Saluting Our Early Pioneers…Women Airforce Service Pilots

Posted via web from Women Veterans Alliance

WWII test pilot Elizabeth Strohfus, one of the few WASPs

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More troops returning from urban warfare to battle homelessness – Statesman.com

Laura Skelding/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

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An Army National Guard member, Brooke Warren served in Iraq twice before the pregnant veteran took shelter at the Salvation Army. The VA got her and son Exavier into an apartment.

Laura Skelding/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Enlarge Photo

While living at the Salvation Army, Iraq war veteran Brooke Warren continued to report to once-a-month duties with the Texas National Guard. Just before giving birth to Exavier, now 7 months, she got help from the VA to move into an apartment.

Unemployment, mental stress, pregnancy swelling numbers of younger, female veterans on the street.

By Jeremy Schwartz

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Published: 10:27 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 30, 2010

TEMPLE — Last spring, on his first night of homelessness, Izay Ramos and his wife slept in his van. Then came nearly a month in a homeless shelter in Copperas Cove, where he battled depression and chronic sleeplessness and searched in vain for a job.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this for Ramos, a father of three and a decorated former sergeant in the U.S. Army. A year earlier, he’d been repairing missile systems and fixing tanks and Humvees in Baghdad as he finished a military career that included two tours of Iraq. He said he left Fort Hood in March 2009 filled with hope, embarking on the next chapter in his life with his wife and three children.

“I was very positive when I first got out,” said Ramos, 27. “I thought I would get a job quickly.” Instead, Ramos and his wife, forced to leave their children with relatives in Mississippi, watched their savings evaporate and their options dwindle.

In Central Texas, Department of Veterans Affairs officials say Ramos is part of a troubling trend. They have begun seeing more younger veterans, often with families, living on the streets or facing eviction than they have before.

As of mid-January, the VA’s homeless program, which covers a 39-county swath of Central Texas, had helped 31 veterans with families, said Paula Wood, the Central Texas VA homeless health care coordinator. The program has seen 27 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans in Central Texas, but officials say they haven’t counted all of the post-9/11 veterans in need of housing assistance.

According to the VA, as of 2009, more than 3,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans had sought housing assistance in the past four years, up from 1,800 in 2008. And the number of female veterans who are homeless has doubled in the past decade.

But officials say getting an accurate number of younger Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who have become homeless is difficult because many are too embarrassed to seek help or avoid the streets by house-surfing with friends and family.

Iraq and Afghanistan veterans continue to represent just a fraction of the nation’s homeless veteran population, estimated at 131,000. But the numbers are unprecedented.

“We haven’t really dealt with (homeless families) before,” Wood said. “Before, we would see maybe one per year. … It’s just unreal. It’s not substance abuse; it’s unemployment.”

Ramos and other recently discharged veterans have returned from war only to run up against some potent forces.

Like an estimated 20 to 30 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, Ramos came home with psychological scars, in his case a major depression fueled by a tough second deployment in which the former mechanic says he was unexpectedly pressed into a combat role.

And new veterans face a grim economic picture: The unemployment rate for all post-9/11 veterans is 11.6 percent, compared with 10 percent for the general public. Unemployment rates are particularly high for veterans younger than 24, at more than 20 percent.

And the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America organization says it’s concerned about another trend: Recent veterans are ending up on the streets faster than veterans of other conflicts. Most Vietnam veterans didn’t wind up homeless for five to 10 years after that war, yet some Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are becoming homeless within 18 months of coming home, according to the VA.

Advocates hope an array of services and programs will help Iraq and Afghanistan veterans avoid the fate that befell tens of thousands of Vietnam veterans, who had few resources to help them avoid homelessness.

For some experts, homelessness among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans remains remarkably low, considering the numbers returning with psychological injuries.

“I’m surprised the numbers aren’t higher, given the nature of the conflict,” said John Driscoll, president of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans. “This generation has proven itself something special.”

For Ramos, the seeds of homelessness were planted during his military service in Iraq. During his first deployment in 2003, he rarely left the huge Baghdad base Camp Liberty, where he repaired fighting vehicles. He saw little action or bloodshed. All that changed on his second deployment in 2006, when he was part of a task force that conducted missions in dangerous Baghdad neighborhoods during a particularly violent phase of the American surge there. Though Ramos was still a maintenance worker, he said he was often pressed into service with the infantry battalion he accompanied.

At the same time, the situation at home was growing difficult. His wife was diagnosed with a painful bladder syndrome that made it hard for her to care for their children. Family members from their native Puerto Rico had to pitch in.

“I couldn’t come back, and that was a stressor,” he said. “Every single day I was going on missions that I wasn’t supposed to be on. It was very bad, very stressful.”

When he did come home, Ramos said he found himself unable to sleep, and for a period he withdrew into himself, avoiding other people and social situations. When his depression led to thoughts of suicide, he said, he spent two weeks at a psychiatric hospital in San Antonio. After he left the Army to care for his wife and children, Ramos said, he and his family stayed with friends near Fort Hood as he looked for work. A few months later they left their children with relatives in Mississippi. When Ramos and his wife returned to Killeen, the friends didn’t want them staying with them anymore, he said.

