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How Southwest Missourians Feel About Women in Combat

Leon Panetta

http://ozarkspub.vo.llnwd.net/o37/KSMU/audio/mp3/panetta_53118.mp3

Leon Panetta on Thursday said the Pentagon’s goal is to eliminate all unnecessary gender-based barriers to service. KSMU’s Scott Harvey has local reaction to the Defense Secretary’s call to rescind the ban on women serving in combat.

While military women have been attached to such units and are doing jobs that can bring them into harm’s way, policy prevented them from serving “directly” in combat operations. Panetta’s initiative overturns that rule.

Springfield veteran Kevin Benedict served with the 101stAirborne Division during the Vietnam War. He doesn’t think allowing women to serve on the front lines is a good idea, but…

“If a woman – that’s how she’s wired and that’s the way she’s built and that’s what she wants to do, she wants to be like G.I. Jane in the movie that we saw - I kind of celebrate the opportunity for her to be able to do that. The actually doing of it I think is going to be very difficult,” Benedict said.

As part of Thursday’s press briefing, Panetta said that every woman is entitled a chance to serve in a combat role, but notes the standards to serve in combat will remain the same.

The announcement was welcome news to Missouri State University senior Suzanne Koehler, an Aircrew Flight Equipment specialist at Whiteman Air force Base in Knob Noster, Missouri. While she’s happy with her current job, her first choice was a pararescue specialist.

“But they told me that because I was a girl that job wasn’t available. And I was kinda like bummed about it because I that would have been for sure the job I wanted. It sounded like something I would love to do,” Koehler says.

Now, pararescue specialists and other Air Force ground assignments like combat air controllers will be available to women, as well as combat positions throughout the military.  But Koehler believes it will take some time for men and women to become comfortable serving together on the front lines.

“There’s a lot of brotherhood, that they say, goes into combat. It’s a really big bond that forms. I think it’s a little harder for guys to adjust to having women fighting with them because they don’t have that same bond and brotherhood with them.”

Kevin Benedict agrees, adding he can’t imagine men in their early 20s, based on their maturity level, serving in a line unit with women, and that “it takes awhile for a boy to grow up.”  He also worries how the public will react to women dying in combat.

“We’ve become accustomed to seeing men come home in caskets but not too many women. I think there’s going to be some adjustments for this. I don’t think it’s going to go as easy as they think it’s gonna go.”

Over the last decade, 61 female service members were killed in action in Iraq and 23 have died in Afghanistan.

Congress will have a month to review Secretary Panetta’s decision before it goes into effect.