Women Enter Debate on Their Combat Role : Military: Lawmakers consider striking down barrier. ‘There’s no front line anymore,’ an O.C. woman says.

EL TORO —  Try telling Barbara Walker that women didn’t serve in combat in the Persian Gulf.

“We were in a combat position,” said the 45-year-old woman from Orange County who carried an M-16 for much of her eight months in Saudi Arabia, the same as the men in her unit.

As the only female physician in the famed 82nd Airborne Division, Walker practically spits out the words as she recounts the horrific sight and sound of Scud missiles exploding near her position.

“If the Iraqis decided they wanted to come 30 miles south of their border, they would have found many women in ‘support’ roles. To say we weren’t in combat areas . . . well, anyone who was involved realized women were there,” she said. “The danger was very real for all of us.”

Walker is among about 220,000 women in the U.S. military worldwide who are watching and waiting as Washington lawmakers consider striking down the historical ban on women in combat.

Some women look with anticipation to the prospect of serving with an infantry unit, or as a fighter pilot. Others watch the current debate with some anxiety. But it is a subject that stirs strong feelings--and challenges age-old preconceptions--among men and women alike.

About 27,000 women, including several hundred from the local area, served in the Persian Gulf War. They were limited, by definition if not execution, to non-combat, support roles, such as communications, transportation, medicine, administration and military police.

Women represented about 6% of the U.S. forces in the war. From the Orange County area, the figure was slightly lower--about 4.3%--with about 300 women serving with 7,000 local Marines from the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing at El Toro.

With votes set for this summer, Congress has shown some support for striking down the last remaining statutory barrier to an integrated military and expanding the role of women to include combat jobs. But the debate heated up last week as the heads of three of the four military services told lawmakers Tuesday that they oppose such a move. The Air Force was the lone exception.

The issue will move toward a resolution after the Fourth of July recess in Congress, as the Senate marks up its defense authorization bill and considers the women-in-combat issue. The House has already approved a bill that would allow the military to use women combat fliers.

Resistance toward women in combat is not limited to military chiefs in Washington. Such views extend to men on the home front in Orange County as well.

Maj. Gen. Royal N. Moore, the El Toro-based aviator who led all Marine fliers in the war, said last week that the 450 women under his command in non-combat roles “did a tremendous job out there.”

But he added: “When you’re down in the foxhole, on the front lines, a one-on-one type situation, for a lot of reasons I think we’ve got to have men doing that. There’s a heck of a mind-set in this world about women in combat, and I’m not too sure that people are ready for that.”

Lt. Col. George Flynn, a Camp Pendleton-based Marine who lives in San Clemente and headed a battalion-landing team in the Gulf, agrees.

“We sort of like things the way they are,” he says. “The men have a role to play, and the women have a role to play, and we’re comfortable with that. . . . I’m not convinced that the American people are ready to see their daughters die in a war.”

Lt. Karla Jessup says she’s not ready to die in a war, either. But the El Toro-based Marine wants the chance to face the danger, the same as any of the men in the Marine Corps.

Jessup, 28, a senior security officer who served with a military police unit in the Gulf, smiles when asked about the subject. It is a confident smile.

“Do I think women should be in combat? I don’t know about all women, but I think I can handle it,” the Oklahoman says. “I’ve had the same training the men have had. . . . I feel I can go right alongside a man.”

Jessup’s enthusiasm sets her apart from some women in the military, though. Cpl. Dena Tamez, a soft-spoken, 23-year-old Marine from Central California who is also based with the military police at El Toro, says, “If this was what I would have to do, I’d do it.”

Yet, would she want the laws changed to allow combat for women? “I’d have to think about it.” So would Capt. Betsy Sweatt, who spent the war as a spokeswoman at the El Toro base.

“It’s tough,” Sweatt says. “Who wants to die?”

Critics of the policy change say they fear that if women were subject to combat duty, fewer would enlist in the first place, reversing gains in the recruitment of females made in the last few decades.

“I do not see any women who want to go” into combat, said Gunnery Sgt. Jean Amico, based at Camp Pendleton, who testified at a congressional hearing this week after serving in the Gulf as an electronics-maintenance chief.

“I do not wish to go into an offensive combat role,” said Amico, testifying in support of Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Alfred M. Gray Jr. “The position of enlisted Marine women is (that) we want to do our job wherever the Marine Corps wants us, but we do not wish to carry a rifle and lug a pack around and live the way the grunts do.”

Local women Marines like Sweatt, Jessup and Tamez say they see few signs of discrimination against their sex in the military.

Jessup says she hears the occasional line from a male Marine that “women don’t belong here” but has learned to shrug it off. In fact, Sweatt says, such nonchalance is needed to ensure women their place and show the men that they can do the job.

The men, Sweatt says, “come in there with a mind-set . . . but you show them that you’ve got the stuff it takes. . . . If you sit around and cry because you’re treated differently as a Marine, you’re going to fuel the fire.”

While women GIs differ on the question of combat roles, many agree that the current distinction between combat and non-combat roles can be both insulting and irrelevant.

In the missile age, they say, virtually any military unit is subject to attack--as shown in the Gulf War--and thus becomes, in effect, a combat unit. Unlike the more traditional scenarios of past wars, Sweatt says, “there’s no front line anymore.”

Maj. Walker, the physician from Orange County who is now based at Ft. Bragg in North Carolina, was at a post just north of Dhahran that was not considered a high-risk target area. But she considered the danger a constant one, accentuated by the explosions of nearby Scuds.

“I’d joke with my battalion commander and say, as a grandmother, I don’t know that I should be there,” she said. “It was somewhat of a shock to me. And there were times I wondered why I was there.”

But she said: “It was very obvious that there were females in forward positions who excelled. And these people should have positions open to them that they’re qualified for--based on physical, mental and psychological factors, and nothing else.”

Times staff writers George Frank in Orange County and Melissa Healy in Washington contributed to this report.