GROUND ZERO.<i> By Linda Bird Francke</i> .<i> Simon & Schuster: 304 pp., $25</i>
If I taught writing rather than social science, I would assign “Ground Zero” tomorrow. Linda Bird Francke describes the struggle to lift the American combat exclusion laws so vigorously that you might think she could single-handedly break through the combat barrier herself. But that’s only if you accept her version of the debate and know little about the military. Otherwise, you quickly realize that she barely skims the surface of the culture she is taking aim at. And she completely skirts the central issues her subject provocatively raises.
For instance, she spends no time with combat soldiers yet has no problem criticizing them. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines are equally contemptible because they revolve around “white male culture.” Not only does white male culture denigrate women but, worse, it encourages men to hound and harass them.
Given recent headlines, one has to wonder: Does white male culture really explain the recent rape and sexual harassment allegations at Aberdeen Proving Ground, where it’s been mostly black drill instructors brought up on charges? Or what about former Air Force Lt. Kelly Flinn? Is white male culture really at fault in her dalliance with the husband of an Air Force enlistee?
If we’re honest, it’s not culture or color but plumbing that makes males male. Hormones also help. The key question “Ground Zero” raises (and hopes to lay to rest) is whether these differences are enough to keep females out of all-male units. Opponents of the combat exclusion laws say no, while proponents argue yes.
But perhaps Francke isn’t being entirely fair when she describes the machinations of the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services. This committee has been grappling with the issue of women in the military for five decades. Yet by treating select members’ concerns about hormonal surges, menstruation, urination and other physiological issues as chief preoccupations, Francke easily makes the ban seem silly.
Over the last several decades, tens of thousands of women have served in the armed forces. This translates into lots of numbers but also lots of potential exceptions, which, when totaled, can be made to sound quite impressive. Both sides use and parry these statistics to the extent that, one would think, they would be rendered a wash. Unfortunately, as “Ground Zero” demonstrates, this is hardly the case.
Instead, it’s those things that can’t be quantified or measured--such as morale, cohesion and trust--which tend to be dismissed as insignificant and immaterial. This is particularly unfortunate, if we pay attention to lessons from previous wars when numbers and bodies were likewise counted and morale, cohesion and trust were similarly downplayed. I am thinking of Vietnam especially, the last lengthy war the United States fought.
By definition, combat units are different from other units because they are designed to be hurled into harm’s way. Even if, as Francke reports, the American public no longer shrinks from the idea of female bodies being mutilated right alongside male bodies, the military has to care whenever its units are chewed up. In prolonged combat, units always are. Consequently, commanders have to be able to plug holes fast and efficiently, which, in turn, means they need fighters they can treat interchangeably.
At ground level, though, pilots, soldiers and Marines can’t regard one another with such detachment, and new personnel are hardly as welcome as you might think. Talk to any combat veteran. “Cherries” aren’t just inexperienced; they’re untested. The most that veterans can hope is that the new guys know their jobs and can conform and fit. Forget (for a moment), then, issues of strength, stamina and speed. Can women conform? Will men treat women as though they fit?
Not if women want to be treated as women or if they take offense at words like “cherry.” Not if they want to wear makeup and feminine hair styles, as Francke suggests “mature women” at West Point do. And definitely not if they want to be treated as though they are special but equal or even different but equal.
The women Francke interviews seem to recognize this, even if they are reluctant to articulate it. After so many years around men, though, you would think they might understand more: It’s not that combat soldiers don’t want women to be able to conform, which is what Francke infers. Rather, as far as men are concerned, there’s no way women can conform.
No matter how strong, fleet or tough a woman might be (or might not need to be), the bottom line is that she’s still not a man. In the heat of one kind of moment, it might be possible for everyone in a unit to forget this; in the heat of another, sexlessness will dissolve. Then interchangeability is disrupted and cohesion goes down the tubes. To deny this is to deny the nature of human nature. It’s also to intellectualize too much. Asking, as Francke does, why men don’t want women in their units leads to all sorts of absurd theorizing. For instance, borrowing from Margaret Mead, Francke asserts that men exclude women to reaffirm their maleness.
