training exercise in California, he was exposed to women mechanics working alongside his unit. When one woman did not want to bother pushing her tools around the motor pool on a cart, she turned to another female mechanic and said that she would a male mechanic perform the task for her. This woman was apparently too lazy to do the job she was supposed to do, so she subsided and had her male co-worker do the job for her. This is not an isolated incident. In the same edition of Reader’s Digest I quoted from in the above paragraph, an Apache helicopter pilot said that a female crew chief simply refused to carry her tools. Also, female peacekeepers in Bosnia, when it came down to physical work (digging and reinforcing bunkers), watched from the sidelines as many of the men did the bulk of the work (141). It is evident that most the female workforce in the military has problems with the physical demands to the jobs they are allowed to fill now, and allowing them to serve in jobs that require even more physical demand would be a huge error in the judgment of our government.An additional reason that women should continue to be barred from serving in combat arms positions is that they would have trouble dealing with the emotional restraint involved in war. Even though it is often “politically incorrect” to make such an assertion, women are not emotionally able to “turn off” the way that men are- especially during war. It is often assumed that those serving in combat arms positions will see the front lines of the war zone. The current combat positions that women are allowed to serve in the military are combat support units, which rarely see any heavy areas of a war zone and almost never see the front lines. Many women break down emotionally serving in combat support units, and to put women in positions that would expose them to more of the disheartening assimilation’s of war would be damaging to the...
