Check out the EFA for more information on this exhibit, and don't forget to watch the livefeed on March 8th!
March 4, 2010, 10:08 am
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/15000-dots-for-iraq-and-counting/
By ALI ADEEB
Warzer Jaff Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi-American artist, as his back was being tattooed. On Monday, Mr. Bilal will remove his shirt and subject his back to 24 hours of nonstop tattooing.
Updated, 3:08 p.m. | An earlier version of this post misstated the number of ink dots that will represent Iraqi casualties. It is 100,000, not 10,000, for a total of 105,000 dots. The start time of the performance was also misstated — it is 8 p.m., not 8 a.m.
In the annals of performance art, this may be one of the more masochistic acts. On March 8, Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi-American artist, will remove his shirt and subject his back to 24 hours of nonstop tattooing.
The plan calls for a tattoo artist to burn 105,000 dots into his skin in the shape of Iraq. Five thousand will be done with red ink, to represent American casualties in the Iraq War. The remainder, representing unidentified and forgotten Iraqi victims, will be done with ink that is visible only under ultraviolet light.
The performance, called “… and Counting,” has an ambitious philanthropic goal: Mr. Bilal hopes to raise $1 per dot in support of Rally For Iraq, a new nonprofit that plans to bring Iraqi orphans to the United States as students.
“This is the least I can do to try to help my country and my people. “ said Mr. Bilal, assistant arts professor teaching photography and imaging at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. “The pain that I will be going through is nothing compared to the suffering of my people. I am afraid that the American public is forgetting about them, and I want to bring attention to the situation in Iraq.”
Mr. Bilal, who left Iraq after the Gulf War in 1991 and has lived in the United States since 1992, has been an outspoken opponent of the Iraq War since it began in 2003.
His antipathy deepened in 2004 when an American missile attack at a checkpoint killed his brother.
The tattoo project is not the first time he has merged his politics and art. In 2007, in a performance titled “Shoot an Iraqi,” he spent a month living in a room of a Chicago art gallery and being shot at by a paintball gun. The gun was connected to an Internet site through which viewers could command the trigger. He turned the event into a book, “Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun.” That year, Mr. Bilal was named the artist of the year by The Chicago Tribune.
The following year, in a project called “Dog or Iraqi,” he allowed the audience to decide whether he or a dog should be subjected to the torture technique called waterboarding, in which water is poured over a person’s face and into his mouth and nose, causing a drowning sensation. He was chosen over the dog and was waterboarded.
He said he believed that artists should be more than educators; they should be provocateurs.
“The best we can hope for is to shock the audience and create engagement,” Mr. Bilal said. “It is not always about education all the time, but agitation also.”
“… And Counting” is the first fund-raising event for Rally for Iraq, which was founded by a group of Iraqi-Americans. The organization intends to raise enough money to support an initial group of five students.
“We believe that educating the new generation will be the best way to help our country build its future,” said Hussein Al-Baya, one of the organization’s co-directors.
Mr. Bilal’s performance will begin at 8 p.m. March 8 at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and will be streamed on the foundation’s Web site using two cameras, one showing Mr. Bilal’s back and the other showing the audience. Throughout the event, a litany of names of people killed in the war will be read aloud. Mr. Bilal is to fly to San Francisco the day after the performance to exhibit his artwork.
In preparation for the event, he has already inked the names of 16 Iraqi cities on his back.
Mr. Bilal visited his family in Iraq last July. He felt that he needed to get to know his sisters and brothers again. The war, he said, had stolen their hope.
“Some people say that when you cross the ocean it doesn’t matter anymore, but we Iraqis are always nostalgic,” he said. “It would be a great achievement if my work can help bring some hope to Iraqis for a better future.”
Ali Adeeb is a former intern and Baghdad newsroom manager for The New York Times. Kirk Semple contributed reporting.
Showing posts with label Iraq. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iraq. Show all posts
05 March 2010
16 August 2009
Women at Arms
This is a really interesting article on women in the US Military Forces. If you enjoy the article, check out the link, and visit the multimedia the NYT offers on the subject.
August 16, 2009
G.I. Jane Breaks the Combat Barrier as War Evolves
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/us/16women.html?_r=1&hp
As the convoy rumbled up the road in Iraq, Specialist Veronica Alfaro was struck by the beauty of fireflies dancing in the night. Then she heard the unmistakable pinging of tracer rounds and, in a Baghdad moment, realized the insects were illuminated bullets.
She jumped from behind the wheel of her gun truck, grabbed her medical bag and sprinted 50 yards to a stalled civilian truck. On the way, bullets kicked up dust near her feet. She pulled the badly wounded driver to the ground and got to work.
Despite her best efforts, the driver died, but her heroism that January night last year earned Specialist Alfaro a Bronze Star for valor. She had already received a combat action badge for fending off insurgents as a machine gunner.
“I did everything there,” Ms. Alfaro, 25, said of her time in Iraq. “I gunned. I drove. I ran as a truck commander. And underneath it all, I was a medic.”
