The trials, and errors, of an integrated Army
One cold April dawn in 1979, the new, integrated Army arrived at Fort McClellan, Ala. The jittery recruits of Alpha Company, 87 men and 76 women mostly between the ages of 18 and 22, stepped off the ramshackle buses and began basic training together. They shared barracks (on alternate floors), mess halls and bivouacs, and a few occasionally made clandestine love in the laundry room or the latrines. When the six weeks of marching, spitting, polishing, obstacle coursing and weapons training were over, and the tears, exhaustion, pride and exhilaration forgotten, Writer Helen Rogan asked their commanding officer, a woman, what differences she had noted between the men and women. Said she: "The men overloaded the washing machines because they didn't know how to use them."
As Rogan points out in her groundbreaking new book Mixed Company:
Women in the Modern Army (Putnam; $14.95), the answer was not entirely accurate. The women's physical standard was slightly different, mainly because men are generally larger and possess greater upper-body strength. Some women with small hands had trouble negotiating the hand-guards of the M-16 rifle, others with short legs could not keep up with the standard 30-in. marching step. The women were required to do fewer push-ups and sit-ups than the men (16 push-ups and 27 sit-ups for the women, 40 of each for the men), and were allowed a little over 22 minutes, instead of just under 18, for running two miles. According to Rogan, who watched the full cycle of basic: "Some men and women couldn't run; some men cried and were scared. The most important differences were between people when it came to training soldiers." For the most part, she concludes, the success of either sex depended on how well the drill sergeants dealt with those individual differences.
The U.S. has more than 67,000 women in its active Army, 8.9% of the total.
The women were recruited as a result of national policy, partly in the belief that they might upgrade the declining quality of the all-volunteer force. At enlisted level many of them are, in fact, better educated and motivated than their male counterparts. But they march on the quaking ground of social change, resisted, harassed, endlessly studied with the concentration scientists might devote to a baffling new virus.
The very subject of women in the military stirs deep emotions and prejudices.
Wherever women soldiers are involved, they tend to be seen as "the problem," and rarely are they asked for their own solutions. Rogan above all listens—to the veterans of the now disbanded Women's Army Corps, to the officers and raw recruits, to the new West Point cadets. She is the first person to report on the experiences of women in the Army, and her book is a touching, though often dispiriting account of personal changes and dashed hopes as men and women are processed into soldiers.