Master Sgt. Cindy Rathbun knew something was wrong three weeks after she arrived in Iraq in September 2006. Her blond hair began “coming out in clumps,” she says.
The Air Force personnel specialist, in the military for 25 years, had volunteered for her first combat zone job at Baghdad’s Camp Victory. She lived behind barbed wire and blast walls, but the war was never far.
“There were firefights all the time,” Rathbun says slowly, her voice flat. “There were car bombs. Boom! You see the smoke. The ground would shake.”
As the mother of three grown children prepared to fly home last February, she took a medic aside. Holding a zip-lock bag of hair, she asked whether this was normal. “He said it sometimes happens,” she says. “It’s the body’s way of displaying stress when we can’t express it emotionally.”
One can only weep.
We are grateful for her service.
Grateful we should be, but women in the military, much less combat areas, is an experiment that should have ended long ago.
Ditto #3. What lunacy that we’ve taken ‘equality’ to mean ignoring the God-given differences between genders and put women with children on the battlefield.
Well, two things come to me:
1. Be careful what you pray for (womens equality across the board)
2. “The law of unintended consequences.
Gloria in SC
reactionary,
How was your service different from the women that you knew, and how was your combat experience different emotionally from the women that you served with?
Re #3
I concur entirely. I applaud women who wish to serve but I believe that with very few exceptions they should do so in a supporting role. This is not simply a keep em barefoot and pregnant response, but a matter of practical consideration. Most women (there are exceptions but it is important to emphasize the word exception) do not have the physical stamina of men. This is obviously not something that can be easily corrected. But the fact remains.
In order to permit women to serve the services have had a long standing policy of holding women and men to different standards of physical readiness. This would be all well and fine if we were talking about requirements to join a club or get into college. But the physical readiness requirements in place for the armed forces are there because that is what is it is needed to keep you and your fellow soldiers/sailors alive when the $&^! hits the fan. When I was in the Navy and there was talk of allowing women on combat vessels (something that happened immediately after I got out), I asked a question which no advocate of women in combat has satisfactorily answered. Will any women I am required to serve with be able to carry me out of a burning engine room on a sinking ship? When the answer becomes yes, I may revisit my opposition.
There are other objections of course, which carry weight. Women in combat units can be disruptive and damage the esprit de corps of the unit. And problems involving sexual fraternization are routinely swept under the carpet by the services. And they exist on a much larger scale than anyone wants to go on record admitting. But for me the deal breaker is that too many of the women in combat units can’t do the job that a man can. That’s not an issue of fairness. It’s an issue of life and death.
#3, 4 & 5 bring back bad memories of some of the questions that Sally Ride, the first female astronaut, got asked.
One would think that male soldiers have never experienced PTSD. Or that it isn’t equally sad for fathers as well as mothers to be on the battlefield.
trooper,
I’m not a combat veteran so I can’t answer that question. I’m also not a woman, so I can’t tell how their psyches process their experiences, which underscores my point. From my admittedly brief experience in the Marine Reserve, my observation is that the military is an inherently male institution in which women are a disruptive element. To summarize, when confronted with women enlistees and officers, the military must change to accomodate them, rather than the historic process of enlistees and officers conforming to the ancient institution. On the macro level, this plays out in a feminized military strategy, with an emphasis on “nation building” and “spreading democracy” rather than focussing on the only thing a military can do well: closing with and killing the enemy.
Culturally, a society that values a woman as a soldier over mother or wife can only be described as nihilistic. There is a biological basis for this distinction: men are more dispensible than women.
Good afternoon! I will no doubt collect a fair share of hatemail for this posting, but here goes.
I recommend we all not take this story and the details provided by the two female veterans at face value. This wouldn’t be the first time that USA Today or another of the mass media outlets went out to find people to supply the gloss for the story the paper intended to write, facts or no facts.
Consider first that the two women featured were neither one in direct combat with an enemy. The Air Force personnel sergeant spent her barely 4 months in theater inside Camp Victory, one of the most secure places this side of Cheyenne Mountain. The Navy woman spent her wartime deployment steering a “fast combat-support ship” (a freighter, in other words) in the Persian Gulf. Other than frequent calls for General Quarters and missing sleep, she says nothing about any direct threats. Nor could she since, other than their bombing of the USS Cole at anchor in Aden, the terrorists have been remarkably unsuccessful at striking our naval vessels.
They both claim that they were victims of “military sexual trauma” in having been raped by superiors and that these experiences contributed to their PTSD. (I did note however, that the Navy woman’s problems began well before the hurricane in Florida during which she states she was raped.) It may be true that both of them were raped, but neither of them reported the events and, as the Duke U lacrosse team case confirms, people do make false allegations when it is in their interest to do so. (I also have to wonder just why someone coined the term “military sexual trauma,” as if rape or groping or foul language were somehow uniquely a military problem. It may be that, as Kipling said: “Single men in barracks don’t grow into plaster saints,” but my experience in 31+ years of military service is that soldiers are a great deal more respectful of women than the average civilian of the same age and social class.)