Before 2001, America’s military women had rarely seen ground combat. Their jobs kept them mostly away from enemy lines, as military policy dictates.
But the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, often fought in marketplaces and alleyways, have changed that. In both countries, women have repeatedly proved their mettle in combat. The number of high-ranking women and women who command all-male units has climbed considerably along with their status in the military.
“Iraq has advanced the cause of full integration for women in the Army by leaps and bounds,” said Peter R. Mansoor, a retired Army colonel who served as executive officer to Gen. David H. Petraeus while he was the top American commander in Iraq. “They have earned the confidence and respect of male colleagues.”
Their success, widely known in the military, remains largely hidden from public view. In part, this is because their most challenging work is often the result of a quiet circumvention of military policy.
Women are barred from joining combat branches like the infantry, armor, Special Forces and most field artillery units and from doing support jobs while living with those smaller units. Women can lead some male troops into combat as officers, but they cannot serve with them in battle.
Yet, over and over, in Iraq and Afghanistan, Army commanders have resorted to bureaucratic trickery when they needed more soldiers for crucial jobs, like bomb disposal and intelligence. On paper, for instance, women have been “attached” to a combat unit rather than “assigned.”
This quiet change has not come seamlessly — and it has altered military culture on the battlefield in ways large and small. Women need separate bunks and bathrooms. They face sexual discrimination and rape, and counselors and rape kits are now common in war zones. Commanders also confront a new reality: that soldiers have sex, and some will be evacuated because they are pregnant.
Nonetheless, as soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, women have done nearly as much in battle as their male counterparts: patrolled streets with machine guns, served as gunners on vehicles, disposed of explosives, and driven trucks down bomb-ridden roads. They have proved indispensable in their ability to interact with and search Iraqi and Afghan women for weapons, a job men cannot do for cultural reasons. The Marine Corps has created revolving units — “lionesses” — dedicated to just this task.
A small number of women have even conducted raids, engaging the enemy directly in total disregard of existing policies.
Many experts, including David W. Barno, a retired lieutenant general who commanded forces in Afghanistan; Dr. Mansoor, who now teaches military history at Ohio State University; and John A. Nagl, a retired lieutenant colonel who helped write the Army’s new counterinsurgency field manual, say it is only a matter of time before regulations that have restricted women’s participation in war will be adjusted to meet the reality forged over the last eight years.
The Marine Corps, which is overwhelmingly male and designed for combat, recently opened two more categories of intelligence jobs to women, recognizing the value of their work in Iraq and Afghanistan. In gradually admitting women to combat, the United States will be catching up to the rest of the world. More than a dozen countries allow women in some or all ground combat occupations. Among those pushing boundaries most aggressively is Canada, which has recruited women for the infantry and sent them to Afghanistan.
But the United States military may well be steps ahead of Congress, where opening ground combat jobs to women has met deep resistance in the past.
Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, a group that opposes fully integrating women into the Army, said women were doing these jobs with no debate and no Congressional approval.
“I fault the Pentagon for not being straight with uniformed women,” said Ms. Donnelly, who supported unsuccessful efforts by some in Congress in 2005 to restrict women’s roles in these wars. “It’s an ‘anything goes’ situation.”
Poll numbers, however, show that a majority of the public supports allowing women to do more on the battlefield. Fifty-three percent of the respondents in a New York Times/CBS News poll in July, said they would favor permitting women to “join combat units, where they would be directly involved in the ground fighting.” The successful experiences of military women in Iraq and Afghanistan are being used to bolster the efforts of groups who favor letting gay soldiers serve openly. Those opposed to such change say that permitting service members to state their sexual orientation would disrupt the tight cohesion of a unit and lead to harassment and sexual liaisons — arguments also used against allowing women to serve alongside men. But women in Iraq and Afghanistan have debunked many of those fears.
“They made it work with women, which is more complicated in some ways, with sex-segregated facilities and new physical training standards,” said David Stacy, a lobbyist with the Human Rights Campaign, which works for gay equality. “If the military could make that work with good discipline and order, certainly integrating open service of gay and lesbians is within their capability. ”
From Necessity, Opportunity
No one envisioned that Afghanistan and Iraq would elevate the status of women in the armed forces.
But the Iraq insurgency obliterated conventional battle lines. The fight was on every base and street corner, and as the conflict grew longer and more complicated, the all-volunteer military required more soldiers and a different approach to fighting. Commanders were forced to stretch gender boundaries, or in a few cases, erase them altogether.
“We literally could not have fought this war without women,” said Dr. Nagl, who is now president of the Center for a New American Security, a military research institution in Washington.
Of the two million Americans who have fought in these wars since 2001, more than 220,000 of them, or 11 percent, have been women.
Like men, some women have come home bearing the mental and physical scars of bombs and bullets, loss and killing. Women who are veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars appear to suffer rates of post-traumatic stress disorder comparable to those of men, a recent study showed.
Men still make up the vast majority of the 5,000 war deaths since 2001; nearly 4,000 have been killed by enemy action But 121 women have also died, 66 killed in combat. The rest died in nonhostile action, which includes accidents, illness, suicide and friendly fire. And 620 women have been wounded.