The couple soon landed at a homeless shelter in Copperas Cove, where administrators estimate that one out of 10 homeless veterans are recent returnees from Iraq. He despaired of finding a job and getting his life on track.

The good news for homeless veterans like Ramos is that they have an array of VA and community-based programs to help them find permanent housing. A number of bills before Congress would dramatically increase funding for the VA’s homeless efforts and allow the department to help veterans with emergency cash payments to help stave off eviction.

In Central Texas, officials say one of their most powerful tools is the Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing program, or VASH, which gives eligible veterans $650-a-month Section 8 housing vouchers to help pay their rent. Once reserved for chronically homeless veterans — typically older single men battling substance abuse — the program is now open to at-risk populations, including families and Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

Since last summer, local Veterans Affairs officials have had two full-time outreach social workers visiting the Austin Salvation Army, the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless and other homeless gathering spots in an effort to reach more veterans within Austin’s homeless community.

“A lot of people say, ‘I have a hard time asking for help; I just got out of the military,’” said VA social worker Molly Batschelet, who has an office at the Salvation Army. “When you are in this situation, it can be incredibly overwhelming. … For some of the younger veterans or those who haven’t been homeless before, the shelter is intimidating.”

Homeless, with child

Last year, Brooke Warren, 30, used the program to get out of the Austin Salvation Army women’s shelter, where the then-pregnant former Fort Hood soldier spent three months while she searched for work.

“It’s not a place for a pregnant woman to be,” said Warren, who was an aviation coordinator in Iraq. “In the shelter, I just felt like I was lost in a way. I didn’t know where to turn, where to go.” With her family in Wisconsin, Warren said, she didn’t have anyone to lean on in Austin.

Despite being homeless, Warren continued to report to her once-a-month duties with the Texas National Guard at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. Every time she donned her camouflage uniform, it drew stares and questions from the other women at the shelter.

“But I liked going,” she said. “I felt better because I was working. I felt productive.”

Eventually, a social worker told her about the VA’s supportive housing program.

“That’s the main thing: People don’t know about it,” she said. “I would have gone directly if I had known.”

At first she moved into the VA’s transitional housing program, an Austin group home with other homeless veterans. Two weeks before she gave birth to her son, she moved into an apartment on William Cannon Drive with a $650-a-month Section 8 voucher, one of 105 available to veterans in Austin.

Today she’s hoping to attend college through the Post 9/11 GI Bill , which pays tuition and a housing stipend for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. “I am blessed really to have an opportunity to be in (the homeless) program,” she said. “Without it, I don’t know where I’d be. I’m not going to fail anymore. I’ve got to get it together.”

Tyreena Mendez ended up at a homeless shelter in Copperas Cove after leaving the Army in 2007, when she was pregnant with her first child. After a fruitless year-and-a-half search for work in the Killeen area, she found herself homeless, with another baby on the way.

“I was really, really stressed” while at the shelter, said Mendez, who has since moved into an apartment through the VA’s housing program and found a job at a day care. “I had the baby; I was pregnant, no job, no food, no money for anything. I did not think it was going to be like this. If I would have known, I would have stayed in the Army.”

Rising tide of women

Experts say Mendez and Warren represent another troubling trend: Though the number of homeless veterans in general has fallen sharply — from about 250,000 in 2004 to 131,000 at last count in 2009 — the number of female homeless veterans has doubled over the past decade to an estimated 6,500.

Many, like Mendez and Warren, are single mothers and were part of the unprecedented presence of servicewomen in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The issue of female homelessness was addressed by Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki in November, when he announced a five-year plan to end homelessness among veterans. Advocates generally lauded the plan, which calls for measures to keep veterans from becoming homeless in the first place.

“If we do not have a definite time frame, we’ll never work as hard to achieve it,” said Driscoll, the homeless veterans coalition president. “If Congress comes through, it probably won’t drive the number down to zero, but it should give an opportunity to every veteran that’s threatened with homelessness to link to services to avoid it.”

A variety of bills wending their way through Congress would provide specialized assistance to single mothers, allow the VA to provide direct financial support to very low-income veterans and triple the number of Section 8 vouchers available to the VA supportive housing program to 60,000 by 2014.

The supportive housing program has been the subject of debate among homeless advocates since the VA ruled it could be available to all homeless veterans and not just the chronically homeless. The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans and other groups argue that the vouchers should be reserved for the chronically homeless — people who may need supportive services for the rest of their lives — which could free up transitional housing programs for more recent veterans, who are more likely to require short-term help.

Ramos said he learned about the VA’s homeless program while he was at the Cove House Emergency Homeless Shelter in Copperas Cove. By October, Ramos and his family had moved into a townhouse in a Killeen fourplex, a three-bedroom, two-bath peace of mind.

“Now it seems like everything is going back to where it’s supposed to be,” he said. “I feel better; I can take care of my family. … The kids seem happier. They know — you think they don’t, but they do.”

Ramos is repairing electronics from home and searching for a part-time job. He hopes to enroll in college through the GI Bill and study software engineering. With his life less chaotic, he said he plans to focus on getting treatment for his depression, which he neglected during his brush with homelessness.