I would also point out some of the statistical information in the report and ask if these data support the basic claims of the story. Women make up 11% of the deployed force, but have suffered only 2.3% of the combat deaths and 1.8% of the combat injuries. Yet, they represent 14% of the PTSD patients in the VA. Far from supporting the notion that there are barriers to women seeking care, these data would suggest that the reverse is true, or that the conditions bringing these women in for care are not actually related to their deployment experiences at all, but are more a reflection of the well-known phenomenon that women seek care for medical and psychological conditions at rates that are considerably higher than men. That’s true even when corrections are made for gynecologic, obstetric and breast health issues that are unique to women.
In any event, my view is that these women are clearly suffering and are receiving quality care for their problems, whether or not they are really the result of battlefield or sexual trauma. And, getting needed care is a good thing. However, I would argue that this story adds support to my no doubt antediluvian view that the military, especially the fighting and dying part of it, is a young man’s game. They do it better and they tolerate it with fewer long-term ill effects. Does that make them better or worse than women? No, only different, and the effort our society keeps making to ignore those differences leads to another sad place, a VA mental hospital.
Jim K.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. As a 26 year Navy and Marine Corps vet, I saw the evolution of women’s military roles from Carter to Bush2. I have also seen that USA Today tends to write with a certain level of dramatic license.
You picked up on some of the statistical anomalies in the story, but there are more important ones that the story neglects. In the Marine Corps, women are smaller on average than men and yet the carry load for women is not significantly less than that of men, thus women are carrying a larger percent of body weight, leading to many problems including stress fractures. Woman roll-back and/or fail boot camp at about twice the rate of men and they are larger consumers of medical and dental care (almost 50%), thus they are more ‘expensive’ to recruit, train and deploy. On the other side, when women join a unit, the personal hygiene of the men improves greatly. Women joining the military have higher average ASVAB scores and tend to shoot the rifle better.
While I believe the purpose of the article was to scold the current administration and use two women’s lives to express displeasure with the war, the real story behind the story is the role of women in the military. We as a nation must recognize that greater numbers of women in the armed forces and in increasingly dangerous roles will continue to change the military, women and the nation as a whole. Do we want these changes?
I knew Vietnam-era military nurses and medics (women) who affected in the same way. Been there and seen it.
Just don’t be too quick to paint with a broad brush. I was on active duty as an Army linguist in a Light Infantry Division. I generally was outmatched physically by my male fellow soldiers, but I was a better translator than most. Some of my fellow female soldiers were sad representatives of my gender, but some outshone their male counterpoints. As a feminist and a mom, I think all women should leave the military as soon as they anticipate being mothers. Motherhood is a higher calling than even military service, and women, even more than men, will have an emotional/mental reaction to leaving their children. As to men being more expendable than women, that is a political statement that is debatable. It is not a Christian one, though.
Both men and women have to adjust to military life, and, frankly, most women adjusted to the discipline better than the men, IMHO. And yeah, I could have heaved anyone shy of 200 lbs and hauled you wherever you needed to go.
Someone very dear to us, a Chrisitan and a married man, was unfaithful to his wife a two children and had an affair with a female in his unit in Iraq. A bitter divorce is in process. So much damage has been done to so many relationships because of this, and lives have been changed forever. And for us, forgiveness is not an option.
I mourn for your family, Charles, for the great pain that they have sustained.
I mourn for you, Charles, for the great pain that you have personally sustained from this tragedy.
I mourn especially for you, Charles, because of the bitterness you hold in your heart; because of the bitterness that blocks you from granting forgiveness.
I pray for your family, Charles, that God will bring healing and take away the pain.
I pray for you, Charles, that God will bring healing and take away your own personal pain that you have sustained.
I pray especially for you, Charles, that everything that blocks you from finding forgiveness in your heart will be taken away, so that on that great Day, God will also forgive you.
[blockquote] [color=red]For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.[/color] [/blockquote]
For followers of Jesus, refusal to forgive is not an option.
#13 has put the matter in all correctness: “Motherhood is a higher calling….” Why has America made it so difficult to understand this fundamental proposition? LM
Larry,
It’s a modern version of gnosticism, and it’s reflected in the secular sentiment that all people are created equal. Well they’re not, and the biological fact of the matter is that a society can reproduce itself with less men than women but not the reverse. So if you want to maintain your society, you better keep your women away from the fighting unless and until the barbarians are at the very gates. Of course, this is biology not ideology, and modern America lives by the gnostic creed that ideology can triumph over biology.
15. Sorry, I meant to say forgiveness is not optional. We have long since forgiven and are living with the new life this mess has left us, trying to make the best of it. Some friends and relatives have refused to forgive.
“Some friends and relatives have refused to forgive.”
I am probably going to get spanked by the Elves, but this is the sort of attitude that really irritates me. Men are sent halfway around the globe into life-threatening conditions and find physical comfort and sexual release with someone of the opposite sex who’s undergoing the same daily life-and-death experiences that the spouse back home in Wal-Mart, USA cannot possibly comprehend. Shocking. [i]Shocking[/i]. Now, I’m not condoning extra-marital affairs by deployed military, but this is not an entirely unpredictable nor unforgiveable and irreversible turn of events. Reconciliation should still be possible, unless the marriage was already in trouble.