The first car into the driveway, deepest in, was supposedly driven up from Baghdad that day, but it is coated with dust and they can't find the keys for it. Even given the Iraqi propensity for jumbling things together in no order, this makes no sense. We find a little cash and some gold jewelry, which are returned, and one chrome-plated pistol, when most houses have at least one automatic rifle per adult or at least per adult male. There's also an address book with Syrian phone numbers in this house that shelters unrelated men among the women.
We are home by breakfast, and afterward I talk with the brigade personnel officer, Maj. Thomas Trazcyk, a powerfully built infantryman, very freckled, like Cabrey a man whose longing for his family is stamped on him. Our conversation ranges from casualties and retention to how the Army likes to develop its infantry officers (light infantry first so they develop the physical and interpersonal skills before they have to deal with the tactical speed and logistical complications of mechanized infantry). I ask a polite yet pointed question. "It must feel strange that there are women who have more combat time than you do."
AFP / Getty Images
Female soldiers, like this one on a raid in Samarra earlier this year, are used to reassure civilians and defuse potentially violent confrontations.
AFP / Getty Images
Female soldiers, like this one on a raid in Samarra earlier this year, are used to reassure civilians and defuse potentially violent confrontations.
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WOMEN AND WAR
Comforting the afflicted, afflicting the comfortable: A local Woman in Black explains herself.
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He gives me a wry smile. "It does!"
And so it goes, the rest of my time in the Sunni Triangle. The small change of soldiering. Patrols and raids, always wondering when you're going to get hit. Straight-up infantry work, military operations in urban terrain. Women medics patrolling with combat units, women second in the stack not only for a knock and greet but for a full-on raid. Doing it with less training and indoctrination than the men they're working with and with less recognition.
And doing it well.
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About the Author
Erin Solaro is a Washington, D.C.–based writer and defense analyst and one of the rising voices of the new civic feminism. Her work has appeared in publications ranging from off our backs to The Washington Times. She is also co-founder, with author Philip Gold, of Aretea, a new Seattle-area think tank. During the summer of 2004, she spent a month in Iraq on a research grant as a journalist accredited by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. While there, she spent time with the "Lionesses," American female soldiers who volunteered for dangerous missions in the Sunni Triangle. It was an eye-opening experience for Solaro, herself a former Army Reserve officer. She is currently working on a book, Beyond GI Jane: American Women, Their Military, and the World, from which the accompanying article was adapted. Drawing on her experiences while embedded with the Army's 1st Infantry Division and the Marines in Iraq (and on a planned trip to Afghanistan), she intends to write what she describes as "a tale of the past 30 years of systemic mistreatment and of discrimination against military women—a searing indictment of the military establishment and a call for radical change." If this excerpt is a guide, it will also offer an uncommon view of the challenges and complexities facing our soldiers, male and female alike, on the ground.
