Military

America has been debating the role of women in combat since 1779.

That’s when the Continental Congress first awarded a military disability pension to Mary Corbin after she manned a cannon in the Revolutionary War at the battle of Fort Washington in New York. Corbin got only half the pension male soldiers received, but she asked for — and received — the full ration of rum.

Today, as the Pentagon decides how to remove the combat exclusion, women still have trouble getting fully recognized for what they’ve achieved at war.

“Are women in combat?” asks Sgt. Jessica Keown. “Hell, yes.”

Keown was a combat medic in Iraq and then pulled patrols with a female engagement team (FET) in Logar, Afghanistan, last year. She accompanied Special Forces raids and infantry dismounts through dozens of firefights.

“It got to the point where you’re doing a patrol and they start shooting at you — right next to your head, that whizzing sound,” says Sgt. Jaclyn O’Shea, who served in the same unit. “And you’re just like, you get used to it.”

Little Recognition

Back home, however, female soldiers don’t always get acknowledged for what they’ve accomplished — especially because the official prohibition on women in combat is still on the books.

O’Shea says she’s sometimes reluctant to wear her hard-earned Combat Action Badge because people will see that she’s a woman and assume she got the badge by sleeping inside a fortified base while rockets flew overhead.

But the military seems to have come around to women’s value. While the Pentagon is re-examining the combat exclusion rule, Army Special Operations Command has set up a permanent corps of female soldiers to go out on missions.

The military has found that women have the physical stamina and haven’t disrupted cohesion in male units. Most importantly, they’re mentally tough and don’t break under fire.

“They fired upon us so we would return fire. The training kicked in and I think it registered that I’m actually shooting at a live breathing person and then it was instinct — that feeling, I go home and they die,” says Sgt. Alyssa Corcoran, from the same FET team. “It was pretty much my life or my friend’s life — or them.”

Corcoran did come home, but she came home angry. She would blow up at her friends and family over nothing. And she couldn’t really get her head out of combat mode.

“I had nightmares, I couldn’t sleep. I was in high alert, ready to go,” she says. “I’d wake up in the middle of the night and actually think that I was getting ready for a mission.”

Post-traumatic stress disorder hits 20 to 30 percent of veterans who serve in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s still early to say whether it affects women differently than men. Corcoran’s family pushed her to get professional help and says she’s doing better.

But the whole idea of battle-fatigued female soldiers is new, and American society is not yet comfortable with the thought that women can be traumatized, gravely wounded, or lost.

A Father’s Grief

Cedric Gordon, a deputy police chief in St. Petersburg, Fla., says it never really hit home that his daughter, Brittany, was at war until she sent him a Father’s Day card that featured a photo of her in full battle gear, with a flak jacket and rifle. Brittany deployed to Kandahar last year as an Army intelligence analyst. She still kept in touch with her dad through letters and phone calls.

“She’d always call and ask me my opinion,” he says. “I could always tell when she was serious, ‘Dad do you have a minute?’ ”

Last year, on Saturday, Oct. 13, when Spc. Brittany Gordon missed a regular call, her father didn’t think much of it. The phone lines sometimes went down.

She had recently told him that she was going on missions outside the base. She was on a mission that day to meet with Afghan intelligence north of Kandahar.

But one of the agents was wearing a suicide vest; his target appeared to be a senior Afghan official. A small piece of shrapnel hit Gordon just below the edge of her Kevlar helmet, killing her.

“Funny story is, she wasn’t even supposed to be out on the mission. She had been out a lot,” says Chief Warrant Officer Gary McCabe, who was in Kandahar with Gordon.

Gordon had flourished on deployment, and McCabe says she was doing the work of a soldier several grades above her rank. She had a high emotional intelligence, one of her officers said. And she loved getting outside the wire to see Afghanistan.

“We were going to send somebody else; he had never been out before,” McCabe says. “She would mentor him, teach him [to] deal with Afghan officials.”

So in the end, she had gone on that patrol.

“I try to tell myself often Brittany is heaven, and heaven is such a nice place that even if she could come down here on Earth and spend time with her dad she wouldn’t,” Cedric Gordon said as he packed up his daughter’s effects after a military funeral. “So that’s how I give myself comfort.”

Gordon has another daughter in the Air Force and a son in the Army. It’s different with daughters, he says. He realized that when he went to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to receive Brittany’s coffin.

A bus carried him and another family out to the hangar, and Gordon says he forgot his own pain for a moment. The other family was a wife and young kids who’d lost their father, her husband. When they reached the hangar, the young widow was too distraught to get out of the bus. He realized that his anguish was different: He felt guilty.

