The 1948 Combat Exclusion Act precludes women from combat roles in the U.S. Navy, Air Force and Marines. Army policy has the same restriction. Women are not allowed to fly combat aircraft in war zones and are banned from fighting ships. Combat infantry and armor units are closed to them. Now lawmakers led by Reps. Patricia Schroeder and Beverly Byron, joined by Sens. Edward Kennedy and William Roth, want to overturn the rule with a Senate vote scheduled this week. And while many female officers support the move, other women say thanks, but no thanks-particularly in the enlisted ranks. “Tell Pat Schroeder to get out of my boots,” snaps Maj. Kathleen Shields of the 70th Division, a 17-year Army reservist. “She’s never been in the service and doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” “I’m not getting in her boots and I don’t intend to,” says Schroeder. “I’m ensuring her equality and removing barriers to her opportunity. "

Few topics I have dealt with as a veteran of Korea and Vietnam, and as a correspondent in the gulf war stir such emotions. Two sets of values are on a collision course. Equality and opportunity are noble ideals, but they have little to do with the battlefield, where the issues are living and dying. The question is: what if it turns out that equality and opportunity hurt combat readiness? The issue is not female bravery; the gulf war proved that patriotism and heroism are not gender-dependent. It isn’t professionalism. The women troops I met during and after the war are smart, dedicated and technically competent. They are also better educated than their male counterparts. I myself have no problem with women in combat flying attack aircraft, though many combat-experienced pilots offer strong arguments against it. I do know from eight years of ground combat that few women could endure its savagery for long. The issue was summed up in Senate testimony by Gen. Robert Barrow of the Marine Corps. It is not “about women’s rights, equal opportunity, career assignments for enhancement purposes for selection to higher rank. It is about, most assuredly … combat effectiveness, combat readiness; and so we’re talking about national security.”

For this article I interviewed hundreds of service people of both sexes, some individually, many in groups. I went to five major U.S. bases. Women made up 20 percent of some units. I met a few I wouldn’t want to arm-wrestle with, and a number I would have been proud to have at my side in a fire fight. Not many would actually choose to join the outfits that do the killing. “Only a small minority want combat units,” says paratrooper M/Sgt. Penny Sweeny of Fort Bragg, N.C. “Women don’t grow up playing with GI Joe dolls.” But they hated the discrimination in the law: they wanted the right to combat. They compared it with the abortion issue: a woman’s choice. Their anger reminded me of the controlled rage I saw in the 1950s among black soldiers who were kept down. Military women are also in the grip of a Catch-22. They need combat experience to get the top jobs, but the system won’t give it to them. Navy Lt. Brenda Holdener, a helicopter pilot at Norfolk Air Station, was candid about this before a recent hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee: “I am very selfish … I would like to see [the law] changed just because that would afford me more opportunities.”

In fact, many combat opportunities could be opened to women. There are few tasks in the Navy that most women couldn’t do. The SEALs require exceptional strength and stamina even by masculine standards, and submariners live in a claustrophobic world best suited to single-sex existence. In the Air Force, females are already well represented in 97 percent of the job assignments. USAF Col. Douglas Kennett at the Pentagon says that his service “couldn’t go to war without women and we couldn’t win without them.” High-speed fighter aircraft do place demands on the physical strength of pilots: withstanding the force of 9 Gs is no easy feat. But except for these jobs, the Navy and Air Force are high-tech services engaging mostly in standoff battles. Combatants never really see each other. Women can plot coordinates and push buttons as fast as men.

