One debate that has been going on for the past few years is the debate about women and if they should be allowed to fight for our country in front-line combat. I believe that women should not be able to fight in combat. Before you drop this paper and beat me up, let me just say I am not against women, women’s rights or anything like that! I believe that women in combat will change our male soldier’s mindset during combat and could be more dangerous for our troops. To make my point I want to cover the mental aspect, people that agree with me for the wrong reasons, and go over some feedback I received when I asked my Facebook friends this question. Again, please don't think I am a member of the “He-man Woman Haters Club”! The most important thing in combat is a soldier’s mental state, remembering your job, your training and trying your hardest to stay calm. One minor slip of any of these things can have a major impact, not just on you but on everyone fighting with you. I believe having women in front line combat can cloud male soldier’s mindset. Growing up, most males were taught not to hurt females in anyway and to protect them from men that do. I know I was taught that at a young age and even spent a night or five in the custody of Pueblo and Boulder’s finest for protecting females. During my time in the US Air Force as a special operations Pararescueman, I had to do a lot of extreme and flat out CRAZY training. During our “Survival School” or “SERE” training you are flown into the middle of the freezing, snowy mountains of Washington and forced to live off the land and evade the “enemy” for 7 days (not fun). On the 7th day you are captured, beaten, interrogated, starved, beaten some more and tortured (really, it wasn’t fun), all in an attempt to make you tell the enemy secret information and information that can help them hurt your fellow American soldiers. In my group there were 3 women and 7 men. During the first days of being out in the mountains, I noticed some of the male team members giving up their portions of food so the girls could have more to eat. I mean that's awesome if you're on a date or something but not when you are starving and trying to survive in the middle of the mountains! Sadly those male team members were not able to finish the training due to fact they collapsed from not having food, water, energy or in my opinion common sense. On the day we were captured, we were forced to stand on a large cement pad. The jerk bad guys made us strip down and they began to shoot us with ice cold water and interrogate us. I noticed some male team members start to get aggravated and lose their bearing when the bad guys would soak, strike and yell at the girls. The bad guys noticed too, so they began to strike the females with the frozen hoses. Their tactics worked, 2 of the males tried to attack the bad guys which in turn cost them their “life” and they were dropped from training. During the next few days we were kept up, stuck in boxes, tortured, and beat. All of that fun stuff had an effect on the women, they all cracked. They gave the bad guys all of our teams “secrets”. So out of the 10 of us, just me and another male made it through the training. I have also witnessed stuff like this happen in Afghanistan and Iraq, but out of respect I will not talk about that. Many people agree with my statement that women should not be allowed in combat, but a lot of those people agree for the wrong reasons. Writer for psychology today, Hadara Graubart asked one male and female the question “Should everyone have the right to fight?”. In which Kingsley Browne, said no, with his reasons basically being that women are weak, not willing to take risk, kill, and can't tolerate pain. After reading that you probably had the same reaction as me and wanted to slap the guy. I do agree with him saying no, but other than that I think the man is nuts and probably single. I met
