Tucker Carlson should shut the hell up

The issue of women in the military was settled when he was in kindergarten learning his ABC's.

I wasn’t going to write about the kerfluffle Fox News host Tucker Carlson caused this week when he made some negative comments about the women serving in our military.  Women have served alongside men for more than 45 years now.  Tucker is a little late to the game with his denunciation of new uniforms for pregnant women and new hairstyle regulations for women.  It has been legal for women serving in the military to be pregnant and remain in uniform since 1975.

But I thought it might be useful to tell a story about the first woman I met serving in combat in Iraq in 2003.  I was with an infantry company in the 101st Airborne Division on a small outpost on the border with Syria in November of that year.  When I say the outpost was on the border, this is what I mean.  The first time I went out to relieve myself outside of the building where we slept, I was standing on a small piece of raised ground looking straight over a fence into Syria.  I could see a huge billboard showing the face of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad about 100 feet away.  Syrian soldiers in military vehicles were patrolling the road connecting the two countries our outpost was located on.

There wasn’t much happening out there in Rabia.  Occasionally, a patrol from the company would intercept a smuggler moving cigarettes or a herd of sheep across the border at night, but no one had fired a shot in anger there in weeks.

The area to the east of Rabia, however, was another story.  The road from Mosul ran through an outlaw town called Tal Afar.  It wasn’t safe at all.  Iraqi insurgents set IEDs along the road buried in piles of trash or in hidden culverts.  Most of the IEDs were made from old Iraqi army 155 millimeter artillery shells.  If one of those things went off, it could kill everything within 50 feet.

One morning I was sitting outside in the compound when a huge water tanker tractor trailer drove up, accompanied by two Humvees.  Neither of the Humvees was armored, although both had M-240 machine guns mounted on them.  The tanker also had a machine gun mount on the passenger side of the cab.  There were about 10 soldiers in the little convoy in all.  One of them was a female First Lieutenant in the Transportation Corps.  She was the company executive officer.  Part of her job was to run resupply convoys out to the combat units of the 101st, which were scattered all over northwest Iraq, most of them in small compounds like the one I was in.  One of the things they needed was a  refill of their small water tank that was mounted on a trailer that could be dragged behind a Humvee.  The local water wasn’t safe, so the transportation soldiers drove the tanker out to Rabia once a week or so.  Two of the soldiers riding guard on the tanker in the Humvees were enlisted women, a private first class and a specialist fourth class.

A few miles outside of Tal Afar the convoy had come under fire from insurgents hidden in some rocky ground alongside the road.  It was just a few shots, the soldiers on the machine guns fired back, and the convoy kept going.  No one was hit.  I asked the lieutenant if they had been shot at before.  Not very often, she said, but there was one road from Tal Afar to Sinjar that was really bad.  They’d had to resupply a battalion that had been in Sinjar recently.  Two Blackhawks were detailed to fly along with their convoy, and they made it okay.  She’d had only one soldier wounded in the six months they’d been up there in northern Iraq.

The lieutenant and her soldiers finished filling up the company’s water tank.  They didn’t hang around.  It wasn’t a social visit.  They quickly mounted up and headed back to the brigade basecamp at the airfield outside of Tal Afar.  They had 50 miles to go.  Fifty miles of bad road in a hostile country full of hostile insurgents who didn’t want them there.  Fifty miles where anything could happen.  They might run over an IED.  They might get sniped at again.  They wouldn’t be safe until they were back inside the wire at the Third Brigade Headquarters of the 101st Airborne Division. 

I doubt very much that Tucker Carlson has driven 50 miles through  enemy territory in a country the United States was at war with.  He doesn’t know what it’s like to be a soldier.  He doesn’t know what they do.  He doesn’t know that it didn’t matter to the soldiers in the company I was with if their water was resupplied by a woman or a man.  They all wore the same uniform.  They all fought for the same country. 

They were all soldiers, Tucker, even the ones who got pregnant and had babies, so shut the hell up.