Taken By Surprise

By Cathy Booth Thomas/El Paso Reporting by Douglas Waller/Washington and Sally B. Donnelly/Doha

Every morning since Shoshana Johnson went off to war nearly two months ago, her father has woken up and turned on the TV in their home in El Paso, Texas, hunting for cartoons for his granddaughter Janelle, 2. "We go through a kind of ritual. We turn on the TV and that keeps her absolutely quiet while I get her milk," says Claude Johnson, with a sparkle in his eye. "So I got up last Sunday to turn on the TV, searching for cartoons, and I saw on Telemundo that Iraq had prisoners of war." The sparkle disappears.

Johnson, who was born in Panama, understood all too well what the Spanish-language network was saying. One of the POWs was an African-American female, 30 years old, named Shana--Shoshana's nickname. Not quite ready to believe the worst, he called Telemundo, which confirmed that his daughter had been spotted on Iraqi TV. It would be six long hours, however, before officials at Fort Bliss called Johnson and his wife Eunice to confirm what the couple had already surmised from surfing TV channels and the Internet. Their gentle daughter--a single mom who, when she was a child, "wouldn't fuss, wouldn't fight"--had become a prisoner of war.

Specialist Shoshana Johnson, a U.S. Army cook, is one of five soldiers from the 507th Maintenance Company taken captive after their convoy was ambushed while supplying the 3rd Infantry Division in its push toward Baghdad. She is America's first female POW since the Clinton Administration lifted the "risk rule" in 1994--in effect letting women take military positions where they might come under enemy fire or be captured. All told, 19 soldiers from the 507th were wounded, killed or unaccounted for in the first week of war, including two more women listed as missing.

At Fort Bliss, the 507th's home base, shock came first, then silence. No one on the post could tell the families of the dead and missing what had gone wrong, what a cook and a computer specialist, a mechanic and an aspiring elementary school teacher were doing in a convoy so close to battle, so unprotected. The 507th's usual job is to keep diesel tankers rolling, fix generators and service Patriot missile batteries. But it was attacked on March 23, at night, somewhere on or near Highway 1, one of the main north-south roads in Iraq.

Reconstructing the attack has not been easy. Even the survivors are confused. Initial reports from the battlefield said the 507th had taken a wrong turn while passing near the town of Nasiriyah, but U.S. Congressman Silvestre Reyes, whose El Paso district encompasses Fort Bliss, says he was told by a senior officer that the convoy was ambushed on a bridge and had not taken a wrong turn. The lightly armed unit didn't have a chance. It had no combat escort, he says. If that's true, the fault for the convoy's vulnerability would lie not with its leader but with Army commanders. Reyes is reserving judgment while the Army investigates.

For the families, the lack of official information adds to the heartbreak. "Everybody that I spoke to at Fort Bliss said they had no knowledge," says Johnson. "I said, 'I got information off TV and off the Internet. What's up? You people don't know anything?' They said, 'No, we don't know.'"

Shana Johnson joined the army because she wanted to be a cook. She left the University of Texas at El Paso and enlisted four years ago so she could get professional training. Her father remembers the meals his daughter likes to make at home--jerk chicken and curry rice, specialties that reflect the family's West Indian heritage. Sometimes these days, however, he forgets to eat. He wonders what his daughter was doing in the line of fire. The 507th wasn't trained for battle, though Shana knew how to shoot an M-16 rifle in defense. Unlike pilots and special-ops teams, who are at higher risk for capture, maintenance outfits usually don't receive specialized training in evasion and escape techniques, much less how to handle interrogations--or worse--during captivity.

The Army has been good for the Johnsons, especially the women. Shana's sister Nikki left last week for officers' training school in Virginia. An aunt is a former Air Force nurse. (Two uncles and two cousins are also in the military.) But Shana Johnson's capture has sparked anew the debate over the proper role of women on the battlefield. Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, was in Washington last week to urge a change in the Clinton-era reforms after the war. She argues that women in combat risk rape by their captors. The two other women missing from the 507th may well be POWs too, she notes. "Feminists are heralding this as a step forward for women's rights, but it's a step back for civilization," she says. "If we say it's O.K. to put women in combat, we're saying it's O.K. for sex abuse by the enemy."

Proponents of an expanded role for women in the military disagree. For one thing, if rape is the concern, men too have been victims while in captivity. Besides, women POWs are not new. There have been dozens of female prisoners in U.S. history, including about 90 nurses captured in the Philippines during World War II.

Lory Manning, director of the Women in the Military project at the Washington-based Women's Research and Education Institute, wonders what women serving so ably in Kuwait and Iraq will do if they are pulled back from the front lines. "I hate to think their thank-you is 'Sorry, girls, you can't do this anymore,'" she says.

In the Johnson family's vaulted living room, Shana's dad is glued these days to the all-news TV networks. As a break, he walks the neat subdivision, tying yellow ribbons around trees. The streets are named after baseball heroes: Roger Maris, Casey Stengel, Yogi Berra. Just to the north lies the Fort Bliss military reservation, spread across white sands. With winds kicking up the Chihuahuan Desert last week, the sky over El Paso was filled with irritating sand--much like that coating the troops in Iraq. Johnson, trapped in his own hell, doesn't notice. "The wait is extremely painful now," he says. "We just don't know what's going on." Until the International Red Cross confirms that his daughter is still alive and well, he will watch--and worry. --With reporting by Douglas Waller/Washington and Sally B. Donnelly/Doha