As an old soldier in the process of just fading away, I have closely followed the sexual harassment controversy in today’s Army. Like millions who have served in the armed forces, my military experience came mainly at a time when the services were male-oriented. In my later years, women began to enter the ranks in much greater numbers and, by the time I was a division commander, almost 10 percent of my soldiers were female. While the addition of women brought with it a new set of challenges to those of us in leadership positions, overall the process went smoothly and our capacity to fight and win wars was not diminished. In fact, our capacity to fight wars was probably enhanced because we found productive ways to integrate women into the force, thus giving our nation a much larger base on which to build if it faced a major war and rapid expansion of the armed forces.
However, in my time, women were not serving in combat. One of the results of the latest sexual-abuse scandals is an increased impetus to open up these areas to women, using the rationale that women in the Army will be second-class citizens until they have the same opportunities open to them as males. While women have been involved in wars over the thousands of years of recorded history, no modern country or civilization that I know of has had a policy of using them interchangeably with males as front-line warriors.
To comprehend what such a departure from past practice might mean, I tried to imagine what my experience in Vietnam as a squadron commander of 1,200 men would have been like if females had made up a significant portion of the armored force I commanded.
The year was 1968 and I had assumed command just before the January Tet offensive, when the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese launched major attacks throughout South Vietnam.
My time was spent almost entirely in the field and encompassed intensive combat . Because we were one of the few armored forces in our area, we were constantly on the move to assist units that were in contact with the enemy. Rarely did we stay in one place for three days. We spent the time in the open country and villages, or sometimes the jungle, looking for or engaging the enemy. At night, we circled our tracks and put out ambush patrols to thwart enemy ground probes of our position.
Personal hygiene was not very personal, as more often than not we had no facilities other than the open fields, the jungle or the other side of the tank. For showers, we carried canvas jungle bags that we hung on the back of the armored vehicles when we stopped in the evening. Since we had no American infantry with us during most operations, we frequently had several South Vietnamese companies with us serving under our direction. The work was physically demanding as we changed the tracks on tanks, loaded ammunition, carried the wounded, and, all too frequently, recovered one of the disabled tracked vehicles from mud, a ditch or from a position exposed to enemy fire. While the period of Tet, and the immediate aftermath, is remembered as a time in which America lost faith that victory was possible in Vietnam, our squadron earned the nation’s highest unit award, the Presidential Unit Citation, as well as the South Vietnamese Unit Cross of Gallantry.
So, if we had been manned, so to speak, with 20 percent females, what might have been different? First, the Army would have had to come up with some objective physical requirements for those, male or female, who would be eligible to serve in the combat arms. Unfortunately, if these standards were realistic, they would probably exclude many females because of lack of upper body strength.
However, for women equal to the challenge, they would have reported to our unit after finishing training in the United States. If we had 20 percent female soldiers in my squadron, there would have been about 250 of them, some as privates, others as sergeants and others as platoon leaders, company commanders or staff officers.
They would have had to live and fight just as we did. But as the commander, I would have had to wrestle with a number of new challenges. I doubt if we could have kept the same personal hygiene procedure, which had almost no provisions for privacy. However, since we couldn’t stop the war to build separate latrines or showers, no solution would have been ideal. As a commander, it would have been my responsibility to insure the proper integration of these women into the unit. Hopefully, much of the indoctrination needed to accomplish this would have been given in the U.S., as I would have had little capability to conduct training in a combat situation.
Sexual harassment would have been another challenge. Living and sleeping side by side for months at a time when the average age of the younger soldiers was 19 years would have made my task all the more difficult. I would be amazed if sex among the soldiers would not have been prevalent and I would certainly expect that a number of my female soldiers would become pregnant. I would have been concerned that many of my sergeants might not show leadership in this area as they, too, were young.
One of the most difficult tasks in relation to sexual harassment would have been investigating charges. Such charges could not have been taken lightly, and an officer would have had to be assigned to each case. No doubt, I would have needed considerable legal assistance to properly prosecute those who were guilty.
I also would have had to take into account our command relations with the South Vietnamese forces attached to my unit. The Vietnamese did not use females in their combat units and were often led by sergeants and officers who had been fighting the communists for more than a decade. It was sometimes difficult to get them to follow our combat tactics since they felt that they were more experienced. If those orders had come from a female officer or sergeant, they may have been even more reluctant. However, since they were so important to our everyday combat operations, they, too, would have had to learn to accept women in combat and such indoctrination would have been the responsibility of our chain of command. It would have been a continuing task, as we received different South Vietnamese infantry troops with each change of mission.
The women who came to us would have had to spend a year fighting under these conditions, unless death, wounds, illness or pregnancy cut their tour short. By the end of the year they probably would have lost considerable weight, become used to sleeping on the ground or in a tracked vehicle with three or four other members of the crew, gotten accustomed to living off the Army’s canned field rations, gone long periods without baths or showers, undergone numerous attacks of diarrhea brought on by the daily and weekly malaria pills we were all required to take, killed a few of the enemy and, like their male counterparts, been fully ready to return to what we called “the world.”
As I tried to imagine what it would have been like to have had female soldiers in combat roles the first question that came to my mind was, “Could a female have endured all this?” My answer was that there certainly must be many who could have. Human beings, regardless of gender, have exhibited some amazing capacities to survive tough situations over the centuries.
My second question was, “Why would any female want to subject herself to such a grueling experience?” This was tougher to answer. I have two daughters. One did serve in the military, but neither of them would voluntarily serve in a combat unit like mine in Vietnam. I doubt if our nation will ever reach the point where it would require women to do so. Thus, those that do would have to be volunteers. Maybe they would do so out of patriotism. Perhaps others would do so to demonstrate that it can be done. And among the female officers, there may be some who choose to do so because they feel the only way to get ahead in the military is by being a combat soldier. So I concluded that there must be some women who would have chosen to serve in my squadron, even though I personally couldn’t think of one I knew.
My last, and perhaps most important question was, “Would the squadron have been as effective and successful if it had a 20 percent ratio of female soldiers?” After all, the military exists to fight wars and we owe it to those we send in harm’s way to give them every advantage we can over the enemy. My answer is that I don’t believe we would have been as effective a fighting force and part of the reason is because of my own leadership limitations. I don’t think that I would have been as effective a combat leader if I would have had to deal with the many problems that having a mixed-gender force would have brought. I am not at all sure that I could have been successful in preventing sexual harassment, let alone curbing excessive sexual promiscuity, even though I would have felt a strong responsibility to do so. I would have been diverted by the effort and there is a good possibility that morale and cohesion might not have been as strong as it was. If my experience as a division commander was an accurate guide, 15 percent of my female soldiers would have gotten pregnant, thus complicating my already high turnover of soldiers who had to be integrated into their platoons and squads.
But, I thought, there must be some pluses to having this mixed-gender combat force. Obviously, in the big picture, such a mixture would provide equal opportunity to women in our nation, but when you get down to squadron level, this plus could well be lost on those carrying out the mission. Despite considerable effort, I find myself unable to identify any positive effect on combat effectiveness of the squadron as a result of having 20 percent of the soldiers be female.
After visualizing how it may have been, I concluded that I am thankful that I served at a time when I did not have to face such a challenge. Perhaps today’s lieutenant colonels are a lot smarter than we were and can handle the complexities of sex and the soldier. Perhaps the sergeants of today can handle the temptations that arise by such long and close contact better than those who served in past decades. Perhaps our nation feels it is worth the effort even if we run the risk of adversely affecting combat capability.
As for me, I’ll just continue the fading process and wish the military well with whichever course it takes.
