter in the hands of the Pentagon. The Pentagon has not issued a decision yet.

There is, of course, a tremendous emotional obstacle. It may be illogical thinking that keeps women out of combat, but it certainly is not unusual thinking.

Apart from the abhorrence we may feel at the idea of anyone being trained to kill, there is something even more disturbing about women in that role because of their traditional roles as mothers and care givers. One could argue that women are not meant to be soldiers because they will never be as strong as men nor as violent.

But some women feel a calling, and it is not fair to thwart them. Nor does the emotional response expressed by Gen. McPeak really take into account the realities of modern warfare.

War is not about foxholes and bayonets anymore. War is about pushing buttons, high technology and thinking fast. Ten years ago, I spent time aboard a guided missile cruiser as it participated in war games off the Southern California coast. I’ll never forget what one of the young officers told me as he gave me a tour of the ship’s command center. “Nowadays,” he said standing at a bank of computer screens and dials, “you’ll never even see what hits you.”

The testimony of the armed services chiefs marked the first time since the Tailhook sex scandal first broke that they spoke out on the subject of sexual harassment in the military.

I found them disturbingly disingenuous.

They claimed no tolerance for sexual harassment in their branches, yet the Air Force’s McPeak explained the alleged sexual assaults on 26 women (half of them Navy officers) attending the Tailhook Assn. meeting last September in Las Vegas as “something that you might expect of a bunch of lieutenants who get together and have too much to drink, and the tragedy of it was that there wasn’t a lieutenant colonel there to put his foot down.”

Really? We might expect, as the Navy has reported, that a group of naval officers would disrobe a drunk 17-year-old girl and pass her around in a hotel corridor?

Frankly, Gen. McPeak, the tragedy was not that the men were not squelched; the tragedy was that they behaved so shamefully.

It’s not the boys’ fault, the brass seems to say. They were just doing their warrior spirit bonding thing.

Several hours before the corridor assaults occurred, this newspaper reported, male aviators attending a Tailhook workshop hooted at the idea of women becoming combat pilots. One male officer cited a 1991 study that found a majority of enlisted women below a certain pay grade became pregnant while on sea duty.

“It’s killing our readiness,” he said.

That’s hard to argue with. But how could he ignore the link between men and pregnancy?

And how could a general really believe that military men cannot help themselves from sexually assaulting fellow officers?

These issues are simply not going to be solved by the tired defense that boys will be boys. The women who choose to serve their country as soldiers deserve better. Many are already risking their lives in the jobs they have chosen.

Military women need to be able to aim for the top, and know that if they are good enough, they will get there.