“I wonder sometimes if that’s the depth of my grief because I always felt like I should be there to protect her, you know, as a father,” Gordon says.

Of course, Spc. Brittany Gordon, with her body armor and rifle, didn’t need his protection. And he was proud that she pushed limits for what women are doing in the military.

Still, he feels like he should have been able to do something to save her.

“I think that’s the way you feel about your daughters,” Gordon says, “whether they’re in the military or not.”

 

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Women In Combat, And The Price They Pay

The Pentagon says it will spend $1 billion to add 14 interceptors to an Alaska-based missile defense system.

Defense officials say it’s a response to faster-than-anticipated North Korean progress on nuclear weapons and missiles.

In announcing the decision, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said he is determined to protect the U.S. homeland and stay ahead of a worrisome North Korean missile threat. He acknowledged that the interceptors already in place to defend against potential North Korean missile strikes have had poor test performances.

He said the 14 additional interceptors will be installed at Fort Greely, Alaska, where 26 already stand in underground silos.

Hagel also cited a previously announced Pentagon plan to place additional radar in Japan to provide early warning of a North Korean missile launch and to assist in tracking its flight path.

In adding 14 interceptors to a missile defense system based in Alaska, the U.S. is abandoning a key part of a European missile defense plan that’s been strongly opposed by Russia.

At the same time, the decision provides a potential opening for new arms control talks.

The Obama administration is citing development problems and a lack of money in canceling the interceptors that were to be deployed in Poland and possibly Romania early next decade.

Senator Lisa Murkowski applauded the move in a press release Friday.

“I am glad to hear the news that Alaska and America are finally being tapped to deliver a better blanket of protection for our nation,” said Murkowski.

Representative Don Young echoed the statement adding “Alaska is the front line in defending the United States of America against a missile threat from North Korea.”

 

In addition to training and equipping Afghan soldiers, U.S. forces in Afghanistan have another critical mission: packing up more than 11 years worth of equipment and sending it home. The number of containers to move out is in the six figures, and some question whether everything can be shipped out by the end of 2014.

Forward Operating Base Frontenac sits amid jagged mountains in the Shah Wali Kot district of Kandahar province. It’s an area that saw a lot of action during the U.S. troop surge, but more and more of the action now is about sending stuff back to the U.S., a mission the military calls retrograde. The 2-3 Field Artillery arrived here in January, and they now spend half their time on missions and half their time on retrograde. They have to clear out 25 percent of their containers, their excess ammo and nonessential equipment by April, when the fighting season begins.

“What we’re doing here is we’re working on retrograde of over 50 vehicles from our task force,” says Capt. Michael Williams, the logistics officer. “These vehicles aren’t being used in any of our missions, so we’re working on pushing them out of the country. We’ve already sent quite a few down to KAF.”

That’s Kandahar Airfield, the main base and staging area in the province. From there, vehicles and containers are shipped out of the country, some by air, but most overland through Pakistan. That’s one thing that makes the exit from Afghanistan so difficult.

When the U.S. military left Iraq, it had what it called a “catcher’s mitt” — in other words, U.S. bases in Kuwait. They could store equipment there and move it out at a leisurely pace. But Pakistan isn’t about to provide storage services, so everything has to ship out as quickly as possible.

All the vehicles here have to go through an inspection process that’s overseen by Staff Sgt. Christopher Risiska.

“Me and my guy, Spc. Ramos, go through bumper to bumper on the vehicle, look for anything missing, anything damaged, any leaks,” he says. “Pretty much a full workup of the whole entire vehicle, every operating system.”

He says they give each vehicle a code on a scale of whether it’s in perfect condition or pure junk. Most of the ones he has inspected can be reused with some minor repairs. He says one did have a ruined engine because the troops driving it were fleeing an area and drove into deep water that flooded the engine.

After the inspection, Williams says, they drive or tow the vehicles out.

“Our role is basically just getting it to the Kandahar Airfield so we can get it turned in and off our books,” he says.

Williams says they have come across a few surprises and oddities in their two months of cleaning up the base.

“For example, one of these vehicles we have to either tow it or head it to KAF because it has no seat belts, so it’s a safety issue to drive it down there,” he says, laughing.

He says his unit never used the vehicle, nor did the prior unit. He says he’s not sure how long it’s been sitting on the base.

And, considering that for years units came and went with no pressure to clear out surplus equipment, it’s now falling in the lap of units like his.