But what if we simply turn this around and ask why men should want to include women? Francke never addresses this. In fact, she never once makes clear why maleness is at all dangerous to the military. She does explain how dangerous she thinks maleness is to women. But beyond noting that the services have had to recruit more and more women because fewer and fewer qualified men join up, she doesn’t explore the implications of maleness itself.
We should wonder. What does it mean if men are avoiding the armed forces in droves? Is it because there is too little prestige attached to service? Or because civilian salaries are higher? Or because today’s young men don’t want to deploy and especially not as humanitarians?
Unfortunately, Francke provides us with little more on this than what was being reported in the late 1970s (when the services were in notoriously horrific shape). And nowhere does she clarify whether women join up and stay in for the same or different reasons than most men.
Yet, when it comes to the women she specifically lionizes, there must be something more motivating than the usual mix of pragmatism and patriotism. After all, women know when they volunteer that they won’t be allowed to fly jets in combat. So why do they later clamor to do so? Perhaps it’s no coincidence that most, if not all, of the women lobbying to be let into combat units are officers, specifically pilots. Why doesn’t Francke hone in on this? Or on the fact that combat experience puts men, who are supposed to be their peers, on a faster track to promotion?
Huge questions lurk. Can the military do a better job of reconciling efficiency and fairness, or effectiveness and equity, especially when career options mean everything to individuals, but individuals per se mean nothing to the military? And how might we, meanwhile, reconcile some women’s desire to fly the latest warplanes with most servicewomen’s fervent wish to stay out of front-line foxholes?
Paradoxes abound. We see some quite clearly through Francke’s eyes because what drew her to this topic in the first place was a young Gulf War pilot, tragically killed in an accident just days after having successfully flown behind Iraqi lines. Francke, like many others, regards Major Marie Rossi as a pioneer. In fact, this is how all the women who were caught in firefights during Panama and the Gulf War have been treated by the media. But what are they pioneers in? Of? For?
The media may be interested in exceptionalism. But exceptionalism isn’t good in the military. You can’t stand out too much and still fit in. We see this easily, thanks to Francke’s vivid descriptions of these wartime female heroes and how media treatment affected their subsequent acceptance (and behavior) in the military once they’d been singled out as exceptional because they were female. Most recently, the nation watched as Kelly Flinn was taught a similar set of lessons. Having been treated as an exceptional female, she wound up behaving as though she was an exceptional individual, not quite subject to the same rules and punishments as everyone else. This ended up costing her her career, though of course the media focus (and a civilian lawyer) helped.
Despite what outsiders presume, those being trained for combat have to have, and be held to, different standards from the rest of us, standards that treat them all as unexceptional. Also, the military has to prepare for worst-case scenarios: long, grinding wars, not quick Panamas or easy conventional wins, as in the Gulf. Thus, it needs methods that probably wouldn’t make sense to most civilians, cocooned as we are in a very different reality. I wish Francke had tried to pierce through this.
The combat soldiers I know recognize all too well the distraction women would pose if they were with them 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for as long as the unit might be in the field, deployed and in danger. They also know how much more difficult their task would be with the added temptation to flirt with, protect, assist or avoid members of the opposite sex. And I’d argue that the same would be true for women should they ever be granted combat units of their own, staffed only by women. Curiously, Francke never suggests this as a possible solution. If girls have their own sports teams at school, why can’t women have combat units? This seems a logical thing to lobby for, until you realize that those fighting hardest for women to go into combat couldn’t care less about winning any war but the gender war.
“Ground Zero” makes this resoundingly clear. In fact, Francke has me completely convinced, though I doubt this has been her intent, that breaking down the combat barrier has less to do with leveling the field men and women are already playing on in the military than it does with evening all sorts of other scores. The military is just the next best institution to assault, individuals and their careers be damned. Worse, individual servicewomen be damned. After men, of course.
