Women and War

As I reading through my daily news sites, I came across an interesting article in Newsweek. Titled "Top of Her Class", the article focuses on the death of Emily Perez, a West Point graduate who was deployed to Iraq shortly after graduation. She was killed last month by a roadside bomb while serving in Iraq. For the most part, this is a well written article, memorializing Perez, who seems to have been a wonderful young person, and praising the military's new willingness to accept women in combat roles.

As the daughter of a retired military man, I have always been interested in women's inclusion and participation in the military. My father and I have often debated to what extent women should be included in the military. I've always been clear on my position: women should be included as fully as men, including being drafted if the draft were ever to be reinstated. My father disagrees; he views women as important in support positions, but he sees them as a potential liability on the battlefield. Recently, I've begun to wonder why military women have been largely excluded from media coverage of the war. Aside from Jessica Lynch, General Janis Karpiniski (who was in charge of Abu Ghraib prison), and Lyndie Englund, we've heard very little about women's military roles in Iraq or Afghanistan. Then I come across this article.

On one level, the article is, as I already noted, a great tribute to a good soldier and a wonderful human being. On another level, it is also dismissive of women's roles in our society and the war. One sentence in particular bothers me: "Although in some circles the unprecedented role women are playing in combat zones is still contentious, the real surprise is how easily we've come to accept women's fighting and dying in war--and, with an overstretchedd military, how indispensable they've become." This sentence bothers me not because I question its validity; rather it bothers me because of the way the author uses the word indispensable. I don't think we've come to view women as indispensable to the war in Iraq. I think we've begun to view all life as dispensable--and by "we" I mean our government. What bothers me about this article (and the reality of the war itself) is that women are becoming indispensable to the fight because we haven't been able to control the violence. By and large, women aren't viewed as essential because they are good soldiers or because they are proving themselves in tougher roles and under impossible circumstances. To be blunt, women are needed because men continue to die. More than three years after the start of the war, we are still fighting on a daily basis, and we're fighting an enemy we can neither fully identify nor fully understand. American soldiers continue to die at the rate of 10 or more a week, and countless Iraqis have lost their lives. I'm troubled by the implication that women are achieving equality when in reality all life, regardless of sex or gender, is being viewed as expendable in the name of winning "the war on terror." I don't think that is what our foremothers had in mind when they began fighting for women's rights as early as the 18th century.

I applaud soldiers like Emily Perez, who clearly believed in what she was doing, but I question our government's willingness to sacrifice its brightest young people simply our prove a point. I am also angry at our media for implying that Perez's death is a sign of women's growing equality when it is little more than a sign that we still don't know what we're doing over there.