High up in the camouflage-draped watchtower, Gunner Georgina Bell sits
motionless, her eye steady over the sights of her machine gun, pointing
straight down the road leading up to the British air base outside Basra. For
hours at a time, she keeps guard in the sand-scorching heat, watching for
the giveaway signs of an explosives-packed car – the lone driver, the
nervous sweating – that would force her to a snap decision. “If I genuinely
thought it was a suicide bomber, a warning shot’s not going to do any good,”
Bell, 24, explains. “You try to take out the individual first.” In other
words, kill him before he kills you.
Across on the other side of the sprawling base, as the evening sun sinks in
the sky, Lieutenant Lucy Butler, 25, is readying her troops for the night’s
mission. Two hours from now, she will set out to lead a snaking convoy of
supplies through the bomb-rigged streets of Basra to the British battle
group based at Saddam’s old palace. The convoy is the only road traffic that
runs between the two bases, and each time it goes out, it is attacked. On
its last run, a week earlier, three young infantry soldiers guarding it were
killed by a home-made bomb planted in the road. They were combat troops;
Butler, technically, is not. “It’s all semantics, really,” Major David
Poole, Butler’s commanding officer, says as he watches the troops buzz
around preparing for departure. “Lucy will be mortared, blown up and shot at
tonight. That’s enough combat for most people.”
History abounds with tales of women warriors, from Boadicea to Joan of Arc to
Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the infamous Red Army sniper who took down 309 Nazi
soldiers before a mortar blast finally forced her from the battlefield. But
their notoriety is such precisely because of their rarity. In the century
and a half since women first officially served alongside British forces in
the Crimean War, as nurses, they have made many inroads into the male world
of war, from the cockpits of fighter jets to the decks of warships. There
are nearly 18,000 women in the regular British forces, accounting for nine
per cent of its troops; 1,600 of them now are serving in Afghanistan and
Iraq. Officially, however, they still cannot serve in so-called close
combat, where their duty is “deliberately to close with and kill the enemy”.
It is a phrase more redolent of Flanders fields than the mean streets of
Basra. Those are the semantics that give Major Poole little comfort as he
waves Lucy and her troops off on her mission while he waits, in his own
words, “like mother hen” for the their safe return; the semantics that mean
Georgina can shoot a suicide bomber when he drives towards her watchtower,
but cannot join the infantry which goes out to capture him before he even
sets out. While the issue of women on the front line is still debated in the
hallways of power, the truth on the ground is that such a boundary no longer
exists. In Iraq, British men and women battle an often invisible enemy
around and among them. Old distinctions about front lines and combat have
melted away in this 360-degree war, placing women soldiers in the firing
line as they have never been before. They may not yet have the inalienable
right to fight for their country, but they share with the men the real risk
of dying for it.
Corporal Nicola Lake is a nurse, the oldest job of women in the military. If
she had gone to an earlier war, she might never have gone anywhere riskier
than a field hospital. On joining up, she would have been trained to fire a
rifle, but might never have needed to carry one. When she goes to work
today, however, it is to a helicopter launch pad, not a hospital, and she
travels with a pistol and an assault rifle. A sweet-faced brunette with a
comforting, maternal air, Lake is a nurse with the RAF’s Incident Response
Team, a flying squad of medical staff that swoops in by helicopter to pluck
wounded soldiers from the field – often while the fighting is still going
on. When an emergency call comes through, Lake and her team scramble to a
waiting helicopter with full body armour, medical kit and weapons to reach
the wounded and get them into theatre within the “Golden Hour” critical to
their survival. They can never be entirely sure what they will find.
“When you’re flying in, you’re thinking about what the situation on the ground
will be like,” Lake explains. Even before the Geneva Conventions were
drafted, conventional warfare was governed by certain codes of conduct that
allowed medical personnel access to the wounded without fear of being drawn
into the conflict. In Iraq, all that has changed. The armband with the Red
Cross that once denoted a medic has now been discarded; to an insurgent, its
only purpose might be to serve as a target. “We take the rifles because
unfortunately the enemy don’t recognise medical personnel as anyone to be
left alone. So we carry it purely for our own protection.” When she gets off
the helicopters to attend the casualties, she leaves the rifle on board,
relying on the pistol strapped to her thigh. “But that’s our last resort.”
It is, Christy Hooson, Lake’s team partner, admits, a strange thought for a
medic that you might have to take, rather than save, a life. “But you are a
soldier first,” she points out. “And you have to make sure the ground is
safe before you can become a medic.”
Lance-Bombardier Claire Stevenson mulls over the same dark thought every time
she leaves the base on patrol. It is her second tour in Iraq and once more
her artillery unit has been sent here to do the job of the infantry, even
though, as a woman, she cannot join its ranks. On her tour last year, she
lost three fellow artillerymen when a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at
their Land Rover. How would she respond under attack? “I think about it most
of the time. Before you go out on patrol, you think, ‘What if I had to do
this?’ If I have to, I have to. If I had to kill someone, I wouldn’t
hesitate. You just have to think, it’s my life or theirs.”
Lucy Butler could easily face such a decision tonight. The Royal Logistics
Corps were once dismissed as “blanket stackers”, taunted that they were so
far from the front, they even had to send their laundry forward. Not any
more. With fewer and fewer British military vehicles venturing on to Basra’s
streets, the snaking, four-mile-long logistics convoy between the airbase
and the palace is the number-one target for insurgents battling the British.
