Clearing the Fog of War

Trip on for oldest woman veteran, 108

The nation's oldest woman veteran, Lucy Coffey, has dreamed of making one last trip to visit her favorite monuments in Washington, D.C. Come Friday, she can check that one off her bucket list.

At 108, the longtime San Antonio resident will board a commercial airliner and fly to Washington, where she will see the World War II Memorial, Arlington National Cemetery and the Women's Memorial. “I want to go, I want to see it,” she said.

Still, this journey almost didn't happen. Veterans' supporters in San Antonio and Austin worked to fly the ailing Coffee, who is on oxygen and frail after suffering a stroke, to Washington without overtaxing her.

Everyone thought things were set late last week when an Austin aviation broker agreed to charter a plane, but the firm dropped its plans because of legal concerns. That didn't stop a pair of retired Marines in Austin and San Antonio from pressing on, and with help from the  Texas General Land Office, they struck a deal.

Pending final medical approval, American Airlines will give Coffey and her caregiver free first-class, round-trip tickets to Washington. A tour of the monuments is scheduled to begin Saturday and end with a visit to the White House.

Read more here: http://www.mysanantonio.com/default/article/Trip-on-for-oldest-woman-veteran-108-5635457.php

Oldest woman veteran, 108, wants one more trip

SAN ANTONIO — When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Lucy Coffey had left the farm in Martinsville, Indiana, spent time in Chicago and finally settled in Dallas, where she worked at an A&P supermarket.

After quitting the A&P in 1943, she joined the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, a call to service that would take her to Japan before she returned and settled in San Antonio.

Now, at 108, the nation's oldest woman veteran has one more trip to make, this time an Honor Flight, an all-expense-paid salute to World War II veterans. The destination: Washington, D.C.

“I'd like to go to see things that are there that were not there before,” Coffey said 

Read more here: http://www.expressnews.com/news/local/military/article/Oldest-woman-veteran-108-wants-one-more-trip-5610408.php#/0

 

Draft law may have to change now that women can fight

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration's decision to lift the ban on women in combat opens the door for a change in the law that compels only men 18-25 to register for a military draft, according to legal experts and military historians.

Never before has the country drafted women into military service, and neither the administration nor Congress is in a hurry to make them register for a future call-up.

But, legally, they may have no other choice.

Now that front-line infantry, armor, artillery and special operations jobs are open to female volunteers who can meet the physical requirements, it will be difficult for anyone to make a persuasive argument that women should continue to be exempt from registration, said Diane Mazur, a law professor at the University of Floria and a former Air Force officer.

“They're going to have to show that excluding women from the draft actually improves military readiness,” Mazur said. “I just don't see how you can make that argument.”

Groups that backed the end of the ban on women in combat also support including women in draft registration as a matter of basic citizenship.

Women should have the same civic obligations as men, said Greg Jacob, a former Marine Corps officer and policy director for the Service Women's Action Network. “We see registration as another step forward in terms of equality and fairness,” Jacob said.

The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., supports draft registration for women, his spokeswoman said.

Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., who heads the House Armed Services Committee, hasn't made up his mind. McKeon said through a spokesman that he's awaiting a Defense Department report due in the coming weeks that will assess the legal impact of lifting the ban on women in combat on draft registration.

Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, is doing the very same thing.

“The Department (of Defense) is currently undergoing a lengthy and thoughtful process to provide guidance on the details of the new policy lifting the direct ground combat exclusion rule for the 200,000-plus women who bravely serve our nation in the military,” he said. “I look forward to studying those results to understand if any additional policy changes need to be made.”

A poll by Quinnipiac University found that American voters firmly oppose a return to conscription. Also, adding women to the mix doesn't appear to be a high priority for a battle-weary nation nearing the end of more than a decade of war.

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Women troops are weighing combat jobs

Pfc. Katrina Welnicki runs two miles in 13 minutes, 45 seconds, and does 83 situps and 68 pushups in two minutes — good enough to not only meet the Army's perfect physical fitness score, but to easily beat it.

She exemplifies the new Army, which recently opened every combat specialty to women. She and fellow Pfc. Justine Westbrook, both training as combat medics at Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, want to serve with special operations troops, and say there's no reason why they can't.

