No. my unit 1/2 C co was deployed to JTF 160 in 2002 and I got out in June of that year. JTF 160 was deployed to Cuba to deal with the first combatants coming from Afghanistan...Before that we were in Okinawa during 9/11 and spent the next few months deploying all over the Pacific as a wannabe security force...
Anyway point is I was not in Afghan or Iraq. As it relates to the question I will say again that I am fine with women in combat related occupations...And as far your convoy ops of course I have no problem with them pulling the trigger.
What I am trying to explain is that I was in the Infantry for 4 years. And what I Am saying is women do not belong in these units. They cant physically handle the standards or the training deployments. This is all. I am not saying they cant be helo pilots, door gunners, EOD or anything else if they meet those standards.....
I don't think it's a good idea. The cons far outweigh the pros in my opinion.
Men would react differently with women on the front-line. It is in most of our instincts as men to protect women and children.
I don't believe women would be able to handle the psychological aspect of being on the front-line either.
Men would react differently with women on the front-line. It is in most of our instincts as men to protect women and children.
I don't believe women would be able to handle the psychological aspect of being on the front-line either.
Perhaps things are much different in these current wars, but I spent the entire year of 1967 with the 4th Infantry Division in the central highlands of Vietnam. Of the 358 days I was in country, 4 were spent on R&R and one night at the 4th Base Camp. The other 353 were in the field. Perhaps 2/3 of those were at our Fire Base, which was moved around twice a month. While there and not on guard, we slept in sandbagged bunkers. A crude outhouse had to be dug out at each location. Sometimes we had a shower, which was really a barrel about 10 feet in the air, wide open to the elements. While on a mission, of course there are no facilities, so hygiene is truly a personal responsibility. At night a squad will usually have 50 percent alert, and the others will pair up and dig deep enough to be below ground level and try to sleep in a very confined area. I just can't picture this type of situation working "coed" wise. I would suggest, if this total folly is actually attempted, the women have their own combat units.
So what you are saying is that a woman would only be signed-up in those scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel situations where the Army finds it must take either an absolutely worthless/dangerous male or take a female. I'd sure hate to be around when the hygeine products hit the fan when the girls find out the criteria used for their recruitment.
<nyt_headline version="1.0" type=" ">n Arduous Officer Course, Women Offer Clues to Their Future in Infantry</nyt_headline>
<nyt_byline style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 10px; line-height: 15px;">By JAMES DAO
</nyt_byline>Published: February 17, 2013
<nyt_text><nyt_correction_top></nyt_correction_top>
Last fall, two newly minted female lieutenants joined about 100 men in Quantico, Va., for one of the most grueling experiences that soldiers not in war can experience: the Marine Corps’ Infantry Officer Course.
</nyt_text>
Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images
Gen. James F. Amos, the Marine Corps commandant, shown in 2011, is assessing female participants in the service’s grueling Infantry Officer Course.
During the 86-day course, candidates haul heavy packs and even heavier weapons up and down steep hills, execute ambushes and endure bitter cold, hunger and exhaustion. Uncertainty abounds: they do not know their next task, or even how long they will have to perform it. At I.O.C., calm leadership under duress is more important than physical strength, although strength is essential.
One of the women — the first to enter the course — was dropped on the first day with about two dozen men during a notoriously strenuous endurance test. But the second woman lasted deep into the second week, when a stress fracture in her leg forced her to quit.
“She was tough,” Gen. James F. Amos, the Marine Corps commandant, said of the woman, who is now at flight school. “She wasn’t going to quit.”
General Amos hopes that the experiences of those women, and others to come, will provide crucial clues about the future of women in the infantry, a possibility allowed by the recent lifting of the 1994 ban on women in direct combat units.
For the Marine Corps, probably more than any other military service, gender integration is a difficult affair. Not only is the corps the most male of the services, with women making up only about 7 percent of its ranks, but it is also a bastion of the infantry. Nearly one in five Marines are “grunts,” proud of their iconic history of bloody ground battles, from Belleau Wood to Iwo Jima to Chosin Reservoir to Falluja.
Not surprisingly, the idea of women in the infantry draws sharp questions from many active-duty Marines and veterans, who express concerns that standards will be diluted for women.
In an interview, General Amos acknowledged hearing those worries and insisted that the corps would not lower its standards. To guarantee that, he plans to use the course, which Marines consider the gold standard of infantry training, to study the performance of potential female infantry officers and then use that data to develop requirements for enlisted infantry Marines.
In March, two Naval Academy graduates will become the second set of women to enter the course. Over the coming years, General Amos is counting on dozens more female volunteers to provide him with enough information to decide whether women can make it in the infantry. The outcome, he says, is far from certain.
