How America's top general came to endorse women in combat
By Matt Smith
CNN
January 24, 2013
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
NEW: Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman says female gunner changed his perspective
The Pentagon is lifting its longstanding ban on women in combat units
Panetta says American women are already fighting and dying overseas
"The time has come for our policies to recognize that reality," he said
(CNN) -- The U.S. military is dropping its longstanding exclusion of women from combat units, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced Thursday, calling it a recognition of the reality on the battlefield.
"The fact is, they have become an integral part of our ability to perform our mission, and for more than a decade of war they have demonstrated courage and skill and patriotism," Panetta told reporters at the Pentagon. American servicemen and women are already "fighting and they're dying together, and the time has come for our policies to recognize that reality."
Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recounted a foray onto the streets of Baghdad as commander of an armored division in the early days of the war in Iraq.
"I slapped the turret gunner on the leg and I said, 'Who are you?' And she leaned down and said, I'm Amanda.' And I said, 'Ah, OK,' " Dempsey said.
"So, female turret-gunner protecting division commander. It's from that point on that I realized something had changed, and it was time to do something about it."
About 203,000 women are in the active-duty military, including 69 generals and admirals. Despite the official ban on combat, which dates back to 1994, women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan often found themselves engaged in firefights.
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Here's a little history for you from a video I did a couple of years ago.
Former Marine thinks the time is right for women to get combat jobs in the military
FOX31 Denver
January 23, 2013
In 1966, there were about 400,000 troops in Vietnam, almost all of them men. There were only 2,500 women in the Marine Corps.
19-year-old Paula Sarlls was one of them. She was recruited right out of high school.
Sarlls says, “He told me the great opportunities there were and education was one.
And I got an education in more ways than one.”
She says opportunities for women were limited to clerical, accounting, radio operators, traffic controllers and some computer work. And she says some men were openly hostile.
She says she has four pages worth of incidents she had to deal with. She describes working at a control tower where the ceiling was covered with huge spider webs.
“The guys thought it was funny to take the spider webs and pin me down and put them on my face,” she says.
When she tried to report it, she says she was told not to talk about it. “As I left the tower that night I had an eight inch knife put to my throat and told if I told anyone else, they’d kill me.“
“It kept on for two, three weeks and finally stopped. But it was pretty bad,” she says.
The women who take the new combat positions will likely face some opposition, too. “It still happens, people are people.”
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by Julie Hayden
