Word: combative
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...driver of the second vehicle was screaming in agony from his wounds; he later died. Makwakwa and the patrol were able to save three other wounded drivers, but the memories of Checkpoint 50 are hard to erase--a constant reminder that while the military officially bars women from combat, the insurgency makes no such distinctions. "In Iraq, female soldiers are in combat," she says. "We're out there...
...them into harm's way. Congress bars women from engaging in offensive warfare with the enemy. In response to dwindling military-recruiting numbers and demands by women's groups for more equality between the sexes, the Pentagon in 1994 loosened the ban and allowed women to take on "supporting" combat roles. In Iraq, that can involve anything from piloting combat helicopters to accompanying infantrymen and Marines on house-to-house raids and searching Iraqi women suspects for pistols and suicide belts. As the insurgency has grown more diffuse, increasing numbers of women are finding themselves in the teeth of combat...
...cops who skirmish almost daily with insurgents, women clerks and cooks inside U.S. camps are vulnerable to rocket and mortar attacks by militants. Such hazards underscore the threats to life and limb that still confront all U.S. troops in Iraq, even as the military attempts to turn over more combat responsibility to Iraqi forces. First Sergeant Michelle Collins, 38, who waits anxiously every day for "her kids" to come back to Camp Liberty from patrol, says, "An IED [improvised explosive device] or a bullet doesn't have the gender marked...
...gender gap. In today's Army, nobody gallantly holds the humvee door open for a female, and a woman is expected to carry as much (Swenson's full gear weighs 115 lbs.) and to shoot as well as a man. Women service members refer to themselves either as "combat Barbies"--those who fight the losing battle of trying to look pretty in Iraq's sandstorms and winter sludge--or "hooah girls," named after the motivational grunt of obedience that soldiers give their superiors. "We females do combat ops," says Sergeant Brandy Everett, 25, a self-confessed hooah girl from Rocky...
Military officers say that the performance of female soldiers in Iraq offers little evidence to back a common argument against the use of women in combat: that they are more likely than men to panic under fire. Marine Colonel Bob Chase, who oversees the training of new Marine officers in Quantico, Va., says that last June, hours after a roadside bomb near Fallujah killed four Marines, including three women, and injured 11 other women, a female Marine officer pulled him aside. Standing with her were more than a dozen other female Marines. "We want to take their place," the officer...