From the S&S archives: U. S. women earned respect in desert war

NORTHERN SAUDI ARABIA — There was no time for Pvt. 2 Brenda Walkington to think about breaking down the barriers that prevent women from getting close to combat. She was too busy flying over them.

In 10 months, Walkington went from a civilian to a soldier flying intelligence missions in Army OV-1 surveillance airplanes. And like many women who served in Operation Desert Storm, her thoughts about the danger were no more than a momentary distraction from her job.

"At first I wasn't very confident in myself. Then I said: `This is a war. You've got to do your job,' and I just went from there," Walkington said.

The 19-year-old native of Holdrege, Neb., was assigned to Company A, 2nd Military Intelligence Battalion in December. She had just earned her flight wings as a technical observer on the Army's OV-1 Mohawk and had been with the Stuttgart-based unit just three weeks when it deployed to the desert.

"This was my first duty station," she said while standing on a flight line in northern Saudi Arabia. Her new unit put her right to work, said Walkington's commander, Maj. Ammon Sink.

"For us, the battle began with the air campaign," Sink said. The fleet of late 1960s-vintage prop planes uses sophisticated electronics to detect movements of enemy vehicles, radar emissions and other electronic signals.

While the OV-1 pilots flew the plane, Walkington and other technical observers operated the intelligence-gathering equipment and relayed the information to battlefield commanders, Sink said.

Walkington's accomplishments wouldn't surprise Capt. Kelly McCormick. The 11th Aviation Brigade Signal Officer said that "it's incumbent upon both genders to say: `This is the mission. This is the job. You get paid to do that job. So, therefore, you must go do it.' "

As signal officer, McCormick is responsible for establishing all communications for the brigade and had to follow close behind combat forces into enemy territory to keep the lines open.

"I came through the breech and I was looking around, and I said to my driver, `You know, we're really close here.' It never crossed my mind that I shouldn't be there or whether I was safe or not." More important, she said, neither did her commander.

An Army veteran of 16 years, 11 of them as an officer, McCormick has served around the globe. When it was time for her unit to go to war, she said there was never a question of whether she should be there. "I was a soldier just like everyone else."

If females are banned from battle areas, "you lose your key players, your key personnel," McCormick said. That breaks down teamwork and unit cohesion built during training, she said. "So, now, you have to develop a new working relationship with someone you don't know in the heat of battle. That's ludicrous."

In conflicts like the Persian Gulf war, where long-range weapons like the Scud missile are used, even rear areas can be combat zones, McCormick said.

"Where is the forward line of troops on the modern battlefield? Who knows? Does that mean there should be only men in the Army? I don't think so."

She said if anyone is safe in a war, it is probably the front-line troops, and restricting women to rear units only puts them in more danger because a competent enemy targets communications, command and control and supply and support elements, "all of which have the highest concentrations of females."

Women have fought long and hard to break gender barriers in the Army, McCormick said. "We went though the fight of learning how to fire a weapon years ago. We went through the issue of different uniforms. It used to be a soldier was male or female. Now the term is generic."

Because women have won near-equal status to men, McCormick said it bothers her that some female soldiers have used their gender to take advantage of the system to get out of the war zone.

According to Capt. Stephen Coleman, a flight surgeon for the brigade, some women did that by trying to get pregnant.

Before the ground war started, Coleman found himself surrounded by a variety of combat service and support units near a logistical base. "We were in such a remote location, I was sort of like the only doc in town," he said.

As such, he said he was bombarded by questions concerning pregnancy from female soldiers assigned to the neighboring units.

"They began to request pregnancy tests, repeatedly, which led me to believe they were going through the process of trying to get pregnant," he said. Some returned as little as two weeks after getting negative test results.

"I think that's a problem," Coleman said, "because that's an avenue of exit, if you will, for a female that's just not there for a male. That's a sure ticket for a female to leave an area of combat. Because it's such a positive thing for them, they know they'll go home. There's a wide margin there for abuse."

But Coleman said "it was a minority that, in my opinion, were trying to get pregnant. The vast majority were doing well." He had especially high praise for the performance of female pilots.

Lt. Col. Roger McCauley, commander of the 4th Battalion, 229th Attack Helicopter Regiment, also praised the female soldiers.

"Female soldiers were team players," he said. "They worked hard, trained hard and were able to do their jobs 100 percent right alongside us. They weren't women, they were soldiers. If it had green baggy skin, it was a soldier," he said, referring to flight suits most soldiers involved with aviation wear.

Women on the ground performed just as well as those in the air, McCauley said. "Eleven Iraqi EPWs were guarded by one of our females," he said. "With a very stern look on her face and an all-business approach in her manner, she was guarding our EPWs with her M16, ready for action if need be."

Another unit soldier, Spc. Susan Barnes, proved calm in a difficult situation. McCauley said he flagged Barnes down one night because the headlights of the 10-ton truck she was driving were on when the unit was in blackout conditions.

As it turned out, her NCO had jet fuel splashed in his eyes and she was trying to get him to medical attention.

"There was this female, in the middle of the night, with this huge truck, taking care of a fellow soldier who had gotten fuel on him," McCauley said. "There's the kind of reliability you saw with female soldiers."

Despite such praise for the women's efforts, Walkington plans to give up the observer seat in the OV-1 for the pilot's seat of a Blackhawk helicopter.

She would like to pilot an Apache gunship, but can't because of regulations that prevent women from flying combat missions. Walkington questions the restriction in light of her combat experience.

"The way I look at it is some females can and some of them can't," she said. "But it's the same with males — you just don't know until you get there."