Female Warriors in the line of fire - Our Female Military teach the Taliban a lesson

The whacky Afghans prove they understand that a Woman in Combat can help win the battle - I have served side-by-side with our female warriors and they are a force to be reckoned with - The female Marines and Seabees are top-notch and were in the line-of-fire just as much as the men were.......

Read this excerpt from the article in The Christian Scientist Monitor - The Taliban got an education on what they were up against - 

Women in combat: US military on verge of making it official

By Anna Mulrine | - CSM

In the opening days of America's war in Afghanistan, Capt. Allison Black's AC-130H gunship thundered low through the night sky. Below, US Special Operations Forces (SOF) were fighting alongside Northern Alliance warlords.

A navigator with the Air Force 1st Special Operations Group, Black was strapped in behind the pilots on a flight deck bristling with radios, gauges, and monitors that kept her in constant contact with SOF forces on the ground, helping them identify targets. It was Black giving the final "clear to fire" consent for the crew to release a barrage from a Gatling gun and other artillery on Taliban forces.

And it was Black's voice that special operators on the ground heard as they fought. Afghan soldiers overheard the chatter, too. On a mission over the northern Afghanistan city of Kunduz in 2001, one particularly fierce warlord, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, "found it amazing" that a woman was directing fire on the Taliban forces, says Black. "He thought it was so hilarious. He asked, 'Is that a woman?' "
When SOF fighters confirmed it was, Dostum, she says, was incredulous – and impressed: "America is so determined to kill the Taliban that they send women," he said.

Then, as Black called in another round of fire, Dostum dialed enemy fighters by phone, so they, too, could hear her voice on his walkie-talkie: "He really berated them, saying 'You're so pathetic, American women are killing you. You need to surrender now,' " Black says.
Taliban forces did surrender the next morning, and the first female navigator to open fire in combat came to be known as the "Angel of Death" among the Afghans. That battle – and others – also made Black, now a major, the first woman to earn the Air Force's combat action medal.
http://www.minnpost.com/christian-science-monitor/2012/07/women-combat-us-military-verge-making-it-official
 

A reminder

While you were out at the ballgame, shopping or the weekend BBQ, brave men and women stand ready to protect our country and others who need our help.

A member of the Female Engagement Team (FET) US Marines Cpl. Reagan Odhner and GySgt Michelle Hill from the 1st battalion 7th Marines Regiment patrol together with Afghanistan National Army (ANA) soliders in Sangin in Helmand Province, June 6, 2012. (Adek Berryadek Berry/AFP/GettyImages


Remember them as they are out there 24/7/365.  They volunteered to protect our freedoms around the world and we are safe because they stand ready to do whatever is required.

SEMPER FI LADIES - Photos of the Female Marines who are out at the tip of the spear

Left: Female Engagement Team leader Sgt. Sheena Adams, 25, of Kauai, Hawaii, outside of a clinic in Landay Nawah County on Jan. 31.

Right: Hospitalman Shannon Crowley, 22, of Swampscott, Mass., on Jan. 31.

One of the most popular posts I have made here in the past two years has been the one about female Marines who serve on the FET (Female Engagement Teams) in Afghanistan. See the post at the enclosed link:

http://usnavyjeep.blogspot.com/2010/12/semper-fi-ladies-female-marines-make.html

These female Marines are the real deal and tough as nails. They walk patrols side by side with their male counterparts and accept the risk as they have a mission to complete; To demonstrate to the people of Afghanistan that we are here to assist them and will provide them with access to basic healtcare which has been unknown in many parts of this land.

Foriegn Policy magazine has presented another great photo essay on the ladies who go out into the villages and try to assist the citizens with healthcare, schooling and basic services that only they can offer to the families of Afghanistan.

Take a look at the additional pictures that you will find on the FP website.

Female Engagement
In Afghanistan, a Marine's work is never done.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/07/27/female_engagement

About the Photographer -

Rita Leistner is a photographer and writer based in Toronto. In 2003, she crossed into Iraq on foot, traveling with Kurdish smugglers from Turkey.

She later spent four months embedded with the U.S. 3/7 Cavalry during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

She has won 12 Canadian National Magazine Awards and co-authored two books, Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq and Ihe Edward Curtis Project: A Modern Picture Story.

She teaches photojournalism at the University of Toronto.

SEMPER FI Ladies - Female Marines make a difference when troops need to deal with the female citizens of Afghanistan

Enclosed is a selection from the photo essay by Getty Images photojournalist Paula Bronstein. Photographed last month, the images depict the women deployed as the second Female Engagement team in Afghanistan. Female Marines gain access where men cannot and train for any possible situation, including learning Afghan customs and basic Pashtun language...

