Saddam Hussein responded to the invasion of Iraq and liberation of Kuwait with Scud missile attacks that often landed well behind the front lines. The Risk Rule did not protect women from the risks of combat; support units also suffered casualties.
Desert Storm brought home to the military and the American public that the traditional notion of a “front line” no longer applied, and that the United States could no longer deploy its armed forces in a major conflict without the participation of women. Women performed well in a combat environment; they coped with the physical demands of their jobs and austere combat living conditions. They managed the lack of privacy and a shortage of feminine hygiene products. They handled sexual harassment from male colleagues and restrictive Saudi customs that many considered demeaning, such as the requirement to wear the abaya and refrain from driving off base. News of women casualties and prisoners of war did not lead to a public backlash. Seventeen thousand dual-service couples and single parents of both genders deployed; most made adequate family care plans for their children. As a result of women’s deployment to and performance in Operation Desert Storm, Congress once again began to consider lifting combat restrictions on women.
A small handful of women who deployed during Operation Desert Storm wrote or cowrote memoirs that received little critical attention. Some described their experiences in articles and professional journals. Others contributed oral histories, letters, and journals to archives years after the end of hostilities. A few are only now beginning work on memoirs of their wartime experiences. The excerpts below were taken from a variety of these sources.
Linda Bray
(1960–)
U.S. Army
Linda L. Bray, from Sanford, North Carolina, served in the Army 1982–91. Considered the first woman to lead troops into combat, Bray was commanding the 988th Military Police Company when her company deployed to Panama for Operation Just Cause. When soldiers of the Panamanian Defense Forces (PDF) refused to surrender their positions at a dog kennel where they had concealed a large weapons cache, Bray gave the order to open fire. Her company took control of the weapons cache.
Publicity surrounding Bray’s participation in the operation brought the issue of women in combat to the forefront of public opinion. Bray became the focus of media controversy and scrutiny from Congress and the Department of Defense. When her company returned to the United States in April 1990, she required a second hip surgery for a training injury incurred years earlier. Bray received a medical discharge in 1991.
What follows are excerpts from an oral history recorded through the Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project (WVHP) at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
In 1989 my company got orders to deploy to Panama. We were going to deploy as a peace operation assisting the Panamanian Defense Force, because [Manuel] Noriega and his forces were basically wreaking havoc, and he was in his dictatorship. Some people were getting killed and things like that. So we just—for Panama, Honduras, the MPs always did a rotation just to help maintain the peace. And so I went to the operation center one day and we’re getting my company prepared to deploy. We start so many months out. It was like, you know, we had to get shots, we had to do all this other stuff.
[Two months before the deployment] I got a call from the major in the operations center. He said, “Captain Bray, can you come over here now?” And I said, “Yes sir.” So I went over to the Emergency Operations Center and I was sitting there. And he was a major and he was looking at me and he says, “Captain Bray, I can’t tell you anything.” He said, “But if I tell you to keep your head down while you’re in Panama, do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”
And I just looked at him and I said, “Yes sir. I think I understand what you’re trying to tell me.” And so evidently the look on my face when I walked back into that—into my company and walked in my first sergeant’s office and shut the door and looked at him, he said, “Oh god no, no. Oh god, no. No.”
I said, “First sergeant, I’m so very sorry.” I said, “I know you’ve been through enough with Vietnam, that you’re looking at this and you’re saying, ‘I’m walking right back into another hot spot or another situation.’” And I said, “I can’t tell you that, but I think you get the feeling from what I’m saying.”
And he goes, “I do, Captain Bray.” He said, “I’ll get the guys together.”
So we at that time started calling in the operations officer, and Colonel Liebe [the provost marshal who hadn’t wanted a woman in command of the 988th; he’d wanted her to take command of a prison company instead] again was mad because I couldn’t tell him what was going on. All he knew was I had started training my company with hand-to-hand combat. I took them to the driving range, made them all get re-qualified again. So I blew every budget I had, whether it was bullets budget, training budget, whatever, I blew it getting this company ready to deploy to Panama. My husband was in the Rangers at the time, an airborne ranger master parachutist, so he got the RIs, which are ranger instructors, to come and teach my company. And we did rappelling. We did a whole bunch of things. We did a lot of maneuvers, a lot of training. And this was making him—making Colonel Liebe even more mad at me, because here I was doing this and he couldn’t know why. He just was like—he doesn’t have any control, and it’s like, “You’re right, you don’t have any control. Sorry. You don’t have control of this at this time.”
• • •
What the plan was, was we had the kennels [for guard dogs], and from the kennels you could actually go in, crash the gate [of Noriega’s Panamanian Defense Forces (PDF) headquarters], and attack it right into the front door, straight on. Well, my goal was to have—in the Humvee [High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle] was going to be a Spanish-speaking soldier and a .50 cal[iber] gunner and another soldier. And what they were supposed to do—meanwhile, the rest of that platoon is waiting back down the road. You know, they’re waiting for the go. . . . And another platoon had come in, and so what we were going to do is kind of attack it from the side and from the front, because we didn’t know what kind of resistance we were going to get. And so my idea was to have two Humvees, and the colonel said, “No.” He said, “You’re only going to go with one.”
