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From the Archives: Jim Webb, "Women Can't Fight"
Welcome to our feature where we highlight thought-provoking and interesting pieces from Washingtonian's decades of archives. Today, it's a 1979 article from Jim Webb (now a Virginia senator) on why women should not be allowed in military combat.
Women Can't Fight By James Webb
"Your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable—it is to win wars," Douglas MacArthur told the 1962 West Point class. In this story, a Naval Academy graduate, a combat veteran of Vietnam, says the country's fighting mission is being corrupted, with grave consequences to the national defense. One of the main problems, he says, is women. From the November 1979 Washingtonian We would go months without bathing, except when we could stand naked among each other next to a village well or in a stream or in the muddy water of a bomb crater. It was nothing to begin walking at midnight, laden with packs and weapons and ammunition and supplies, seventy pounds or more of gear, and still be walking when the sun broke over mud-slick paddies that had sucked our boots all night. We carried our own gear and when we took casualties we carried the weapons of those who had been hit. When we stopped moving we started digging, furiously throwing out the heavy soil until we had made chest-deep fighting holes. When we needed to make a call of nature we squatted off a trail or straddled a slit trench that had been dug between fighting holes, always by necessity in public view. We slept in makeshift hooches made out of ponchos, or simply wrapped up in a poncho, sometimes so exhausted that we did not feel the rain fall on our own faces. Most of us caught hookworm, dysentery, malaria, or yaws, and some of us had all of them.
Read the full article.
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Comments
We slept in makeshift hooches made out of ponchos, or simply wrapped up in a poncho, sometimes so exhausted that we did not feel the rain fall on our own faces. Most of us caught hookworm, dysentery, malaria, or yaws, and some of us had all of them.
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Edward
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Posted by: dating sties , Aug 29, 2011 09:02:41 AM
I suggest that Mr. Webb read the latest book about women in war written by Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee and Evelyn Monahan "A Few Good Women" Mr. Webb was inivitewd to be interviewed by the authors but declined--wonder why! Mr. Webb, get with the program and hang up your sexist and antiquated views about what women can do. How do the women in your family feel about your attitude? Lynn Ashley, WW11 WAC veteran(included in the book, incidentally).
Posted by: Lynn Ashley, Apr 29, 2010 12:19:50 PM
Women, men, and war have not changed since 1979. Webb was right then, and only his ambition has changed his views to those deemed politically correct by the Democratic voters of Virginia.
Posted by: Tony, Oct 13, 2008 06:37:26 PM
So nice of you to raise this article from the dead.
But Hey, time does a funny things to thinking minds; they evolve.
Posted by: Mimi Schaeffer, May 22, 2008 07:54:19 AM
As a former Marine of 8 1/2 years who went to Iraq...this article is completely moot. There are no front lines anymore, women are in combat everyday (but without benefit of receiving a combat action ribbon), and they do a great job. Haven’t heard any morale problems about it...war isn’t for the sensitive of either gender but come on, we aren’t sending prissy schoolgirls there. Let people do the jobs they can do, and want to do. Ability and desire determine who succeeds in war - not politics.
Posted by: Sara, May 21, 2008 07:34:18 PM
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