But war will also continue to be about seizing ground, or defending it. In the gulf war, a badly led Iraqi Army allowed itself to be defeated by technology. Ground forces played a secondary role. This was a unique war, not a model. The next one may be less hospitable to high-tech weapons. Ground war is not dead. The line doggies will still engage the enemy eyeball to eyeball, belly to belly. And in that setting, women are disadvantaged. Brawn will count for more than computer smarts for a while yet. A 110-pound woman with the heart of a lion can’t pack out a wounded 200-pound comrade. Army studies show that only 18 percent of women recruits could lift between 50 and 100 pounds. A grunt’s rifle, ammunition and gear average 110. Tank and artillery rounds weigh between 50 and 100 pounds. “The issue is not strength,” wrote Army Sgt. Donna Patzer of Tripler Army Medical Center, Hawaii, “but whether women are capable of performing the task which they are expected to perform.”

The biggest complaint I heard from both women and men was there is one physical standard for men and another for women. Each service has a different standard for men and women, called gender norming. To get the Army’s maximum fitness rating, for example, a 22-year-old male must be able to run two miles in 12 minutes and 36 seconds; A female gets an extra three minutes to win the same rating (chart). To pass the Marines’ combat-conditioning test, men must climb 20 feet of rope in 30 seconds; women can take 50 seconds. “We are told to evaluate woman on a different scale than man,” says a male Air Force captain. “A woman who is adequate is rated as outstanding, or who is unacceptable is rated as acceptable … We lie to the public, we lie to the Air Force, and most of all we lie to each other.” Schroeder agrees: “When the military imposes double standards, they think they’re doing women a favor, but women don’t want it.”

The temptation is to say that women should be admitted to any combat role if they have the skills and the strength. Former New York mayor Edward Koch used to say he didn’t care what sex his firefighters were so long as they could carry a 206-pound mayor out of a burning room. Lt. Margaret Dunn, an Air Defense Artillery leader in the gulf, got as close to combat as a woman could. She says that “not just any female can handle the physical and mental stress of a combat unit.” But she feels herself fully capable. In 10 years of rising from the ranks, she has seen a change in male mind-set as women prove themselves, and a “woman must prove herself more than a man. " Dunn is ramrod-lean and rucks 12 miles with a heavy pack. She maxes any fitness test on the male scale. “I don’t see why I can’t go [into combat],” she says. “I can do it.”

But skill and strength are not the only issues. The top officers who opposed the Schroeder legislation were united on one point: the military has seen enough experimentation for the moment. The services are downsizing on a scale unseen since the end of World War II. They are restructuring units and redefining missions. They are intensively studying the lessons of the gulf war. It is strongly believed by the top brass that now isn’t the time to put women into combat without first sorting out what is known and unknown about the issue, especially the intangibles such as effects on morale and unit cohesion. An Israeli colonel, asked by a visiting U.S. Army major, Martin Stanton, about the wisdom of using women in combat, said, “You can perhaps afford such experiments. We have to take war seriously.”

The Army has changed since I wore a soldier’s suit. It is now a big family where the married outnumber the single and the day-care center has replaced the day room. Dual-service parents are common. Back in 1971, women soldiers were WACs and fewer than 20,000 dedicated women mainly took care of sick people and paperwork. The end of the draft in 1973 opened the services up to women; there weren’t enough male soldiers who were up to handling the complex jobs. Today the Army is the most sexually integrated of the services. Women do everything but kill enemy soldiers. Yet if attacked they know how to fight in a defensive role. I asked a woman captain if she felt like she had invaded the sacred turf of man. She replied, “It’s not sacred anymore.”

Men’s attitudes are changing, but slowly. During the gulf war many line commanders refused female medics - until they learned it was “take woman medics or go without.” Thousands of years of genetic imprinting and social programming are at work. “I was raised to protect the female,” says Specialist Peter Cardin of the elite XVIII Airborne Corps. “I couldn’t handle being in a tank or infantry squad with a woman. It would blow unit esprit and destroy male bonding.” Male bonding is an abstract thing, yet it is the glue that holds fighting units together and allows them to do the impossible. Once, after a night battle in Korea, every member of my Raider unit, including myself, lay dead or wounded. Not one survivor left his position-even though some were blind or had limbs shot off-so great was their dedication to their comrades. Spirit and will are the most essential elements of warfare. Without them you lose. At the end, we lacked them in Vietnam and we lost.

