Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
They have been around combat. Women are MPs, truck drivers, wheeled mechanics, medics. In those fields you see plenty of combat. It's not like females aren't being shunned in the corner back in the rear. I just don't think women should be in the infantry. Imagine the EO complaints! or the simple fact that females in the Army have it way easier then any male does, females can sham out of anything ....IT'S TRUE. How is that gonna apply in the Infantry when life sucks for EVERYBODY? And lets face it, grunts aren't the smartest dudes around, issues like sexual assault, favoritism...etc will be a problem. To me it's just a lot of problems for just a little pride. Infantry sucks, most grunts hate it. And besides, women in the fields I've mentioned above get almost as much action as combat arms do anyway.
All those factors do exists that may make difficult for women to get a fair chance to be in the infantry. However, the way I see it, it is not different than the excuse of not allowing blacks in certain field because others may discriminate them so for their protection were excluded in some field. The attitude in the past was also was that they were not smart enough. The comment that the infantry Soldiers are not the smartest can't farther from the truth. They as in any field have their share of smart and dumb people as the other fields. In today's Army with all the sophisticated equipment they need to learn to handle requires a lot of reading and training.
EO complaints? I do not accept that as a reason to not allow them for social engineering purposes.
Women have it easier? I agree that in some cases it is true but partly has to do that men make it easier for them. They do not push them. It is a matter of culture that many men still tend to help them out or are not patient with them. I often saw that a Sergeant was stern with a male Soldier and push him to get things done but yet treated a woman in a paternalistic way and let her get away with things.
As I said before a lot of this obstacle are actually in the head. Take care.
My problem is that when I went to fmtb a few weeks ago (where they train navy corpsman to be deployable with grunts) the females werent given roving or quarterdeck watches at night for fear of them getting sexually assaulted by marines (because there was an incident in camp johnson apparently) yet we think theyre ready and safe to go out with grunts to fight enemies with bad intentions, its really hipocritical
I wouldn't say women are not invovled throughout Combat nor would I say they don't deserve a shot at ITB however, I know of the various day to day riggers that make up Infantry life ( began my career as a 0331). I do not believe Women belong in the Infantry realm.
The question should be; could women thrive in the structure of Infantry.
And lets face it, grunts aren't the smartest dudes around,
that is a ridiculously uneducated and flippant thing to say, and i have found it to be completely wrong. i don't know if you have noticed, but civilians have been saying that about the troops in general––regardless of MOS––for a long time now, and i'm pretty sure that you can agree with me that they are speaking out of ignorance and some deluded desire to feel superior to and smarter than someone else when they say that military personnel are typically dumber than civilians.
some of the smartest guys that i have met in my life were team leaders and squad leaders in the infantry. i was always jealous about how quickly their minds worked and how well they could correctly analyze a problem on the fly and change tactics to meet it head-on. many of them already had college degrees when they went in, and more of them have college degrees now that they are out. these guys are mentally and emotionally tough, experienced, and sharp, and i feel very privileged to have worked with so many of them.
and i'm no slouch myself; i scored a 96 on my entrance test (99 the first time, but that was years before i actually joined, so i did it again) and was told i could do pretty much anything i wanted in the usmc. but i went infantry, because that is what i have wanted to do since i was a kid. and i know a lot of other guys that did the same thing.
now, none of that is to say that there are not complete boneheads in the infantry––there are. but you'd be hard-pressed to prove to me that there are more in the infantry than there are in POG jobs, just as you'd be hard-pressed to prove that military personnel in general are dumber than civilians.
as an aside, i know that some people think that military service or police service or something similar will be easier, so they go that route. but i think that they are usually surprised by how mentally challenging these jobs really are. a neighbor of mine says that he went into the fire department so that he could stay away from college and studying. but can you guess what they keep doing to him in the fire department? they keep sending him to different classes and qualifications, and he studies constantly.
there is a lot to the supposedly menial, uneducated jobs, in and out of the military that a lot of high-testing, college-bred people would find just as difficult as what they did to earn their degrees or five-figure reenlistment bonuses.
My problem is that when I went to fmtb a few weeks ago (where they train navy corpsman to be deployable with grunts) the females werent given roving or quarterdeck watches at night for fear of them getting sexually assaulted by marines (because there was an incident in camp johnson apparently) yet we think theyre ready and safe to go out with grunts to fight enemies with bad intentions, its really hipocritical
Hypocritical? It is wrong for any men to rape or assault anyone regardless of the situation. In other words, women that would like to serve their country are essentially hurt because some men do not have the moral values we should have. In other words it is similar when other people blame the woman for a rape because she got drunk. Because a woman gets raped does not mean she is to blame. Getting drunk does not mean a license for a men to rape her. How about the men that do get raped in the services also? They do get raped too. The problem is that it carries a very social stigma that in some ways is worse than a raped woman. Men most of the time do not report if they are raped by some guys also. That happens in the services a lot more than it is reported. Take care.
What I was trying to say was that its hippocritical to no let them stand watches here because of fear of them getting raped by other marines but to let them deploy with infantry where theyre in dange of that and much more..
I was an 0351 infantry assaultman in the USMC. I deployed twice to Iraq and participated in over 1,000 combat patrols. I had the "pleasure" of working with female lionesses in Iraq. We had NOTHING but problems with them. They slept with the cooks to get cheesesticks and steaks cooked for them (in the middle of the night when the kitchen was closed). One lioness got court-martialed for sleeping with Iraqi police officers (plural). They were incapable of loading their gear into the back of 7-tons (who do you think loaded it?). We had to help most of them get into the trucks because they were unable to lift themselves up into the back with the gear they had on. I had to take a female's post at her cush job working an x-ray machine on the base because she was having cramps from her period (this was in between my 3 foot patrols a day). They complained when they didn't have ice, so we had to give them coolers from our trucks so they could have ice at their checkpoint (they needed cold drinks more than the people who were out on 6 hour patrols). An Iraqi shot a man in the head right outside of our walls, and the women didn't even put a round in the chamber of their weapons and waited behind the sandbags while I had to go out alone to take care of the situation. Several rivalries among Marines brewed because they were trying to sleep with the same women (they usually both did). If these problems were unique to our unit, I'll stand corrected. However, these women cycled in every 3 weeks, and we had the same problems every cycle.
The question she asks is at the core of the fiasco---------------" who is pushing that agenda " ?
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
....IT'S TRUE. How is that gonna apply in the Infantry when life sucks for EVERYBODY? And lets face it, grunts aren't the smartest dudes around, issues like sexual assault, favoritism...etc will be a problem. To me it's just a lot of problems for just a little pride. Infantry sucks, most grunts hate it. And besides, women in the fields I've mentioned above get almost as much action as combat arms do anyway.
