No special treatment for women
Of about 300 Rhode Island National Guard military police serving in Iraq, 29 are women.
02:09 PM EDT on Wednesday, October 22, 2003
BY MICHAEL CORKERY
Journal Staff Writer
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- On patrol, Specialist Brooke Carney wears her brown
hair pulled behind a Kevlar helmet.
When Iraqi men realize this American soldier is a woman, some make
obscene gestures, a few have thrown rocks, but many just stare.
"They don't know how to react to a woman with such a huge gun," says
Carney, a Smithfield native.
Specialist Kyla Cannon, a medic from Narragansett, treated a soldier
with a head wound after an explosion rocked their Humvee. Days later,
Cannon pulled a piece of shrapnel out of her side -- discovering only
then that she had been hit in the explosion.
Specialist Bonnie Tanguay, of Warwick, has worked as a truck driver and
a mechanic in the Rhode Island National Guard. But her favorite mission
was manning a mounted machine gun driving through a firefight.
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ONE OF THE GUYS: Specialist Brooke Carney, of Smithfield, on patrol outside of Baghdad with the Army National Guard's 119th Military Police Company, says that Iraqis sometimes "don't know how to react to a woman with such a huge gun."
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"If you have your finger on the trigger, and you have the audacity and
tenacity to do it, you can do it," says Tanguay.
There are 29 women in the Rhode Island Military Police units serving in
Iraq out of about 300 total members.
These three women say they expect to be treated no differently from the
men on missions and around their camps.
Their commander, Lt. Col. James E. Keighley expects the same. "We don't
segregate them on missions," says Keighley. "They are right alongside
the guys."
WHEN BROOKE Carney, 22, joined the National Guard, she never expected to
go to war. Back then, she had one goal, to finish Rhode Island College
in four years.
She joined the Guard to help her pay for school. "The recruiter said you
will most definitely not go anywhere."
That was in June 2000 -- before the Sept. 11 attacks changed the
military landscape and the role of the National Guard.
Carney had just started her final semester, studying criminal justice at
RIC, when her unit, the 119th Military Police Company, was activated in
February for the Iraq war.
Her friends and family worried. She tried to reassure them, while at the
same time reassuring herself. RIC refunded her tuition and the money for
her textbooks, she says. She moved out of her apartment in Providence
and headed to war.
In Iraq, Carney guards convoys of military supply trucks traveling
between Baghdad and points south. She has traveled thousands of miles
but has so far escaped an attack. Unlike many MPs, Carney has never had
to use her weapon.
Overall, Carney says she's happy to serve in Iraq. But she says "there
are times when you think this is absolutely ridiculous, but someone has
to secure the convoys so supplies can get up here."
Carney lives with her otherwise-male squad in a large green tent at
Baghdad International Airport. She has carved out a corner of the tent,
drawing a curtain around her cot for privacy.
Next to her cot, she keeps a black plastic trunk, her Kevlar vest and
helmet, with her goggles attached. Above her bed hangs a large American
flag. The sheets on her mattress are pink and so is the small rug in
front of her cot.
"I don't want any special treatment. I don't deserve any special
treatment. I try to fit in as much as possible and still be feminine. I
am a girl at heart."
Carney says the five other women in the 119th occasionally watch movies
together. But they spend most of their time with men. For fun, she jogs
or power walks four miles around the Baghdad airport.
Carney hopes to finish her last semester at RIC by December 2004. Her
duty in the National Guard ends in 2006.
She's not sure about her plans for the future. "When I get home, I have
a lot of thinking to do," she says.
AFTER THE Iraqi insurgents started planting roadside bombs, Kyla Cannon,
24, woke up every morning in fear.
"It's like Russian roulette," she recalls. "It's like playing with your
life. But you have to do what you have to do sometimes. I'm confident if
I died, I would die doing something I love to do."
Cannon says all that separated her from death on the afternoon of Sept.
1 was about three feet.
