Following up on yesterday’s post, here’s more from the NY Times on military women on the frontlines in Iraq.
It’s interesting to me (having suffered through 20 years of narrow-minded arguments why women shouldn’t 1)serve in the military at all or 2)fill combat roles) how pragmatic all the systems are when it comes down to it.
Accommodations for privacy and some semblance of safety turn out not to shatter a fighting force from within. Sex goes on yet women aren’t getting knocked up and leaving in droves. Supply officers order devices from REI to allow women to pee on the run (figuratively speaking).
And nowhere in the three pages of this story is there mention that PMS factors into any activity, from command decisions to operating the turret gun on a Humvee.
Back when the Navy was first bruiting about the idea of assigning women to sea duty, I well recall the reaction from Navy wives around Norfolk was embarrassing: you can’t have women with men on ships! The mixed sexes will have, you know, sex, and it’ll be the female sailors’ fault! (No notion that their husbands might be expected to keep it, you know, zipped.)
But it turns out that, while there has been fraternization, the women are there (and in Afghanistan and Iraq and at other duty stations) to do a job.
Just imagine!
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