U. S. women to face obstacles in new battlefront roles

CAMP LEJEUNE, N. C. — Women are about to break another barrier in U. S. military services. By year’s end, a half dozen women are expected to become the first assigned to a battlefront Navy job that is just now opening up to women.

U. S. military services are struggling to figure out how to move women into battlefront jobs, including infantry, armour and elite commando positions. They have until Jan. 1, 2016, to open as many jobs as possible to women, and to explain why if they decide to keep some closed.

The three Riverine Delta Company units are used for combat operations, often called on to move quickly into shallow waters where they can insert forces for raids or conduct rescue missions.

The Delta Company jobs are some of the first combat positions in the military to formally accept women, and breaking through the barriers hasn’t been easy. The pressure is mounting on the six women expected to be formally assigned to a Riverine combat company by year’s end.

Anna Schnatzmeyer, one of the women, knows all too well that the world is watching.

Her face is taut with concentration as she slowly manoeuvrs the Riverine assault boat away from the dock, using the complex controls to try and inch the 34foot ( 10- metre) craft straight back without sliding sideways.

Her instructor, standing next to her, orders her forward again, and despite the slow, careful creep, the Navy boat knocks into the pier.

It’s the first time she’s ever piloted a boat. She’s in full battle gear and the sun is beating off Mile Hammock Bay on the edge of Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. A stiff wind is tossing waves against the nearby shore.

Schnatzmeyer has already passed the combat skills course, allowing her to be part of a Delta Company crew, as an intelligence analyst or maybe a gunner who controls one of the machine- guns mounted on the boat, jobs that weren’t open to women before. But this Riverine crewman course would allow her to be a boat captain or coxswain — crew leaders who drive the boat or direct the fight. “Ever since I was little, this is what I wanted to do,” said Schnatzmeyer, who was in grade school when terrorists attacked on 9- 11. “My dad would take me to air shows and I would tell my family I wanted to be a soldier.”

She was drawn to the combat, to the guns.

“Growing up you want to join the branch and you want to do what you can to help, and then you realize, ’ I can’t go into combat,”’ Schnatzmeyer said. “You think, what’s the purpose of me being in the military? To sit at a desk?”

By lifting the ban on women in battlefront combat jobs, she said the Pentagon is now giving her and other women a chance.

Riverine combat units, for example, went to war in Iraq.

They were not used in Afghanistan, where river combat operations weren’t really needed.