Female Soldiers See 'Great Opportunity' To Serve In Combat Roles

Female Soldiers See 'Great Opportunity' -- Stars and Stripes/The State (Columbia, S.C.)

COLUMBIA, S.C. -- Don't tell Sgt. 1st Class Marielena Witten, a U.S. Army soldier for 14 years, that women don't belong in combat. She's already been there.

Deployed to Iraq in 2003 in the opening days of Operation Iraqi Freedom, she came under the same machine gun and rocket-propelled grenade fire on her convoy as her male counterparts.

"I just rolled down the window of the Humvee and laid down suppressing fire," said the Philadelphia native, now a drill sergeant at Fort Jackson in Columbia, the Army's largest basic combat training base. "We got through it."

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My Comment: What's my take .... aside from the obvious fact that women are in combat everyday. The U.S. is a democracy and it's elected leaders have made the decision that women can now apply for combat roles. Has this been thought through .... probably not. But women will become a feature of U.S. military combat life and the U.S. military will now have to get use to this new fact of life. I just hope that in the end our elected leaders, the military, the public, and the women who sign up for combat are ready to accept the consequences that such a decision entails .... consequences that I suspect many are not prepared for.