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Lionesses of Iraq
In the dangerous Sunni Triangle, female GIs are volunteering for dangerous duty. As one reporter discovers, it's work no man can do.By Erin Solaro
Washington, D.C., to London. London to Kuwait. Kuwait to Al-Taqqadum Air Base, 35 miles west of Baghdad. Maybe it is the jeans and peach polo shirt that attracts attention. Or maybe it is the fact that I am a woman alone, a journalist traveling without an entourage and an attitude. A Marine asks me if I know what I am getting myself into. I look into his eyes. "Yes, Major, I do." I don't know what he sees in mine, but I think he likes it because then we have a serious conversation about the war. Funny, I think. For months, I've wanted to have serious conversations about the war. I have to go to Iraq to get one. It will be the first of many. Same jeans and polo shirt the next morning, when after a lengthy wait for a helicopter flight, I stagger into Blue Diamond, the headquarters of the 1st Marine Division just across the Euphrates from Ramadi, one of Iraq's flash-point cities in the Sunni Triangle. Packed in my bags are four pairs of trousers (two tan, two khaki) and four shirts (two tan, two light green), all from Sierra Trading Post, which sells wonderful gear at a discount, and broken-in desert boots. I will live in those clothes for the next several weeks. I wear my hair, which is very long, either pinned up in a bun or braided down my back, in deference to military sensibilities, and no makeup at all. I'd been told to bring a vest and helmet, and I wear them. I have too many bags, having spread the load in case British Airways decided to lose anything, but I can carry everything myself in one trip, although every Marine and soldier who gives me a hand has my thanks. My host unit is the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the U.S. Army's 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One, commanded by Col. Arthur W. Connor Jr. After breakfast, I am met by Capt. Joseph Jasper, a cavalryman serving as the brigade's public affairs officer. We drive across the Euphrates on a bridge that makes every soldier who has to use it nervous, a few miles inland to the brigade's base, Camp Junction City, a former Iraqi Army Air Defense base. He finds me a place to sleep for a few days with five female maintenance soldiers of the 101st Maintenance Service Team, then moves me to the 1st Engineer Battalion, the Army's oldest and most decorated engineer battalion. There, I share a barracks room with Capt. Anastasia Breslow, a signals officer and a second-generation soldier. By ancestry, she is half Russian, half Chinese. By conviction, All-American. She wears an 82nd Airborne Division combat patch from the Afghan campaign. Any military unit engages in whatever combat comes its way. That includes units with women, who are barred from most of the combat arms: the infantry, the armor, and the artillery, but not aviation, nor the Corps of Engineers, whose branch motto is "Essayons" ("We will try") but ought to be, "First we dig 'em, then we die in 'em!" The 1st Engineers are commanded by Lt. Col. W.D. Brinkley, who understands the necessity of women soldiers interacting with Iraqis. He makes available to other units within the brigade his women soldiers, who quickly earn the honorific of "Lionesses." Their specific function is to attach to the all-male combat units they are barred from to interact with Iraqi women and children on combat missions. Their presence reassures Iraqi women and men alike, none of whom can fathom Iraqi soldiers searching their homes without raping them, that any violence visited upon them by foreign conquering soldiers and Marines will be a matter of military necessity. Some women volunteer for Lioness missions. Others don't. No woman feels free to decline because it means someone else has to do her work. And if that someone else is a man, the mission will be more dangerous than it has to be. The presence of women and children normally inhibits an aggressor, but when it does not, the meaning of the violence escalates from political defeat to cultural annihilation. Killing fighting women is one thing. Killing noncombatant women and old men, much less children, is something else again. The job of the Lionesses is to help keep the violence in the realm of political defeat. As soldiers, that means they have to fight, if necessary. And they have. Posted by: lotp 2006-01-11 |
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