Stacy Pearsall
Staff Sgt. Stacy Pearsall, who was a photographer in Iraq, in a self-portrait over Baghdad during her first deployment in 2003.
During her second deployment to Iraq, Staff Sgt. Stacy Pearsall of the Air Force found herself attached to an Army ground unit that was clearing roadside bombs. They had just found their 26th device of the day when one of their armored personnel carriers exploded. An ambush was on.
The chaos that unfolded over the next few hours was not a typical day for Sergeant Pearsall. But under the Pentagon’s decision to allow women into front-line combat units, officially announced Thursday, it could become much closer to the norm for women in American uniforms.
As Sergeant Pearsall tells the story, her vehicle came under intense fire that day in 2007, near the city of Baquba. The male soldiers in her carrier had already dashed out to join the fight, so she jumped onto the machine gun and began returning fire.
Outside a soldier lay unconscious. Sergeant Pearsall opened the rear door and crawled to the man, who was 6-foot-2 and more than 200 pounds, twice her weight. From behind him, she clasped him in a bear hug and dragged him toward the vehicle. She fell once, then again. Somehow, she hauled him into the armored safety of the carrier.
After tearing off his protective vest, she realized his carotid artery had been torn by shrapnel. As blood spurted all over, she closed her eyes, stuck her fingers into his neck and squeezed. He screamed, and she thanked the heavens. He was still kicking.
What happened next seemed almost cinematic. Emerging from a purplish haze outside, a medic jumped into the carrier and set his kit beside her. “Are you a medic?” he asked.
Heck no, Sergeant Pearsall replied. “I’m the photographer.”
The question that now looms over the Pentagon as it moves toward full gender integration is whether female service members like Sergeant Pearsall, for all their bravery under fire, can perform the same dangerous and physically demanding tasks day in and day out, for weeks at a time, as permanent members of ground combat units like the infantry or armored cavalry.
Since 1994, women have technically been barred from serving in those front-line units. But throughout the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, women — working as medics, intelligence officers, photographers, military police officers and in a host of other jobs — have been routinely “attached” to all-male ground combat units, where they have come under fire, returned fire, been wounded and been killed.
To supporters of Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta’s decision to rescind the prohibition on women in combat, the experiences of those women proved that the distinction between being “attached” to a combat unit and actually serving in one was outdated, and pointless.
“When the military goes to full integration, it allows commanders to put the best person in the job, not just the best man,” said Greg Jacob, a former Marine Corps officer who is now policy director for the Service Women’s Action Network, an advocacy group for women in the military. “If the best shot in the platoon is a woman, I can make her a sniper. But until now, I couldn’t do that.”
But to skeptics of the policy change, it is one thing for women to perform well when they come under fire while temporarily attached to all-male combat units. It is a far different thing, they argue, to carry out the daily mission of hunting down and engaging enemy forces as an infantry soldier or tank commander.
Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California and a Marine Corps veteran with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, defines it as a difference between “incidental combat,” as women have faced in convoys or attacks on bases, and “the direct combat duties of our advanced and most elite ground operators.”
Representative Hunter said in a statement, “The question here is whether this change will actually make our military better at operating in combat, specifically finding and targeting the enemy.”
Ask Sergeant Pearsall, who was decorated for her actions in Baquba and received a medical retirement from the Air Force in 2008, and the answer is simple: Yes, women can do it, and I already have.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 25, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated the standards that female service members have to meet to pass their physical fitness tests. They must meet the same sit-up standard as men, they are not allowed to pass with fewer sit-ups. Women are also allowed to run a slower 2-mile run, not a 1.5-mile run.
From Front Lines, Women Offer Evidence on Ability in Combat
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From Front Lines, Women Offer Evidence on Ability in Combat