“I think there is absolutely no reason to think our females can’t be tankers, or be amtrackers, or be artillery Marines,” he said, referring to tracked amphibious assault vehicles. “The infantry is different.”
General Amos said that if too few women were able, or willing, to join the infantry, he or his successor might ask the secretary of defense to keep the infantry closed to women. The deadline for that request is January 2016.
“You could reach the point where you say, ‘It’s not worth it,’ ” General Amos said. “The numbers are so infinitesimally small, it’s not worth it.”
Advocates for women in the military would almost certainly protest any effort to keep the Marines infantry male only. Those advocates acknowledge the harshness of infantry life: carrying heavy loads on foot for long distances and enduring spartan environments are requisite. But they say that properly trained women will make it through I.O.C. and, eventually, whatever program the corps creates for screening and training enlisted infantrywomen.
Even if very few women pass I.O.C., enlisted women should still be allowed to join male-led infantry units, said Greg Jacob, a former Marine officer who is the policy director for the Service Women’s Action Network, an advocacy group.
“Leadership is leadership,” Mr. Jacob said. “You don’t need a female leader to lead female Marines.”
General Amos, a fighter pilot, opposes doing that, saying enlisted female Marines will do best if they have female officers as mentors. “I’m not going to bring in 18-year-old females and put them in an infantry battalion when I’ve got no female officers,” he said. “I can’t do that.”
In the coming months, the most pressing task for all of the armed services will be establishing gender-neutral requirements for every combat job, known as military occupational specialties. Of the 340 job categories in the Marine Corps, 32 had been closed to women under the 1994 ban.
<nyt_text>he Marine Corps has set out a two-tiered process for creating those requirements: one short-term for armor, artillery, combat engineering and low-altitude air defense units, and a longer-term one for the infantry.
</nyt_text>
For noninfantry combat units, Marine commanders will be expected to establish requirements for every job by June. For example, artillery crews, working in pairs, must be able to lift and load shells weighing about 100 pounds. Tank crew members must be able to lift 40-pound shells using arm strength alone, because of the vehicle’s tight quarters.
Those requirements will become the basis for physical tests intended to screen men and women for particular jobs. It is possible that the tests already administered to all Marines annually — the physical fitness test and the combat fitness test — will be deemed adequate for determining physical ability for some jobs. But where those tests are not adequate, the corps will develop additional ones.
The corps will also begin using a new physical fitness test next January that will require all Marines, male and female, to do a minimum of three pull-ups and, for Marines under the age of 27, 50 crunches in two minutes. The three-mile run time will be scored by gender.
Marine officials say that the 15 women who volunteered to use the new fitness test this year all passed with maximum scores for pull-ups, doing eight or more. For men, 20 pull-ups are needed for a maximum score.
General Amos said he hoped that tests for the noninfantry combat units would be in place by the end of this year, potentially allowing women who are finishing boot camp early next year to move into some combat units.
“I’m really pretty bullish on this thing,” he said.
The infantry will take longer. The Marine Corps produces only about 110 female officers a year, and so far, only four have volunteered for I.O.C. General Amos said he would need many more volunteers to draw conclusions.
Given the heavy dose of infantry life that all officers experience in their initial training, he said he was unsurprised that women were not knocking down the door to enter I.O.C.
“By the time you’ve spent six months of this, picking ticks off of every part of your body, freezing cold, smelling like a goat and eating M.R.E.’s, you may go, ‘Well, this infantry stuff isn’t for me,’ ” he said, referring to packaged military meals. “So we don’t have a lot of volunteers.”
<nyt_byline style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 10px; line-height: 15px;">By JAMES DAO
</nyt_byline>Published: February 17, 2013
<nyt_text><nyt_correction_top></nyt_correction_top>
Last fall, two newly minted female lieutenants joined about 100 men in Quantico, Va., for one of the most grueling experiences that soldiers not in war can experience: the Marine Corps’ Infantry Officer Course.
</nyt_text>
Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images
Gen. James F. Amos, the Marine Corps commandant, shown in 2011, is assessing female participants in the service’s grueling Infantry Officer Course.
During the 86-day course, candidates haul heavy packs and even heavier weapons up and down steep hills, execute ambushes and endure bitter cold, hunger and exhaustion. Uncertainty abounds: they do not know their next task, or even how long they will have to perform it. At I.O.C., calm leadership under duress is more important than physical strength, although strength is essential.
One of the women — the first to enter the course — was dropped on the first day with about two dozen men during a notoriously strenuous endurance test. But the second woman lasted deep into the second week, when a stress fracture in her leg forced her to quit.
“She was tough,” Gen. James F. Amos, the Marine Corps commandant, said of the woman, who is now at flight school. “She wasn’t going to quit.”