I was like, “Those guys are going out there—those guys are being put out there by themselves.” It’s like, “Oh no!” You know, it was like I knew—I was like, “Oh my god. They could easily be overtaken.” Oh, it was a .60 gunner too. And what else had happened was I was up at the command post up by the school talking on the radio, and what had happened is the two platoons that went OPCON to the infantry battalion, they were still on my radio frequency. So they’re calling me and they’re telling me what’s going on, and they’re running into an ambush. So I’m trying to talk to them and at the same time talk to the other two platoons that’s getting ready to attack the kennels. And my first sergeant jumps in a Humvee and he gets a driver and he grabs a gun and weapon and everything and he takes off flying down [to the kennels].
And finally I got the two platoons to understand that they were on the wrong frequency and they needed to get onto the infantry frequency so that that commander could help direct them. I wasn’t trying to abandon them, but I just needed them to get off my frequency so I could handle what’s going on. By that time I just looked at my driver and I . . . said, “Get in, let’s go.” He got his gun, got his weapon, got his ammo, and we jumped in [the Humvee].
We took off and we got down to the very first stop, and so we left the Humvee there because nobody had put up a roadblock. I was like, “Oh my god! There’s supposed to be a roadblock right here.” I said, “Here, put the Humvee here.” And some of the guys that were sitting there waiting, they said, “What do you want us to do?” I said, “Follow me.”
We hit this ditch and we were running in this ditch down to the front gate where the specialist [announced that] gunfire had already started, so he had already announced for them to put down their guns and surren
der. Gunfire was starting. Well, the .60 gunner is right here on my right, and so he starts just firing away. And I lay down and I pulled out my gun. . . . I said, “Oh wait a minute. Wait a minute, wait a minute.”
And about that time first sergeant said, “Cease fire! Cease fire!” And everybody started yelling, “Cease fire! Cease fire!”
So I . . . said, “Listen, don’t start hitting everything out there, because right now I’m telling you, what’s over there is a housing area and there are people that are actually out there. And there’s a horse riding stables on the other side, so don’t just start firing.”
So I worked my way up to another soldier crawling on top of him, and then I crawled on top of my first sergeant, and he’s like, “What are you doing?”
I said, “Somebody’s got to talk to headquarters and let them know what’s going on.” About that time I get into the Humvee. I’m laying on my stomach, I’m talking on the radio because they’re still calling me. I’m talking on the radio telling them exactly what we’re doing. We’re getting ready to charge the gate with the Humvee. I’ve got the .50 cal gunner standing on my back. The .50 cal mis-operated, so that .50 cal gunner is having to fire one round at a time, okay. And he’s standing on my back. So we crash the gate.
And [my driver] says “What next?”
So I’m like okay, now we have to do this, we have to set up a roadblock over here, we have to maintain communications, we have got to stop their communications to getting to their headquarters. So I ran inside, and I had that Swiss Army knife that Jamie [a family friend and former Marine] had given me when I got my commission. I had that Swiss Army knife, and one of the platoon sergeants was standing beside me and the phone started ringing. I said, “Oh no! We’ve got to stop that.”
I pulled the phone line off the wall, took that Swiss Army knife, cut that stuff in half, sparks flew everywhere—matter of fact, one of them hit one of the sergeants on the neck. I said, “Well, that’s the end of that line of communication. We don’t have to worry about that anymore.” So I said, “Let’s clear the building.”
So now we’ve got people coming in to clear the building. One of my NCOs [noncommissioned officers] had gone into this room to the right and he goes, “Captain Bray, you need to come here.”
And I walked in and I like—I’m like, “Oh, my gosh.” There was a cache of weapons by the hundreds, by the hundreds. AK-47s and bayonets, and it was . . . the biggest cache of weapons I’d ever seen. Well, come to find out, when everything was kind of calmed down, said and done, come to find out that kennel was also the home of the Panamanian Special [Defense] Forces. So as we go through and we’re continuing to clear, then I get some of the guys to go into the sleeping quarters, and so we’re going through lockers and we’re doing this. There was a lot . . . of gas mask protection and different things like that, and there was a lot of Cuban money in there. So the assumption from operations is that Cuba was probably helping Noriega out.
Anyway, we finished and then I took one platoon and had them figure out a rotating schedule to secure the area. Because we had to secure the area before we could call in another company to replace us so that then we could go and do other missions.
[The Panamanians] had mostly scattered, because we hit the side [of the kennel] with a [M]203, a grenade launcher.
[Three weeks later, in January, the reporters start arriving.]
