Man, cutting into limited sleep time on my limited R&R to talk about this kinda stuff. Oh well.
My base in Iraq is all male, when I first got there, there were a few female cooks. Because of the presence of females (it's a army tendency to refer to women only a females for some reason), we had to take steps for gender segregation. That means that one or both of the shower trailers was closed to men some of the time (I never actually found out when, it was really confusing and had about five different interpretations). There had to be a designated female tent, and because of a designated female tent, there had to be a protocol involved if a male wanted to get inside (which required getting a specific person, which then required another protocol for finding said person). Until we're accepting enough to have Star ship Troopers style shared facilities, it means that there's a lot of extra stuff to have put in. In a big base (like a COB), this isn't a big deal, but in a small facility (patrol bases or small forward operating base) it can get to be a hassle. Combat Arms types are in small facilities a lot and we don't really want to deal with it.
Secondly, females can get to be damaging for morale. Guys are guys, and while the vast majority of guys I serve with are upright, upstanding people, remember that a lot of us are teenage/young men -> idiots. Moreso, we're away from home for a heckuva long time when we're deployed (even for a loner with a tendency to wander like me, it gets bad after awhile, and I consider my home to be these damn boards as much as I do Fargo). This doesn't just apply to privates like me. It's a saying that more E-9 and O-5 careers have been ruined by a female E-4 than anything else.
In rear echelon type jobs, these things aren't that big of a deal, but when it's a combat arms job, I know that I don't want to deal with this kind of problem. Infantry and Armor aren't hurting for people right now, why deal with the problem? Fuck political correctness.
As a tanker, all of my drill sergeants were male, but there was this one female drill sergeant (I'd assume it was for general basic) who *hated* us. She'd make it her fucking mission to chase down our company whenever we got a four hour pass and try to ruin it. It was an especially awesome day when DS Grider (after she accused us of "running to the px and going past the people in line for haircut" both the standard operating procedure. We ran everywhere, and no one was getting a haircut) gave us a long speech about the difference between a good NCO and a bad one. Then he finished by telling us all that we were going to take shit like that, because we're 19kilos, super-soldiers who have to be able to do any job, even take shit from a female DS who didn't have a clue (his terminology was different, but I've changed it. Sue me).
Posting to watch.
Incidentally, I think this is a good thing, so long as the army gets off its ass about the rape issues. I've read elsewhere that women in the US army are more likely to be raped by fellow soldiers than to be killed in combat >_>
I have taken about ten goddamn hours of classes about that. The Army is very-much off it's ass about it. Like most of the problems that the army faces, I think that my guiding principle of "don't get totally off my feet drunk" solves about 99% of them (and we try to keep females inside the wire as much as possible).
Didn't Betsy Ross sew the flag? That's not exactly combat-arms type work . . .
9 new replies? Do I have to start posting a sentence at a time again!?
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Topic: Women In The Infantry (Read 23589 times)