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Drill Sargeant Hassna's Military Corner: Women In The MilitaryBy Steve Hassna I must admit I have had some prompting recently in the form of having my heels locked by one Command Sergeant Major Mary Moore who told me to get off my third point of contact (that's an Airborne term meaning your ass) and write her a column she would be proud of, not to worry about the electronic age, and to join the 20th century before it is over. All that in that order. (To have one's heels locked is also a military term meaning to come to an extreme position of attention: heels together, feet at 45 degree angles, fingers curled with thumb and index finger along the outside seam of your pants, eyes straight ahead and your attention focused on the instructions the Sergeant Major is dispensing. That, my friends, is having one's heels locked. If you still don't understand, then find a veteran and ask for a demonstration. I'm sure they would be more than happy to oblige.) As for me, I was receiving the motivation talk from Sergeant Major Moore because of my lack of columns for the Sonoma County Free Press over several months. For which I have no excuse. There are things one should remember. First off, the army calls this a motivation factor: noncompliance with the Sergeant Major's commands results in your wishing you had been born on another planet in a faraway galaxy. Help from God on your behalf will not be tolerated or allowed. Plus you don't give excuses to a Sergeant Major. So here I am in Mary's shop, Long Ago And Far Away, in Sebastopol, California, at the position of attention, saying at the right times "yes, Mary, you're right, yes, I'll get right on it." Et cetera, et cetera. You get my drift here? Mary wanted a column and she wanted it yesterday. At that point I lovingly promoted her to Command Sergeant Major. For those of you who don't know what a Sergeant Major is I'll give a brief rundown. If you still don't understand, find some vets and ask them. It doesn't matter, officers or enlisted ranks - Sergeant Majors scare everybody. It's amusing to see officers cringe when one of these people gets pissed off. The highest ranking noncommissioned officer in all services is designated E-9. In the Army and Marine Corps it's called a Sergeant Major; for the Navy and the Coast Guard it's Master Chief Petty Officer; for the Air Force, it's Chief Master Sergeant. There are some rules to remember when dealing with these people:
Are you getting all this? If not, you got it - find a vet to translate. Well now, with all that perfectly clear, let's move on. For some time now I wanted to do a piece on women in the military, but just as I got started something else would come up. Drill Sergeants, PR problems, the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) - which isn't. One scandal after another. Ain't the military just great? So what I'm going to do is just do what I first wanted to do - women in the military. I'll cover all that other stuff in later columns. In 1996, the movie Courage Under Fire came out, about a woman chopper pilot in the Gulf and her being recommended for a posthumous Medal of Honor, America's highest award for valor. (That's a word you should remember here: posthumous, or dead, because that's how most of these things are awarded. I'd like to see Mister Rogers come out someday and say, "Hi, children, can you say 'posthumously'?" with that weird smile on his face.) This was billed as being about the first woman to be recommended for this award. But that was not completely accurate. (I got that line from Independence Day.) The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story about one Doctor Mary Walker who received an award for her part in the Civil War. She worked in a field hospital, was captured by Confederate troops, interned in a POW camp, and tended to the sick while there, being released at war's end. She received the medal from President Andrew Johnson, who by the way took over after Lincoln died of an acute case of lead poisoning. But that is a whole different story. Things went on just fine for Mary for a lot of years. She wore the medal proudly every day after she received it. She also wore men's suits and conducted her life as if she were in charge of it. Seems no one told her that men were in charge. Then, in 1903, things changed. A congressional committee decided that what Mary did wasn't all that brave and stripped her of the medal. The guys in charge were really upset with the fact that Mary was an outspoken advocate for women's rights and opposed the death penalty. She also had the guts to tell those in authority to go pound salt! Two Federal cops were sent to take the medal back. They were met by Mary - wearing her medal and a twelve gauge shotgun. The cops decided that being recommended for a posthumous Medal of Honor for taking same medal from a live recipient wasn't worth the trouble and left, never to return. Mary continued to wear the medal every day until her death a few years later. Now that, troops, is an attitude that anyone could be proud of, including this