Should women be in the military? Should they be in combat? I must have been asked about these issues a thousand times since I was shot down in Iraq during the Gulf War. I don’t think people think it’s so remarkable that I’ve been in the Army, but do people really believe that being shot down in a helicopter and spending a week in prison makes you an expert on social/ military issues? That seems pretty unreasonable to me. I think I do have an important point of view about such issues, but I believe my view is valuable because...

These are some of the responses I encountered from family, friends, and professors when I announced my decision to apply for admission to the United States Military Academy in the fall of my sophomore year in college. I was a good student and a varsity athlete, seemingly well on my way to graduating with a degree in biology and a life of defending the earth’s ecosystems. There was something missing, though. I felt some sort of void in my life, which defied identification. I felt a lack of fulfillment, but that seemed like an absurd emotion for a twenty-two-year-old. Still,...

Army Regulation 360-5 requires that soldiers submitting articles for publication must first have their work reviewed by an official “who know(s) the subject matter and audience” (1986, 13). I complied in preparing this essay for publication. It was reviewed and heavily criticized by senior officials, and, although I was never ordered not to publish, neither was I given explicit clearance. They said the methodology was flawed and the argument weak. They doubted, in fact, that it was a scholarly paper at all. All this commentary was so authoritative that I became briefly convinced that the work was, indeed, deeply flawed....

There are four military services: the Army, which is the largest: the Marines, which is the smallest; the Navy, which has a special relationship with the Marines; and the Air Force, which is the youngest. The Coast Guard is a uniformed service and has an academy to train young officers, but it is under the Department of Transportation. In wartime it comes under the command of the Navy (Table 4-1).

In the military, rank matters. Officers and enlisted are ranked separately, but all officers outrank all enlisted. Enlisted and officers correspond roughly to those military personnel with high school diplomas...

Women have served as nurses for and in the military of the United States since colonial days. Surprisingly, however, this special story has not been told adequately. During the nation’s wars, American military nurses have endured the same conditions and privations as the soldiers with whom they served. Nurses, like soldiers, have been killed by enemy fire, have been captured and made prisoners of war, and have received decorations for their valor.

Unlike the soldiers, however, nurses had to fight to be accepted on the battlefield and in the military. In the early days, nurses were usually soldiers’ wives, who...

Whenever I mention research I am doing on African American women who served overseas during World War II, my listeners almost invariably reply, “I didn’t know black women served in the military during World War II!”

The fact is that as early as the American Revolution, African American women supported military troops as cooks, laundresses, seamstresses, and nurses. Virtually every history book on African Americans documents slave and abolitionist Harriet Tubman’s service as a spy for Union troops during the American Civil War. But Tubman was not the only African American woman to participate actively in the Civil War. In...

When Secretary of Defense Les Aspin announced the Clinton administration’s new policy on women in combat in April 1993, he sought to implement a congressional mandate that would permit women to compete for all assignments in aircraft, including those aircraft engaged in combat missions (Aspin 1993). The Aspin policy was far-reaching and reflected the sentiments of advocates who had been urging an expanded role for military women for years.

Although the 1993 policy gives women a greater potential for receiving combat assignments, the technologies associated with these assignments, for example combat aircraft, constrain, if not actually preclude, the directive from...

Nearly forty-one thousand women served in the U.S. military in Desert Storm, approximately 7 percent of the total forces (see Holm 1992. xiii). Even though women were officially excluded from combat duty, they were assigned to posts that positioned them in or near the line of fire (see U.S. Senate 1991, 803; Association 1991, 18). (And, of course, the “line of fire is an artificial construct, given modern military technology.) Throughout Desert Storm, women performed flight operations within the combat zone; a number of women also participated in support and rescue assignments that were as physically demanding as combat and...

“To Fight, To Defend, and To Preserve the Peace”: These have been watchwords of generations of Americans who have served their country in the armed forces. Throughout our history, some of these Americans have been women, and their persistent presence in the military appears likely to continue (Devilbiss 1994, 136). But what will be the watchwords of the U.S. military of the future? And what will be the role(s) of women in the military? This essay attempts to answer these questions by discussing the evolution of the role(s) of women within the context of the changing mission of the armed...

Every day at the United States Naval Academy, midshipmen walk back and forth across “the yard” past memorials to their profession: a shiny black anchor big enough to dwarf the largest midshipman; an early-model fighter jet poised on the carefully mowed grass like an exaggerated lawn ornament; a bronze statue of Billy the Goat, whose testicles glisten from the polishing by plebes assigned the task; and Herndon Monument, a twenty-one-foot obelisk that, at the end of every year, the grounds’ crew circles with a deep trench, greases with lard, and tops with a “dixie cup,” the sailor’s hat all freshmen...

I listened once to Tim O’Brien, author of several prizewinning novels about the Vietnam War and himself a veteran of that war, as he sat and told stories to an audience of West Point cadets. After riveting their attention with tales of his first night “in country,” of his base being mortared, of his sergeant, and of his friends being killed, he turned casually to his audience and said, “You know, of course, that none of what I’ve been telling you is true. These are all war stories.”

War stories are some of the oldest recorded narratives in many cultures,...

War has become a constant presence in our lives, whether through telecasting of “ethnic cleansings” in Cambodia or Bosnia or Rwanda or through experiencing militarization here at home. We may seem further away from nucleas night than we were as recently as 1989, but smaller-scale, widespread explosions of violence force us to ask why people who were living together in “peace” suddenly begin killing one another. The causes of was must be explored; surely, war is not inevitable; it is only made to seem that way.

A bumper sticker on the car in front of me reads, “Subvert the Dominant...

In 1994–95, we (U.S. citizens) spent close to $270 billion on defense. In 1990, we were 5 percent of the world’s population, occupied 7 percent of the Earth’s land surface, created 27 percent of the world’s GNP, but made 41 percent of the world’s military expenditures (Sivard 1993. 37). Since 1990, many nations (particularly the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) have reduced military expenditures, but we have not. The result is that we now spend almost as much as the rest of the worldcombined.

The military budget has been treated as untouchable even as federal (and state...