For Women in Military, a Long Slog Toward Acceptance

WASHINGTON (Feb. 26) -- When I heard about the Navy's decision this week to end its ban on women serving on submarines, all I could think about was a meatball sub.

That's what I was eating 10 years ago in the officers' mess of the USS Miami as the Los Angeles Class submarine bobbed on the surface of the ocean off the Florida coast. I remember feeling queasy with motion sickness. And how much better I felt once we submerged and got under way beneath the waves.

Later I would write these words: "Fifty-eight steps. That's the distance from one end of this attack submarine's living space to the other, and the 133 men who serve on it go back and forth about whether there is room aboard for women."

How far we've come since then. And the news of the Navy's change of heart on submarines, and Army Gen. George Casey's testimony that "it's time we look at what women are actually doing" in Iraq and Afghanistan, has me reminiscing about my up-close view of that journey.

For someone who never served in the military, I've walked a lot of miles of Pentagon corridors and eaten in more DFACs than is good for anybody. During more than two decades as a correspondent for USA Today, including a long stint at the Pentagon, and now reporting and writing for AOL News, I have chronicled the ups and downs of women warriors.

Indeed, 20 years ago this month I was in Lexington, Va., reporting on the battle to admit women to Virginia Military Institute, the all-male bastion that today features a female cadet on its Web site. You'd never know the U.S. Supreme Court had to order the school to let women in, 14 years after the U.S. military academies went coed.

I later stood on the Charleston, S.C., campus of the Citadel when the first female cadet reported there. Quite the media circus. I had gone home by the time Shannon Faulkner dropped out five days later citing harassment and death threats similar to those faced by the black students who integrated southern universities a generation earlier.

Though female soldiers had been integrated into the ranks for a generation by the time of the Persian Gulf War, when I started to report on the military, they were still a novelty. It was news when female pilots took part in the largest helicopter assault in history up to that time, airlifting men and cargo across the border into Iraq. It was bigger news when a Scud missile hit an Army barracks in Saudi Arabia and among the dead were female soldiers; one of my least favorite assignments was chasing around western Pennsylvania trying to locate the homes of the first women killed in war since Vietnam. It was huge news when Maj. Rhonda Cornum was taken prisoner and abused by her Iraqi captors.

Each event was a cue to a new round of debate. Would Americans stand to see their daughters come home in body bags? Worse still, their mothers?

"A Christmas without mom" was the headline on a USA Today cover story I wrote during the buildup to Operation Desert Storm. Fathers have long spent the holidays on the front line, but in 1990 it was unprecedented for so many fatigue-clad women to be away from their children. In this time of multiple deployments, it hasn't gotten any easier to balance work and family. Nor has the controversy subsided.

After the fighting was over, the real battle -- between the sexes -- began. When a male colleague who covered the Pentagon for the newspaper didn't see the news value in the fallout from a convention in Las Vegas where dozens of women were sexually assaulted by naval aviators, I was asked to cover the Tailhook scandal. Talk about conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. Tailhook revealed a frat-boy atmosphere in the Navy that prompted congressional hearings and a call for a "cultural change" in the way all the military branches treated women.

That change would take a while. I spent a good chunk of the 1990s writing about sexual harassment. On military bases. At veterans hospitals. In the Defense Department. In 1997, a particularly salacious year, I actually wrote that "love, not war" was consuming the U.S. military.

When it appeared that Air Force Gen. Joseph Ralston would be named chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff despite revelations about past adultery, critics decried the apparent double standard: Just a month before, 1st Lt. Kelly Flinn, the first female B-52 pilot and a recruiting poster child for the Air Force, had been forced to resign after she was accused of an affair with a civilian married to an enlisted subordinate. Ralston finally withdrew his name from consideration -- and was given a plum job as NATO commander in Europe.

I spent more time than I care to remember sitting in military courtrooms as one high-ranking soldier or general underwent court-martial for behaving badly. More compelling were the stories of ordinary women struggling for acceptance from their troop-mates.

With the country abuzz over the movie "G.I. Jane," in which Demi Moore played the first (fictional) woman to train as a Navy SEAL, I headed to boot camp in South Carolina. I visited Fort Jackson, where the Army mixes new recruits, and Parris Island, where the Marines kept men and women apart. Despite a raging debate then over whether separate was equal, the Leathernecks still do.

As I wrote nearly two decades ago, "Women who are aggressive and physical -- prized attributes among warriors -- are suspected of being lesbians. So are some women who file sexual harassment charges." That's still true. Indeed, women may have the most riding on the Obama administration's proposed repeal of the Pentagon's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which has disproportionately affected lesbians. The Air Force on the whole is 20 percent female, but lesbians accounted for 61 percent of its discharges under the policy in 2008. In the Army, where 14 percent of soldiers are women, 36 percent of those dismissed for being gay were female.

Despite such odds, I have seen women successfully adapt to military life. In a story headlined "Battling Bias," I spent time with a female battalion commander on field maneuvers at Fort Stewart, Ga. We shared a tent, where she taught me how female soldiers maintained their modesty in mixed bivouacs by dressing inside their sleeping bag. When she said goodnight, she tucked her 9mm pistol beneath a pink flowered pillowcase.

During the Kosovo War, when I was embedded at an Apache helicopter base in neighboring Albania, I shared a larger tent with female helicopter pilots, medics and air controllers. We endured weeks of cold rain and boot-sucking mud, but these women didn't complain. At this point "women warriors" stories no longer qualified as news. By the time I went to Afghanistan in 2002, I was more interested in writing about the novelty of Afghan women learning to drive cars than I was about American women driving Army trucks.

Though they now make up 14.3 percent of the military, women are still barred from ground combat units -- infantry, armor and artillery -- as well as special forces like the SEALS. But that hasn't kept them out of harm's way, as was discussed at great length in the early days of the Iraq war.

In western Afghanistan, an enlisted woman came along on a civil affairs mission in a remote village in western Afghanistan. During a whirlwind Christmas Day tour of remote combat outposts in Iraq in 2008, I ran into Army Sgt. Danyle Gray at a base near Balad. What was she doing with the infantry? As a military police officer, she wasn't "assigned" to the the ground combat unit. She was just "attached."

The Army and other services have been fudging on the "collocation" rules since the post-9/11 wars began. More than 212,000 women have been sent to Iraq and Afghanistan in logistics, intelligence and other "support" roles. They make up 11 percent of the deployed force. Women have been awarded Silver Stars for valor in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than 100 have given their lives. Like their male counterparts, they've been scarred physically and mentally by war.

But as I was reminded again just last week, as I watched Air Force Tech Sgt. Michelle Spencer operate an aerial refueling boom in an aging KC-135 tanker, perhaps the most remarkable thing about women serving in the military is that it is not so remarkable anymore.