“I think gender shouldn't have anything to do with that,” said Welnicki, 20, of Newburgh, N.Y. “It should be based purely on ability, rather than if you're a male or female.”

The Pentagon's decision to end its ban on women serving in closed combat specialties comes as good news to women in Fort Sam's 232nd Medical Battalion, where future combat medics learn their trade over 16 weeks.

Billed by top military officials as an equal opportunity action, it's also a reaction to the thinning ranks of young people qualified to serve in the armed forces — with only about two in every 10 applicants making the grade.

Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/military/article/Women-troops-are-weighing-combat-jobs-4266243.php#ixzz2KbqqeAr0

Combat ban lifted, but trouble is ahead

A longstanding Pentagon rule barring women from critical ground combat units that include the infantry and special operations was rescinded Thursday, but changes won't come quickly, and Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans warned of rough times ahead for women and the military.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta unveiled the change, saying that, in tearing down barriers to women who want to serve in the military's most dangerous jobs, “we are making our military stronger, and we are making America stronger.”

Advocates agreed, echoing his view that ability — not gender — should decide who serves in 237,000 jobs that will open to women.

But others said women have struggled to serve as equals in a male-dominant military, and one sociologist warned the transition would be more difficult for the first women blazing the trail in once-forbidden specialties.

Former Spc. Kasey Hunter, one of only four women in an aviation unit near Baghdad in the Iraq war, said she was taunted about her breasts. Before arriving in Iraq, Hunter, then 21, said GIs took bets on who would sleep with her.

“I went into the military a very naïve, trusting, innocent girl and I came out something totally different,” said Hunter, a 2005 Churchill High School graduate. “Jaded, I guess, broken, I was just changed completely. Jaded, I mean angry at the world. I have a hard time trusting people, I'm very on edge and lots of anxiety.”

The policy change had been weighed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff over the past year and ends an era for a military that long had limited opportunities for women.

The services were told to evaluate their occupational performance standards and submit them in mid-May. The process will be completed in three years.

Women make up roughly one in every six of the 1.4 million active-duty troops, and they serve in a wide range of once-shuttered specialties, from the Air Force's Security Forces and Army medics to helicopter and jet pilots.

Only a relative few specialties remain closed, most of them tied to direct ground combat. But Anu Bhagwati, a former Marine Corps company commander, blamed the 1994 combat exclusion policy for much of the harassment women continue to face.

“Women deal with daily discrimination and harassment in large part because legalized discrimination exists in the Marine Corps and the Army and the Navy ... through the combat exclusion policy, so it's given rise to a culture in which it's OK for women to be told they're second-class citizens,” said Bhagwati, executive director of Service Women's Action Network.

Panetta said women ought to be able to serve if qualified, a view echoed by Bexar County Sheriff Susan Pamerleau, a retired Air Force major general, who said, “Each job is based on requirements ... and if a woman meets those requirements, then I think she ought to have an opportunity to compete.”

But Hunter, 25, of Belton, and Spc. Cody Nusbaum, an infantryman shot 11 times in Kandahar and now at Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, expressed reservations, pointing to women who are posted in austere environments surrounded by men.

“My main concern is just the bickering and the I-liked-her-first sort of thing, because when guys get overseas and they've been away from women awhile, they get weird,” said Nusbaum, 23, of Camden, Ohio.

“I don't know whose idea it was to do this, but I feel like it's going to get a lot of people hurt,” he added.

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Ban on women in combat ends

In a historic action, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta today will remove the ban on women in combat that has excluded them from jobs ranging from infantry squad leaders and tank gunners to commandoes.

The decision, praised by women's advocates but denounced by the conservative Family Research Council, ends a 1994 Pentagon policy that barred women from high-risk ground combat jobs.

Women often have seen combat anyway over the past decade, as 283,000 of them went to Afghanistan and Iraq, according to a Congressional Research Service report, with 144 killed and 855 wounded.

“I remember in 1990 when we went into the first Gulf War, there was an uproar about women going to the front lines and talking about women being taken away from their children and having to go to war, having to go into combat,” said Bexar County Sheriff Susan Pamerleau, a retired Air Force major general.

