Crossing The Lines

By Tim McGirk/ Baghdad

For Captain Shonnel Makwakwa, it was a rare assignment "outside the wire": a chance to break the monotony of life on the base and get out onto the streets of Baghdad. But it didn't take long to realize that this was no routine mission. Minutes after Makwakwa's humvee pulled out of Camp Liberty last December, bad news crackled over the radio: a supply convoy of six 18-wheel trucks was ambushed at Checkpoint 50, a freeway cloverleaf that is a notorious shooting alley for insurgents. Makwakwa, a bright, fit New Orleans native, handles medical logistics for the U.S. 10th Mountain Division--the kind of deskbound job often assigned to women G.I.s. Now she found herself wearing a first-aid kit on her belt, gripping an M-4 rifle and crawling on her stomach as enemy fire rained down. "I could hear the rounds pinging all around me," she says. "It was surreal." The scene was horrific. Flies were everywhere, and so was blood. "I'd dealt with people dying in the hospital, but it was nothing like this," she says. Makwakwa and another soldier kicked in the bullet-shattered windshield of the lead vehicle, but the driver was already dead. The driver of the second vehicle was screaming in agony from his wounds; he later died. Makwakwa and the patrol were able to save three other wounded drivers, but the memories of Checkpoint 50 are hard to erase--a constant reminder that while the military officially bars women from combat, the insurgency makes no such distinctions. "In Iraq, female soldiers are in combat," she says. "We're out there."

American women have served in every U.S. military conflict since the Revolution, usually as nurses or spies, but the country has never been comfortable with sending them into harm's way. Congress bars women from engaging in offensive warfare with the enemy. In response to dwindling military-recruiting numbers and demands by women's groups for more equality between the sexes, the Pentagon in 1994 loosened the ban and allowed women to take on "supporting" combat roles. In Iraq, that can involve anything from piloting combat helicopters to accompanying infantrymen and Marines on house-to-house raids and searching Iraqi women suspects for pistols and suicide belts. As the insurgency has grown more diffuse, increasing numbers of women are finding themselves in the teeth of combat. Says Lory Manning, a former Navy captain who is now a policy analyst at the Women's Research and Education Institute in Arlington, Va.: "This is the first time in U.S. history that women are allowed to shoot back."

It is also the first time they are suffering substantial casualties. Women troops make up nearly 15% of active-duty service members. Since 2003, 48 women have died in Iraq--just 2% of the total number of U.S. troops killed but far more than the 8 nurses killed out of 7,500 servicewomen in the Vietnam War. Three hundred have been wounded in Iraq. Few female troops are out of the line of fire. While military police patrol Baghdad with Iraqi cops who skirmish almost daily with insurgents, women clerks and cooks inside U.S. camps are vulnerable to rocket and mortar attacks by militants. Such hazards underscore the threats to life and limb that still confront all U.S. troops in Iraq, even as the military attempts to turn over more combat responsibility to Iraqi forces. First Sergeant Michelle Collins, 38, who waits anxiously every day for "her kids" to come back to Camp Liberty from patrol, says, "An IED [improvised explosive device] or a bullet doesn't have the gender marked on it."

To get an idea of how much the lines dividing male and female roles have blurred--or vanished--TIME joined a unit of U.S. military police from the 10th Mountain's 1st Brigade on patrol along the reedy canals and palm groves outside Baghdad. This is a favorite route for insurgents streaming in from Fallujah. As the troops load into their humvees, Sergeant Lenore Swenson, 25, from Colorado Springs, Colo., who dreams of leaving the Army someday and buying a horse ranch, tucks her flaxen hair under her helmet. Her friendly grin vanishes beneath a black fire-retardant mask with goggles. She trained as a driver, but her superiors switched her to gunner. "We need maturity behind the gun," says squad leader Darren Horve. "And she's got it."

As the humvee leaves camp, Horve yells out to her, "Hey, Swenson! Keep an eye open for triggermen hiding along the road." She nods. In the gunner's hatch, she is armed with a 240 Bravo machine gun that fires 950 rounds a minute, but she is more vulnerable than the men inside the humvee's armored shell to sniper bullets and shrapnel from roadside bombs. As the convoy rolls down the back roads, Swenson and the guys in her humvee keep up an easy, comradely banter, joking about the Iraqi kids they see along their patrol: one boy moves like a hip-hop dancer, another like a ninja fighter. Swenson says, "What I'll remember isn't threatening Iraqis with my machine gun but seeing the children wave as we go by," and then adds that "sometimes they do throw rocks." And so she remains vigilant. The roads are peppered with hidden land mines and bomb craters. After steering around one huge, blackened hole, Swenson says, "Boy, that one sure woulda woken me up." When they roll back to camp safely, the relief among the soldiers on patrol is palpable. They were lucky that dayno attacks, no IEDs. "I'm no hero. I don't want no Purple Heart," she says. "I just want to make it back without a scratch."

