I remember the first time I saw a female combat soldier. It was in a town called Arasadithivu, on the island of Sri Lanka. I’d taken a canoe across a wide lagoon and into territory controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or L.T.T.E., a guerrilla group that was fighting the Sri Lankan government. When I got to the far shore of the lagoon, I found my way to a military camp run entirely by women. The Tigers, as they were known, were extraordinarily fierce. A few weeks before I got there, the women had gone into a nearby village and, using machetes, hacked its inhabitants to death. The Tiger ladies were famous for their suicide bombings. (One such Tiger assassinated Rajiv Gandhi, the Indian Prime Minister, in 1991.) They were fit and strong and humorless. “It’s difficult to say how many people I’ve killed,” a Tiger named Seetha, age twenty-two, told me. What I remember most from that trip are the tiny vials of cyanide that Seetha and every other Tiger wore around their necks, like pieces of jewelry. Capture at the hands of the Sri Lankan government often meant torture, so the Tigers weren’t taking the risk.
It was strange, meeting those women. They were impossible not to like, even to respect, despite—or even because of—their brutality. And that was it: they were as tough as the men. The Tigers, run at the time by a cult-leader-like figure named Velupillai Prabhakaran, started drafting women into the army not because Prabhakaran was a feminist but because so many of the men, after more than fifteen years of fighting, were dead. There was a surplus of women, and they wanted to fight. The headline that ran with my story was “Women Dying to be Equal.”
I thought of the Tiger ladies yesterday when I read about the decision, by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, to rescind the ban on American servicewomen in combat. The order was a long time coming. A dozen years ago, it would have been remarkable for American women to be shooting people and losing their eyes and legs in war. Not anymore. In the twelve years since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began, the military has been steadily pushing women into jobs that no one could call “non-combat” without stripping the phrase of its meaning. Nowadays, women fly Apache helicopters—giant, terrifying killing machines armed with rockets and cannon. Women fly medevac helicopters, often descending directly into firefights to carry away wounded soldiers as they take enemy fire. Members of what the military calls “female engagement teams” venture into remote Afghan villages—nearly all of which are contested by the Taliban—to talk to Afghan women because of the cultural barriers that stand in the way of American men. What’s “non-combat” about those jobs? It’s no surprise that, as the Times pointed out today, more than a hundred and thirty women have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more than eight hundred wounded. The women are as tough as the men.
Notions of equality aside, the real factor that rendered the “non-combat” distinction meaningless was the changing nature of the wars. In an old-style conflict like, say, the Second World War, big, uniformed armies squared off against other big, uniformed armies. In a war like that, driving a truck in a supply convoy, or briefing reporters on the days’ events, could be deemed relatively safe. As long as you were behind the lines, your chances of getting killed were small. But in Iraq and Afghanistan there are no front lines. Or, as the troops on the ground say, the front line is where you are.
Who’s in greater danger? A male Marine on a foot patrol in Helmand Province, or a female Marine driving a fuel truck on a highway to Kandahar? Technically speaking, the former is a combat job, and the latter is not. But the distinction, in both of our recent wars and in any we are likely to fight in the foreseeable future, is meaningless.
I remember the first time I saw American women in combat. It was in March, 2003, a few days into the American invasion of Iraq. I was driving a rental car, tagging along with a group of Marines who were supplying the rest of the troops with gas and ammunition. The Marines were ambushed by a group of Iraqi soldiers, who’d been hiding on the roadside. The Marines quickly dispatched them, killing some, capturing the rest.
When it was over, the bodies of several Iraqi soldiers were lying in a ditch, and a group of female Marines were putting away their M16 rifles. I don’t know—I don’t think they knew—if their bullets had killed the Iraqis. (There were male Marines there, too.) I asked the inevitable question, which now seems embarrassing: What was it like being a woman in combat? And the women just shrugged, as if to say “whatever.” A while later, they started the engine on their truck and resumed the drive to Baghdad.
Progress, I guess.
Illustration by Kris Mukai