| Original headline in NYT was "For Female Marines, Tea Comes With Bullets", the suckiest headline I've ever read. |
3 female Marines and the patrol they were attached to recently came under fire near Marja. In their sights they could see the source of the blast: an Afghan man who had shot aimlessly from behind a mud wall, shielded by a half-dozen children. The women held their fire with the rest of the patrol so as not to hit a child, waited for the all-clear, then headed back to the base. Six months ago an experiment began with sending full-time "female engagement teams" out with all-male infantry patrols in Helmand Province to try to win over the rural Afghan women who are culturally off limits to outside men. the female Marines have daily skirted the Pentagon rules restricting women in combat. They have shot back in firefights and ambushes, been hit by homemade bombs and lived on bases hit by mortar attacks. None of the 40 women have been killed or seriously injured. Some have seen friends die. One lady Marine said she would not volunteer for the female engagement teams again.
"It's not the living conditions, it's not the mission, it's this," she said, gesturing toward a memorial display of boots, rifles and dog tags belonging to the dead Marines [one of whom she had given first aid to just before he died]. She was, she said quietly, "too much of a girl to deal with these guys getting killed." |