Ask the Israelis. They are the only ones with extensive experience of women in direct combat roles. The Israeli Army put women on the front lines in 1948. The experiment ended disastrously after only three weeks. It wasn’t that the women couldn’t fight. It was that they got blown apart. Female casualties demoralized the men and gutted unit cohesion. The men placed themselves at higher risks in order to protect women, and in some cases failed in their combat mission. Today, Israeli women are drafted, but not for direct combat jobs. Granted, things have changed since 1948. But no Pentagon order can abolish these fundamental attitudes. “The politicians are rushing the cadence,” says Capt. Gloria Nickerson of the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg. “Nothing is going to change until society stops raising little girls to be popular and wear pink dresses and raising little boys to take care of little girls.”

It’s down at the bottom where the first sergeant and chief petty officer sit where the problems come home. The NCOs are the backbone of the military; they train, discipline and lead units into battle. It is here where ideas and policies are put into practice. Unlike the officers, NCOs don’t shift units frequently. When the buck comes to a screeching halt, it’s on their watch. It is here where readiness means moving prepared teams quickly with all their gear to do the job. Military teams just like an urban police SWAT team cannot have holes in them; every member is interdependent on the other. A rifle squad needs every member, as does a tank, aircraft, fighting ship and support and service unit. The military is serious business and with the drawdown and return to Fortress America, readiness is even more critical.

During Desert Shield all four services fielded units with crucial jobs unfilled. Some of these jobs had been assigned to single parents, others to a parent with a spouse also in the service. In all, there were more than 128,000 dual-service parents and single parents on active duty during the war. Many of these were slated for shipment to the gulf but had to stay home when a family-support plan fell apart. Parents would show up at the orderly room with children in tow. Many parents reached the gulf but then had to return home to sort out family problems. Others suffered psychologically for leaving their children. All this stress can’t help but impair a combat soldier’s effectiveness. In a NEWSWEEK POLL, 89 percent of the respondents were concerned by the idea of mothers with young children being sent to war.

Pregnancy is a perennial problem now. Between 10 and 15 percent of the servicewomen wear maternity uniforms during a normal year. It’s hard to get precise numbers, as the Pentagon treats this information with almost as much sensitivity as it devotes to the location of nuclear weapons. But there is no question that pregnancy soared during the war. Three Pentagon sources report that as of mid-February of 1991, more than 1,200 pregnant women had been evacuated from the gulf-the equivalent of two infantry battalions. “Nineteen ninety-two will be a baby-boomer year,” predicts one doctor at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. A Navy report says: “Pregnancy is viewed as epidemic.” One ship alone, the destroyer tender Acadia, become known as the “Love Boat” after 36 female crew members conceived. An Army support company commander at Fort Bragg told me that out of 100 soldiers he had 13 pregnant women stay behind, which left a big hole in his unit. “Fortunately,” he says, “the enemy gave us six months to fill those holes, or we would have been in a world of hurts.”

Most senior commanders sent the pregnant women home. On the other hand, I have talked to women soldiers who got pregnant while in the gulf and who told no one and stuck it out because “they didn’t want to let their team down.” Other women soldiers had their babies and six weeks later rejoined their desert units, They, too, didn’t want to let their units down. Too many woman soldiers say bitterly that their units “kept exacting statistics on pregnancy, but not on men’s sport’s injuries,” which, according to Col. Robert Poole, the physician who headed the triage center at Andrews AFB, was the biggest casualty producer in the gulf. Schroeder says pregnancy in the service was “just not a problem,” but the view at the bottom is that it was. Back in the days of the WACs, the senior women officers who ran that outfit had a simple rule: if you’re pregnant you’re out. Combat would intensify the problem. As Korean War machine-gunner Robert Haas puts it, “If a pregnant women catches a slug in the gut, what’s the statistic: one dead soldier or two?”

