To the Editor:

Walter A. McDougall’s article, “Sex, Lies, and Infantry” [September], is the most recent example of a disturbing tendency on the part of conservatives to join feminists in demeaning military men. Both conservatives and feminists are now exploiting the sexual-harassment scandal at the Aberdeen Proving Ground to promote a view of the military as a den of ubiquitous sexual misconduct and seething animosity toward women. Mr. McDougall, for example, portrays “grizzled sergeants” as irresistibly tempted to abuse their authority when charged with training “nineteen-year-old girls.” He even acknowledges his basic agreement with Linda Bird Francke’s depiction—or, more accurately, caricature—in her book, Ground Zero, of the military as an institution that fosters a culture of hostility toward women.

Bashing military men has become the common sport of feminists and conservatives alike because this activity so conveniently advances everyone’s particular political agenda. The spectacle of the sexually menacing military man is used by liberal feminists to press for opening more combat positions to women, by conservatives to urge rolling back the participation of women in the military, and by radical feminists to assail the dominant “masculinist culture.” Consequently, a distorted and unjust image of military men has become pervasive.

There is no good reason to suppose that military men are more sexually aggressive than, say, lawyers or accountants. Is the male-professor/female-student relationship less fraught with temptations to abuse power than the male-sergeant/female-junior-enlisted relationship? I strongly suspect that the opposite is in fact the case. A less ideologically-driven examination of the armed forces might even reveal that, aberrations like the scandal at Aberdeen notwithstanding, gender relations are more equitable and amicable in the military than in many other institutions.

As a young woman I served in the U.S. Army for three years during the 1970’s. I worked with and took orders from innumerable “grizzled sergeants.” In contrast to the prevailing view of these men as sexual predators, which Mr. McDougall sees fit to reinforce, I remember them as some of the most decent and dignified human beings I have had the privilege to know.

Regina F. Titunik
University of Hawaii
Hilo, Hawaii

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To the Editor:

Walter A. McDougall deplores the fact that the military he loved has changed, in his view, for the worse. I feel for him. Lots has gone to hell in a hand-basket since I was a girl. But times change. That’s life. Which does not excuse Mr. McDougall’s blaming “feminists” or “feminism” for unfortunate conditions in our military.

Today, the need for hand-to-hand combat is on the wane and the most effective weapons are complex and technical. Such weapons require skilled button-pushing, which can be done by women as well as by men, as Mr. McDougall would discover in any laboratory. No one claims that all women are qualified for all tasks any more than all men are. As I recall, in World War II and the Korean war many men were given certain jobs because their physiques disqualified them from others.

The discussion of pregnancy, harassment, etc. is disingenuous. Mr. McDougall would have us believe that before women ruined the military, clean-cut American boys enlisted virginal and chaste, and returned the same way; that married soldiers remained faithful to their wives. The truth is, and always has been, that prostitution flourished around military bases; that when the fleet was in town, prostitutes worked overtime; that military men brought venereal diseases home to faithful wives, not to mention the fact that homosexual incidents, consensual or not, were as common in the military as in prisons or boys’ schools.

Problems related to sexuality in the military may have changed, but they are not new. What is new is their being discussed, not hushed-up in the name of “morale.” Mr. McDougall seems bothered not by disruptive sexual behavior in the military, but by the fact that it is taking place “inhouse,” as if it were all right when it played itself out on the civilian population. When he cites the figures for soldiers discharged because of pregnancy, why not cite figures for soldiers (past or present) dismissed for venereal disease? And am I wrong that more male soldiers have to be dismissed for drug and alcohol abuse than females for pregnancy? As to those drill sergeants who abused young recruits, these miserable men probably savaged male recruits as well, though perhaps in a different way.

Mr. McDougall says, first, that women enlist because they want good pay, schooling, and government benefits. In a peacetime army that is what happens. Does he really think men enlist because they yearn to be maimed or to die in battle? Then he says that “for reasons which it is considered bad form to question,” some women “want to storm beaches . . . or bomb Baghdad.” Well, what are the reasons of these women who should be Mr. McDougall’s dream girls? That they come from Cleveland? That they are young professors denied tenure? They seem exactly the right people for the job; the military should be gung-ho to recruit more like ’em! As to the problem of women—possibly mothers—dying in combat: ha! This, in a country where 4,000 women, many of them young mothers, die yearly from domestic violence? Get a grip.

The notion that “nature has placed upon the shoulders of men” the warrior role is simply bizarre. In nature, females are as aggressive and diligent killers as males. In some species it is the female who hunts and kills for the pack. It is men qua men who have chosen—admittedly over millennia—to kill each other in war. War qua war is a human—Mr. McDougall would have it a male—invention. And just as many men cannot distinguish between sexual desire and rape, so it is a male—not a human, not a natural—notion that equates aggressiveness and bodily strength with war and violence. All animals are aggressive and physically assertive from birth; it is culture that channels the aggressiveness in humans.

C. Parens
New York City

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To the Editor:

Walter A. McDougall’s opposition to the presence of women in the armed forces is really quite misguided. If the effectiveness of the armed forces is imperiled by male overprotectiveness or male resentment of female recruits, the answer is clear: return male soldiers to civilian life and establish an all-female military.

Jennifer L. Green
Emory, Virginia

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To the Editor:

Walter A. McDougall does a creditable job discussing the impact of women on the American military. The goal of feminists and their political allies in Congress and the bureaucracy is to transform the armed forces into a coeducational institution whose main purpose is to offer travel, education, job opportunities, and self-fulfillment to everyone. Any student of warfare knows that the only reason for the existence of an army, navy, and air force is to win wars by killing as many of the enemy as possible.