Despite longstanding fears about how the public would react to women coming home in coffins, Americans have responded to their deaths and injuries no differently than to those of male casualties, analysts say. That is a reflection of changing social mores but also a result of the growing number of women — more than 356,000 today — who serve in the armed forces, including the Reserves and the National Guard, 16 percent of the total.
Over all, women say the gains they made in Iraq and Afghanistan have overshadowed the challenges they faced in a combat zone.
“As horrible as this war has been, I fully believe it has given women so many opportunities in the military,” said Linsay Rousseau Burnett, who was one of the first women to serve as a communication specialist with a brigade combat team in Iraq. “Before, they didn’t have the option.”
Although women make up only 6 percent of the top military ranks, these war years have ushered in a series of notable promotions. In 2008, 57 women were serving as generals and admirals in the active-duty military, more than double the number a decade earlier. Last year, Ann E. Dunwoody was the first woman to become a four-star Army general, the highest rank in today’s military and a significant milestone for women. And many more women now lead all-male combat troops into battle.
The Army does not keep complete statistics on the sex of soldiers who receive medals and tracks only active-duty soldiers. But two women have been awarded Silver Stars, one of the military’s highest honors. Many more women have been awarded medals for valor, the statistics show.
To be sure, not all women in the military embrace the idea of going into combat. Like men, a few do what they can to try to get out of deployments. Military women and commanders say some women have timed their pregnancies to avoid deploying or have gotten pregnant in Iraq so they would be sent home. The Army declined to release numbers on how many women have been evacuated from a war zone for pregnancy.
In addition to the dangers, military life is grueling in other ways, especially for mothers juggling parenting and the demands of the military, which require long absences from home. And while the military is doing more to address the threat of sexual harassment and rape, it remains a persistent problem.
Bending Rules, Shifting Views
The rules governing what jobs military women can hold often seem contradictory or muddled. Women, for instance, can serve as machine gunners on Humvees but cannot operate Bradleys, the Army’s armored fighting vehicle. They can work with some long-range artillery but not short-range ones. Women can walk Iraq’s dangerous streets as members of the military police but not as members of the infantry.
And, they can lead combat engineers in war zones as officers, but cannot serve among them. This was the case for Maj. Kellie McCoy, 34, a wisp of an officer who is just over five feet tall. As a captain in 2003 and 2004, she served as the first female engineer company commander in the 82nd Airborne Division and led a platoon of combat engineers in Iraq.
On Sept. 14, 2003, her four-vehicle convoy drove into an ambush. It was attacked by multiple roadside bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire. Three soldiers were wounded in the ambush. As one of the wounded stood in the middle of the road, bloody and in shock, Major McCoy ran through enemy fire to get him, discharging her M4 as she led him back to her vehicle. Then, she and the others returned to the “kill zone” to rescue the remaining soldiers. Insurgents shot at them from 15 feet away. But eventually, all 12 soldiers piled into one four-seat Humvee and sped away.
Major McCoy received a Bronze Star for valor and, most important for her, the admiration of her troops. “I think my actions cemented their respect for me,” she wrote in an e-mail message from Iraq. “I worked hard to earn their respect.”
As an officer, Major McCoy’s assignment followed both the letter and the spirit of the regulations.
But in other cases, the rules were bent to get women into combat positions.
In 2004 and 2005, Michael A. Baumann, now a retired lieutenant colonel, commanded 30 enlisted women and 6 female officers as part of a unit patrolling in the Rashid district of Baghdad, an extremely dangerous area at the time.
On paper, he followed military policy. The women were technically assigned to a separate chemical company of the division. In reality, they were core members of his field artillery battalion. Mr. Baumann said the women trained and fought alongside his male soldiers. Everyone from Mr. Baumann’s commanders to the commanding general knew their true function, he said.
“We had to take everybody,” said Mr. Baumann, 46, who wrote a book about his time in Iraq called “Adjust Fire: Transforming to Win in Iraq.” “Nobody could be spared to do something like support.”
Brought up as an old-school Army warrior, Mr. Baumann said he had seriously doubted that women could physically handle infantry duties, citing the weight of the armor and the gear, the heat of Baghdad and the harshness of combat.
“I found out differently,” said Mr. Baumann, now chief financial officer for St. Paul Public Schools in Minnesota. “Not only could they handle it, but in the same way as males. I would go out on patrols every single day with my battalion. I was with them. I was next to them. I saw with my own eyes. I had full trust and confidence in their abilities.”
Mr. Baumann’s experience rings true to many men who have commanded women in Iraq. More than anything, it is seeing women perform under fire that has changed attitudes. But some experts say the hostility toward women in the military was fading on its own. Many young men today have grown up around female athletes, tough sisters and successful women.
As the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan sinks in, some experts and military officers believe that women should be allowed to join all-male combat units in phases (so long as job-specific physical exams are created to test the abilities of men and women).
For New Warfare, New Roles
War is different today, they say. Technology has changed the way some of these jobs are done, making them more mechanized and less strength-dependent. Warfare in Iraq involves a lot more driving than walking.