“Right now,” he said, “I’m getting at the point where I’m getting back on my feet.”

jschwartz@statesman.com; 912-2942

via statesman.com

 

Posted via web from Women Veterans Alliance

Saluting college veterans – Sacramento Press

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Sacramento State has the second-highest veterans and their dependents student population of any California State University and University of California campus. With more than 1,200 veterans and dependents taking classes there, the Student Veterans Organization is one of the highest profile clubs on campus. Its first spring meeting is Monday.

Active since fall 2007, SVO is dedicated to helping veterans and their families in every facet of college life. From class enrollment to complicated government forms, theSVO assists members every step of the way.

“This is my version of a fraternity,” Air Force veteran Dustin McMillan said of the group. “Commonalities we all share, like the military, provides the base to build on.”

A special forum, Veterans Cafe, begins this spring. Every other Monday on the CSUS campus, the cafe will hold workshops for all students. Topics will include health care, jobs and veteran women’s rights. Each cafe session will feature a speaker who is an expert in their field.

“This is an outlet for questions,” said Army veteran and club president Janelle Adams. “This brand new concept is a chance for faculty and students to receive an answers to their questions from the (authoritative) source.”

Veterans Cafe is just one of the semester’s activities. Plans also include a canned food drive benefiting homeless veterans in the community and fund-raisers such as a crab feed and car washes.

SVO also provides leisure activities. In addition to tailgating before every home football game, the club plans to tailgate before River Cats and Stockton Thunder games.

The administration at Sac State also offers programs for veterans and their dependents. The Veteran Advisory Council was designed to develop programs for returning veterans.

“Sac State realizes the growing issues facing veterans today,” said Adams. “With an increase of returning female veterans, sexual assault and other abuse is possible. These are issues theSVO has addressed in the past and we will continue to address in the future.”

Students who are veteran or their dependents are encouraged to join the club, as are students from Los Rios Community College. Though the club promotes veterans’ rights and educates members about state and federal programs, it has other advantages as well.

“I have made so many lifelong friends here,” said Vice-President Ryan Roebuck. “They are my friends, support group and most importantly, family.”

The SVO can be reached through its website.

via sacramentopress.com

Posted via web from Women Veterans Alliance

My Mom’s A Soldier

Eight children from three military families are forced to grow up fast while their mothers are serving in Iraq.

via InTheirBoots.com

Posted via web from Women Veterans Alliance

Women’s war roles undergoing transformation – Richmond Times-Dispatch

By Luz Lazo
Published: January 24, 2010

U.S. Marine Corps Cpl. Anna Wallace, assigned to Marine Aircraft Support Squadron 1, 2nd Marine Air Wing, loads a rucksack onto the back of a truck at Asad, Iraq, March 23, 2009. Wallace will undergo training in the Lioness program, which gives units an all-female security team that provides cultura

Lance Cpl. Audrey Graham

• 

  U.S. Marine Corps Cpl. Anna Wallace, assigned to Marine Aircraft Support Squadron 1, 2nd Marine Air Wing, loads a rucksack onto the back of a truck at Asad, Iraq, March 23, 2009. Wallace will undergo training in the Lioness program, which gives units an all-female security team that provides cultura Lance Cpl. Audrey Graham

• 

  U.S. Marines assigned to Combat Logistics Battalion 4, 2nd Marine Logistics Group, place a waterproof tarp over their tent at Shadow Range, Iraq, March 23, 2009. Lance Cpl. Audrey Graham

• 

  U.S. Marine Corps Cpl. Brandy Young assigned to 2nd Supply Battalion, 2nd Marine Logistics Group, uses a mirror to search underneath a vehicle during search procedure training at Shadow Range, Iraq, March 27, 2009. Lance Cpl. Audrey Graham

• 

  U.S. Marine Corps 1st Lt. Victoria Sherwood, of the Marine Expeditionary Brigade Female Engagement Team, gives candy to women and children during a populace engagement in the Helmand province of Afghanistan July 23, 2009. The Marines are executing controlled population engagements to collect atmosph Cpl. Sarah Furrer

• 

  U.S. Army Pvt. 1st Class Misty Raines, left, assigned to Charlie Company, 701st Brigade Support Battalion, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, reviews her final notes, after teaching a basic medical aid class, to the Iraqi army medical staff, at Ordnance Park, in Tikrit, Iraq, Dec. 17, 2 Spc. Canaan Radcliffe

• 

  U.S. Marine Corps Master Sgt. Julia Watson, with the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, provides security during a patrol in Khwaja Jamal, Afghanistan, Dec. 29, 2009. Marines are in the area to meet with and speak to Afghan women. Cpl. Albert F. Hunt

TECH. SGT. ERIK GUDMUNDSON

U.S. Air Force Senior Airman Michelle Kendall, a member of a 332nd Expeditionary Security Forces Squadron security team, provides security as cargo is unloaded out of a C-130 Hercules aircraft at a remote location in Iraq on Nov. 22, 2008.

In charge of a section of about 30 soldiers providing support to combat operations in Iraq, Army Staff Sgt. Connica McFadden had the respect of fellow soldiers — female and male.

It was when she supervised Iraqi men assisting in the missions that she found resistance.

