omen fighting in the military were brutally raped, beaten, and even killed in some cases. Overall, they were treated far worse than their fellow male prisoners. Its a fact that many times male prisoners of war have been beaten brutally by their captors, but many that were held with women prisoners will openly state that males were treated much better than the females.On the flip side of safety from captors is the problem of safety among comrades. Were a woman to be placed into an isolated situation, such as the case with men in the jungles of Vietnam, there would be large incidences of rape and sexual harassment. This is a problem that is due entirely to human nature during strenuous and isolated situations. One needs simply to look how male soldiers behaved during Vietnam to realize this. Stories have come about dealing with issues of males and sexual acts that were performed on fellow male soldiers as well as animals. By looking at those examples, it would not be hard to figure that a female would be treated the same, if not worse.Finally, the committee needed to look at the psychological impact placing women into combat would have on both males and females. The biggest impact would be seen in the male soldiers for many reasons. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Israel allowed women to fight in combat alongside male soldiers. Due to the stereotype places on women as being motherly and nurturing, not killers, the males spent a large part of the battles struggling to protect the females from incoming fire. They claimed afterwards that it was because they saw their mothers and sisters in the faces of the female soldiers and could not let their family members get killed. The sights of women being maimed and killed during battle destroyed not only the morale of the unit, but the psyche of each male member. The men equated these women to their mothers, and therefore saw images that destroyed them internally. Following the war,...
