The title Women Can't Fight comes from a well-known 1979 article by Jim Webb, Naval Academy graduate, novelist, senator, Secretary of the Navy, and combat officer in the Marines during Vietnam. He was wounded twice and has the decorations to show for his experience and courage. His article has raised controversy for years. He says women can't fight and he explains why.
In his article, Webb is highly sympathetic to the rights and the cause of women. He simply believes they have no place in combat. He believes "the country's fighting mission is being corrupted, with grave consequences to the national defense." One of the main problems, he says, is women. Among other issues, he states that sexual tensions in such an intimate, twenty-four-hour environment could cause problems of discipline and morale, and put women at risk of mistreatment.
His novel Fields of Fire conveys the stench, the filth, the fear, and the bewildering unexpectedness of fighting an elusive enemy in a jungle. It has often been called the best book about Vietnam. As for the article, this is an excerpt from "Women Can't Fight":
"We would go months without bathing, except when we could stand naked among each other next to a village well or in a stream or in the muddy water of a bomb crater. It was nothing to begin walking at midnight, laden with packs and weapons and ammunition and supplies, seventy pounds or more of gear, and still be walking when the sun broke over mud-slick paddies that had sucked our boots all night. We carried our own gear and when we took casualties we carried the weapons of those who had been hit.
When we stopped moving we started digging, furiously throwing out the heavy soil until we had made chest-deep fighting holes. When we needed to make a call of nature we squatted off a trail or straddled a slit trench that had been dug between fighting holes, always by necessity in public view. We slept in makeshift hooches made out of ponchos, or simply wrapped up in a poncho, sometimes so exhausted that we did not feel the rain fall on our own faces. Most of us caught hookworm, dysentery, malaria, or yaws, and some of us had all of them.
We became vicious and aggressive and debased, and reveled in it, because combat is all of those things and we were surviving. I once woke up in the middle of the night to the sounds of one of my machine gunners stabbing an already-dead enemy soldier, emptying his fear and frustrations into the corpse's chest. I watched another of my men, a wholesome Midwest boy, yank the trousers off a dead woman while under fire, just to see if he really remembered what it looked like.
We killed and bled and suffered and died in a way that Washington society, which seems to view service in the combat arms as something akin to a commute to the Pentagon, will never comprehend. And our mission, once all the rhetoric was stripped away, was organized mayhem, with emphasis on both words. For it is organization and leadership, as well as the interdependence sometimes called camaraderie, that sustain a person through such a scarring experience as fighting a war.
This is the only country in the world where women are being pushed toward the battlefield. The United States also has one of the most alarming rates of male-to-female violence in the world: Rapes increased 230 percent from 1967 to 1977 and the much-publicized wife-beating problem cuts across socioeconomic lines.
These are not separate issues, either politically or philosophically. They are visible peaks in what has become a vast bog. They are telling us something about the price we are paying, in folly on the one hand and in tragedy on the other, for the realignment of sexual roles. . . . .
Lest I be understood too quickly, I should say that I believe most of what has happened over the past decade in the name of sexual equality has been good. It is good to see women doctors and lawyers and executives. I can visualize a woman President. If I were British, I would have supported Margaret Thatcher. But no benefit to anyone can come from women serving in combat. . . . .
Their military function is to free the men to fight. . . . .
Why? Because men fight better. We can try to intellectualize that reality away, and layer it with debates on role conditioning versus natural traits, but it manifests itself in so many ways that it becomes foolish to deny it. When the layerings of centuries of societal development are stripped away, a basic human truth remains: Man must be more aggressive in order to perpetuate the human race. Women don’t rape men, and it has nothing to do, obviously, with socially induced differences. As Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin observe in The Psychology of Sex of Differences, man’s greater aggressiveness “is one of the best established, and most pervasive of all psychological sex differences.
Man is more naturally violent than woman. Four times as many men are involved in homicides as women. You might not pick this up in K Street law offices or in the halls of Congress, but once you enter the areas of this country where more typical Americans dwell, the areas that provide the men who make up our combat units, it becomes obvious. Inside the truck stops and in the honky-tonks, down on the street and in the coal towns, American men are tough and violent. When they are lured or drafted from their homes and put through the dehumanization of boot camp, then thrown into an operating combat unit, they don’t get any nicer, either. And I have never met a woman, including the dozens of female midshipmen I encountered during my recent semester as a professor at the Naval Academy, whom I would trust to provide those men with combat leadership."
Furthermore, men fight better without women around. Men treat women differently than they do men, and vice versa. Part of this is induced by society (for the tendency to want to help women who are, more often than not, physically weaker), and part is innate (the desire to pair off and have sexual relations). These tendencies can be controlled in an eight-hour workday, but cannot be suppressed in a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week combat situation. Introducing women into combat units would greatly confuse an already confusing environment and would lessen the aggressive tendencies of the units, as many aggressions would be directed inward, toward sex. rather than outward, toward violence. . . . What are the advantages to us, as a society, of having women in combat units? I don’t know of any. . . . ."