She was sitting in the back seat of a Humvee, behind the driver, when a
makeshift bomb exploded, killing Staff Sgt. Joseph Camara, of New
Bedford, and Sgt. Charles Todd Caldwell, of Attleboro.
Caldwell sat in the front passenger seat; Camara sat behind him. Cannon
and the driver, Dameon Harrington, of West Warwick, survived the blast.
Cannon immediately went to work treating the gunner, Edmund Aponte, who
was in the turret of the Humvee when the bomb went off. Shrapnel hit his
neck and the top of his head. While waiting for the Medivac helicopter
to arrive, she shielded Aponte from the hot sun.
One of the drivers in the convoy pulled his truck in front of the Humvee
to protect Cannon and Aponte from the ammunition exploding inside the
burning vehicle.
Cannon could not give Aponte morphine for his head wound because she
needed to keep him conscious.
Aponte kept asking Cannon not to leave him. "You develop a bond with
these people like they are family," she says.
After the deaths, Cannon spoke to an Army counselor, but preferred
speaking with her friends, many of whom include other women in the unit.
There are about 15 women in the 115th Military Police Company.
Cannon joined the National Guard because she wanted to be a nurse, but
could not afford college. She still wants to pursue a nursing career,
but far from combat.
In the civilian world, Cannon plans to work with the elderly. "I love
old people," she says. "I believe that life is one big circle. You are a
baby who needs to be taken care of and then you are old and need to be
taken care of again."
Sitting in the shade of a concrete barrier at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait,
Cannon looks forward to the future, away from the Middle East. She reads
novels and swims in the base pool. Her fair skin has turned red from the
sun.
Earlier this month, the company moved out of Iraq and into Kuwait -- a
break from the constant danger and stress. Like many members of the
115th, Cannon expects she will not return to Iraq.
Cannon escaped the war unscathed, almost.
One day in the shower, she felt an object no bigger than the size of a
pencil eraser lodged in her skin. It turned out to be shrapnel from the
blast.
WHEN BONNIE TANGUAY reached Kuwait with her MP unit, some of the men
said her journey had ended.
There was no way a woman would join them in the combat zone, in Iraq,
they said. One month later, Tanguay was fighting her way out of an
ambush in Fallujah.
"Male, female, it doesn't matter," says Tanguay, 24. "I got to be shot
at and shoot back. Those guys caught on real quick."
Tanguay grew up playing soldier. She joined the National Guard out of a
sense of duty and because she wanted to learn new skills. At the time,
she was working on an assembly line at Amtrol Inc. in East Greenwich.
When Tanguay arrived at her MP unit, she had to prove herself.
"A lot of guys will try to help you, not to be insulting, but because
they think you can't do it. They will ask if you need help, until they
see you can spin a turret or change a tire."
That part came easily to Tanguay. An only child, she learned how to work
on cars from her father. Together, they fixed her first car, a 1984 Ford
Tempo.
At the 118th's Headquarters in Baghdad, Tanguay crawls under Humvees, in
a grease-stained T-shirt, tightening brakes and blowing out air filters.
She has cropped her blond hair short. At home, her hair falls past her
shoulders. Before the deployment, she had just bought a house in Warwick.
Tanguay says U.S. forces need to take a harder line in Iraq.
"How do you root out the bad from the good? It's very difficult. There
are always going to be casualties of war. We need to take a different
stand and go out there and own these roads."
Tanguay believes that the United States has achieved a great deal in
Iraq.
"I know [Saddam Hussein] was linked to terrorism. I wouldn't want to
come here for no reason. I believe in why we are here. I will be really
upset if they pull all the armed forces out.
"A lot of people say we should get the hell out and let them kill each
other," she says. "But if we pull out, we would have lost people for no
reason; it would be like another Vietnam."
DIGITAL EXTRA: Browse previous Journal dispatches featuring Rhode Island
National Guard military police units, post messages to the troops and
more at:
http://projo.com/extra/2003/iraq/