“We have, across most of Afghanistan, over 10 years of building these places up, and so many units have accumulated so much,” Williams says.

We walk along the base, and he points out that there are hundreds of containers sitting around.

“When you actually go through these containers and look at them, there’s junk in them,” he says. “There’s torn tents, there’s one container full of busted bed frames.”

We head over to a couple of containers lined up in the staging area.

“There’s nothing of value in them for the most part,” Williams says. “This one has some old dunnage — it’s just empty ammo containers.”

He moves to the next one over. “Let’s go in this mystery container,” he says. It clanks open and there’s nothing but reverberation inside — it’s empty.

They will fill it up with broken generators, bullet-riddled glass panels from armored vehicles and any other junk shipped from smaller bases that are closing. Then they will send it down the line to Kandahar. And once they meet their quota for this quarter, they will get new orders on what to clear out next.

Getting these containers and vehicles down to Kandahar is no easy task. It’s a two- to four-hour drive, and that’s assuming nothing breaks down along the way. Plus, IEDs and insurgent attacks are still a threat.

On a chilly morning, a cavalry troop assembles to deliver two vehicles and a truckload of equipment to Kandahar. But the convoy didn’t even make it off the base before one of the vehicles to be turned in broke down.

They set off without it. Once they get to Kandahar, it can take several days to complete the paperwork before they can return to their base and prepare the next load.

 

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New Afghan Challenge For U.S.: Shipping Stuff Out

The Coast Guard lifted an order restricting movement of Shell’s Kulluk drill rig Thursday morning. Petty Officer David Moseley says the company had to provide information about assessments of the rig and their tow plan to the Coast Guard for review.

“The inspection, its seaworthiness, was done by industry class certification. They are the experts on those type of vessels. They inspected, they gave us their inspection for review, so we could understand what they found, if there were any concerns, or not, that needed to be addressed prior to its being transferred, or transported, from Kiliuda Bay,” Moseley says.

Now that the Captain of the Port order has been lifted, Shell is free to start towing the rig whenever it sees fit. It’s not clear when that will be, but Moseley says that the Coast Guard will be notified.

“We will know once they start that transit and we will monitor it as they make their transit to Unalaska,” Moseley says.

For now, the rig is anchored in Kiliuda Bay, on the south side of Kodiak Island.

That’s where two of the tugs that will be towing the Kulluk to Unalaska collided on Friday afternoon, as the Anchorage Daily News first reported. While working in close proximity, the Corbin Foss ran into the port side of the Ocean Wave. Petty Officer Moseley says there were no injuries and that the damage was minimal, but that the Marine Safety Detachment in Kodiak inspected both vessels.

“When we have an incident with reported damage that could impact the vessel, we, as the Coast Guard, want to ensure the safety of that vessel and the crew onboard so we will provide an inspection and an investigation into the incident to include things like drug testing of the crew, taking down statements of what was going on at the time, so we get a clear understanding of what was going on to see if there’s anything that needs to be addressed in the future with similar operations,” Mosely says.

The Ocean Wave is still tied up at the dock in Kodiak. The Corbin Foss is with the rig in Kiliuda Bay.

You can find more information about the Kulluk’s tow plan here.

The U.S. Attorney in Anchorage on Friday announced an arrest in the double murder at the Communications Station at Coast Guard Base Kodiak nearly a year ago.

James Michael “Jim” Wells, long considered the prime suspect by the FBI, was taken into custody by members of the Coast Guard Investigative Service and the Alaska State Troopers.

On April 12, 2012, U.S. Coast Guard Electrician’s Mate First Class James Hopkins and retired Chief Boatswain’s Mate Richard Belisle were found shot to death in one of the buildings at the communications station by coworkers. Belisle was working for the Coast Guard as a civilian contractor at the time. Wells was also employed at the communications station.

FBI spokesman Eric Gonzales said Wells’ arrest came after an officer filed a criminal complaint and a federal arrest warrant was issued. Gonzales said the complaint, or affidavit, will remain sealed until Wells appears in court, which is expected sometime next week in Anchorage. That means the underlying details and facts leading up to the arrest remain confidential. Gonzales did not say what the motive in the killings might have been.

The arrest came after 10 months of investigation led by the FBI and the Coast Guard Investigative Service, along with the Alaska State Troopers.

Senator Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., is President Obama’s nominee to be the next defense secretary.

If confirmed, Hagel will be the first enlisted man to serve as secretary of Defense.

Hagel will face questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee.

 

You can listen the live proceedings starting at 5:30 a.m. (Audio ended)