Ready to Kill

The man yelled, "But you can't fly this!"

He yelled some more. "It has guns!"

Finally, he found the words to yell what it was that was making him so confused and angry: "You're a woman flying an attack helicopter!"

The scowling man is not alone in objecting to the very idea of a woman operating a machine designed to kill in combat. Women were banned from combat aircraft and combatant ships until the mid-1990s. They're still banned from units where direct ground combat is the primary mission, such as infantry, tanks and artillery. At a Senate hearing in 1991, a former commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Robert Barrow, exclaimed that because combat entails killing, "Women can't do it!"

Barrow went on to say: "I may be old-fashioned, but I think the very nature of women disqualifies them from doing it. Women give life. Sustain life. Nurture life. They don't take it."

But in today's military, they are taking it. True, women aren't assigned to the units that are launching the ground offensives. Nevertheless, in the course of serving in hostile territory where they have to defend themselves and others, they have begun to participate in the military's central mission: to break the will of the enemy by killing him or convincing him that he will be killed.

"The first time I saw a woman soldier in a maternity military uniform -- the warrior versus the giver of life -- that was visually jarring to me," acknowledges Mady Wechsler Segal, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland and associate director of the school's Center for Research on Military Organization. "That was in 1979. But recently, when I told that story to my students, they looked at me like I was from outer space."

Segal is barely old enough to be her students' grandmother, which means that in less than two generations, perceptions about a woman's place in the military have begun to change. When the 507th Maintenance Company was ambushed in Nasiriyah during the first days of the Iraq war, initial news reports seized on a Pentagon claim that Pfc. Jessica Lynch had fought the attackers like a videogame superheroine. While the story later proved to be false, nowadays many Americans appear to have little trouble believing that a young woman who looks like your favorite babysitter is capable of putting up a ferociously lethal defense.

The truth is, more and more military women are fighting and killing the enemy. As they do, they're battling their way into unfamiliar territory. Because, when it comes to women and killing, very little is known about the consequences for the military, for our society or even for the women themselves.

THE COBRA THUNDERED OVER IRAQ'S ANBAR PROVINCE LAST WINTER, HORNER IN THE FRONT SEAT, CAPT. ROGER HOLLIDAY IN BACK. A Huey flew off to the side in the clear blue desert sky north of Al-Asad Air Base. The two helicopter crews were conducting visual reconnaissance for a group of Marines on a mission down on the ground.

As always, Horner's M-4 rifle was shoved between the right side of her seat and the plexiglass canopy. Her 9mm pistol was stashed in her escape-and-evasion bag, which she stuffed into a crack beside the console. A Cobra's cockpit is a tight squeeze. On the ground, she wore the pistol in a shoulder holster. Her father taught her to shoot when she was growing up in Texas. "Never point a weapon at something you don't intend to kill," he told her. Her father and brother shot doves. Horner shot skeet. She had a problem with hunting something she wasn't going to eat and didn't have any other reason to kill.

Horner recalls that a call came in over the radio: Friendlies on patrol to the south were taking fire. Friendlies could be Americans, coalition forces, Iraqi soldiers. Horner's Cobra and the Huey diverted south. Where exactly they were headed wasn't entirely clear; all they had was a general location.