“Back there, the women have to walk behind the men. The men, when we were in mission, did not want to talk to women, did not want to talk to me,” recalls McFadden, 30, who deployed twice to Iraq and is currently the Basic Petroleum and Water Logistics Division operations non-commissioned officer at Fort Lee.

“It is hard for men in the Middle East to deal with a female telling them what to do and questioning them about stuff. They didn’t feel like they had to answer to me.”

The cultural differences, however, did not affect McFadden’s ability to do her job. On the contrary, those cultural bar riers have put her and other women in uniform in a crucial role in this war.

“This is the first time in the history of American women in the military that women can do something men cannot do,” said Robynne Dexter, archivist at the U.S. Army Women’s Museum at Fort Lee.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, women have become crucial in gathering intelligence from women and children.

Department of Defense policies still prohibit women from being assigned to ground combat units. They are restricted from tank crew, artillery crew, infantry soldier, ship gunner and submarine navigator.

But in a war with no clear front lines, women serving in support units as truck drivers, machine gunners, medics, military police and other roles often find themselves in combat zones.

“The thing that is so interesting to me is that even though people believe that women are not allowed to be in combat, in fact they are in combat,” said Laura Browder, an English professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of “When Janey Comes Marching Home: Portraits of Women Combat Veterans.”

. . .

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has faced challenges that have contributed to the ongoing transformation of the role women play in war.

“If you want to go and search a house that has women in it, you need a woman to go and search those women because men are not authorized to be touching women,” said Brig. Gen. Wilma L. Vaught, a U.S. Air Force retiree and president of the Washington-based Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation Inc.

“It was causing an uproar in Iraq when men were going into households and attempting to search them,” she said, “and there were women present. So the Marine Corps got some Army women assigned to perform those searches. Now, it is pretty much a routine.”

Women in the service are put in life-threatening positions just as much as their male counterparts, said Browder, who has interviewed numerous women who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“For a long time, public policymakers had a really hard time thinking that women could really be soldiers and equal of men, but I think that this war has really once and for all broken down a lot of those assumptions and more and more combat positions are open to women,” she said.

Rhonda Seward, an Army sergeant who was on a one-year tour to Iraq in 2004 and currently works as a public information officer at Fort Lee, agrees.

“Technically, women cannot take infantry-type jobs, but women are in convoys, women are delivering supplies, women are going from one installation to another, driving trucks, issuing fuel, fueling jets. These type of jobs put them in harm’s way,” she said. “In essence, there is no safe zone when they are in war.”

The roles of women in uniform have expanded considerably in the past two decades.

The reasons are twofold, said Nancy Duff Campbell, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center.

More women are joining the military and, after the Persian Gulf War, the public became more accepting of them and more aware of their contributions.

“They did such a good job that they were recognized,” said Campbell, who has advocated for military women’s rights since the 1980s. It became known, she said, that women provided essential support, not just behind a desk, but in combat zones.

The shift in the 1970s from the military draft to an all-volunteer force created an opportunity for women to serve in greater numbers. Women in service grew from less than 2 percent to the current 14.2 percent.

In the early 1990s, after the Persian Gulf War, Congress repealed laws banning women from flying in combat and from duty on combat ships, thus ending laws restricting women from certain jobs in the military. The current restrictions on tasks women can perform were determined by the Department of Defense.

“The restrictions that exist are policy only,” Campbell said.

The first Clinton administration also set new rules and policies that opened more military jobs to women. More than 90 percent of career fields in the armed forces are open to them now.

In Campbell’s view, the reality of the current war makes the restricting policies outdated. They also are often not put into practice, she said. The commanders in the field, she said, are assigning missions to whoever is available and can do the job, regardless of gender.

“The problem, however, is that women are not necessarily getting the recognition. They never get a record of having done the job and can’t get certain kinds of pay or promotions because they weren’t supposed to be doing that job,” she said.

A reversal of the restrictions would allow men and women to compete equally. It would open up opportunities to women, allowing them to be assigned to positions necessary or valuable to advancement and promotion, Campbell said.

Bottom line, she said, “we shouldn’t be making assumptions on what women can do.”

. . .

In a long-awaited win for women, the Navy announced in September that it is reviewing a policy prohibiting women from serving aboard submarines.

An end to the policy, which the Navy says has been in place because of the lack of privacy on the vessels, has been promoted by national women’s groups and lately by an increasing number of military leaders.

It could take years before women are aboard submarines because the Navy would need to interview people and have them trained, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said in October during an appearance on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”

But the consideration alone is a sign of the times, experts say.

The shift could be a natural progression of society as an increasing number of women are studying engineering and have proven themselves capable, said Vaught, 79, who has been advocating the change for years.

“That is now creating an opportunity [for] women to be assigned to submarines,” Vaught said.

Other issues still need to be resolved, said the Air Force’s first female general.

For example, she said, what would happen if Congress considers reinstating the draft?

“Would we draft women?” she asked. “We would have to, but it would be a very controversial issue and it would raise the whole spectrum on combat and hand-to-hand combat and being in the trenches with men.”

Still far off are prospects of having a female chief of a service, or a female member or chair of the joint chiefs, Vaught said. But the changes resulting from the current military conflict show a promising future for women in uniform.