The gulf experience revealed other problems:

Fraternization. Put young men and women together for long stretches in the moonlike desert and they’ll do what’s natural. The military issued more than a million condoms.

Sexual harassment. Many women soldiers reported nightmare times. “There were hard stares and harder hits,” explained a woman signaler. “Some guys hadn’t seen a woman for five months and they acted like animals … They assumed we were [already] doing it.”

There were even reports of rape and female prostitution that required courtsmartial. (However, owing to the absence of drugs and alcohol, the incidence of crime was much lower in the gulf than in the peacetime military or any other war.)

Few of the women who served in combat-support units recommend the experience. Conditions get primitive when you near the cutting edge, Everyone complained about the sand, the grime and the heat, but women found the lack of privacy particularly hard. Bathing and body functions were difficult in front of men. Sleeping arrangements were uncomfortable. Men could at least slip away into the open desert in search of privacy. Most women stayed close in, fearing attacks from Iraqi soldiers.

In the end, the message I got from both male and female gulf veterans was: don’t rush to judgment on women in combat. Congress should not repeal the exclusion law “until each soldier is home, off leave and able to give her side of the story,” says Capt. Gloria Nickerson. Lt. Sandra Nieland, a paratrooper based at Fort Bragg who spent six months in the desert, seconds Nickerson: “The smart way is to research all the problems before Congress acts.”

It may be that an evaluation of the military’s gulf experience will suggest a number of combat roles for women. Any fix will be expensive. It costs $6 million to train an F-16 fighter pilot, for example. If a woman pilot becomes pregnant she doesn’t fly. If war comes along, a unit is missing a pilot, and, after the baby, that pilot must requalify. Renovating ship quarters is costly. So is child care and down time to deal with family problems.

There is one last question that can’t be answered by further study. The bottom line of war is about killing, and it’s unknowable how women will react to this. I spoke to an Army helicopter pilot, Capt. Wendy Mullins at Fort Bragg. Mullins wants to fly the Apache, an awesome tank stalker. Says her instructor pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Ralph Clemons, a veteran of two wars: “She’s more than qualified and should be given a shot.” When I asked her if she personally could kill, Mullins said: “I accept responsibility that I might shed blood or I may shed the blood of others.” The Army has changed. In the old days, the reply would have been, “I’d paint ’em red in a heartbeat. " Yet from the look in her warrior eyes and what her male flying mates told me, I have no doubt she’d shoot to kill and win. “There is more trauma hunting deer than tanks,” said Mullins. That’s true. With standoff weapons, you don’t see the tank, only a blip on the scope. Yet later, there’s the stress syndrome. Only shrinks and time can tell how the women will cope with the killing that will always be part of the obscenity we call war.

Total number of females who participated in Operation Desert Storm:

35,000 6 % of the total U.S. troops

Number who died: 11 5 due to hostile action, 6 due to accidents or natural causes

Number of POWs: 2

A majority of Americans think women should be allowed to fight, but only if they choose to.

Only if they want them 53%

On the same terms as men 26%

Never 18%

Able to refuse 54%

No special treatment 40%

Yes 57%

No 39%

Mothers leaving small children at home 89%

Women becoming pregnant and putting fetus at risk 76%

Women becoming pregnant and having to be replaced 64%

Women unable to perform at the same level as men 53%

Men will fight less well because women are present 38%

Yes 50%

No 47%

ADVANTAGE BURDEN Combat support 72% 20%

Jet-fighter pilot 63% 30%

On a Navy warship 59% 33%

Infantry soldier 41% 51%

For this NEWSWEEK Poll, The Gallup Organization interviewed 610 adults by telephone July 25-26. The margin of error is plus or minus 5 percentage points. Some “Don’t know” and other responses not shown. The NEWSWEEK POLL copyright 1991 by NEWSWEEK, Inc.

U.S. Army physical fitness standards for people age 22 to 26:

Women Men

Push-ups 56 80

Sit-ups 85 87

Two-mile run 15:36 12:36