Soldiers and veterans welcome a move by the Pentagon to allow women in dangerous jobs closer to the front lines.
The Defense Department said Thursday the move would open up about 14,000 combat-related positions to female troops on the front lines, including tank mechanics and intelligence officers.
“I think it’s fine,” said Chance Cleland, who serves at Fort Benning. “It’s pretty good.”
All soldiers should be able to serve in the jobs they want, he said. “I know plenty of females who are mechanics and medics,” Cleland said. “We got females that do the same as males.”
Tony Bailey, a retired Army master sergeant with 25 years of service and lost his daughter, Spc. Lakeshia M. Bailey, to a rollover accident in Iraq in 2010, supports the move.
“Women that serve should be able to serve anywhere they want to in the military,” Bailey said Friday from his home in Fort Mitchell, Ala.
A veteran of the Gulf War in 1990-91, Bailey said women served with him in a forward capacity but they weren’t allowed in the combat arms.
He worked as a mechanic on wheeled and tracked vehicles during his entire Army career.
“They had female medics and I had two female mechanics on my team,” Bailey said.“I had female mechanics that went forward with me.”
Women have always been right there with the men, said Patricia Holder, who served in Army supply and retired in 2007 as a master sergeant.
“I think the problem is now they will get recognized for being there on the front lines with them,” she said.
With the announcement, Holder said the general public is able to recognize that women play such a big role in the military.
“I don’t think it’s a big change,” she said. “Women have been in support roles except for the pilots and everything. When the unit deploys, they don’t say you’re not going because you are female. We go together and it doesn’t matter.”
Bailey said he feels that women should be trained in the infantry as well but not necessarily with the male infantry.
Women would be helpful on some missions, he said, when infantry soldiers go out to areas where women may be required to be searched.
“A lot of times they have to search females and stuff in these third-world countries we are fighting in,” Bailey said. “You are going to put them in harm’s way and they haven’t had the same infantry training you have had.”
The Army should have a company of women that have taken the combat arms specialty to assist the infantry, he said.
According to the Defense Department, about 280,000 women have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.
At least 144 women have been killed and 865 have been wounded.