“We are in the middle of a sea change,” Browder said. “I don’t think many positive things have come out of this war, but I think one positive thing has been that it is going to change the way we as society view women in the military. This is key towards winning women’s equal rights everywhere.

“Women have proven themselves to be capable in the military. There may be a ban on combat, but I am sorry, if you are outside of your forward-operating base 12 hours at a time and you are doing house-to-house searches and busting down doors, or if you have an explosive-sniffing dog and you are going into dangerous areas . . . how is that not being in combat?

“If you are a convoy gunner and you are ordering your troops to take out a car that is dangerous, how is that not combat?”

Contact Luz Lazo at (804) 649-6058 or llazo@timesdispatch.com   

Related Info

• Women’s war roles undergoing transformation
• Women in the armed forces speak

WOMEN IN THE MILITARY
• Audio: Retired USAF Brigadier General Wilma L. Vaught
• Report: historic highlights

The numbers

Women have served with or within the U.S. military since the Revolutionary War. In the 1940s, the government established that women could not make up more than 2 percent of the armed forces. The cap was lifted in 1967, and women are entering the armed forces in greater numbers now.
205,000 women are on active duty, accounting for 14.2 percent of all active duty in the U.S. military. The number has gone up from less than 2 percent in the 1970s.
19.6 is the percentage of women in the Air Force, which has the largest percentage of women of the five branches.
6.2 is the percentage of women in the Marine Corps, the smallest proportion among the branches. The Marines have launched a vigorous recruitment campaign targeting women.
73,902 women serve in the Army, the largest branch in the military. They make up 13.6 percent of the force.
15 is the percentage of women in the U.S. Navy, which has not allowed women to serve on submarines but is reviewing that policy.
12.2 is the percentage of women in the U.S. Coast Guard.
24.1 is the percentage of women in the Reserve units, and 15.1 is the percentage in the U.S. National Guard.
SOURCES: Department of Defense, Coast Guard, Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation Inc.

Female casualties

As of Jan. 9, 124 females have died in Afghanistan and Iraq, of which 94 were Army women.
Hostile deaths: 67
Nonhostile deaths: 57
Wounded in action: 660
SOURCE: Department of Defense

via Richmond Time-Dispatch

Posted via web from Women Veterans Alliance

The Nation: The Plight of Women Soldiers – NPR.org

by Helen Benedict

 
U.S. Army, Sgt. Jim Wilt/HO

Spc. Monica Brown received the Silver Star Medal at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan in March 2008. Brown is the second female since World War II to earn the Silver Star award for her gallant actions while in combat. Pentagon policy prohibits women from serving in front-line combat roles, in the infantry, armor or artillery, for example. But the nature of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with no real front lines, has seen women soldiers take part in close-quarters combat more than previous conflicts.

May 6, 2009

Army specialist Mickiela Montoya was standing silently in the back of a Manhattan classroom while a group of male Iraq war veterans spoke to a small audience about their experiences as soldiers. It was November 2006, and she had been back from Iraq for a year, but was still too insecure to speak out in public. Anyway, the room was full of men, and Montoya had learned that a lot of men aren’t much interested in listening to military women.

“Nobody believes me when I say I’m a veteran,” she said that day, tucking her long red hair behind her ears. “I was in Iraq getting bombed and shot at, but people won’t even listen when I say I was at war. You know why? Because I’m a female.”

Montoya, who grew up in a Mexican family in East Los Angeles, served in Iraq for eleven months, from 2005-2006, with the 642nd Division Aviation Support Battalion. She was only 19 back then, but by the time she turned 21 she was as bitter as any old veteran, not only because of the lack of recognition she was receiving as a combat vet but because of the way she had been treated as a soldier—by her comrades, the army and by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Many female veterans share Montoya’s anger. They join the military for the same reasons men do—to escape dead-end towns or dysfunctional families, to pay for college or seek adventure, to follow their ideals or find a career—only to find themselves denigrated and sexually hounded by many of the “brothers” on whom they are supposed to rely. And when they go to war, this harassment does not necessarily stop. The double traumas of combat and sexual persecution may be why a 2008 RAND study found that female veterans are suffering double the rates of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder for their male counterparts.

Not many people realize the extent to which the Iraq War represents a historic change for American women soldiers. More women have fought and died in Iraq than in all the wars since World War II put together. Over 206,000 have served in the Middle East since March 2003, most of them in Iraq; and over 600 have been wounded and 104 have died in Iraq alone, according to the Department of Defense. In Iraq, one in ten troops is a woman.

Yet the military—from Pentagon to the troops on the ground—has been slow to recognize the service these women perform, or even to see them as real soldiers. Rather, it is permeated with age-old stereotypes of women as passive sex objects who have no business fighting and cannot be relied upon in battle. As Montoya said about her time as a soldier, “The only thing the guys let you be if you’re a girl in the military is a bitch, a ho, or a dyke. You’re a bitch if you won’t sleep with them, a ho if you even have one boyfriend, and a dyke if they don’t like you. So you can’t win.”

