Fire When Ready, Ma'am

A dog kennel seemed an odd venue for a watershed event in U.S. military history. But when members of the 988th Military Police Company from Fort Benning, Ga., engaged Panamanian soldiers in a firefight at an attack-dog compound near Panama City, the American platoon was commanded by a woman: Captain Linda L. Bray, 29, of Butner, N.C. Bray, one of 771 Army women who took part in the Panama operation, had added a page to the annals of American warfare: for the first time women, who compose almost 11% of the U.S. armed forces, had engaged hostile troops in modern combat.* Though doubts arose over whether Bray's platoon had actually killed any enemy soldiers, her exploits rekindled a debate over whether women should be on the firing line.

American women are excluded by law and regulation from assignment to units, such as infantry, armor and artillery, that are likely to be engaged in combat. But Panama demonstrated how such distinctions blur when the shooting starts. Colorado Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder argued last week that "once you no longer have a definable front, it's impossible to separate combat from noncombat. The women carried M-16s, not dog biscuits."

Although military police like Bray are considered support troops, their duties can be hazardous. Women are among Marines guarding U.S. embassies abroad, and the Air Force employs female test pilots. Yet promotion often hinges on command experience in aircraft, fighting ships or tanks -- and women's careers are circumscribed without it.

Brian Mitchell, author of Weak Link: The Feminization of the American Military, argues that the use of female troops in Panama proved nothing. "The sorts of things they were doing could be done by a twelve-year-old with a rifle," he says. He and other critics contend that women are not capable of performing critical battlefield functions: women Marines, for example, are not allowed to throw live grenades because the corps does not believe they can toss them far enough to avoid injury. But recent Army studies indicate that women's physical strength develops rapidly during training, and as Meredith Neizer, head of a Defense Department advisory committee, notes, intelligence and technical skills are also important to a soldier: "Modern war is fought in a variety of arenas, and the slight physical differences don't have to play a role."

A greater barrier to a combat role for women is public sensitivity to possible female casualties. Yet the military knows the combat exclusion is artificial protection. "The critical point," Army spokeswoman Paige Eversole said last week, "is that these women were trained for whatever contingency they encountered. They could and did fire their weapons where necessary. In war," she added, "we expect women to be casualties in direct proportion to the numbers in which they serve."

FOOTNOTE: *A few women fought in battle as early as the Revolutionary War; one of them, Margaret Corbin, is buried at West Point.