What is more, not all combat jobs are the same. Handling field artillery or working in Bradleys, for example, are jobs more suited to some women than light infantry duties, which can require carrying heavy packs for miles.
Still, most women in the military express little, if any, desire to join the grueling, testosterone-laden light infantry. But some say they are interested in artillery and armor.
Any change to the policy would require Congressional approval, which lawmakers say is unlikely in the middle of two wars. But women in the military and their allies want their performance in combat to count for something.
“We have to acknowledge it because the military is like any other corporation,” said Representative Loretta Sanchez, Democrat of California and the senior woman on the House Armed Services Committee. “If you are not on the front lines doing what is the main purpose of your existence, then you won’t be viewed as someone who can command.”
Military women said they were encouraged by the words of Representative John M. McHugh, the nominee for Army secretary, who just four years ago supported a failed push in Congress to restrict the role of women in combat zones.
At his Senate hearing in July, Mr. McHugh, Republican of New York, sought to allay concern. “Women in uniform today are not just invaluable,” he said, “they’re irreplaceable.” He added that he would look to expand the number of jobs available to them.
In Mr. Baumann’s view, the reality on the ground long ago outpaced the debate.
“We have crossed that line in Iraq,” he said. “Debate it all you want folks, but the military is going to do what the military needs to do. And they are needing to put women in combat.”
Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Baghdad.
August 16, 2009
G.I. Jane Breaks the Combat Barrier as War Evolves
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/us/16women.html?_r=1&hp
As the convoy rumbled up the road in Iraq, Specialist Veronica Alfaro was struck by the beauty of fireflies dancing in the night. Then she heard the unmistakable pinging of tracer rounds and, in a Baghdad moment, realized the insects were illuminated bullets.
She jumped from behind the wheel of her gun truck, grabbed her medical bag and sprinted 50 yards to a stalled civilian truck. On the way, bullets kicked up dust near her feet. She pulled the badly wounded driver to the ground and got to work.
Despite her best efforts, the driver died, but her heroism that January night last year earned Specialist Alfaro a Bronze Star for valor. She had already received a combat action badge for fending off insurgents as a machine gunner.
“I did everything there,” Ms. Alfaro, 25, said of her time in Iraq. “I gunned. I drove. I ran as a truck commander. And underneath it all, I was a medic.”
Before 2001, America’s military women had rarely seen ground combat. Their jobs kept them mostly away from enemy lines, as military policy dictates.
But the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, often fought in marketplaces and alleyways, have changed that. In both countries, women have repeatedly proved their mettle in combat. The number of high-ranking women and women who command all-male units has climbed considerably along with their status in the military.
“Iraq has advanced the cause of full integration for women in the Army by leaps and bounds,” said Peter R. Mansoor, a retired Army colonel who served as executive officer to Gen. David H. Petraeus while he was the top American commander in Iraq. “They have earned the confidence and respect of male colleagues.”
Their success, widely known in the military, remains largely hidden from public view. In part, this is because their most challenging work is often the result of a quiet circumvention of military policy.
Women are barred from joining combat branches like the infantry, armor, Special Forces and most field artillery units and from doing support jobs while living with those smaller units. Women can lead some male troops into combat as officers, but they cannot serve with them in battle.
Yet, over and over, in Iraq and Afghanistan, Army commanders have resorted to bureaucratic trickery when they needed more soldiers for crucial jobs, like bomb disposal and intelligence. On paper, for instance, women have been “attached” to a combat unit rather than “assigned.”
This quiet change has not come seamlessly — and it has altered military culture on the battlefield in ways large and small. Women need separate bunks and bathrooms. They face sexual discrimination and rape, and counselors and rape kits are now common in war zones. Commanders also confront a new reality: that soldiers have sex, and some will be evacuated because they are pregnant.
Nonetheless, as soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, women have done nearly as much in battle as their male counterparts: patrolled streets with machine guns, served as gunners on vehicles, disposed of explosives, and driven trucks down bomb-ridden roads. They have proved indispensable in their ability to interact with and search Iraqi and Afghan women for weapons, a job men cannot do for cultural reasons. The Marine Corps has created revolving units — “lionesses” — dedicated to just this task.
A small number of women have even conducted raids, engaging the enemy directly in total disregard of existing policies.
Many experts, including David W. Barno, a retired lieutenant general who commanded forces in Afghanistan; Dr. Mansoor, who now teaches military history at Ohio State University; and John A. Nagl, a retired lieutenant colonel who helped write the Army’s new counterinsurgency field manual, say it is only a matter of time before regulations that have restricted women’s participation in war will be adjusted to meet the reality forged over the last eight years.
The Marine Corps, which is overwhelmingly male and designed for combat, recently opened two more categories of intelligence jobs to women, recognizing the value of their work in Iraq and Afghanistan. In gradually admitting women to combat, the United States will be catching up to the rest of the world. More than a dozen countries allow women in some or all ground combat occupations. Among those pushing boundaries most aggressively is Canada, which has recruited women for the infantry and sent them to Afghanistan.
