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At Their Command: Liberated to Death
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by Mary Beaudoin, W A M M
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There are 356,000 women in the U.S. military, more than 200,000 of them on active duty. Since the U.S. wars on Iraq and Afghanistan the numbers have increased so that now approximately 15% of the military are women. (1)
However, the official status of many women in the military is currently somewhat ambiguous. That’s because the policy issued by the Defense Department in 1994 remains; it states that no job in the military service would be closed to a woman just because it is dangerous, but it did not open direct, offensive, ground-combat jobs to them. Yet, despite official policy, with the fluid situations of warfare and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, women have not only acted as support for combat but have also assumed an active role in combat—something military services and policymakers are happily promoting.
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Photo by Sgt. Dale Sweetnam |
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Early last year the Minnesota Post published an article online about a mission that was reported to originate with Lt. Col. Thingvold of Stillwater, Minnesota. The commander of an assault helicopter battalion with the Minnesota National Guard, he sounded like the Svengali of women in combat in the skies. He was said to have pushed the idea of having a crew of young, female pilots fly in a Blackhawk assault helicopter and sit in its open doors, pointing their lethal weapons, from on high, over the heads of Muslim Iraqis on Christmas Day 2007. Cheery reports on various web sites state that they flew in and around Baghdad “under combat conditions,” picking up various VIPs, including U.S. Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann. Photos show the crew posing in front of their assault helicopter wearing Santa hats in red or camouflage, trimmed with white fake fur.
Though women had driven Humvees and flown aircraft, including helicopters, in Iraq prior to this, the all-woman crew was said to have accomplished a landmark mission because there were no males along. Dubbed “the Christmas Mission,” it was a far cry from the holiday rejoicing that some people, who take the Christian religion to heart, associate with the birth of their Prince of Peace. Some subtexts could be read into this jolly scenario. It sounds suspiciously like a modern-day crusade with the involvement of Michelle Bachmann, who promotes Islamophobia in the War on Terror, and a National Guard officer from her district who has a keen interest in recruiting women into the Minnesota Guard. It is also reminiscent of the old “Charlie’s Angels” TV series, in which a powerful, older man sends young women into situations, which titillate with the excitement of seeing them in danger, while he pulls the strings in the background.
Perhaps that isn’t what Thingvold intended, but it certainly has the potential for that interpretation. At the very least, it appears that the Christmas Mission was only an opportunity to let all young women know that, if they enlisted in the armed services, they, too, might be able to experience the joy of working together with other women on holidays to threaten the inhabitants of a city with deadly weapons.
It wasn’t always publicly acknowledged and publicized, but women had already been involved in the air and on the ground in true combat situations. In 2004 and 2005, Lt. Col. Michael A. Baumann commanded 30 enlisted women and six female officers as part of a unit patrolling the extremely dangerous Rashid district of Baghdad. Baumann, now the chief financial officer of St. Paul Public Schools in St. Paul, Minnesota, stated that the women in his patrol had been “core members of his field artillery battalion” and fought alongside his male soldiers because everyone was needed in battle, even though they were not classified as “combat” on paper. “‘We have crossed the line in Iraq . . . Debate it all you want folks, but the military is going to do what the military needs to do. And they are putting women in combat,’” he told the New York Times. (2)
Women in the military complain that they have been in combat but have not been properly recognized for it, that they want to be respected and acknowledged as equal to men in battle, and that without combat experience, they have difficulty rising to higher ranks.
So now the push is on to go beyond unofficial use of women in combat to official use, selling the idea as an advance in the liberation of women. This idea suits both military recruitment and foreign policy hawks well—it throws wide open a whole new category of potential military recruits, as well as gives official status to work best suited for women in foreign invasions and occupations. On the front page of its foreign policy web site, The Center for New American Security (CNAS) is calling to “Let the women fight,” in an article written by Lt. Col. Kelly Martin, who serves on the CNSA staff as a Senior Military Fellow. (3) CNAS is a think tank that includes war hawks from both Democrat and Republican administrations on its Board—Madeleine Albright, Richard Armitage, Nicolas Burns, and the chairman of Lockheed Martin, as well as a former Secretary of the Navy. It is aggressively pro-war and boasts of having several associates in the Obama administration.
Advocates for U.S. world dominance want control of the world’s resources—many of which are located in Muslim countries. In order to obtain access, they must have a way of operating in Muslim cultures—something that could use a woman’s touch.
