Ready to Kill

Horner listened to Holliday talking over the radio with one of the friendlies in the small patrol that was under attack. The man had to shout to be heard over the heavy machine gun fire. Horner scribbled down the data he was shouting, while Holliday piloted the helicopter. She searched through her maps, made sure her targeting laser was ready to use, her Hellfire missiles coded.

The desert unreeled below, tawny and creamy and streaked with brown. The Cobra and Huey skimmed over sand dunes and wadis, groves of date palms and orange trees. They found the patrol hunkered down in dusty vegetation in a rural area along a river.

To reduce the risk of taking out friendly troops or innocent bystanders in the fog of war, strict rules dictate when pilots may and may not shoot. Especially in a congested area, the targeting process is laborious and exact. This was different. This was out in the empty countryside. The shots were coming from the river's other bank, the patrol reported, and there were no friendlies on that side. Controlling close air support was not the regular job of the man shouting into the radio below, so he just used landmarks to talk them onto the target: a palm grove, a blue tractor. From behind that tractor among the palms, someone was shooting at the patrol, pinning it down.

The Cobra started its run. Holliday was at the controls. The horizon tilted as he curved in toward the grove, lining it up so Horner could fire straight at the tractor with the 20mm gun in the Cobra's nose. The gun's turret was in front of her knees, the belt of ammunition in a case beneath her backside.

Neither Horner nor Holliday remembers feeling nervous, just pumped up on adrenaline. There was nothing spectacular about what they were doing above the palm grove that day. This was an ordinary, workaday application of lethal force. They'd practiced it so many times that for Horner -- her left hand on the action bar and the trigger, her right hand on the side hand control, her eyes searching for the target and any other possible threats through the window, then peering into the telescopic sighting unit's cross hairs, up to the projected multifunctional display, back to the cross hairs -- it was all muscle memory. She held down the trigger in five-second bursts, and the gun's familiar, deep bass stutter chattered like a massive sewing machine, stitching, stitching, stitching through the roar of the engines before Holliday peeled off.

The Huey curved in behind them. A door gunner fired one of the Huey's 50-caliber machine guns into the tractor, covering Holliday and Horner while Holliday brought the Cobra around for a second run. The helicopter roared through the curve, then Horner caught a glimpse of the tracers from the Huey's big gun before the Huey in turn broke off to make way for the Cobra. The grove and the blue tractor glided once more into Horner's cross hairs.

Twenty-millimeter rounds have the capability to zip through metal, blast through engine blocks, rip off arms, blow apart heads. By the time Horner and the Huey's door gunner finished firing on their second runs, no more shots were coming from behind the tractor. Whoever had been shooting from back there was undoubtedly dead.

AT THE MOMENT THE ENEMY IS KILLED, IF THE HAND ON THE TRIGGER BELONGS TO A WOMAN INSTEAD OF A MAN, DOES IT MATTER? Militarily, sociologically, personally -- does it make any difference?

While researchers have studied killing as it relates to men, there's very little data and no good research on women and killing in combat. The public discussion has been just as limited. What public debate there is about women, combat and military readiness focuses almost exclusively on the more general issue of whether or not women should participate in direct ground combat. There, brawn is as important as brains.

Opponents and supporters argue over whether women can achieve enough upper body strength to haul heavy weapons or carry wounded buddies, or whether greater flexibility and smaller size gives women an advantage inside cramped tanks and tunnels. Opponents worry that either sexual tension or the male instinct to protect females will undermine a unit's ability to pull together and fight effectively. But supporters worry that sparing women the hard, dirty work of combat is just as bad for morale because it incites resentment among the men. Such pros and cons dominate the rare moments when the issue gets public attention, overlooking the potential impact of sending women off to kill.

Zero in on the act of taking a life, and the pros and cons change. Strength becomes largely irrelevant at the moment of killing in modern warfare. With today's weaponry, if you can move your finger, you can pull a trigger. So if there's anything about women that makes them less effective at killing, it may be more psychological than physical.

Take empathy. In many studies published by American Psychological Association journals, women do show signs of being more empathetic; whether they're born or made this way isn't clear. So far, no studies have examined whether empathy undermines military readiness. But Wayne State University law professor and military observer Kingsley Browne wrote in a Buffalo Law Review article, "If it is true -- as so many feminists argue and the psychological data seem to support -- that women exhibit greater compassion, sensitivity and empathy than men, then women may be more reluctant than men to kill the enemy."