MASH was entirely misleading when it came to the military. I know it has been hailed as "great" and so forth by many folks but the fact remains that it was a thinly veiled(Korea-VietNam, whatever) critique of the VietNam war by and for liberals who opposed it. And everything about the show was aimed in that direction, not only to say that VietNam was bad but simply to damage the US Military in as many ways as possible.
I personally am opposed to women in the military period, in support units or anywhere else OCONUS(Outside the Continental US). Jessica Lynch is a prime example of why. She was in a "support" unit. The only people who ever said (I don't think they really believed it, it was just politically expedient) women would be safe and capable of accomplishing the mission in "support" units as opposed to combat units were the people who had political axes to grind over the issue. And the danger to support units was just as high in WWI and WWII and Korea and VietNam as it is now. War has always been war and soldiers have always been fair game. The Israelis are a modern army who had a deliberate policy of female combat units. They did it the smart way too, not comingling male and female but with all female units. They found it was unworkable because of the effect I described in a previous post, that Eric described as cultural baggage. Whether it's cultural or not is immaterial in our reality. It's real and it gets more people killed and significantly lessens combat effectiveness.
As for the statement that females have been doing just fine in combat in Iraq, show me where and tell me how. I didn't see it in Iraq and I didn't see it in Afghanistan. Being exposed to danger is nothing like seeking out the enemy and engaging in combat.
Stacer(I'm not attacking you, you're just the only female in the conversation), can you honestly say you would be able to remain at peak effectiveness on a two week field mission where showers and toilets are totally unavailable, 16 hour days of frantic activity and two hour watches in the middle of the night are the norm, sweat and filthiness are all you can expect, that started a day or two before your period was due?
''They are able to bond with men or pick up and shoot an automatic weapon when that is necessary. They have no problem living hard in the field," Manning said. ''All those old excuses for why women can't be in combat are falling by the wayside."
As I said, I never saw women "living hard in the field." They lived harder than in the big air-bases out at the firebases but living "in the field" is as far from living at a firebase as living at a firebase is from living at home in the States.
As for picking up an automatic weapon, none of the women I ever trained with ever shot more than marksman, the lowest possible passing score on the rifle-range and half of those women had drill instructors or their male supervisors shooting down their targets from the next lane over. (they do this to avoid the vicious political flap that would arise from 50% female failure rates on the shooting range) I'm sure there are women out there who can shoot, it's just not the norm. How many women do you know who could drag a male soldier in full combat gear out of the line of fire? I never met any overseas. The women I worked with, back at the main air-base couldn't even lift a 240 machine gun.
Then you've got the whole Army Physical Fitness Test. It is designed to test whether a person is capable of performing in combat situations. The female standard is much lower than that for the males. Why? So they can pass, thereby accomplishing political/activist goals.
I will say this. If there had been a female on my team, who could pass the male PT test with 80% or higher (our internal standard), who could pass the marksmanship test, who overcame, somehow, the whole menstruation problem, who overcame the whole uncleanliness leading to infection problem, who had proven herself as mentally capable of performing the work and performing under stress as we all did (before the teams were formed), who could resist the temptation to play romantic head-games (the kind described in that article Stacer linked to), and (I'm not kidding here) could resist the temptation to cry when being forcefully rebuked, she would have done fine, there would have been no problems. But any one of those things I listed is, for obvious reasons, a deal breaker. I don't see that very many of those problems have been solved.
*Sorry for the length of this post.