“Mortars going off, friendly force and enemy force, mortars, flares, Apaches
overhead, explosions, the crackle of small-arms fire,” Butler lists the din
of battle she must blank out to lead the convoy. “While I’m aware of the
danger, it’s not something I feel as a pressing presence. When you get back,
you realise what you’ve come through, and the adrenaline flows.”
That relief will have to wait, for another 12 hours at least. Tonight they
will be trying a new route, never tested before, in a bid to throw the
enemy. The journey will take them half the night as they skirt around the
city and then back in towards the palace, dropping off their load before
setting out again. In front of a map marked with the routes, Lucy reminds
her troops how to act under fire. Some listen while others scribble
intently. “If there is small-arms fire, try to exit the killing area,” she
tells them. You may not open fire, unless your life or that of another
soldier is in danger.” The likelihood is there will be quite a few weapons
fired tonight. “There are no certainties in life, and [the idea] that I
would come back home is not a certainty,” Lucy admits. “But neither is
Armageddon.”
Getting war tales out of some of these self-possessed young women can be a
little like drawing teeth. The tendency to underplay the danger they face is
universal. “Oh, you don’t want to get into that war stories malarkey,” Lucy
laughs when I ask her how much she tells the folks at home about what she
really gets up to. It’s a far cry from some of the chest-beating bluster
that goes on when the men come home. One female soldier tells of her private
amusement when she meets squaddies home on leave and they start bragging of
their wartime exploits. “You won’t tell them what you do, just so you can
hear what their chat-up lines are, and they’ll go on about Iraq and
Afghanistan, and then after about an hour you find out that really they are
just a clerk and they’ve never been out on the ground after all. And then
you say, ‘Oh, I’m in the army, too.’ The looks on their faces.”
Lucy never joined up to get thrills, or be in danger; it is something she
accepts with the job. Indeed, as poor grounded Prince Harry could testify,
it is hard to be taken seriously, or sustain a military career, if you have
never seen action. War, after all, is what armies are about, what they are
ultimately trained to do. That ultimate test, and the quest for adventure,
too, drove Louise Roberts, 23, to pester commanders for a transfer to
another brigade when she discovered it would be the next to go to Iraq. She
was prepared to be in the line of fire right from the moment she joined up
at 19 as a radio operator with the Royal Corps of Signals. “You watch war
films and the key bloke is always the one with the radio,” she says.
“Unfortunately he’s always the one that gets slotted,” she adds, with a
hearty Brummie laugh.
Roberts – blonde, sporty, ferociously focused – landed her plum job as
personal signaller to the brigade commander over a male colleague, a huge
shock. Unlike most of the other signal positions, the job meant going out on
the ground with the brigadier on a daily basis. “You always think that
they’ll go for the guy, but they didn’t,” she tells me. “Initially, I just
thought I’d love to go to war – well, not I’d love to go to war, because no
one would love to go to war, but I’d love to do my job. And then you come to
theatre and you think, wow, you’re actually in a war zone.” She had been in
Iraq just two weeks when she encountered her first improvised explosive
device, or IED: the roadside bombs that have become the weapon of choice of
insurgents and militias alike in post-Saddam Iraq.
"They are not not aloud" - who taught you how to write
"hand tied behind thier backs" - and spell for that matter!
piers, London,
My sister is one of the girls interviewed in the article. It is her choice of career, her choice to fight. If women can success in brining new dimensions and new quallities to the armed forces, which only strengthens the position, then they should be allowed. Anyone thinking that women can't be in the forces is incredibly narrow minded and naive. What happened to freedom of choice? Come back to the 21st century. I might fear for my sister's safety but am equally incredibly proud of her. She shows more courage than most people.
Sophie , London,
Women ARE allowed (note the correct spelling please Ray) in combat in the British Army - hence a female Lynx Helicopter pilot who holds the "only combat job open to women".
Sophie , London,
Women are NOT aloud in combat in the British army - that is the law. They are not not aloud for the same reasons that women athletes do not compete against their male colleagues in the olympics - the reasons are obvious to any rational being and don't need to be stated here. Until recently, women in the support services trained alongside their male counterparts, signals transport etc. This has now been stopped after New Labour's ten year experiment proved a disaster - to put it frankly, the women could not keep up. This practice has now been reversed and women train seperately to reduce injury.
Although I would not put it past New labour (or indeed, the 'New Tories'), to send young men into combat with one hand tied behind thier backs, this should be resisted at all costs. It would be a purely political decision, not one based on combat effectiveness.
Ray, Derby, Derbyshire
Absolutely pathetic and disgusting! The Brits are turning a blind eye to women serving on the front lines. You all ought to be ashamed of yourselves. I just hope America doesn't follow. I know we allow female helicopter and fighter pilots, but not artillery gunners and soldiers going out on patrols. Does the UK not have enough men to stand up and fight that 1600 out of just over 10,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are women? I wonder what my grandfather, who served in WWII, would have said about this.
GI, Atlanta, USA/Georgia
Oh, please, get a grip on reality....
If you took all the women out of the British Army, then there would be no chance of meeting their current commitments.
I think the barefoot, pregnant and chained to the kitchen sink days are long gone.
If you want to proudly fight for your country and can hack the macho world that Army still is, good on you! Male or female!
Bix, Edinburgh,
WHAT HAVE WE BECOME?
British women in combat? It is un-British, un-manly
and un-natural!
The Tommies of WWII, Korea, The Falklands, etc., would hang their heads in shame that it has come to this.
This too shall pass: A Proud New Britain will arise!
Garth Rex, Glendale Heights, USA
Interesting piece, thank you once again to all our fighting forces, men and women. You do us proud, shame you can't get the support you deserve from higher up the chain..
Robbie, Aberdeen,