We’re on Quarry Heights and the reporters are coming in, and I had a female as an M60 gunner. And this reporter, his name was Peter Copeland, walked in and they were checking him in at the gate. [The M60 gunner] was behind the M60 guarding the gate and they were letting these reporters come in. And this reporter walked over to her and he said, “You’re a female.”
She said, “Yeah?” She’s kind of a real sassy, you know. And she said, “Yeah, I’m Specialist So-and-so.”
And so he asked her, he said, “Have you been doing missions out here?”
She says, “Heck yeah!” And she’s like, “We did this, this. We did this and this,” and this guy’s mind is about to blow right now.
And he’s like, “I didn’t even think they let females in combat.”
And she goes, “Well heck, that’s nothing. My company commander’s a female.” And then he comes to see me.
And I was like. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” you know.
And then the story hit the . . . wire [that] said, “Oh my God, first female to lead troops in combat.” [Colorado Congresswoman] Patricia Schroeder, [New York] Senator [Al] D’Amato—I got a call from the White House [Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater]. I had to go talk to all these people, and I had to go talk to my four star commanding general in Panama. I got called in. I had to go see the four-star general commander of the [U.S. Army] Pacific Command. . . .
And of course . . . the army had a military policy that women couldn’t be in combat arms units. Patricia Schroeder took that to say women could not be in combat. And “what has the military done?” You know, it was almost an attack, and that got the reporters confused, which then in turn confused the public. It’s like they’re talking about the combat patch. . . . We weren’t going to get the CIB, which is the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, even though we were OPCON to an infantry battalion. . . . A lot of civilians [didn’t understand] that CIB was designated specifically for the infantry. . . .
They have a new medal now for units that are not infantry, but they get their own combat pin now because of this. Because everybody was arguing about the infantry badge versus the patch. And there’s a difference, and that got confusing to public and everybody. . . . The politicians weren’t paying attention to the actual verbiage that was coming out. So there would be different stories, and there would be conflicting stories of what was going on and what was going on around in Panama. . . .
And then [there were different versions of her height and weight reported in the press]. What they didn’t understand was I was losing weight. So yes, I started out at 5'1.5" at a hundred and five pounds, but . . . I kept losing weight. Now, it gets to the White House and some people are thinking about retracting stories, and then it turned around and it was like they were trying to kill the story. And when I had to go see this four-star general, they were prepping me to get ready for interviews with ABC, CB[S], NBC, and CNN. So I went to see this four-star general, and he sat down beside me and he put his hand on my leg like this, and he said, “Captain Bray, do you know the military’s opinion of what’s happened here?”
And I looked at him I said, “Yes sir. I do believe I do. I think I have a good understanding of the military’s feelings on women in combat.”
He said, “Okay,” he said “I just wanted to know. I just wanted to make sure that you’re okay.”
So he turned me over to a colonel in public affairs, and we went downtown Panama to this hotel and got up there, and the colonel looked at me and he said, “Do you know what you’re going to say?”
And I said, “No, I have no idea what I’m going to say, but, you know, if you see that I’m going to say something wrong, you know, just hold up your hand and I’ll change my train of thought.”
And he said, “Okay.”
So I got up there and I got on that balcony, and of course here’s this big camera, black, facing me. . . . I know my first interview did not go as well as every other interview afterwards, because they asked me the question “What is your stance on women in the military?”
And I sat there and I thought and thought and I said, “I’ll tell you what, in 1983 I raised my right hand and I said, ‘I, Linda Bray, do solemnly swear to defend,’”—you know, I . . . gave the swearing in oath. I said, “All I’ve done is exactly what I swore I would do.”
And I could see the colonel . . . was waiting to hear what I had to say. And then by the time I was getting to the end of what I had to say, he sits back, he smiles, and he says, “Yes, yes.”
So I learned very quickly how to answer questions [from reporters]. I learned it by—what is it,
trial by fire or something like that? So my subsequent interviews went a lot better. . . . I stayed with this same concept, you know. I took an oath to defend the country, and I have done what I . . . was told to do, and that’s it.
• • •
And so during this time, an investigation started. Time went on and that MP colonel in Panama called me in. And he said, “I need for you to tell me about the night at the kennels.”
I . . . told him blow by blow. I told him that there were some dogs that we had to kill because . . . we could not even get in the front door because they had guard dogs trained to attack. . . .
He said, “About how many?”
I said, “I will say a total of about four or five, something like that.”
And he said, “Are you sure? Will you swear to it?”
I said, “Most definitely. You can talk to people in my company. You can talk to the NCOs that shot them.”
He said, “No, no problem, but you need to quit talking to the press. You need to just quit talking to anybody at this point.”
And I was like, “Okay.” I still didn’t know what was going on.
[A] reporter from a magazine . . . took [a] picture of me and my soldiers around a Humvee. And the battalion commander MP in Panama saw it and he came up to me and he said, “Captain Bray, am I going to have to file charges against you for failure to obey an order?”
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