I normally don’t quote other news articles if I can help it, but a recent Associated Press story caught my eye. It was about women war veterans, and the battles they face when they come home.
Like their male counterparts, they should be getting a hero’s welcome.
Quite often, they are not.
According to AP, more than 230,000 women have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at least 120 have died. Another 650 have been wounded in service to their country.
But a lot of times, they don’t even merit a free beer at the local watering holes near their bases, like their male counterparts do.
They have to fight harder to get the benefits to which they are entitled, because their combat experience often gets downplayed. And often their transition back into civilian society is far lonelier than that of their brothers in arms.
There’s a multifaceted barrier our women face, and it’s something that stinks of antiquated thinking. It also has to do with the way their job duties are described.
And it also has to do with how the rest of us see women, doing what used to be considered a man’s job. Sometimes we just don’t get it.
Before I go any farther, I want you to realize that women in other places have been fighting and doing men’s work for a long time: they’ve been a part of the Israeli military forces for nearly as long as there has been an Israel, and they were prized combat pilots for the Soviet military during World War II, and continue to serve in combat positions there, and in other countries as well.
But that’s not the case in the U.S.
Defense Department policies forbid women to take assignments where the primary focus is combat. But in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where the enemy could be anywhere (and often is) those lines are utterly blurred. Women are serving in combat. They’re right there with the guys, taking on enemy fire, with just as big a target on their backs.
But because of the U.S.’ antiquated notions of what women can and can’t do, these female veterans find themselves brushed aside when they go home, or their claims of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder trivialized.
“‘Oh, you didn’t do anything; you were just on base,”‘ the AP article quotes Sgt. Rachel McNeill saying, describing the attitude of people she came into contact with, after returning home to the states.
McNeill, according to AP, was a gunner during hostile convoys in Iraq. She was there with the guys and just as vulnerable to death and injury as they were.
But even her VA paperwork reportedly trivialized her experience, going so far as saying she was just riding along on convoys, completely disregarding the risks she was taking with her brothers in arms.
“‘Like I was a passenger in the back seat,'” McNeill said.
Others have had to explain multiple times, when they are stateside and in the company of their male counterparts, that they are not in fact their girlfriends or spouses.
They have to keep overcoming that perception that women don’t fight.
But they do.
They’re also fighting other things in the military: sexual harassment and assault. And because they are in what used to be the boys’ club, they’re also fighting for the right to do their jobs as well as the guys.
This isn’t some indictment of the whole U.S. military complex. But if you want to use the metaphor that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, then this military, and our country, need to be doing far better by our women warriors than they are now.
And there’s another issue here that we women, myself included, have fallen into.
A lot of us flinch at the term “sexual harassment.” There is a stigma attached to this phrase that implies whining and victimization. Most of us with careers stay away from it if we can help it.
I’ve bumped into it a few times in my career. Not all that much, and not at my present job, but I am more than aware that it exists.
When it happens, we have got to be a lot more willing to stand up and call a spade a spade, rather than sweeping it under the rug. That’s the only way we are going to have some honest dialogue as a society. And the only way we’re going to enable women to move forward, to do the jobs they are born to do.
Including serving our country, alongside the men.
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