But the United States military may well be steps ahead of Congress, where opening ground combat jobs to women has met deep resistance in the past.
Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, a group that opposes fully integrating women into the Army, said women were doing these jobs with no debate and no Congressional approval.
“I fault the Pentagon for not being straight with uniformed women,” said Ms. Donnelly, who supported unsuccessful efforts by some in Congress in 2005 to restrict women’s roles in these wars. “It’s an ‘anything goes’ situation.”
Poll numbers, however, show that a majority of the public supports allowing women to do more on the battlefield. Fifty-three percent of the respondents in a New York Times/CBS News poll in July, said they would favor permitting women to “join combat units, where they would be directly involved in the ground fighting.” The successful experiences of military women in Iraq and Afghanistan are being used to bolster the efforts of groups who favor letting gay soldiers serve openly. Those opposed to such change say that permitting service members to state their sexual orientation would disrupt the tight cohesion of a unit and lead to harassment and sexual liaisons — arguments also used against allowing women to serve alongside men. But women in Iraq and Afghanistan have debunked many of those fears.
“They made it work with women, which is more complicated in some ways, with sex-segregated facilities and new physical training standards,” said David Stacy, a lobbyist with the Human Rights Campaign, which works for gay equality. “If the military could make that work with good discipline and order, certainly integrating open service of gay and lesbians is within their capability. ”
From Necessity, Opportunity
No one envisioned that Afghanistan and Iraq would elevate the status of women in the armed forces.
But the Iraq insurgency obliterated conventional battle lines. The fight was on every base and street corner, and as the conflict grew longer and more complicated, the all-volunteer military required more soldiers and a different approach to fighting. Commanders were forced to stretch gender boundaries, or in a few cases, erase them altogether.
“We literally could not have fought this war without women,” said Dr. Nagl, who is now president of the Center for a New American Security, a military research institution in Washington.
Of the two million Americans who have fought in these wars since 2001, more than 220,000 of them, or 11 percent, have been women.
Like men, some women have come home bearing the mental and physical scars of bombs and bullets, loss and killing. Women who are veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars appear to suffer rates of post-traumatic stress disorder comparable to those of men, a recent study showed.
Men still make up the vast majority of the 5,000 war deaths since 2001; nearly 4,000 have been killed by enemy action But 121 women have also died, 66 killed in combat. The rest died in nonhostile action, which includes accidents, illness, suicide and friendly fire. And 620 women have been wounded.
Despite longstanding fears about how the public would react to women coming home in coffins, Americans have responded to their deaths and injuries no differently than to those of male casualties, analysts say. That is a reflection of changing social mores but also a result of the growing number of women — more than 356,000 today — who serve in the armed forces, including the Reserves and the National Guard, 16 percent of the total.
Over all, women say the gains they made in Iraq and Afghanistan have overshadowed the challenges they faced in a combat zone.
“As horrible as this war has been, I fully believe it has given women so many opportunities in the military,” said Linsay Rousseau Burnett, who was one of the first women to serve as a communication specialist with a brigade combat team in Iraq. “Before, they didn’t have the option.”
Although women make up only 6 percent of the top military ranks, these war years have ushered in a series of notable promotions. In 2008, 57 women were serving as generals and admirals in the active-duty military, more than double the number a decade earlier. Last year, Ann E. Dunwoody was the first woman to become a four-star Army general, the highest rank in today’s military and a significant milestone for women. And many more women now lead all-male combat troops into battle.
The Army does not keep complete statistics on the sex of soldiers who receive medals and tracks only active-duty soldiers. But two women have been awarded Silver Stars, one of the military’s highest honors. Many more women have been awarded medals for valor, the statistics show.
To be sure, not all women in the military embrace the idea of going into combat. Like men, a few do what they can to try to get out of deployments. Military women and commanders say some women have timed their pregnancies to avoid deploying or have gotten pregnant in Iraq so they would be sent home. The Army declined to release numbers on how many women have been evacuated from a war zone for pregnancy.
In addition to the dangers, military life is grueling in other ways, especially for mothers juggling parenting and the demands of the military, which require long absences from home. And while the military is doing more to address the threat of sexual harassment and rape, it remains a persistent problem.
Bending Rules, Shifting Views
The rules governing what jobs military women can hold often seem contradictory or muddled. Women, for instance, can serve as machine gunners on Humvees but cannot operate Bradleys, the Army’s armored fighting vehicle. They can work with some long-range artillery but not short-range ones. Women can walk Iraq’s dangerous streets as members of the military police but not as members of the infantry.
And, they can lead combat engineers in war zones as officers, but cannot serve among them. This was the case for Maj. Kellie McCoy, 34, a wisp of an officer who is just over five feet tall. As a captain in 2003 and 2004, she served as the first female engineer company commander in the 82nd Airborne Division and led a platoon of combat engineers in Iraq.
