Military women

If McElvogue was, as he put it, degraded and insulted by Dobrzyski’s insinuations to the general effect that the Armed Forces are no more than a pack of loony monkeys playing games with weapons that pack a serious wallop when used—or indeed misused—his letter to the editor hardly gave me any reason to doubt the veracity of her statement … quite the opposite, in fact.

His entire attempt at a defending rhetoric leads one to believe the entire Armed Forces is made up of a pack of gibbering, brain-damaged simians with a unreservedly ugly penchant for deranged violence, first, and a comparatively unevolved and primitive—read primate—sexual drive …

Darwin would have done a half-gainer in his grave at this picture that I had gotten of these chattering apes in military fatigues swinging through the trees with full backpacks and AR-15s while in the midst of John’s FTX/AT maneuvers—sans, of course, any females of the species. Almost as if the forces of evolution had taken one look at these gibbering primates, shied away from the daunting task at hand and instead had decided to take a sudden, and very indefinite holiday.

John’s vision of unrestrained raging military libidos is, to put it mildly, an extremely hairy concept which has far more relevance to the way those brutish cavemen did things in the prehistoric eras—look around for a female that roused the hormone level to mind_numbing proportions, bonk her over the head with a club and drag her to his grotto by the hair—than any kind of current and civilized perspective on the subject.

And, while we’re at it, why don’t we consider the real, albeit probably unconscious, reason that the military denies women combat status? The return of the psyche to a primitive aggression status suitable for the brainless atrocities—or, if you prefer, crimes—perpetuated in wartime is far more easily accomplished by excluding women, who tend to have a tempering influence that balances the full-bore male depredations of unrestrained carnage that characterize war with a certain measure of human kindness and courtesy.

And, God help any woman from the other side who is caught by our all-male troops. My Lai, as well as ‘Nam in general, has provided us with far more examples of this kind of despoilment of innocents that was even remotely necessary—and if the military permit women to fight, they will simultaneously relinquish the dependably psychological edge of fear which is instilled in our “enemies'” women, who will necessarily be far safer among a co-ed troop of soldiery than the present alternative.

Thirty pregnancies on a single ship? Hmm … doesn’t that sound as if our Armed Forces are still rigidly enmeshed in the unenlightened as to not provide condom machines and other birth control alternative to its personnel, and is abortion completely out of the question for a military woman?

And, is every grunt so incredibly immature as to screech “Now go away” in infantile pique at a woman who threatens their cherished bastians of male atavism?

Greg Brown

NIU Alumnus