<p>“Women do not command US submarines.”</p>
<p>You are right, they don’t, for now. But the reason has nothing to do with command ability, leadership qualities, brains, seamanship, or physical prowess. It has everything to do with social norms, which change–ever so slowly—but change they will.</p>
<p>You asked, “Should you be injured when a fire breaks-out or a torpedo strikes the engineering spaces, would you prefer that a female who can’t do one pull-up be the one there to pull you to safety?” Interesting scenario, I’ll respond with a real case: </p>
<p>"Spec. Shavodsha Hodges, 29, of San Antonio, says she joined the Army because her GI husband encouraged her to. She is a veteran of the 2003 Iraq invasion and well into her second year in a war zone. She and about 100 other women make up 20 percent of Provancha’s logistics battalion in Mosul. They serve as truck and Stryker drivers, medics, mechanics and supply soldiers like Hodges who conduct between 50 and 70 convoy missions a month. Ferrying critical goods from Mosul to outlying bases on the precarious roads of northern Iraq, Hodges has developed keen instincts.</p>
<p>On Oct. 29, she was in a supply convoy heading out of the hostile town of Tall Afar, near the Syrian border. “We were told to watch out for an Iraqi national in black,” she recalled. “Within seconds we were hit with an IED,” or improvised explosive device, the military’s term for a roadside bomb.</p>
<p>As her Humvee began to roll over, Hodges reached over and grabbed the legs of Pfc. Gregory Burchett, who was manning a .50-caliber machine gun. She pulled him down from the hatch and into the vehicle just before it flipped, saving him from being crushed.</p>
<p>Burchett was disoriented and moaning in pain. His face was bleeding from multiple shrapnel wounds and he couldn’t move his arm. Hodges helped him out of the vehicle, but almost as soon they climbed out they came under small-arms fire from insurgents 200 yards away.</p>
<p>“Stay down!” Hodges yelled. Cradling Burchett’s head in her lap, she lay forward over his upper body to shield him from the bullets. “Don’t get up!” she said, twice sheltering the gunner from enemy rounds.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the Humvee’s commander, Staff Sgt. Armando Mejia, had his hand trapped under the vehicle. After the shooting stopped, Hodges and other soldiers pushed it up enough to free him. Only later did she realize that she, too, was injured.</p>
<p>For her quick thinking and bravery in the ambush, Hodges became the first woman in her brigade to be awarded the Army Commendation Medal with “V” device, for “valorous conduct” that “saved the lives of her fellow soldiers.”</p>
<p>Between missions at her camp in Mosul, Hodges said she had no doubts about women’s abilities in the war zone. “I think a woman is just as capable of dealing with this as a man,” she said. “You think fast, and you react fast,” she said, her tone confident but sober. “You have to be prepared at any moment, for anything.”</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/12/AR2005051202002_pf.html[/url]”>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/12/AR2005051202002_pf.html</a></p>
<p>Ask the young pfc above if he cared that the soldier that saved his life was a woman?</p>
<p>It’s the 21st century, people.</p>