The common dangers facing service members in Iraq have helped close the gender gap. In today's Army, nobody gallantly holds the humvee door open for a female, and a woman is expected to carry as much (Swenson's full gear weighs 115 lbs.) and to shoot as well as a man. Women service members refer to themselves either as "combat Barbies"--those who fight the losing battle of trying to look pretty in Iraq's sandstorms and winter sludge--or "hooah girls," named after the motivational grunt of obedience that soldiers give their superiors. "We females do combat ops," says Sergeant Brandy Everett, 25, a self-confessed hooah girl from Rocky Mountain, N.C. "And you know what? I enjoy it." Still, some women in the military--and a good number of men--admit that the dangers of serving in Iraq have been jarring. Many enlisted before the Iraq war, when military life for privates was much the same as working in, say, McDonald's, only you had to salute your bosses. "I thought I'd be working in a hospital," says medic Sergeant Dywata Reynolds. "But then this war started." While on patrol recently, Reynolds, the mother of a baby, survived a fusillade of insurgent gunfire. Says Collins: "We didn't expect to be as close to combat as we are, but you can't get much closer than this."

Military officers say that the performance of female soldiers in Iraq offers little evidence to back a common argument against the use of women in combat: that they are more likely than men to panic under fire. Marine Colonel Bob Chase, who oversees the training of new Marine officers in Quantico, Va., says that last June, hours after a roadside bomb near Fallujah killed four Marines, including three women, and injured 11 other women, a female Marine officer pulled him aside. Standing with her were more than a dozen other female Marines. "We want to take their place," the officer told Chase.

And yet despite such displays of mettle, acceptance from some of the guys is grudging. Says a military-police sergeant in Baghdad: "I've got nothing against them. But they're slower and weaker"--and therefore would be a liability in hand-to-hand combat. Some commanders grumble about the loss of personnel in their units as a result of shipping home pregnant women. When Collins brought a group of female soldiers--assigned to search women during raids on suspected insurgent hideouts--to the 10th Mountain infantry's camp, she says, "the men all had one big frown, as if to say, 'What the hell are you doing here?'" She angrily demanded the infantrymen give her female soldiers breathing space so they could prove their worth. Usually in such circumstances, the men oblige, says Collins, but that doesn't spare women some awkward moments. "Even when I take off my helmet, the Iraqi women don't believe I'm a female," says Sergeant Elizabeth Ricci, 20. "They'll come up and tug my hair." And Iraqi men? "One man saw a ring on my finger and asked who I was married to," she recalls. Joking around, Ricci pointed to a male soldier beside her. "Next thing, the Iraqi opens his wallet and is over there trying to buy me," she says.

Such light moments provide only fleeting relief from the rigors of life in Iraq and the longing for family. More than from the perils of combat, women soldiers suffer from the trauma of separation from their children, according to Captain Kyle Bourque, an Army social worker at Camp Liberty. It's particularly trying for new mothers like Sergeant Reynolds, who was sent to Iraq when her baby was only 4 months old. Reynolds, a petite 25-year-old, tries to maintain contact by singing to her baby over the phone and staying up until 2 a.m. so that she can hook into the military's webcam service and watch Ariana crawling around at the baby sitter's house in New York. With older kids, the split is painful too. Warrant Officer Ena Gomez, 30, a single mother, is trying to raise a teenage daughter via e-mails and phone calls. Gomez works behind a desk but can hear insurgent mortars and rocket shells screaming over her trailer. "It's funny, but if I weren't here, I wouldn't tell my girl that I love her every day," Gomez says. "What if a rocket falls? I want her memories of me to be nice."

The exposure of women to combat isn't going entirely unchallenged by those who oppose the military's drift toward "co-location" of male and female troops. Led by Representative Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Republicans won passage of an amendment to last year's defense-spending bill that requires the Pentagon to issue a report this year showing that the military is following congressional restrictions on women in combat. But given the strains on the military, the need for women to take on expanded roles is likely to grow. In Iraq's danger zones, officers say, female MPs, medics and pilots have earned the right to be treated as equals. Major Tim Parker of the 10th Mountain Division says it's still hard for men to conceive of sharing a foxhole with their women comrades, but he acknowledges that change is inevitable. "There still needs to be a line," he says. "But in the future, I'm sure we'll cross that." Many women in Iraq would say they already have.

For more photos of the lives of women troops in Iraq, visit time.com

With reporting by Sally B. Donnelly/ Washington