A couple of months ago, I wrote about Spc. Monica Brown who became only the second female to be awarded the Silver Star since WW II.
Pat Dollard reports that Spc. Brown was pulled from combat duty shortly after her heroic acts that won her the bronze star.
Turns out that Spc. Brown wasn’t supposed to be on that patrol because she’s a woman:
Within a few days of her heroic acts, however, the Army pulled Brown out of the remote camp in Paktika province where she was serving with a cavalry unit — because, her platoon commander said, Army restrictions on women in combat barred her from such missions.
“We weren’t supposed to take her out†on missions “but we had to because there was no other medic,†said Lt. Martin Robbins, a platoon leader with Charlie Troop, 4th Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment, whose men Brown saved. “By regulations you’re not supposed to,†he said, but Brown “was one of the guys, mixing it up, clearing rooms, doing everything that anybody else was doing.â€
In Afghanistan as well as Iraq, female soldiers are often tasked to work in all-male combat units — not only for their skills but also for the culturally sensitive role of providing medical treatment for local women, as well as searching them and otherwise interacting with them. Such war-zone pragmatism is at odds with Army rules intended to bar women from units that engage in direct combat or collocate with combat forces.
Military personnel experts say that as a result, the 1992 rules are vague, ill defined, and based on an outmoded concept of wars with clear front lines that rarely exist in today’s counterinsurgencies.
“The current policy is not actionable,†concluded a Rand Corp. study last year on the Army’s assignment of women. “Crafted for a linear battlefield,†the policy does not conform to the nature of warfare today and uses concepts such as “forward and well forward [that] were generally acknowledged to be almost meaningless in the Iraqi theater,†it said.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, noncombat units in which women serve face many of the same threats that all-male combat arms units do and are performing well, commanders say. “Army personnel were consistent in their perception that a strict adherence to the Army policy would have negative implications†and that the policy should be revised or revoked, the Rand study said.
I agree that it’s time to revise that policy.
Spc. Brown has obviously proven her worth and merit anywhere in combat. Ask 10 different infantry units if they’d like to have Spc. Brown serve along side of them as their combat medic, and I’ll bet you 10 out of 10 say, “Hell yeah!”
