Two women marines and a female Navy petty officer were killed, and eleven were wounded, when their convoy was ambushed on the night of June 23 in Fallujah.  The Pentagon took several days to confirm the casualties, and media coverage was thin.  If Americans took note of the tragedy at all, it was not to recoil (at last) at the horror of mothers, wives, and daughters dying on the battlefield.  On the contrary, the single bloodiest day for American women in the Iraq war (the deadliest for American women in uniform since a kamikaze claimed the lives of six nurses aboard the U.S.S. Comfort in 1945) moved us one step closer to accepting women in combat as routine.  Nearly 50 female American soldiers and Marines have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Over 300 have been wounded.  At least ten American children have lost their mothers to the war.  Contrast these figures with the total number of American female war dead during the entire Vietnam War: eight nurses.

Courageous journalists such as Brian Mitchell and organizations such as the Center For Military Readiness have presented enough evidence to choke an elephant that women are not equal to the rigors of combat and that further sexual integration of the Armed Forces will undermine our national defense.  Their arguments are ignored by feminists, who, rather than confront the reality that the Armed Forces use softer physical-fitness standards for women than for men, speak of equal opportunity and American values.  Marine Lt. Col. Sara Phoenix, currently serving in Fallujah, told USA Today that “The ideal of equality is not just about the right to vote or work.  This notion that women are somehow not able to perform their jobs in the military in a combat environment flies in the face of everything we say we value in the USA.”

Does it?  Americans value 19-year-old girls being raped and sodomized as prisoners of war and 23-year-old single mothers being torn apart by shrapnel?  Where is the public outcry?

The groundwork for the events of June 23 began decades ago with legislation such as former senator Pete Dupont’s sexual integration of the service academies.  At the time, the idea of women on aircraft carriers, much less in the cockpits of fighter jets, would have been laughable.  When women are at last assigned to submarines, Americans will not even notice.

Republican legislators take pains to point out that it is women in combat to which they object, not women in the military.  The Iraq war has shown this to be a distinction without a difference.  As the more practically minded Army Sergeant Rachel Deaton told USA Today of her assignment in Baghdad, “I could stay on base my whole time here and be in just as much danger,” adding that keeping female soldiers out of the line of fire would require “keep[ing] us in Kuwait.”

That is not likely.  American law, for now, prohibits women from serving in combat-arms specialties such as infantry, armor, and artillery; however, the Army, determined to push the envelope, now “collocates” female soldiers in support specialties with forward-deployed combat units in Iraq.  Since these support jobs (mechanics for the most part) could be filled by men, we do not have to think too hard to determine the Army’s intentions—particularly when, on June 16, to much fanfare, 23-year-old Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester was awarded our nation’s third-highest award for valor, the Silver Star, for killing three Iraqis in a firefight.  Sergeant Hester is a believer, telling the Washington Post that “Women can basically do any job that men can.”  Mission accomplished.  The ghost of Jessica Lynch has been exorcised at last.

Sergeant Hester is not the first woman to be awarded a Silver Star.  Two nurses earned the medal in World War II for heroism at Anzio.  Hester is, however, the first woman to be decorated so highly for action in close combat.  If purists are concerned with whether affirmative action might have influenced Sergeant Hester’s award, they can compare her citation to Silver Star citations from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.  The more important question is, “Why was a woman in a situation where she might earn a Silver Star in the first place?”  The media attention lavished on Hester provides the answer.  In the Post’s words, “[t]he medal, rare for any soldier, underscores the growing role in combat of U.S. female troops in Iraq’s guerrilla war, where tens of thousands of American women have served . . . ”