Iraq provided a challenge to the US military that had a special place for female soldiers. I had the honor and pleasure of knowing some excellent women in my time there. While I think that they would be embarrassed by being singled out by name, I want to tell you about some of them. We had an excellent female PSYOP sergeant first class. She had a boss who, though not a bad guy, needed a strong NCO to keep him on track. She always did that, and forced the rest of us to acknowledge the Phase VII results even when we'd prefer to trust our gut about what ought to work. We benefitted from her discipline a great deal. I knew an Army surgeon, a female LTC, who did tremendous things for womens' health in rural Iraq. In places where a male doctor could simply not have gone, she ensured sometimes the first access to medical care that women or their children had ever known. She also came by and redecorated my boss' desk right before he came back from EML: I won't reproduce the "To Do List" she left for him. The best Army PAO I ever met was a female officer, a Major, who was there during the height of the Surge fighting. She understood the importance of communicating to the home front that we were turning the war around. At a time when political opponents of the war were telling the American people that the war was lost, she was helping get the soldiers' true stories out to the homefront. One of my good friends was a Civil Affairs soldier, a female reservist who was an emergency medical technician back home. I had the pleasure of seeing her promoted laterally from specialist to corporal, in recognition of her constant leadership and strong work. Later, in the same deployment, I got to see her promoted to Sergeant. She was an outstanding NCO, and a good Civil Affairs soldier as well, outside the wire helping people rebuild their lives. Finally I want to recognize a woman who was not soldier, but a civilian military advisor there present as the social scientist for one of our Human Terrain Teams. She produced some tremendous insight into what had been a hidden world -- how the wives of some of the tribal figures we worked with saw the conflict, and their husbands' relationships with other tribal figures. This often provided a depth that I could use to check bearings on what we were hearing about those relationships from intelligence, the TPTs, or the CATs. Iraq was that kind of war. We were lucky to have these women out there with us.
Read the complete post at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Blackfive/~3/dd1KC514TqE/the-women-that-we-love-warriors.html
Posted
Feb 13 2012, 11:53 PM
by
BLACKFIVE