The pinnacle of this derogatory attitude toward women is the Pentagon’s ban on women in ground combat, which it reaffirmed in 2006 despite being perfectly aware that in Iraq women are in combat all the time. (Speculation is that President Obama may finally reverse this ban, but it stands as of now.) Because the US military is so short of troops and Iraq’s battlefields are towns and roads, women are frequently thrown into jobs indistinguishable from those of the all-male infantry, cavalry and armor divisions, often under the guise of “combat support.” They “man” machine guns atop tanks and trucks, guard convoys, raid houses, search and arrest Iraqis, drive military vehicles along bomb-ridden roads, and are killing and being killed. In Afghanistan, too, women find themselves in these positions.

Yet even though more than 2,000 women who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan have been awarded Bronze Stars, several for bravery and valor in combat; more than 1,300 have earned the Combat Action Badge; and two have been awarded Silver Stars, the military’s top honor for bravery in combat, the official ban continues. This makes it difficult for women to be taken seriously as soldiers or advance in their careers, let alone win respect.

The Pentagon justifies the ban by blaming civilian attitudes. American society, its policy statement says, believes that femininity is incompatible with combat, and will not tolerate the killing and mutilation of its mothers and daughters. Likewise, it argues, soldiers are more troubled by the sight of women being wounded and killed than of men, so will put themselves at extra risk trying to protect women in battle. And finally, women in combat would endanger men because of their lesser strength.

These arguments have been made for decades by conservatives too, but ironically a 2005 Gallup Poll, reported by the military itself, belies them: 72 percent of the public favored women serving anywhere in Iraq, and 44 percent (and here I quote the military’s own report) “favored having women serve as the ground troops who are doing most of the fighting.”

Not one of these arguments against women in combat has been borne out in Iraq. Any sign of public or media outrage over how many women soldiers are being killed and wounded in Iraq has been conspicuously absent; rather, the press has focused the bulk of its war stories on men, as if female soldiers barely exist, and the same applies to feature films and documentaries. Far from protecting women, many men are attacking them, as discussed below. Studies have long shown that some women’s strength matches that of some men, and that women use ingenuity instead of strength where necessary. And there is no evidence that women soldiers add to the danger of men in any way. On the contrary, it is women who are in more danger than before, both from being in battle and from those very men who are supposed to feel so protective of them.

The fact is that military women want equality, and even though not all will choose to join a ground combat unit, just as not all men do, they want the choice to be theirs, not the government’s. “War doesn’t give a damn what your job is, we’re getting killed anyway,” said Miriam Barton, an army sergeant from Oregon who served in Iraq from 2003-2004 as a heavy gunner with an engineering unit. “We’re getting blown up right alongside the guys. We’re manning whatever weapons we can get our little hands on. We’re in combat! So there’s no reason to keep us segregated anymore.”

The majority of military men do not look down on women as inferior soldiers or sex objects, of course, but there are still too many who do. “A lot of the men didn’t want us there,” Montoya said about her time in Iraq. “One guy told me the military sends women soldiers over to give the guys eye-candy to keep them sane. He told me in Vietnam they had prostitutes, but they don’t have those in Iraq, so they have women soldiers instead.”

Some soldiers and commanders show their hostility by undermining women’s authority, denying them promotions, or denigrating their work. Others show it through sexual harassment, assault, and and rape (of which there is a shockingly high rate in the military). These problems occur throughout the military, on US bases all over the world, as well as at war.

In 2003, a survey of female veterans found that 30 percent said they were raped in the military. A 2004 study of veterans who were seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder found that 71 percent of the women said they were sexually assaulted or raped while serving. And a 1995 study of female veterans of the Gulf and earlier wars, found that 90 percent had been sexually harassed.

The Defense Department shows much lower numbers, but that is because it only counts reported rapes—and, as the DoD admits itself in this year’s annual Pentagon report on military sexual assault, some 90 percent of rapes in the military are ever reported at all. Nonetheless, that same report showed that in 2008, reports of assault increased by 8 percent military-wide, and by 26 percent in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. For many women soldiers, the result of all this persecution is that instead of finding camaraderie among their fellow soldiers, or being able to rely on comrades to watch their backs in battle, they feel dangerously alone. As specialist Carlye Garcia, who was sexually harassed throughout her service with the Army Military Police in Baghdad from 2003-04, put it, “It got so I didn’t trust anybody in my company after a few months. I didn’t trust anybody at all. I still don’t.” The hostility and rejection can run right up through the ranks, too, as women commonly find when they try to report an assault. Some examples: when Lieutenant Jennifer Dyer refused to return to post with an officer she had reported for raping her, the army threatened to prosecute her for desertion.

When Specialist Suzanne Swift reported her sergeant for repeatedly raping her over months and then refused to redeploy under him, the army tried her by court martial for desertion and put her in prison for a month.

When Cassandra Hernandez of the Air Force reported being gang-raped by three comrades at her training acadamy, her command charged her with indecent behavior for consorting with her rapists.

When Sergeant Marti Ribeiro reported being raped by a fellow serviceman while she was on guard duty in Afghanistan, the Air Force threatened to court martial her for leaving her weapon behind during the attack. “That would have ruined by career,” she said. “So I shut up.”

All the men who were accused in these cases went unpunished. Several of them even won promotions.