On Sept. 14, 2003, her four-vehicle convoy drove into an ambush. It was attacked by multiple roadside bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire. Three soldiers were wounded in the ambush. As one of the wounded stood in the middle of the road, bloody and in shock, Major McCoy ran through enemy fire to get him, discharging her M4 as she led him back to her vehicle. Then, she and the others returned to the “kill zone” to rescue the remaining soldiers. Insurgents shot at them from 15 feet away. But eventually, all 12 soldiers piled into one four-seat Humvee and sped away.
Major McCoy received a Bronze Star for valor and, most important for her, the admiration of her troops. “I think my actions cemented their respect for me,” she wrote in an e-mail message from Iraq. “I worked hard to earn their respect.”
As an officer, Major McCoy’s assignment followed both the letter and the spirit of the regulations.
But in other cases, the rules were bent to get women into combat positions.
In 2004 and 2005, Michael A. Baumann, now a retired lieutenant colonel, commanded 30 enlisted women and 6 female officers as part of a unit patrolling in the Rashid district of Baghdad, an extremely dangerous area at the time.
On paper, he followed military policy. The women were technically assigned to a separate chemical company of the division. In reality, they were core members of his field artillery battalion. Mr. Baumann said the women trained and fought alongside his male soldiers. Everyone from Mr. Baumann’s commanders to the commanding general knew their true function, he said.
“We had to take everybody,” said Mr. Baumann, 46, who wrote a book about his time in Iraq called “Adjust Fire: Transforming to Win in Iraq.” “Nobody could be spared to do something like support.”
Brought up as an old-school Army warrior, Mr. Baumann said he had seriously doubted that women could physically handle infantry duties, citing the weight of the armor and the gear, the heat of Baghdad and the harshness of combat.
“I found out differently,” said Mr. Baumann, now chief financial officer for St. Paul Public Schools in Minnesota. “Not only could they handle it, but in the same way as males. I would go out on patrols every single day with my battalion. I was with them. I was next to them. I saw with my own eyes. I had full trust and confidence in their abilities.”
Mr. Baumann’s experience rings true to many men who have commanded women in Iraq. More than anything, it is seeing women perform under fire that has changed attitudes. But some experts say the hostility toward women in the military was fading on its own. Many young men today have grown up around female athletes, tough sisters and successful women.
As the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan sinks in, some experts and military officers believe that women should be allowed to join all-male combat units in phases (so long as job-specific physical exams are created to test the abilities of men and women).
For New Warfare, New Roles
War is different today, they say. Technology has changed the way some of these jobs are done, making them more mechanized and less strength-dependent. Warfare in Iraq involves a lot more driving than walking.
What is more, not all combat jobs are the same. Handling field artillery or working in Bradleys, for example, are jobs more suited to some women than light infantry duties, which can require carrying heavy packs for miles.
Still, most women in the military express little, if any, desire to join the grueling, testosterone-laden light infantry. But some say they are interested in artillery and armor.
Any change to the policy would require Congressional approval, which lawmakers say is unlikely in the middle of two wars. But women in the military and their allies want their performance in combat to count for something.
“We have to acknowledge it because the military is like any other corporation,” said Representative Loretta Sanchez, Democrat of California and the senior woman on the House Armed Services Committee. “If you are not on the front lines doing what is the main purpose of your existence, then you won’t be viewed as someone who can command.”
Military women said they were encouraged by the words of Representative John M. McHugh, the nominee for Army secretary, who just four years ago supported a failed push in Congress to restrict the role of women in combat zones.
At his Senate hearing in July, Mr. McHugh, Republican of New York, sought to allay concern. “Women in uniform today are not just invaluable,” he said, “they’re irreplaceable.” He added that he would look to expand the number of jobs available to them.
In Mr. Baumann’s view, the reality on the ground long ago outpaced the debate.
“We have crossed that line in Iraq,” he said. “Debate it all you want folks, but the military is going to do what the military needs to do. And they are needing to put women in combat.”
Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Baghdad.
01 July 2009
Iraq Marks Withdrawal of U.S. Troops From Cities
July 1, 2009
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/world/middleeast/01iraq.html?hpw
BAGHDAD — Iraq celebrated the withdrawal of American troops from its cities with parades, fireworks and a national holiday on Tuesday as the prime minister trumpeted the country’s sovereignty from American occupation to a wary public.
Even with a deadly car bombing and other mayhem marring the day — the deadline for the American troop pullback under an agreement that took effect Jan. 1 — Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki seized on the occasion to position himself as a proud leader of a country independent at last, looking ahead to the next milestone of parliamentary elections in January.
He made no mention of American troops in a nationally televised speech, even though nearly 130,000 remain in the country; most had already pulled back from Iraq’s cities before Tuesday’s deadline.
The excitement, however, has rung hollow for many Iraqis, who fear that their country’s security forces are not ready to stand alone and who see the government’s claims of independence as overblown.
From Basra in the south to Mosul in the north, Iraqis expressed skepticism about the proclamation of “independence.”
“They will not withdraw to their homes; they will stay here and there so that they can return in emergencies,” said Samir Alwan, 28, the owner of a mini-market in Basra. “So it is not sovereignty, according to my point of view, and I think that the Iraqi Army is only able to secure the south of the country and unable to secure Baghdad and Mosul.”
