For Female GIs, Combat Is a Fact

Several male Army officers also dismissed Bush's statement as woefully uninformed. "The president got blindsided. The president didn't understand what the policy really was," said one officer, who requested anonymity because he was questioning the commander-in-chief. He and others urged Army leaders to push for new policies that reflect women's expanded role.

"I'm ashamed," he said, "that the Army has not taken this on."

Valor Under Fire

In sheer numbers, women are essential to the American military effort in Iraq -- where tens of thousands have served -- and are playing a bigger role than in any previous U.S. conflict. Historically, women's involvement in the military has surged in wartime. Today, that pattern is amplified by the all-volunteer U.S. military's growing share of women, which has steadily expanded in recent years to 15 percent of the active duty force.

Moreover, in contrast to their roles in past wars, women are serving in a widening variety of Army ground units -- from logistics to military police, military intelligence and civil affairs -- where they routinely face the same risks as soldiers in all-male combat units such as infantry and armor.

"We live and work with the infantry," said Maj. Mary Prophit, 42, who heads a four-person civil affairs team with a Stryker battalion in Mosul. An Army reservist and librarian from Glenoma, Wash., Prophit handles security duties from the hatch of a Stryker armored vehicle, watching houses during searches and returning fire when shot at. "Civil affairs teams have to be prepared to perform infantry functions, because at any time we could be diverted," she said.

In January, Prophit was delivering kerosene heaters to a Mosul school when insurgents detonated a roadside bomb as her convoy passed, fatally wounding three Iraqi soldiers. Prophit moved to shield the medic treating the wounded, firing at insurgents who were shooting at them from a mosque across the street. "Women in combat is no longer an argument," she said matter-of-factly at her camp near the Mosul air field. "There is no rear area."

At least as often as insurgents attack all-male infantry forces, they strike targets such as military supply convoys, checkpoints and camps where U.S. servicewomen are often present. As a result, hostile fire in Iraq has taken a proportionally larger toll on servicewomen than in any prior U.S. conflict, killing 35 and wounding 279.

"You can't tell me I'm not being shot at. You can't tell me I can't handle combat," said Provancha, who has nearly been hit by road bombs, rockets and the chow hall suicide bombing that killed 22 in December. "That was pretty frickin' direct fire if you ask me," she said, holding up a piece of shrapnel.

Far from shrinking from the fight, women in Iraq are winning medals for valor under fire.

Spec. Shavodsha Hodges, 29, of San Antonio, says she joined the Army because her GI husband encouraged her to. She is a veteran of the 2003 Iraq invasion and well into her second year in a war zone. She and about 100 other women make up 20 percent of Provancha's logistics battalion in Mosul. They serve as truck and Stryker drivers, medics, mechanics and supply soldiers like Hodges who conduct between 50 and 70 convoy missions a month. Ferrying critical goods from Mosul to outlying bases on the precarious roads of northern Iraq, Hodges has developed keen instincts.

On Oct. 29, she was in a supply convoy heading out of the hostile town of Tall Afar, near the Syrian border. "We were told to watch out for an Iraqi national in black," she recalled. "Within seconds we were hit with an IED," or improvised explosive device, the military's term for a roadside bomb.

As her Humvee began to roll over, Hodges reached over and grabbed the legs of Pfc. Gregory Burchett, who was manning a .50-caliber machine gun. She pulled him down from the hatch and into the vehicle just before it flipped, saving him from being crushed.