The Defense Department claims that since 2005, it has instigated reforms that have created a “climate of confidentiality” that allows women to report without fear of being disbelieved, blamed, or punished like this. As Kaye Whitley, director of the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office (SAPRO), said at a press briefing at the Pentagon this past March 17, “The numbers have gone up and I reiterate, this does not mean sexual assaults have gone up, this means the number of reports have gone up, which we see as very positive as we’re getting the victims in to get care.”

In fact, nobody knows whether an increase in reported rapes means more rapes or more reports. And all the cases described above happened after the reforms of 2005.

Even when the military does accept a report of sexual assault, the consequences to the perpetrators tend to be negligible. Of the assaults reported and recorded by the Defense Department in the fiscal year 2008, 49 percent were dismissed as unfounded or unsubstantiated—meaning there wasn’t enough proof of assault, or that the women recanted or died—and only 10.9 percent resulted in court martial.

Even those few men who are found guilty of sexual assault or rape tend to receive absurdly mild punishments, such as suspension, demotion, or a scolding letter for their file. In 2008, 62 percent of offenders found guilty received mild punishments like this. This amounts to a tiny fraction of the men accused of sexual assault. One particularly grotesque example of this sort of justice is the 2006 case of army sergeant Damon D. Shell, who ran over and killed 20-year-old Private First Class Hannah Gunterman McKinney of the 44th Corps Support Battalion on her base in Iraq on September 4. Shell pleaded guilty to drinking in a war zone, drunken driving and “consensual sodomy” with McKinney, an underage junior soldier to whom he had supplied alcohol until she was incapacitated. Having sex with a person incapacitated by alcohol is legally rape, and using rank to coerce a junior into a sexual act is legally rape in the military, too. Yet a military judge ruled McKinney’s death an accident, said nothing about rape, and sentenced Shell to thirteen months in prison and demotion to private. Shell was not even kicked out of the army.

The military’s retrograde attitude towards rape gets even more sinister. More female troops have died in Iraq of non-hostile causes than have been killed in battle, and several of those deaths have either been labeled suicides or been left unexplained by the military. Four of those women had earlier been raped, and at least sixteen others died in such suspicious circumstances that retired Army Colonel Ann Wright and Congressman Ike Skelton have called for Congress to compel the military to reopen the cases and investigate, so far to no avail.

One of the most shocking of these cases is that of 19-year-old LaVena Johnson, whose dead body was found on her base in Balad, Iraq in July 2005. Her father, who has pictures of her body, said her face was battered; she had been stripped, raped, burned, re-clothed, dragged across the ground bleeding and shot in the head. The Army initiated an investigation, then suddenly closed the case and labeled her death a suicide. Her father and Colonel Wright have been trying to get Congress and the Army to reopen the investigation ever since, but so far the Army has declined to cooperate.

The Defense Department has made some effort lately to improve its dismal record on military sexual assault. After a set of Congressional hearings on military sexual assault in July and September 2008, and again in January 2009, the army announced fresh programs designed to educate the troops on the prevention of sexual assault, and the hiring of more litigators to prosecute it. The other military branches, too, are revamping the sexual assault prevention classes that every new recruit must attend.

Whether these changes will make any difference is soon to be put to the test. The collapsing economy is driving numerous new recruits to the military, 16 to 29 percent of whom are women, depending on the branch of service. It remains to be seen whether these female troops will be as isolated, harassed or abused as their predecessors, or finally given the respect they deserve.

via NPR.org

Posted via web from Women Veterans Alliance

Women’s roles in war transforming – HickoryRecord.com

By Luz Lazo

Media General News Service

Published: January 26, 2010

Richmond, Va. – In charge of a section of about 30 soldiers providing support to combat operations in Iraq, Army Staff Sgt. Connica McFadden had the respect of fellow soldiers — female and male.

It was when she supervised Iraqi men assisting in the missions that she found resistance.

“Back there, the women have to walk behind the men. The men, when we were in mission, did not want to talk to women, did not want to talk to me,” recalls McFadden, 30, who deployed twice to Iraq and is currently the Basic Petroleum and Water Logistics Division operations non-commissioned officer at Fort Lee.

“It is hard for men in the Middle East to deal with a female telling them what to do and questioning them about stuff. They didn’t feel like they had to answer to me.”

The cultural differences, however, did not affect McFadden’s ability to do her job. On the contrary, those cultural bar riers have put her and other women in uniform in a crucial role in this war.
“This is the first time in the history of American women in the military that women can do something men cannot do,” said Robynne Dexter, archivist at the U.S. Army Women’s Museum at Fort Lee.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, women have become crucial in gathering intelligence from women and children.

Department of Defense policies still prohibit women from being assigned to ground combat units. They are restricted from tank crew, artillery crew, infantry soldier, ship gunner and submarine navigator.

But in a war with no clear front lines, women serving in support units as truck drivers, machine gunners, medics, military police and other roles often find themselves in combat zones.

“The thing that is so interesting to me is that even though people believe that women are not allowed to be in combat, in fact they are in combat,” said Laura Browder, an English professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of “When Janey Comes Marching Home: Portraits of Women Combat Veterans.”
. . .
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has faced challenges that have contributed to the ongoing transformation of the role women play in war.