In a national address, Mr. Maliki focused his praise on Iraqi troops and security forces for their role in fighting the insurgency. “The national united government succeeded in putting down the sectarian war that was threatening the unity and the sovereignty of Iraq,” he said, as if the United States had played no role.
President Obama, who ran for office on a pledge to end the war, marked the occasion with minimal fanfare, declaring it “an important milestone” even as he warned of “difficult days ahead.”
“The Iraqi people are rightly treating this day as cause for celebration,” he said.
The withdrawal did not command its own presidential appearance — Mr. Obama’s brief remarks were delivered at a ceremony honoring entrepreneurs — a contrast with his predecessor, who rarely missed an opportunity to celebrate milestones in Iraq.
Underscoring the insecurity, a suicide bombing in a market in a Kurdish neighborhood of the volatile northern city of Kirkuk killed 33 people, according to the police there. In Baghdad, the American military reported that four United States soldiers were killed in an attack on Monday, evidence of the vulnerability of the troops as they withdraw.
Military experts anticipate more violence in the days ahead.
Mr. Maliki’s effort to capitalize on Iraq’s latent anti-Americanism and to extol the abilities of his troops is a risky strategy. If it turns out that Iraqi troops cannot control the violence, Mr. Maliki will be vulnerable to criticism from rivals — not only if he has to ask the Americans to return but also if he fails to enforce security without them.
Some American commanders have said they were taken aback by Mr. Maliki’s insistence on taking credit for all the security successes in Iraq. However, they also see the importance of having him and Iraqi troops appear strong, especially in the face of insurgent factions intent on destabilizing the government.
Gen. Ray Odierno, the top commander of American troops in Iraq, brushed aside the dismissive tone of public remarks by the country’s leaders about the Americans, saying that Mr. Maliki personally thanked him Monday night and again Tuesday for the sacrifices the American troops had made.
“I do not get these negative comments from the political leaders that are in the government,” he said at a news conference at the American military headquarters at Camp Victory. “In my mind, I frankly don’t worry about those comments because I understand that we are working this together.”
He also played down concerns about security in Iraq’s cities after the withdrawal of most American combat forces, noting that nearly 130,000 troops remained in Iraq. He said the American and Iraqi militaries continued to cooperate on security issues inside and outside the cities.
In most places the transition to the Iraqi forces has gone relatively smoothly, but there have been bumps, reminders of the underlying tensions between the two militaries and the resentment that American soldiers feel as the Iraqis appear eager to push them out the door even though they still want them to be on call.
In Diyala Province, where the Americans closed 11 of 18 bases or outposts before Tuesday’s deadline, the transfers did not go entirely smoothly. An official in Mr. Maliki’s office showed up early at a camp near Baquba and complained that the Americans had not left behind generators and air-conditioners for the Iraqis — something the American commander in the region said had never been part of the agreement. The dispute on Sunday delayed the formal transfer.
“You can’t treat your partners that way,” the commander, Col. Burt K. Thompson of the First Stryker Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, said in Baquba.
For Iraqis, claiming sovereignty is something of a national pastime, with various politicians celebrating different markers: 2004, when the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority handed power to the interim Iraqi government; 2006, when Iraq seated its first constitutionally elected Parliament; and Jan. 1, when the security agreement took effect.
Mr. Maliki seems to be making a conscious effort to cement his image as a strong ruler by using many of the same tools of power as the predecessor he hated so much, Saddam Hussein. He has used the state television network and newspaper to spread nationalist messages, and has used parades and festivals to encourage public pride.
Over the past several days the state television network, Al Iraqiya, not only ran a “Countdown to Sovereignty” clock but also broadcast promotional spots glorifying Iraqi history, culture and people. Its images of the marshes of southern Iraq, the markets of Baghdad, men performing traditional dances and children playing in the mountain meadows of Kurdistan — much of it filmed before the 2003 invasion — presented an image of Iraq completely unfamiliar to most Iraqis, who now live in neighborhoods cordoned off by blast walls and are forced to go through multiple checkpoints every day.
“This is all for the media,” said Amina al-Esadi, a female searcher at the compound of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a religious Shiite political party.
“Some people are afraid because the Americans have left. Some think it will be better because then the enemies of the Americans will leave Iraq” and the country will be safer, she said.
Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Baghdad, Sheryl Gay Stolberg from Washington, and employees of The New York Times from Basra and Diyala Province.
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/world/middleeast/01iraq.html?hpw
BAGHDAD — Iraq celebrated the withdrawal of American troops from its cities with parades, fireworks and a national holiday on Tuesday as the prime minister trumpeted the country’s sovereignty from American occupation to a wary public.
Even with a deadly car bombing and other mayhem marring the day — the deadline for the American troop pullback under an agreement that took effect Jan. 1 — Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki seized on the occasion to position himself as a proud leader of a country independent at last, looking ahead to the next milestone of parliamentary elections in January.
