It's My Country Too

by Jerri Bell, Tracy Crow

  [The interviewer asks if she felt pressure as the G-2 (staff intelligence officer) with the DSC deployed forward.]

  You know, I wouldn’t say that I felt any pressure. I knew that the general was depending on me to get information and to provide him intelligence, and General Krulak made sure that I knew what information he expected. . . . Once we were deployed, he spent a lot of time in the G-2 section sitting in front of the map talking to [me and] the Marines that worked for me, because he wanted to make sure that if he had a question or he wanted a response from them, that there was a rapport between him and the corporals and the sergeants that were there—that they would be able to talk to each other, that the sergeants wouldn’t be so intimidated that they wouldn’t be able to think. So he would come over and actually work with all of us and kind of set up the situation. So I wouldn’t say there was pressure.

  We knew what we were supposed to do. We worked hard at doing it. We had a tremendous team. Even though it was a small intelligence section, we had worked at forming a good coherent team, and everybody worked effectively together. We did some really good analysis. We sent out collection requests for things that we needed. We went back to a lot of the good old-fashion[ed] ways of analyzing things and coming up with information and putting it down, and thank goodness we were in a command that didn’t care about dog and pony show type things. We could stick a map on the wall, use a pencil as a pointer, and point out what we were talking about as long as we got the information across, which I think invariably we always did.

  [The interviewer asks about her role in the actual liberation of Kuwait.]

  Well, I guess you’d just describe it as keeping my commander and his staff and subordinate commanders apprised of the situation so that they could better perform their duties. We worked very closely with the commanders for the engineering battalions that were going to work the breaches—you know as far as diagrams of the breach sites, the width of the minefield, the types of mines that were there. All that information turned out to be very accurate so that they could plan and rehearse.

  We also, through map studies, tried to work with the resupply plan. There was emergency re-supply set up that had already been determined by the units being supported, what type of emergency resupply units would like at different points in the battle, and a lot of that was prestaged so that it could be delivered either by land or air. So if it was air, the intel section had picked out some spots that could have been used as LZs [landing zones] to go in and put some of those down. Of course, all of that had to be fluid based on the situation of what was going on. But other than that, basically the G-2 role in the actual invasion was keeping people apprised of what was there and what was going on in front of them.

  Probably the hardest part of being the G-2 is doing all the analysis and the estimates beforehand. So when things are actually happening and moving ahead, of course, you’re trying to see further ahead, but things moved so swiftly in Desert Storm and the Iraqis started fleeing so soon that there really wasn’t a whole lot of intel to do. As the red disappeared off the map, so to speak, then our job became more one of looking at various area security-type functions and the exploitation of documents and things like that, what to do with enemy weapons, and things of that nature.

  [The interviewer asks if there were any issues with deploying male and female Marines together.]

  You know, I don’t think so, and I think one of the things that I learned and I think many of the men in the command element [CE] learned was that it really didn’t matter if you were male or female. When we had the first NBC [nuclear, biological, and chemical] alarm and had to go into full MOPP [mission-oriented protective posture] gear, when you looked around there and you saw everybody trying to open up those suits for the first time and getting into everything, everybody had the same big eyes and everybody reacted the same and everybody helped each other, and I don’t think it made any difference. We had women out manning the machine-gun positions on the perimeter along with the males. Everybody filled their own sandbags and worked. Of course, General Krulak filled sandbags and worked too. So we had good leadership and everybody was inspired to work side by side.

  I think one of the things that we found was that we were all Marines, and we were all one family, not necessarily brothers—you know the Marine Corps brother thing kind of went out the window—but I think we were all brothers and sisters. As far as living in the desert, there weren’t that many differences, at least when we were out there. We didn’t mark the heads for male and female. You kind of waited, and a couple [of] women would go in together, so you wouldn’t fill up one whole area and keep the men from being able to use the head or anything. [She chuckles.] But you know, I think everybody kind of looked at it as there wasn’t really time to worry about that stuff, and I think it worked really well.

  The only thing I would say is at that point, you know the Marine Corps had been training women to go to the field for a little while. When I came in, they didn’t, however. You know, we did a few things out in the field with the men at Basic School but that was it. But as things changed, the Marine Corps never went back and trained the women who were already in higher positions. You just were expected to already know how to go out to the field and do all the stuff. And while we were over there, I know a reporter asked me if I felt the Marine Corps had trained me adequately to be able to live in the field, and I told him, no, I didn’t think they had. However, the Girl Scouts had.

  11

  Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom

  “This Is My War Story”

  The RQ-2 Pioneer unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, waited for the takeoff command. The two-stroke, two-cylinder engine started with an abrupt buzz. Moments later, the UAV shot upward like an arrow fired from a taut bow. It flew north over Iraq’s Highway Seven from Qalat Sikur toward Kut, its onboard camera capturing the terrain below and linking the footage back to a tent manned by Marines.

  A number of white vehicles appeared on the screen. Men dressed in black moved among them. One had a motorcycle.