old Drill Sergeant. All this attention, including the film, has come about due to the arguments about the question of women in combat. There is a misconception that women in combat is a new thing. WRONG!!! Women have been involved in combat and close support roles since the Revolutionary War. They just haven't been acknowledged for their part. Only recently, since the issue hit the public forum, have women's roles been explored. All this publicity should be a warning to any women planning to enlist in the armed forces. Be prepared to get medals posthumously. Because, as far as I can see, women will be involved more in future wars. One reason for this is the concept of the fluid battlefield. The ebb and flow of the battle can change very rapidly on a modern battlefield. Front lines will change quickly, and the rear, or support, may become the front. The US military started looking at this in the 1970s. From this came the rapid deployment forces - Army Airborne and Air Assault units, Marine amphibious forces, and reliance on reserve and National Guard units for support. I will go over this stuff in later columns. Now let's get back to the main question - women getting posthumous medals. I stated earlier that women have been involved since revolutionary times. One job women had was support to field artillery. Their job was to stand by the guns with pitchers of water and pour the water over the hot barrels to help cool them so gunners could keep firing. Now where did I glean this tidbit of history? Why, from a US Army recruitment poster showing a woman in 18th century dress standing by a cannon with a pitcher in her hand. Oh, before I forget, these women were nicknamed Molly Pitchers by the male troops. The poster went on to explain that women have been there when their country needed them since the Revolution. I have this poster at home. Let's move on to World War I. Now that was a great time to test the idea of human wave assaults across open areas against fortified machine gun positions. The machine guns won. Also long range artillery, air strikes, submarines, and - who could forget - mustard gas? All these lovely examples of mass killing caused high casualties on all sides. Field hospitals were packed, and women were there doing what needed to be done. Bombs do not sort out combat and noncombat personnel. Or did you already know this? After World War I everybody went home to regroup and rearm, vowing to meet in the near future for an even bigger stage production with a cast of millions. In fact, just about everybody on the planet would be involved. This is called an Equal Opportunity War. When the US entered World War II, full mobilization brought about a call for women to do their part again. Weapons factories were filled with women while the men went off to fight the good fight. In the military, women were shunted to support roles, but one of these support jobs took them directly into harm's way. Female pilots were used to transport unarmed bombers into combat theaters of operation. Then male crews would arm and man the bombers and go out to bomb the bad guys. These women were not considered combatants because they didn't fight. No kidding, Sherlock. They didn't fight because they didn't have any guns to fight with. Which made no sense at all if they would be dealing with enemy fighters whose pilots had no concern about whether they were unarmed and defenseless, or whether these planes were piloted by women. They were in enemy aircraft and that was that. It was not until years after the war that these pilots received any recognition for their service. On to Korea, where women were part of mobile MASH units. Then Vietnam and again into field hospitals where many were killed or wounded. Funny thing about Vietnam is that the military couldn't come up with an exact number of women in country. I have heard numbers over the years from a few thousand to thirty-five thousand. Like women of other wars, they were virtually forgotten. Now to the present, when we have women as chopper pilots flying close support missions during the Persian Gulf War. That, to me, is as close to combat as you can get. All I can say to women thinking about the military as a career option is this: learn how to spell "posthumously" proficiently. Well, troops, that's it for today, and today's tips are:
See you around the base camp,
Drill Sergeant Hassna Steve Hassna is the West Coast Coordinator of VVAW. He lives in Northern California and is a poet and author. He served in the 101st Airborne in Vietnam and was a drill instructor.
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Listen up, troops, it's the old Drill Sergeant here. I'm sitting on the Group W bench wondering how I got here. Well, it's not really the Group W bench of Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" fame; it's the jury selection room of Sonoma County, California. Feels a lot like it, though. You got it - I got tagged to take part in the American justice system. American justice - now, that's a concept. It would be best served by using all this time on my hands to write my next history lesson.