At least stop sending women to war…

I saw it when I was in the U.S. Army 30 years ago: women in combat zones. It just doesn’t work.

When I was posted to West Germany from 1979-82, our unit, a field intelligence unit, had many women in it. One of them was a young wife who was 6 months pregnant when we went on field maneuvers in the Fulda Gap, where the Soviet offensive would have blitzed us.

6 months pregnant? Out on maneuvers in an Army truck? Insane.

We treated her well, of course. She sat in our commo (communications) truck and made coffee. A 6-months pregnant woman can’t string barbed wire, carry heavy radios and encryption equipment, or even lift an M-16 more than a few yards.

And let me stress, again, that this was peacetime.

Yet all presidents, from Carter and Reagan and Bush Uno, to Clinton and Bush Dos,  have abetted such abominations.

Now this:

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—More than 80 percent of a sample of Air Force women deployed in Iraq and other areas around the world report suffering from persistent fatigue, fever, hair loss and difficulty concentrating, according to a University of Michigan study.

The pattern of health problems reported by 1,114 women surveyed in 2006 and 2007 is similar to many symptoms of Gulf War Syndrome, the controversial condition reported by veterans of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

“It is possible that some unknown environmental factor is the cause of current health problems and of Gulf War Syndrome,” said U-M researcher Penny Pierce.

“But it is also possible that these symptoms result from the stress of military deployment, especially prolonged and multiple deployments.”

War is bad enough on men, but even worse on women. Men were designed by God — or evolution, if you will — to bear the stresses of war. Since time immemorial, there have been wars and rumors of wars, fought by men. And a main motivation of wars for men is to keep their womenfolk safe.

It’s only modern, feminized, de-masculinized, Neoconnized America that imposes this absurd experiment on women gullible enough to enlist. Well, at least women aren’t drafted — yet.

Instead of sending even one woman into a combat zone, we should send Bush Uno, Bush Dos, both Clintons, Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, every Neocon ever heard of, and anybody else who supports these wars.

Women don’t belong in arms, their arms belong holding babies.

Women in combat update

As you may have noticed, the right side my blog features a “Random Posts” area. This must have brought up a blog I did in July, “Women don’t belong in combat zones.”

A reader who’s in the military sent me a post on this topic, providing a first-hand account. You can check the “Recent Comments” section to the right. Or just click here.

(Keep up with my blog. Sign up for my RSS feed. And click here to hire me for your writing projects.)

Women don’t belong in combat zones

The Register runs a story today on the return of the 950th Combat Support Company, based in Los Alamitos. The online story doesn’t include the picture on the front-page of the print edition. It shows a young woman soldier greeting her niece. Fortunately, no soldiers were killed, although four were injured in combat and six purple hearts were awarded.

It’s part of the craziness of this war, and of American life the past 35 years, that women are in combat positions in the military, as this story shows. It isn’t well known, but about 75 women have been killed in Iraq, most by “hostile fire.”

There are numerous reasons why women should not be anywhere near where they can get killed:

• This may come as a shock to the women’s libbers out there, but women get pregnant. When they’re pregnant, they can’t fight. It’s not clear what the number is, but many women have gotten pregnant in Iraq and been sent home.
• Women’s upper-body strength is half that of men. That means they can’t lift some heavy equipment, which means the men in their unit will have to do more heavy lifting than if the unit was made up only of men. I had first-hand experience with this problem when I was in a U.S. Army Military Intelligence field unit in West Germany from 1979-1982. The girls in our unit couldn’t pick up ammo boxes, barbed wire, encryption devices (then quite unwieldy), etc. So the guys had to do more work. And this was in peacetime, where the major health hazard was the junky vehicles we drove would break down when you’re driving them (this hurt several soldiers) — not wartime where people are trying to kill you.
• The basic small combat unit that wins wars is the platoon made up of about six to 12 young men. That’s why boys play team sports with each side having about that many guys on it. Sports are training for war. This comes from everyone’s ancestry, only a couple hundred years ago, as hunters and gatherers. The men hunt, usually for animals (protein) to take home to the family, fighting other men if necessary; the women gather. That’s why you like to shop till you drop, ladies.
• The Israelis tried women in combat in 1948 and it was a failure. Military historian Edward N. Luttwak studied the matter and found, “Men moved to protect the women members of the unit instead of carrying out the mission of the unit.” Women were barred from combat in 1950, even though Israel is a small country with a manpower shortage.

Although President Bush presents himself as a “compassionate conservative,” there’s nothing compassionate or conservative about sending women into combat. Conservatives used to have a strong sense of chivalry, of protecting women and children. No more, apparently.

he problem, of course, is that women now make up about 15% of the armed forces, so sending them home would make even more acute the military’s manpower shortage. This is just another way in which Bush’s Iraq war, instead of making America safer, is hurting our country.