Crossing The Lines

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."