But there need to be new, official policies that allow women in combat because, as part of the military, women are put in positions that can easily morph into combat. This was the subject of the award-winning documentary, Lioness. (4) The film features a group of military women whose support jobs crossed the line into fierce firefighting, along with Marines in Ramada, in the spring of 2004. The women were called “Team Lioness,” which reflects the hierarchal, patriarchal, military system, of which they were a part: a Pride of Lions consists mainly of females and a few males, one of which is dominant. Groups of female lions hunt together, while the male’s job is to protect the hunting territory—he considers both the females and the territory his possessions.
Now operating in various branches of the military, Lioness teams began to operate during the second U.S. invasion of Iraq. The U.S. military sent them into urban, village and rural areas. They were used at checkpoints and in house-to-house invasions, when the military figured out that it would inflame situations further if male soldiers touched and searched women. (Is there any culture that wouldn’t be inflamed by a heavily-armed foreign military invading the close, physical space of women? Would U.S. citizens allow it on their own soil?)
Though slightly less intimidating than men, these U.S. military women were used to subject Iraqi and Afghani women to humiliating searches of their garments, private effects, persons, homes—and most terrifying of all, their children. Women soldiers were told to offer children candy to de-escalate situations. Photo ops of conquering armies with smiling children and candy bars are a classic in occupations, but do mothers really want strangers to give their children candy?
No matter what palliatives they offered to sweeten situations, women soldiers were in positions of risk. In an interview with Judy Woodruff, a sergeant in the Virginia National Guard, Carolyn Schapper, spoke of her assigned work in Iraq from 2005 to 2006: “I was armed. I would go out almost every day, and I would go into the villages and the cities, and get out of my truck, and walk into their homes…” She described how her life had several times been in jeopardy. (5) Heavily armed and invasive during missions and on patrol, it is not surprising that women were often indistinguishable from men and viewed as hostile foreign occupiers and aggressors, as well.
Today, under the Status of Force Agreement for troop withdrawal, most U.S. military men and women in Iraq have supposedly withdrawn from cities and are not considered combatants. Instead, they are used in the capacities of “training,” “support,” and “advisory.” However, reclassifying troops by name and where they sleep doesn’t change the fact that they are still part of an armed military occupation. Also, you have to wonder how U.S. women “training” Iraqi men plays where there is the memory of women used to horribly humiliate the masculinity of males in prisons like Abu Ghraib.
Far from liberating them, war and occupation has harmed the people and especially the women of Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries whose land, homes and lives have been invaded and damaged or destroyed.
War also victimizes the women in the United States because the beast of war devours the country’s treasure that could have been used to supply human needs, such as affordable housing, healthcare, education for their children, and a properly maintained infrastructure. It has robbed them of their sons and now it wants their daughters, seducing them with promises of jobs and training, while other options for their futures shrink. And, regardless of how much choice the women who enlist feel they have, once they are in the military they lose most of their ability to control their own lives—they are under a command and must do as ordered by what is ultimately a male-dominated system and hierarchy. According to the Women’s Memorial Foundation in Washington, D.C., which takes it data from the Department of Defense, 123 U.S. military women have died in Iraq and Afghanistan since March of 2003. Many more have been wounded and sustained serious injury.
There seems to be little doubt that soon women will be able to hold the official status of combatants to fight the wars of empire. “We literally could not have fought this war without women,” John Nagl, current president of the Center for a New American Security, was reported by the New York Times to have stated. And he should know—he had battlefield experience in both U.S. wars on Iraq and has acted as military assistant to U.S. Secretaries of Defense. (6)
Nagl’s statement is something that we, as women, ought to pay attention to—individually and collectively. If we don’t cooperate, the Masters of War can’t have their wars. Just as Rosey the Riveter rolled up her sleeves and kept the weapons and support factories humming at home, for these U.S. imperial wars to continue, women’s participation is needed in many ways. Killing or being killed, in a dominator system so private corporations can steal resources from people in other countries is not liberation. By refusing to be complicit, women have the power to end war—they just need to realize it and use it.
1 Statistics on Women in the Military, The Women’s Memorial Foundation, with information from Dept. of Defense, US Coast Guard and Veterans Affairs. Revised 04/07/09
2 “GI Jane Breaks the Combat Barrier,” New York Times, August 16, 2009
3 Center for New American Security web site <www.cnas.org>”Let the Women Fight,” appeared as an Op Ed in the Boston Globe, September 2, 2009
4 Lioness was directed and produced by Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers
5 PBS Newshour, July 5, 2007
6 “GI Jane Breaks the Combat Barrier,” New York Times, August 16, 2009. |
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© 2009 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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