“If you want to go and search a house that has women in it, you need a woman to go and search those women because men are not authorized to be touching women,” said Brig. Gen. Wilma L. Vaught, a U.S. Air Force retiree and president of the Washington-based Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation Inc.

“It was causing an uproar in Iraq when men were going into households and attempting to search them,” she said, “and there were women present. So the Marine Corps got some Army women assigned to perform those searches. Now, it is pretty much a routine.”

Women in the service are put in life-threatening positions just as much as their male counterparts, said Browder, who has interviewed numerous women who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. “For a long time, public policymakers had a really hard time thinking that women could really be soldiers and equal of men, but I think that this war has really once and for all broken down a lot of those assumptions and more and more combat positions are open to women,” she said.

Rhonda Seward, an Army sergeant who was on a one-year tour to Iraq in 2004 and currently works as a public information officer at Fort Lee, agrees.

“Technically, women cannot take infantry-type jobs, but women are in convoys, women are delivering supplies, women are going from one installation to another, driving trucks, issuing fuel, fueling jets. These type of jobs put them in harm’s way,” she said. “In essence, there is no safe zone when they are in war.”

The roles of women in uniform have expanded considerably in the past two decades. The reasons are twofold, said Nancy Duff Campbell, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center. More women are joining the military and, after the Persian Gulf War, the public became more accepting of them and more aware of their contributions.

“They did such a good job that they were recognized,” said Campbell, who has advocated for military women’s rights since the 1980s. It became known, she said, that women provided essential support, not just behind a desk, but in combat zones.

The shift in the 1970s from the military draft to an all-volunteer force created an opportunity for women to serve in greater numbers. Women in service grew from less than 2 percent to the current 14.2 percent.

In the early 1990s, after the Persian Gulf War, Congress repealed laws banning women from flying in combat and from duty on combat ships, thus ending laws restricting women from certain jobs in the military. The current restrictions on tasks women can perform were determined by the Department of Defense.

“The restrictions that exist are policy only,” Campbell said.

The first Clinton administration also set new rules and policies that opened more military jobs to women. More than 90 percent of career fields in the armed forces are open to them now.
In Campbell’s view, the reality of the current war makes the restricting policies outdated. They also are often not put into practice, she said. The commanders in the field, she said, are assigning missions to whoever is available and can do the job, regardless of gender.

“The problem, however, is that women are not necessarily getting the recognition. They never get a record of having done the job and can’t get certain kinds of pay or promotions because they weren’t supposed to be doing that job,” she said.

A reversal of the restrictions would allow men and women to compete equally. It would open up opportunities to women, allowing them to be assigned to positions necessary or valuable to advancement and promotion, Campbell said.

Bottom line, she said, “we shouldn’t be making assumptions on what women can do.”
. . .
In a long-awaited win for women, the Navy announced in September that it is reviewing a policy prohibiting women from serving aboard submarines.

An end to the policy, which the Navy says has been in place because of the lack of privacy on the vessels, has been promoted by national women’s groups and lately by an increasing number of military leaders.

It could take years before women are aboard submarines because the Navy would need to interview people and have them trained, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said in October during an appearance on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”

But the consideration alone is a sign of the times, experts say.

The shift could be a natural progression of society as an increasing number of women are studying engineering and have proven themselves capable, said Vaught, 79, who has been advocating the change for years.

“That is now creating an opportunity [for] women to be assigned to submarines,” Vaught said.
Other issues still need to be resolved, said the Air Force’s first female general.

For example, she said, what would happen if Congress considers reinstating the draft?

“Would we draft women?” she asked. “We would have to, but it would be a very controversial issue and it would raise the whole spectrum on combat and hand-to-hand combat and being in the trenches with men.”

Still far off are prospects of having a female chief of a service, or a female member or chair of the joint chiefs, Vaught said. But the changes resulting from the current military conflict show a promising future for women in uniform.

“We are in the middle of a sea change,” Browder said. “I don’t think many positive things have come out of this war, but I think one positive thing has been that it is going to change the way we as society view women in the military. This is key towards winning women’s equal rights everywhere.

“Women have proven themselves to be capable in the military. There may be a ban on combat, but I am sorry, if you are outside of your forward-operating base 12 hours at a time and you are doing house-to-house searches and busting down doors, or if you have an explosive-sniffing dog and you are going into dangerous areas . . . how is that not being in combat?

“If you are a convoy gunner and you are ordering your troops to take out a car that is dangerous, how is that not combat?”

via HickoryRecord.com

Posted via web from Women Veterans Alliance

Women’s Army Corps offers Scholarships

Women’s Army Corps Veterans Association Nor-Cal Chapter 111
The Women’s Army Corps Veteran’s association is reaching out to all female veterans who are seeking to improve themselves through education. Scholarship amounts vary from $500 to $1,000.  For more information call (530) 941-6408. Deadline to apply is April 15, 2010.

For more information about available scholarship opportunities contact Karen Chandler in the Weed Campus Financial Aid Office at (530) 938-5209. The Weed Campus may also be reached by calling (530) 938-5555 or toll-free, (888) 397-4339.

Via Siskiyou Youth

Posted via web from Women Veterans Alliance

Bench dedicated to the Women of the Navy

WAVES, Nurses & Wives
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Posted via email from Women Veterans Alliance