Men are attracted to the military life because it requires aggression, ruthlessness, intense physical competition, challenge, and camaraderie that are virtually unknown in civilian life. President Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Barbara Pope, and those who think like her, are clearly determined to destroy the unique male military culture that has served this country so well in the past. As Mr. McDougall quotes her as saying, “We are in the process of weeding out the white male as norm. We’re about changing the culture.”

Pregnancy is now one of the most serious and unmentionable problems faced by our armed forces (several naval vessels have been dubbed “love boats”). As Mr. McDougall points out, standards have been lowered in the service academies and throughout the armed forces with predictable effect on morale and military effectiveness. It is a career-ending exercise for any military officer to speak the obvious truth about what is happening. It is testimony to the present state of our society and culture that American men are now willing to let their wives, sisters, daughters, even those who are mothers with infants and small children, fight, be wounded, killed, taken prisoner, and sexually abused—all of which happened in the Gulf war.

Any future wars against formidable enemies like the Germans and Japanese in World War II or the North Korean and Vietnamese Communists would put a quick end to this social experimentation, but not until a terrible price had been paid in American lives. Before that happens, it is to be hoped that fearless, patriotic men and women in Congress and in the armed forces will speak the truth about a national tragedy in the making.

George E. Rubin
Bronx, New York

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Walter A. Mcdougall writes:

The first two letters ascribe to me positions so far removed from those I recalled taking that I had to reread my article to regain my composure. Happily, I discovered that, indeed, I wrote what I had meant to write; unhappily, I had to conclude that the issue of women in combat is seen through such ideological blinders as to obscure any hope of rational discussion.

For instance, Regina F. Titunik accuses me of joining the feminists in “demeaning military men,” albeit to argue for an all-male military. I did criticize “the brass” for not acknowledging the damage done to military standards, morale, discipline, and preparedness by the mixing of the sexes in frontline units. But I made clear that my target was not the officers themselves but the Orwellian political environment that forbids men to witness to the truth. Likewise, I deplore the sexual harassment that has occurred in coeducational training units. But my purpose was to expose the stupidity of placing “grizzled sergeants” in the way of temptation, not to impugn the honor of all noncommissioned officers. And far from affirming Linda Bird Francke’s depiction of the military as an institution that fosters a “culture of hostility,” I considered her book “petulant and haranguing,” her style an unrelieved polemic, and her evidence anecdotal at best. The point I attempted to make was that recent incidents of sexual harassment, far from being the natural product of a macho military mindset, are unnatural products of the Utopian integration of the sexes demanded by those like Francke.

Regina Titunik then asks rhetorically whether “the male-professor/female-student relationship is less fraught with temptations” than the military one. The answer to that is yes, because teachers and students do not march, sweat, bathe, bunk down, and share their innermost fears about battle together. What is more, male professors today live in a climate in which merely sharing a cup of coffee with a female student might lead to false accusations. I shudder to think what such a climate of fear might produce in the military, where not only the education but the lives of men (and women) depend on mutual trust.

C. Parens misconstrues my article in the opposite way, in order to argue that military men behave like belligerent brutes toward women as well as toward the enemy. She begins by suggesting that “Mr. McDougall deplores the fact that the military he loved has changed.” Nowhere in my essay did I even hint at this. The fact is, I could not wait to get out of the Army; what I “deplored” was the demoralization, drugs, insubordination, defeatism, and careerism that characterized the U.S. Army of 1969. The Army, to its credit, has changed since then, and significantly for the better. But I fear that all the progress made in the military since Vietnam is now being threatened by feminization.

C. Parens then restates the old saw about how war has changed and women are just as able to “push a button” as men. Of course they are, but let us not stop there. Let us also grant that some women are physically more fitted for “hand to hand combat” than some men (including myself). That is not the point. The point is whether we are to impose full sexual integration on the military, with all the ancillary friction that entails, so that a small number of tomboys can play on the varsity. Military preparedness and combat efficiency are determined at least as much by psychological as by physical factors.

The most egregious example of putting words in my mouth, however, is the claim that “Mr. McDougall would have us believe that before women ruined the military, clean-cut American boys enlisted virginal and chaste. . . .” Ha! That is hardly the Army I recall, and nowhere in my essay do I hint that it was. But yes, I do think that sex in the ranks is a far more dangerous phenomenon than the frequenting of prostitutes, because it undermines good order and discipline. And I think C. Parens begs the question in arguing that servicewomen lose less time to pregnancies than males to drug and alcohol problems. Are we to introduce yet another social cancer into our military simply because other malignancies already exist?

C. Parens ends by embracing the feminist dogma which holds that the female of the species is as aggressive and diligent a killer as the male, but that the patriarchal culture is what channels aggression into rapine and war. Hence she is prepared to believe that “those drill sergeants who abused [female] recruits . . . probably savaged male recruits as well”—so much for Regina Titunik’s “decent and dignified” drill sergeants. She also scoffs at those who would shrink from sending mothers to war when “4,000 women” die each year from domestic violence. That logical leap leaves me breathless. Because women are killed at home, they might as well be killed abroad? Can we not say instead that women ought not to die violent deaths at home or abroad—or would that too be sexist?

At present, no reconciliation is possible between the need for military effectiveness and the claim of equal opportunity unless, as in Jennifer L. Green’s letter, we take the psychosexual political dynamic at work in the Clinton Defense Department to its ultima ratio—and establish an all-female Amazon corps.

Finally, let me thank George E. Rubin for his approbation. I fear, however, that the fact of his gender will render his opinion as nugatory as mine.

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