  Lt. Jane Blair ordered the payload operator to keep the UAV in the area. The men on the ground, she told him, were forward observers for Iraqi artillery. One of the sergeants suggested they might find Iraqi mortars a few kilometers out; artillery could be twenty to forty kilometers farther away. She directed the UAV to search to the northwest.

  Exactly where they’d expected: Iraqi infantry on the side of the road near a canal, and twenty kilometers away—two batteries of Soviet-designed 122-mm anti-tank howitzers. Soldiers walked around the guns and prepared to load them. To the south, U.S. Marines advanced on the city of Kut and would soon be in range of the Iraqi artillery.

  Blair ordered a Marine to wake up the commanding officer to authorize a fire mission. Another notified the Fire Direction Center, where other Marines would choose the best way to put rounds on target. An artillery unit directed Blair to keep the UAV in orbit over the target.

  The screen filled with plumes of smoke when the first U.S. rounds landed on the battery. The Marine artillerymen made one range correction. Fired for effect. Rounds rained down on the Iraqi position.

  When the smoke cleared, Blair reported the battle damage assessment. Dozens of dead soldiers lay among the destroyed artillery pieces. The Marines around Blair cheered, but she felt numb. “In one instant,” she recalled in her 2011 memoir, “I had become their executioner. There was blood on my hands now. . . . Once you kill, you can’t take it back.”

  Beginning in the mid-1980s, women aviators from the Navy, Air Force, and Army came to Capitol Hill under the auspices of two women’s advocacy groups, the Women’s Research and Education Institute (WREI) and the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC). Using their personal leave time for meetings, and in civilian clothes to avoid creating a perception that they were engaging in political activity in uniform, the women educated members of Congress on their training, their duties, and the adverse effects of the combat aviation excl
usion law on their careers. They found allies among congresswomen and congressmen, in both political parties, and in the House and Senate. One was Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colorado), an outspoken advocate for military reform.

  When Desert Storm ended in February 1991, Schroeder recognized that public approval of women’s performance in the conflict presented an ideal opportunity to try again to repeal the combat exclusion laws prohibiting women from serving on naval combatants and in combat aircraft. On the morning of May 8, during the House Armed Services Committee markup of the 1992–93 defense authorization bill, in a surprise move Schroeder introduced an amendment repealing 10 USC 8549 and authorizing Air Force women to fly in combat aircraft. Rep. Beverly Byron (D-Maryland) added language extending the amendment to women aviators in the Navy. The measure passed the House on a voice vote, which surprised even Schroeder. When the appropriations bill went to the Senate in July, Senators Edward Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) and William Roth (R-Delaware) cosponsored a similar amendment in the Senate Armed Forces Committee (SASC).

  The Senate Armed Services Committee held an acrimonious and emotional hearing on the proposed amendment on June 18. All four service chiefs opposed the amendment, and the assistant secretary of defense offered that while SecDef also opposed the repeal, he welcomed flexibility and the authority to make policy. Six servicemembers testified; the four Army and Marine Corps personnel—including one woman—opposed the repeal, while Navy and Air Force representatives testified that women should have the opportunity to fly in combat. The chair of DACOWITS and the director of the National Women’s Law Center also spoke in support of repeal, while DACOWITS member and executive director of the conservative think tank Center for Military Readiness Elaine Donnelly and former Marine Corps Commandant General Robert Barrow opposed it.

  Four senators—John Glenn (D-Ohio), John McCain (R-Arizona), Sam Nunn (D-Georgia), and John Warner (R-Virginia)—countered the Kennedy-Roth Amendment with a separate amendment offering a temporary repeal of combat exclusion while a presidential commission studied the assignment of military women. Both amendments passed, and the bill went to conference committee for resolution. Compromise legislation fully repealed the combat exclusion law for women aviators, but established the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces to study the issue. The Department of Defense refrained from assigning women to combat aviation units while the commission conducted its review.

  The George H. W. Bush administration included five vocal critics of women in combat among the fifteen commission members. Eight of the fifteen had served in the military, but only one had aviation experience. Nine were men and six women. The members could not come to consensus. Five (including a senior Air Force enlisted woman) who opposed women in combat walked out of the meeting and refused to participate again until the other members allowed them to publish dissenting views as part of the commission’s report. In 1992 the commission recommended that military readiness should be the primary concern when developing assignment policies. While the final report recommended repeal of the law preventing women from assignment to naval combatants, it also recommended continued exclusion of women from direct land combat units and positions and retention of the Risk Rule.

  President Bush passed the report to Congress without endorsement, and Congress took no action on it. After President Clinton took office in 1993, Congress repealed the law prohibiting women from serving on naval combatants. Secretary of Defense Les Aspin rescinded the Risk Rule. He approved a new Direct Ground Combat and Assignment Rule excluding women from assignment to units below the brigade level whose primary mission was engaging the enemy in direct ground combat (defined as engaging the enemy with individual or crew served weapons while being exposed to hostile fire and a high probability of direct physical contact with enemy personnel). Women could also be restricted from assignments to units and positions physically collocated with ground combat units closed to women.

  Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on U.S. territory, President George W. Bush ordered troops into Afghanistan for Operation Enduring Freedom. The Taliban, which had been harboring 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden, declined to extradite him to the United States. American and allied troops backed the “Northern Alliance,” a primarily ethnic Tajik military faction, in its overthrow of the Taliban government. The Taliban responded with an increasingly lethal insurgency campaign. Planning for a concurrent invasion of Iraq, intended to remove the Ba’athist government of Saddam Hussein and cripple its weapons of mass destruction program, began almost immediately after 9/11; forces were deployed to the region late in 2002, and on March 20, 2003, U.S. and allied forces invaded. Not long after a multinational Coalition Provisional Authority assumed responsibility as a transitional government of Iraq, insurgent groups began targeting U.S. troops and the new Iraqi Security Force.

  Counterinsurgency operations blurred the lines between forward and rear operating areas, and support units frequently ended up in close proximity to active engagements or defending themselves from insurgent attacks. Public debate over the assignment of women resurfaced when three women assigned to the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company—Pvts. First Class Jessica Lynch and Lori Piestewa and Spc. Shoshana Johnson—were injured and captured in an ambush (Piestewa, a Native American, died of her injuries in an Iraqi hospital).

  To support the rotation and training required by fighting wars in two countries, the Army began reorganizing into “modular units.” The Brigade Combat Team (BCT) became the basic large tactical combat unit. BCTs were supported by collocated Multi-Functional Support Brigades, which included “noncombat” personnel. Many were women. The Army, however, had not updated its assignment policy for women to match the less restrictive DoD policy implemented in 1994: women could not be assigned to units smaller than a battalion whose mission was “direct combat”—“closing the enemy by fire, maneuver, and shock effect in order to destroy or capture the enemy, or while repelling the enemy’s assault by fire, close combat or counterattack.” However, the fluidity of the “front line” in Iraq and Afghanistan meant that women in Multi-Functional Support Brigades did repel enemy assault.

  In May 2005, Rep. John McHugh (R-New York), chairman of the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, introduced at the request of HASC Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-California) an amendment to the FY 2006 National Defense Authorization bill to ban women from service in “forward support companies,” which would have closed almost 22,000 jobs to women. Twenty-seven Democrats and one Republican in the HASC wrote to oppose the amendment. They pointed out that Army leaders also opposed the amendment, feeling that it tied their hands in a time of war. Army officials also argued that the amendment would impose “unwarranted” obstacles on servicewomen’s career advancement opportunities, adversely affect recruiting, and undermine cohesiveness and morale by drawing “unsupported gender distinctions on deployment of trained personnel.”

  Representative McHugh responded with a substitute amendment barring women from Army forward support companies, codifying into law the four categories of exclusion previously permitted at service discretion, and prohibiting the opening of military occupational specialties to women without changes in the law. The final bill passed without these measures, requiring only that DoD notify Congress of planned changes in assignment of women while Congress would be in session for a minimum of thirty days, with a description of and justification for the change— and an analysis of the change’s legal implications for constitutionality of the Military Selective Service Act.

  In the meantime, the undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness had commissioned the RAND National Defense Research Institute to study the 1994 DoD assignment policy. Their 2007 report “Assessing the Assignment Policy for Army Women” found differences in the Army and DoD assignment policies and a lack of clarity in both. They noted that strict compliance with the restrictive 1992 Army policy would prohibit women from participating in Army o
perations in Iraq and would prevent the Army from completing its mission. The study recommended redrafting assignment policies to conform clearly to the nature of modern and future warfare, but stopped short of recommending that the Army open more assignments to women. That July, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates informed congressional defense committees that the services’ assignment policies were in compliance with the 1994 DoD policy, and that the Army’s reorganization into modular units did not conflict with DoD assignment policy for women.

  Beginning in 2005, the Marine Corps formally implemented its Lioness program, in which women Marines and some Army female soldiers were tasked to conduct physical searches of Iraqi women at checkpoints for concealed weapons and explosive devices and to conduct outreach with Iraqi women. Volunteers for the Lioness program were given one week of training in weapons systems, language and cultural norms, Marine Corps Martial Arts Program tactics, and combat lifesaving techniques. Although the women in the Lioness program performed the same missions at the checkpoints as men in infantry and combat arms military occupational specialties, the Marine Corps managed to avoid violating the Direct Ground Combat and Assignment Rule by forming the Lioness teams as a brigade-sized element. Over time the mission evolved to include women in civil affairs and outreach operations. Five years later the Marine Corps deployed its first trained Female Engagement Teams—women Marines who volunteered to form relationships with Afghan women and to conduct civil affairs and outreach missions in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province in support of counterinsurgency goals. In the summer of 2010, a congressional inquiry over whether the women were violating combat exclusion co-location rules led to a policy of deploying the female engagement teams to the field for a maximum of forty-five days (“reset”), then returning them to a major base for a short time before they returned to the field. In that same time frame, Adm. William McRaven, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, created the Army’s Cultural Support Teams. Volunteers screened in a physically and mentally demanding program to be selected for the program, and then trained for six weeks prior to deployment with civil affairs teams and the Army’s Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment in Afghanistan.