He made no mention of American troops in a nationally televised speech, even though nearly 130,000 remain in the country; most had already pulled back from Iraq’s cities before Tuesday’s deadline.
The excitement, however, has rung hollow for many Iraqis, who fear that their country’s security forces are not ready to stand alone and who see the government’s claims of independence as overblown.
From Basra in the south to Mosul in the north, Iraqis expressed skepticism about the proclamation of “independence.”
“They will not withdraw to their homes; they will stay here and there so that they can return in emergencies,” said Samir Alwan, 28, the owner of a mini-market in Basra. “So it is not sovereignty, according to my point of view, and I think that the Iraqi Army is only able to secure the south of the country and unable to secure Baghdad and Mosul.”
In a national address, Mr. Maliki focused his praise on Iraqi troops and security forces for their role in fighting the insurgency. “The national united government succeeded in putting down the sectarian war that was threatening the unity and the sovereignty of Iraq,” he said, as if the United States had played no role.
President Obama, who ran for office on a pledge to end the war, marked the occasion with minimal fanfare, declaring it “an important milestone” even as he warned of “difficult days ahead.”
“The Iraqi people are rightly treating this day as cause for celebration,” he said.
The withdrawal did not command its own presidential appearance — Mr. Obama’s brief remarks were delivered at a ceremony honoring entrepreneurs — a contrast with his predecessor, who rarely missed an opportunity to celebrate milestones in Iraq.
Underscoring the insecurity, a suicide bombing in a market in a Kurdish neighborhood of the volatile northern city of Kirkuk killed 33 people, according to the police there. In Baghdad, the American military reported that four United States soldiers were killed in an attack on Monday, evidence of the vulnerability of the troops as they withdraw.
Military experts anticipate more violence in the days ahead.
Mr. Maliki’s effort to capitalize on Iraq’s latent anti-Americanism and to extol the abilities of his troops is a risky strategy. If it turns out that Iraqi troops cannot control the violence, Mr. Maliki will be vulnerable to criticism from rivals — not only if he has to ask the Americans to return but also if he fails to enforce security without them.
Some American commanders have said they were taken aback by Mr. Maliki’s insistence on taking credit for all the security successes in Iraq. However, they also see the importance of having him and Iraqi troops appear strong, especially in the face of insurgent factions intent on destabilizing the government.
Gen. Ray Odierno, the top commander of American troops in Iraq, brushed aside the dismissive tone of public remarks by the country’s leaders about the Americans, saying that Mr. Maliki personally thanked him Monday night and again Tuesday for the sacrifices the American troops had made.
“I do not get these negative comments from the political leaders that are in the government,” he said at a news conference at the American military headquarters at Camp Victory. “In my mind, I frankly don’t worry about those comments because I understand that we are working this together.”
He also played down concerns about security in Iraq’s cities after the withdrawal of most American combat forces, noting that nearly 130,000 troops remained in Iraq. He said the American and Iraqi militaries continued to cooperate on security issues inside and outside the cities.
In most places the transition to the Iraqi forces has gone relatively smoothly, but there have been bumps, reminders of the underlying tensions between the two militaries and the resentment that American soldiers feel as the Iraqis appear eager to push them out the door even though they still want them to be on call.
In Diyala Province, where the Americans closed 11 of 18 bases or outposts before Tuesday’s deadline, the transfers did not go entirely smoothly. An official in Mr. Maliki’s office showed up early at a camp near Baquba and complained that the Americans had not left behind generators and air-conditioners for the Iraqis — something the American commander in the region said had never been part of the agreement. The dispute on Sunday delayed the formal transfer.
“You can’t treat your partners that way,” the commander, Col. Burt K. Thompson of the First Stryker Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, said in Baquba.
For Iraqis, claiming sovereignty is something of a national pastime, with various politicians celebrating different markers: 2004, when the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority handed power to the interim Iraqi government; 2006, when Iraq seated its first constitutionally elected Parliament; and Jan. 1, when the security agreement took effect.
Mr. Maliki seems to be making a conscious effort to cement his image as a strong ruler by using many of the same tools of power as the predecessor he hated so much, Saddam Hussein. He has used the state television network and newspaper to spread nationalist messages, and has used parades and festivals to encourage public pride.
Over the past several days the state television network, Al Iraqiya, not only ran a “Countdown to Sovereignty” clock but also broadcast promotional spots glorifying Iraqi history, culture and people. Its images of the marshes of southern Iraq, the markets of Baghdad, men performing traditional dances and children playing in the mountain meadows of Kurdistan — much of it filmed before the 2003 invasion — presented an image of Iraq completely unfamiliar to most Iraqis, who now live in neighborhoods cordoned off by blast walls and are forced to go through multiple checkpoints every day.
“This is all for the media,” said Amina al-Esadi, a female searcher at the compound of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a religious Shiite political party.
“Some people are afraid because the Americans have left. Some think it will be better because then the enemies of the Americans will leave Iraq” and the country will be safer, she said.
Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Baghdad, Sheryl Gay Stolberg from Washington, and employees of The New York Times from Basra and Diyala Province.
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