These intrepid female warriors are assigned to the FET (Female Engagement Team) 1st Battalion 8th Marines, Regimental Combat team II - Pics were taken at their forward operating base on November 17, 2010 in Musa Qala, Afghanistan.

The 48 women in the US Army’s Female Engagement Team help with non-military operations such as medical visits and educational programmes. The recruits have been taught Afghan customs and have learned the language so they find it easier to earn people’s trust.

Weeks into a seven-month deployment that has sent them in twos and threes to 16 outposts across Helmand, including Marjah and other spots where fighting continues, the women have encountered resistance: some from Afghan women and some from male Marines and U.S. commanders skeptical about the teams' purpose.

The women are taking it in stride. "If it were easy, it wouldn't be interesting," they said.

No one disagrees that the teams have potential and that female Marines are needed, especially at medical clinics, as part of the counterinsurgency campaign. As the officers say, you can't swing the population to your side if you talk to only half of it.

But interviews and foot patrols with Marines during two recent weeks in Helmand show that the teams, which have gained access to some of the most isolated women in the world, remain a work in progress.

One trip in early May to offer medical care to Afghan women in the village of Lakari showed the program's promise, problems and dangers. The trip was delayed because of reports that the Taliban had put a bomb in the intended clinic building; although nothing was found, the Marines moved to another place.

Building trust

Gardner, a helicopter mechanic who was working with the Marines from Pendleton but had not trained with them, found herself as the lone woman dealing with five ailing Afghan women. There was no female interpreter or medical officer — there are chronic shortages of both — and the Afghans refused to leave their compound or let the male interpreter and medical officer come to them. Gardner devised a solution.

"Some of these women would rather die than be touched by a male," she said. "So, we'll diagnose by proxy."

By the end of the day, an Afghan woman was trusting enough to hand her baby to Gardner to take to the medical officer, who diagnosed digestive problems from a diet of sheep and goat milk.

She took the women's vital signs herself. Then she had an older Afghan woman come outside with her to describe the women's symptoms, chiefly headaches and stomachaches, to the male interpreter. He translated for the American male medical officer. (The American men were partly obscured from the older woman by a mud wall to respect her modesty.) Eventually medication — the painkiller ibuprofen — was handed over to the older woman to distribute.

Sgt. Gabriel Faiivae, 25, the patrol leader, who had kept watch outside the clinic, acknowledged that the logistics had to be fixed. "But as far as building trust, it was really good," he said.

Villagers are often stunned, if not disbelieving, to see women underneath the body armor. Inside compounds, the female Marines say they have been poked in intimate places by Afghan women who want to make sure they are really women.

Team leaders said some male Marine commanders have been reluctant to send the women on patrols, fearing either for their safety or that they will get in the way.

Women, who make up only 6 percent of the Marine Corps, are officially barred from combat branches like the infantry. In a bureaucratic side step commonly used in Iraq for women needed for jobs such as bomb disposal or intelligence, the female engagement teams are added to the all-male infantry patrols.

Measuring up

The women, who carry the same weapons and receive the same combat training as the men, cannot leave the bases unless men escort them. Lt. Natalie Kronschnabel, one of the team leaders, said she had to push a Marine captain to let her team go on a five-hour patrol.

"It wasn't that hard, it was only four or five clicks," said Kronschnabel, 26, using slang for kilometers. "And they kept asking, 'Are you doing OK? Are you breathing hard?' "

Like the other women, Kronschnabel, a high-school athlete, had to meet rigorous physical requirements in the Marines.

Male Marines, who consider themselves the most aggressive fighters in the armed services, have been won over by the female engagement teams, referred to as FETS.

"I was skeptical 100 percent," said Sgt. Jeremy Latimer, 24, a platoon leader in Company F of the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, who is based at Patrol Base Amir, an outpost in central Helmand. "I didn't like taking anybody who wasn't infantry. Basically, I was worried about getting shot at with FET Marines."

He changed his mind after he took two of the women into a village elder's home to smooth the way for a male medical officer to treat the Afghan's wife and daughters — again, from the other side of a wall. Latimer said the favor was important, because the elder had become an informant about the Taliban.

Since then, Latimer said, Afghans have been more receptive when his patrols included the female Marines, who hand out stuffed animals to children. When male Marines try that, he said, "It's just a bunch of guys with rockets and machine guns trying to hand out a bear to a kid, and he starts to cry."

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I had the privilege of meeting and speaking with many female Marines based out of Camp Leatherneck while I was there and working in concert with them at Camp Fallujah, Iraq while I was deployed there in 2004 - 2005.

They are military professionals and do an amazing job in difficult places....

SEMPER FI Ladies....This Seabee was always glad to have you there and appreciated the job you did.....no doubts from me on why they were there as they are Patriots and want to serve their country.