Soldier Girls by Helen Thorpe

parties with her friends.”
    â€œWell, I just wasn’t sure,” said Debbie’s mom. “Your father and I just weren’t certain.”
    Debbie figured that of all the things that could go wrong, this was not the worst—her daughter would survive a little overprotection. Yearslater, however, Ellen Ann revealed that while her mother was gone she had snuck out of her bedroom window and had run wild, getting into the kind of trouble a mother would have wanted to shield her fourteen-year-old from experiencing. But Debbie knew nothing of this, and envisioned Ellen Ann leading an especially quiet life. When Debbie returned home for Christmas, her father told her, “I am so proud of you. I knew you could do it the whole time.” Even Tony seemed impressed. Ellen Ann looked taller and curvier and more mature; the difference caught Debbie by surprise.
    In January, Debbie reported to Aberdeen Proving Ground, in Maryland, to study the army’s big guns. At Aberdeen, Debbie learned the mechanics of scopes, gun tubes, and what to do about parallax. She worked on howitzers, mortars, and the large guns up in the rotating turrets of tanks. Debbie found the big guns romantic. Leveling a howitzer made her feel important in a way that she had never felt at the beauty salon.
    Back in Indiana, Debbie resumed parenting Ellen Ann full-time, and joined the 113th Support Battalion’s Bravo Company, which drilled in Bedford. The previously all-male unit had just opened to women. At various times in US history, women had taken up positions on the battlefield—during the Revolutionary War, Mary Hays McCauley famously picked up the rifle of her fallen husband at Monmouth and began firing at the British. Generally speaking, however, the armed forces had operated on the principle that women could serve their country but only men should be asked to experience combat. During World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, every branch had restricted the types of jobs that women could hold in battle zones with the aim of preventing women from seeing war firsthand in any role other than that of nurse. After Vietnam, however, the military’s attitude had shifted. The women’s rights movement had transformed ideas about the roles of women generally, and Vietnam had made the idea of conscription intensely unpopular. The US government declared it would now field an all-volunteer military, and began recruiting women for jobs that had previously been reserved for men. The army continued to prohibit women from certain jobs that were considered to be at the very heart of combat, but opened up many jobs on its periphery.
    Four years before Debbie had enlisted, the US Army had adopted theDirect Combat Probability Coding System, specifically to address this question. “Each position is then coded on a scale of P1 to P7, based on the probability of engaging in direct combat,” wrote Victoria Shaw in Women in the Military . “P1 represents the highest probability and P7 the lowest. Women are excluded from positions that are coded P1.” The army coded the job of infantry soldier as P1, because during a war the infantry soldier was the most likely person of all to experience combat. As it happened, most soldiers of the Indiana Army National Guard belonged to the 38th Infantry Division, but infantry soldiers needed other people to cook their meals, do their laundry, order their supplies, drive their trucks, fix their guns, and bury their dead. Around the time that Debbie enlisted, many of those support positions had just opened up to women for the first time. Commanders found the transition from all-male to mixed-gender units to be bumpy. The 113th Support Battalion had tried admitting women previously but had run into difficulties and reverted to an all-male status. Bravo Company reopened to women in 1987—the year in which Debbie enlisted.
    In the spring of 1988, when Debbie began drilling