A reader quotes another:
Women have been assigned combat missions without the training that the military requires for male soldiers to do the same actual job. This is pure negligence.
I have no idea what this even means. As some of your other readers have noted, almost every mission on the modern battlefield is potentially a combat mission. I served as a signal corps paratrooper in XVIII Airborne Corps and in a signal unit in the Republic of Korea. Signal is considered a "combat support" branch, so there are lots of opportunities for contact with the enemy, either because what passes for a front has shifted and signal stations have found themselves in newly unfriendly territory, or because someone's decided to go after a unit's signal assets.
At both duty stations, there were women in my units (serving as small unit, company and battalion level commanders, for that matter), and they were getting the same training as the rest of us: what to do if you get hit with chemical agents, what to do if the enemy sends a squad around to attack a given node, what to do if it looks like your site is about to be overrun and you have a choice between shooting back or taking an axe to the gear and burning all the crypto. In fact, my (female) company commander told me she picked the Signal Corps because it was a chance for her to get actual combat experience instead of languishing in the rear echelon.
At Fort Bragg, women were jumping out of the airplanes with the rest of us. The plan was to land in an area that had been secured, but doctrinally everyone is aware that you might end up jumping into a hot DZ, and that's included in the training.
In Korea, my platoon's M203 gunner, the one with the cool over-and-under grenade launcher? She weighed 100 pounds dripping wet, kept up with the rest of us on ruck marches and qualified "expert" on the firing range. She was out there at the 3 a.m. for the chemical attack drills with the rest of us, practicing site defense with the rest of us, and generally training to fight just like the rest of us.
None of us were as well trained for combat as a platoon of infantry or cavalry scouts, but we were as well trained as the army could make us to defend ourselves on a shifting battlefield. Nobody was making the girls go hang out in the barracks while the boys played with the guns, and the commander I followed out the door on jumps was a woman, trained to fight just like me.
Another writes:
There was an excellent discussion regarding this topic on "On Point with Tom Ashbrook". It covered the viewpoints in your thread, but also included multiple call-ins from active-duty military members and veterans from all branches of the armed services. The old fashioned viewpoints were represented, as well as more modern takes from people just back from the front lines (if there are any anymore) in Iraq/Afghanistan.
Another story:
My youngest sister served in the Army in Iraq in 2004 and 2005, driving trucks between the rear and the front. She carried a rifle and wore the Army's Expert medal. She served mostly with men and lost some good friends while she served. One of her best stories was the day an enemy fighter appeared from out of nowhere and fired an RPG at the armored truck she was driving. The rocket struck the driver's side, disabling the truck but sparing the lives of both her and the male soldier riding shotgun. After shaking off the noise and shock from the rocket grenade's impact, without thinking twice my sister and the male soldier got out of the truck, chased the Iraqi down and beat the shit out him.
In Rick Santorum's world, that does not happen. No, my sister's squad mate would've been reduced to a sobbing mess, sitting in a puddle of his own tears or something, because an enemy fighter could've hurt a woman. Dumbass.
I've attached a couple of pix. I don't have permission from my sister to publish them, but just thought you guys would like to see who I'm talking about. I'm enormously proud of her, to the point of tears as I type this.
(Photo: A US female soldier from Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment secures the area during a joint house-to-house search operation between Iraqi and US forces, in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, on April 15, 2007. Insurgent gunmen attacked an Iraqi army checkpoint and killed 13 soldiers on a road in northern Iraq, in an area where Iraqi security forces often clash with Sunni insurgents linked to the Al-Qaeda network. By Mauricio Lima/AFP/Getty Images)
The Dish 