A New Horror of War: What kind of country sends its girls and mothers into combat?

From the comfortable safety of editorial offices, the capture of Specialist Shoshana Johnson by Iraqi irregulars is heralded as a welcome opportunity for someone else's daughter to face violent abuse or a horrific death on "equal footing" with the men in her company. In its editorial, "The Pinking of the Armed Forces," the New York Times laments that even more military women don't face a lethal threat, because the United States "is simply a laggard on the topic of women in combat." In a Washington Post op-ed, the normally sensible Anne Applebaum declares that "the argument about women in combat is over," since two female sailors were killed in the bombing of the USS Cole, women are engaging the enemy in Iraq, and "American civilization has not collapsed as a result."

So women soldiers are just like men soldiers, right? Wrong. Some are now arguing that the military -- just like law firms and newsrooms -- should get with the program and accommodate young mothers by offering generous leaves and sparing them deployments.

Just as war plans typically don't survive contact with the enemy, the ill-informed, ideologically driven case for women in combat, calling simultaneously for equal rights and special treatment, can't survive the facts on the ground. The indisputable fact is that military women are facing unprecedented danger in Iraq in the absence of a serious national debate about their appropriate wartime role. Soldiers' families are clearly unaware of the Clinton-era policy changes that have conferred feminist-icon status on their threatened loved ones: Spec. Johnson's younger sister explains that Shoshana, who joined the Army to train as a chef, never expected to be in such jeopardy, and her aunt, an Air Force veteran, expressed shock that her niece was accompanying front-line troops. "She shouldn't be facing this. She was supposed to cook for the troops. This is so awful," Margaret Thorne Henderson told the Miami Herald. "Too bad" sums up the reaction of Carolyn Becraft, an assistant secretary of the Navy in the Clinton administration, who points out that women like Shoshana Johnson -- the mother of a two-year-old daughter -- have volunteered for service. In an interview with Anne Applebaum for the Washington Post, Becraft concludes: "This is their job. These are the conditions of their employment."

While Becraft boldly asserts that young women exposed to the brutality of the enemy are merely getting what they are underpaid for, the argument that a civilized nation doesn't send teenage girls and mothers to engage in hostilities to advance an equal-opportunity agenda is made sotto voce. "Very far off the record, one high-ranking Pentagon official" sheepishly admits to Applebaum that he is troubled by images of mothers hugging their babies before heading to the Gulf. "We're the United States of America. How can we ask a young woman to leave her infant?" the official anonymously asks.

Not so long ago, military leaders reflected American values by openly expressing their opposition to placing women in mortal danger on the battlefield. In early 1992, the heads of each service argued against integrating their combat forces. Former Air Force chief of staff Merrill McPeak told the "Women in Combat" Presidential Commission (on which I served) that he believed "old men shouldn't send young women to war." But -- illogically -- their sex scandals and -- ironically -- their battlefield successes soon combined to cause the services to raise a white flag in the Pentagon's gender wars and acquiesce in assigning women to the bulk of combat specialties.

At the end of the Vietnam War, when it was understood that brutal combat was what the military did for a living, women made up about 2 percent of the armed forces. Although women were barred from serving in any combat positions, the number of women on active duty in the all- volunteer force gradually increased during the relative peace of the next 30 years. Women now represent 6 percent of the Marine Corps, 13 and 16 percent respectively of the Navy and Army, and 18 percent of the Air Force.

The novelty of deploying 40,000 women to the Persian Gulf for a successful four-day ground war in 1991 prompted calls to integrate now supposedly "battle-tested" female personnel into combat positions. A presidential commission was appointed to study the role of women in the military, so that, in Sen. John McCain's words, there would be no "rush ahead without proper study and a national consensus." While Congress was repealing the ban on women serving in combat aircraft -- and establishing the commission to advise the Pentagon on the advisability of repealing limits on women's service -- the Navy was under feminist assault in the wake of its 1991 Tailhook convention in Las Vegas. The feminists quickly concluded that the remedy for the sexual mistreatment of women who had attended that drunken bacchanal was for the military to expose servicewomen to violence at the hands of the enemy by putting them in combat positions. Navy brass surrendered and agreed to integrate combat ships, with the exception of submarines.

Within a year, the commission's findings -- among them, that women could be expected to bring lower deployment rates, higher attrition, less physical strength, more sexual activity, and higher costs to mixed-gender units -- were gathering dust in the Pentagon offices of Clinton appointees. In 1993, combat ships and planes were integrated. With equal opportunity all the rage under the Pentagon's new management, the following year, defense secretary Les Aspin revoked the "risk rule" that had protected women in combat-support positions from the perils of direct combat.

Thus, Spec. Shoshana Johnson is the first female POW under the Clinton policy. Clinton's military legacy also includes those who are missing from her maintenance company ever since it took that fatal wrong turn near Nasiriya on March 23 -- among them Pfc. Lori Piestewa, a 23-year- old mother with a four-year-old son and three-year-old daughter.

Although Pentagon studies consistently find that only about 10 percent of enlisted women are interested in volunteering for combat, the changes promoted by feminist advocates have exposed large numbers of them to the perils of front-line troops. Supporters of women in combat typically argue that, since military women are deployed near fluid battlefields that expose them to danger, it is unrealistic to try to protect them -- so they might as well serve in direct combat. But the fate of brave young women like Shoshana, Jessica, and Lori should prompt the debate on women in the military that was short-circuited in the peaceful past. It is, after all, up to the American public, on whose behalf they serve, whether our defense should rest on the shoulders of teenage girls and unwitting young mothers.

As we go to press, there are reports that two shallow graves, containing the remains of four American soldiers, were found near a "hospital" in the vicinity of Nasiriya. One body was reportedly "brutalized and mutilated." Inside the hospital, U.S. Marines found bloodied pieces of an American female soldier's uniform. Her name badge and American flag were missing.