For 1,000 Troops, There Is No Going Home

By MONICA DAVEY

Published: September 9, 2004

(excerpt of longer article)

The Women: Dying, in a Role Quietly Redefined

Before she left her home in Richmond, Va., Leslie D. Jackson's Junior R.O.T.C. instructor warned her that although women might not officially be on the very front line of a ground war, they were edging ever closer - and the line itself, if ever there was one in Iraq, had grown dangerously blurry.

"I told her that even combat support roles could still take you places that maybe you should not be," said Master Sgt. Earl G. Winston Jr., who taught Private Jackson at George Wythe High School. "But she said she was ready to accept the challenge. She said she did not want her fellow soldiers, most of them men, to think that she wasn't every bit as good as them."

Private Jackson, who had talked her reluctant mother into letting her sign up for the Army when she was 17, died on May 20 in Baghdad. The truck she was transporting supplies in hit a roadside bomb. She had finished basic training eight months before, and had turned 18, making her the youngest of 24 women who have died in Iraq.

Not long before, she had sent an e-mail message to her former principal, Earl Pappy, to say that she was spending long hours driving trucks and had been unnerved at seeing a soldier killed for the first time right before her: " 'I left home as Mommy's little girl,' '' Mr. Pappy said she wrote, " 'and I'm coming back as a strong woman.'

"She told me she wouldn't be in combat, and I don't think women should be," said Viola Jackson, Private Jackson's mother. "But then again, they joined the Army, and I guess you've got to do whatever the other people are doing. I don't know. What I know is she was a sweet child."

Women make up some 10 percent of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they account for less than 3 percent of the 1,000 deaths in Iraq. Still, more women have died there than in any conflict since hundreds died in World War II - a certain if somber sign of how women's roles in the military have grown in the last decade.

More surprising, though, to advocates on both sides of a long-simmering debate over what women should and should not do in times of war has been the public's reaction to the loss of 24 women. Mostly, there has been silence.

"What it means is that our view of women has changed," said Lory Manning, director of the Women in the Military Project at the Women's Research and Education Institute in Washington and a retired 25-year veteran of the Navy.

"Within our minds, women are doing a lot of athletic things. They're SWAT team members and firefighters now. This is worldwide. So people see this as less horrible. The horror of death is equal now."

But others, like Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, an independent public policy group in Livonia, Mich., said Americans were largely oblivious to the role women were playing in Iraq and would be disturbed if they knew. Female soldiers who die receive little attention, she said, except in small hometown newspapers; the same is true of the 207 women who have been injured in Iraq.

Shortly after the war began, there were hints of the nation's discomfort when three female soldiers, including Pfc. Jessica Lynch and Specialist Shoshana Johnson, were taken hostage, and one of them, Pfc. Lori Ann Piestewa, was killed, Ms. Donnelly said. In images broadcast around the world, Specialist Johnson looked terrified, her eyes darting.

"The risk of capture is why we oppose women in combat," said Ms. Donnelly, who wants the Pentagon to reconsider the jobs close to combat that women now hold. "We're a civilized nation. Violence against women is wrong. I hope that we don't become that kind of a nation that doesn't care about this sort of thing."

Eight women died in Vietnam. Sixteen died in the first Persian Gulf war. Three died in Afghanistan. And through most of that time, people have argued over what place women should take in war.

Women have served in the American military since 1901, and others quietly did unofficial military work as early as the Revolutionary War. But in 1948, Congress adopted the Armed Forces Integration Act, which capped women at 2 percent of the services and barred them from serving on combat planes and combat ships.

After Vietnam, and the end of the draft, the restrictions on women began to fade, one by one. By 1994, women were allowed to fly combat aircraft, to serve on fighter ships but not submarines, and to fill ground jobs except those most directly on the front lines: special forces, infantry, armor, artillery. But in Iraq, the jobs that women could fill - as drivers in convoys bringing supplies to troops and as members of military police units - came under attack from homemade bombs and mortar fire, too, and the notion of a front line seemed no longer to fit the conflict.

Nearly all of the women killed were full-time soldiers in the Army. And two-thirds of them died in hostile situations, not in accidents or because of illness.

Even Ms. Manning, who supports bigger roles for women in the military, said she was surprised at the degree to which women had been included in critical operations, including patrolling checkpoints. In part, their role may have been a necessary outgrowth of cultural differences in Iraq. Female soldiers were needed when Iraqi women were searched or questioned.

Still, Ms. Donnelly and other critics say, the scars from so much change are being ignored: What will come of the children, they asked, who lose their mothers to war?

Sgt. Tatjana Reed, a single mother, was killed on July 22 when a bomb exploded near her convoy vehicle. She had signed papers leaving her 10-year-old daughter, Genevieve, in the care of relatives near her base in Germany, expecting the arrangement to be temporary.

Sergeant Reed "always said, 'What a man can do, I can do,' '' recalled her mother, Brigitte Dykty, who lives in Clarksville, Tenn. "Sometimes I wish she hadn't thought that."