General Amos hopes that the experiences of those women, and others to come, will provide crucial clues about the future of women in the infantry, a possibility allowed by the recent lifting of the 1994 ban on women in direct combat units.
For the Marine Corps, probably more than any other military service, gender integration is a difficult affair. Not only is the corps the most male of the services, with women making up only about 7 percent of its ranks, but it is also a bastion of the infantry. Nearly one in five Marines are “grunts,” proud of their iconic history of bloody ground battles, from Belleau Wood to Iwo Jima to Chosin Reservoir to Falluja.
Not surprisingly, the idea of women in the infantry draws sharp questions from many active-duty Marines and veterans, who express concerns that standards will be diluted for women.
In an interview, General Amos acknowledged hearing those worries and insisted that the corps would not lower its standards. To guarantee that, he plans to use the course, which Marines consider the gold standard of infantry training, to study the performance of potential female infantry officers and then use that data to develop requirements for enlisted infantry Marines.
In March, two Naval Academy graduates will become the second set of women to enter the course. Over the coming years, General Amos is counting on dozens more female volunteers to provide him with enough information to decide whether women can make it in the infantry. The outcome, he says, is far from certain.
“I think there is absolutely no reason to think our females can’t be tankers, or be amtrackers, or be artillery Marines,” he said, referring to tracked amphibious assault vehicles. “The infantry is different.”
General Amos said that if too few women were able, or willing, to join the infantry, he or his successor might ask the secretary of defense to keep the infantry closed to women. The deadline for that request is January 2016.
“You could reach the point where you say, ‘It’s not worth it,’ ” General Amos said. “The numbers are so infinitesimally small, it’s not worth it.”
Advocates for women in the military would almost certainly protest any effort to keep the Marines infantry male only. Those advocates acknowledge the harshness of infantry life: carrying heavy loads on foot for long distances and enduring spartan environments are requisite. But they say that properly trained women will make it through I.O.C. and, eventually, whatever program the corps creates for screening and training enlisted infantrywomen.
Even if very few women pass I.O.C., enlisted women should still be allowed to join male-led infantry units, said Greg Jacob, a former Marine officer who is the policy director for the Service Women’s Action Network, an advocacy group.
“Leadership is leadership,” Mr. Jacob said. “You don’t need a female leader to lead female Marines.”
General Amos, a fighter pilot, opposes doing that, saying enlisted female Marines will do best if they have female officers as mentors. “I’m not going to bring in 18-year-old females and put them in an infantry battalion when I’ve got no female officers,” he said. “I can’t do that.”
In the coming months, the most pressing task for all of the armed services will be establishing gender-neutral requirements for every combat job, known as military occupational specialties. Of the 340 job categories in the Marine Corps, 32 had been closed to women under the 1994 ban.
<nyt_text>he Marine Corps has set out a two-tiered process for creating those requirements: one short-term for armor, artillery, combat engineering and low-altitude air defense units, and a longer-term one for the infantry.
</nyt_text>
For noninfantry combat units, Marine commanders will be expected to establish requirements for every job by June. For example, artillery crews, working in pairs, must be able to lift and load shells weighing about 100 pounds. Tank crew members must be able to lift 40-pound shells using arm strength alone, because of the vehicle’s tight quarters.
Those requirements will become the basis for physical tests intended to screen men and women for particular jobs. It is possible that the tests already administered to all Marines annually — the physical fitness test and the combat fitness test — will be deemed adequate for determining physical ability for some jobs. But where those tests are not adequate, the corps will develop additional ones.
The corps will also begin using a new physical fitness test next January that will require all Marines, male and female, to do a minimum of three pull-ups and, for Marines under the age of 27, 50 crunches in two minutes. The three-mile run time will be scored by gender.
Marine officials say that the 15 women who volunteered to use the new fitness test this year all passed with maximum scores for pull-ups, doing eight or more. For men, 20 pull-ups are needed for a maximum score.
General Amos said he hoped that tests for the noninfantry combat units would be in place by the end of this year, potentially allowing women who are finishing boot camp early next year to move into some combat units.
“I’m really pretty bullish on this thing,” he said.
The infantry will take longer. The Marine Corps produces only about 110 female officers a year, and so far, only four have volunteered for I.O.C. General Amos said he would need many more volunteers to draw conclusions.
Given the heavy dose of infantry life that all officers experience in their initial training, he said he was unsurprised that women were not knocking down the door to enter I.O.C.
“By the time you’ve spent six months of this, picking ticks off of every part of your body, freezing cold, smelling like a goat and eating M.R.E.’s, you may go, ‘Well, this infantry stuff isn’t for me,’ ” he said, referring to packaged military meals. “So we don’t have a lot of volunteers.”
