Since the attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, the Center for Military Readiness counts more than 120 women who have died in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kuwait, many of them in plane or helicopter crashes and explosions of the roadside devices that make sudden death the companion of everyone who travels the roads of those benighted places. This compares to 16 women slain in the Vietnam War, mostly nurses, and only six were killed in the first Gulf War, most of them by scud missiles.
The Army is reluctant to recognize the women killed in the Middle East, not wanting to call attention to the oft-gruesome deaths of women who are not supposed to be at risk of death in combat. Congress made the rules, but the Army has found ways to tell Congress to mind its own business.
This suits Congress just fine. A senator or a congressman doesn't want to get caught in a crossfire between public opinion and feminists and their allies who, personally, don't want any part of the Army, in or out of combat. The Senate Armed Services Committee last took testimony on the subject 18 years ago -- it didn't even have time to listen in 1992 when it heard from the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces, which recommended that most, but not all, combat exemptions be retained. The last time a House committee heard testimony on the subject was 30 years ago.
The Pentagon, eager to tap new sources of recruits, couldn't resist taking what appeared to be congressional indifference as a wink and a nudge to do as it pleased. Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have kept hands off. The Army drew a convenient loophole by redefining missions. A case in point was the deployment of the 1st Battalion, 293rd Infantry of the Indiana National Guard last year with 39 female soldiers. We can expect these women to do their duty, as women in the military always have, but when men send women to war the country has lost something very precious.