“Then when we went into the Iraqi war (in 2003), there were no longer those kinds of issues,” she said. “Those issues weren't raised because people were recognizing that we've done this for a long time, women are trained to do this.”

Military officials said Panetta would unveil details in a news conference this afternoon.

An implementation period is expected, though details of how the service branches will phase in the policy weren't clear.

Anu Bhagwati, executive director of Service Women's Action Network, which joined three officers and an Army staff sergeant in lawsuit led by the ACLU to overturn the policy, called the decision a historic moment.

The policy, and laws before it, were rooted in a military long segregated by color, ethnicity and gender. But barriers to women had fallen over the decades, especially after the Women's Army Corps was disbanded in 1978.

The combat exclusion policy had barred women from serving in around 238,000 jobs, said Bhagwati, who noted that many of those positions set the stage for higher-ranking assignments. Giving women the chance to compete for combat roles, she predicted, would improve retention and recruiting.

Women make up 14 percent of the 1.4 million troops in the armed forces.

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Woman general says 'shift happens' on the road to success

Becky Halstead's “success” diagram has as many lows as highs — a coach's fatal skydiving accident, her appointment to West Point and soon after, marriage, divorce and rising to general.

There's a word to describe the scraggly hand-drawn graph that illustrates her life, but not the one some of the women veterans hearing her speech Saturday in San Antonio might have been thinking.

“When shift happens in our life it's about the response more than it is about the shift,” Halstead, who led 20,000 GIs in Iraq in 2005, told a veterans support group for women. “And so I give most of my speeches on leadership with the premise that the first person you must lead is you.”

At 53, Halstead is the first female West Point graduate to become a one-star general. But she has an untraditional resume, one that includes falling ill to a chronic illness and jettisoning the drugs that were supposed to help — but didn't.

The tale of her recovery was perfectly suited to Grace After Fire's fall summit, “The Power of Women Veterans." The gathering touched on healthy nutrition, family resiliency, relaxing techniques for women and a seminar, “Are you sick and tired of feeling sick and tired?”

Psychologist Sunita Trevino pointed to a range of issues faced by women while they are in uniform and, later, while reintegrating into civilian life. The problem starts with a simple perception.

“When you think of a veteran,” she said, “the first thing you think of is a man.”

The military was even more of a man's world when Halstead went to West Point in 1977. At first rated among the worst cadets as new students began summer training, she became a top performer. Nothing was easy. As a one-star general, a commander gave her a scathing performance review, prompting Halstead to say, “Don't think the challenges stop. They never stop.”

Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/article/Shift-Happens-on-the-road-to-success-3946218.php#ixzz29F3sO2aW

Lackland's 'culture' blamed for scandal

Three California congresswomen visiting San Antonio on Tuesday said an Air Force sex scandal is rooted in a culture that tolerates predators while punishing whistle-blowers.

Reps. Susan Davis, Loretta Sanchez and Jackie Speier, all Democrats, told reporters after a tour of Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland that troops here were aware of misconduct between instructors and trainees, but fear of reprisal kept them silent.

“Reporting this issue was not acceptable at Lackland. When you had only one individual who came forward to file a complaint when there were 44 victims, it was not being taken seriously,” Speier said.

“People knew it was going on,” Sanchez said, adding that they felt like “part of a family of buddies” they didn't want to turn in. “You go through a series of things: denial, ‘Maybe I didn't see it quite right,' ‘Maybe I didn't hear it quite right.'”

“You know, that's human nature to not want to believe that these things are going on. And then to break that bond, to break that family bond, to break that and to say it's so bad I have to go and tell somebody about it.”

The scandal goes back to at least 2008 and has grown to nearly four dozen victims. Some observers have raised the issue of culture playing a role in the scandal, explaining it's hard to understand how so many trainers on one base could have broken the rules without being reported.

Two instructors had illicit sexual relationships with 10 women each, while two other instructors testified that they learned of misconduct but hesitated to report it. One testified that he said nothing for more than a month after Staff Sgt. Craig LeBlanc bragged to him about having sex with a basic trainee.

Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/article/Lackland-s-culture-blamed-for-scandal-3913699.php#ixzz29FKXQYMc