How women played crucial roles in Iraq – and changed US military forever

At the time of the US-led invasion of Iraq, American military women were still officially banned from ground combat.

Yet the nature of that war with its ill-defined frontlines and insurgent attacks meant that female troops quickly found themselves under enemy fire – and they began firing back. Twenty years on, what started on that chaotic battlefield in Iraq ended up changing the US armed forces forever.

Related: ‘The US army destroyed our lives’: five Iraqis on the war that changed the Middle East

During the war, women played crucial roles under fire alongside their male counterparts, including intelligence-gathering, medical aid, being deployed with the national guard, the military police and combat service support roles. All the while, many also faced issues including ill-fitting uniforms, sexual harassment and difficulty applying for veteran benefits upon leaving the service.

Since the Al-Qaida terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, more than 300,000 US women have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. A total of 166 women were killed during combat operations and over 1,000 were wounded, according to the Washington, DC-based Service Women’s Action Network (Swan).

Despite the Combat Exclusion Policy prohibiting women from being “assigned” to ground combat battalions in the invasion, commanders shifted to reflect the new reality without officially changing policy, by saying women could be temporarily “attached” to direct combat units.

“That was a war that didn’t really have a normal … battle space … If you were on … transport from the airport to the camp, you could find yourself having to fight,” Lory Manning, a retired captain who served over 25 years in the navy, told the Guardian.

On the ever-shifting frontline, she said: “Army or marine corps majors or captains would have to decide whether to send an infantry patrol out without a medic – or to send a woman.

“Also, with the cultural differences [in] Iraq and Afghanistan, if you were going to search a [local] woman, it had to be done by another woman. If you were going to get the sort of intelligence you could get by talking to the local people, our men couldn’t talk to the local women. Our women could talk to both the men and women,” Manning, now a director at Swan, added.

As a result, female Marines on the “Task Force Lioness” ad hoc unit accompanied male infantry soldiers on raids and house searches.

In Fallujah in June 2005, 13 marines were killed after a suicide bomber targeted an American convoy – 11 of the marines were female, marking the deadliest day for American female soldiers, at the time, since second world war.

Other women in a variety of roles became engaged in huge firefights and killed enemy insurgents, with some being killed and injured themselves.

In 2005, Sgt Leigh Ann Hester became the first female army soldier in US military history to be awarded the Silver Star for her actions during a firefight outside Baghdad that year.

While scanning and clearing a route for a supply convoy, Hester’s squad was attacked by enemy insurgents. Hester directed her team andthen began fighting on foot, killing at least three insurgents. In the end, 33 insurgents were killed or wounded and one captured, while everyone on her unit survived.

Other women such as Phyllis Wilson, a retired army veteran who served 37 years as a military intelligence voice intercept operator, played crucial roles for special operations missions.

Wilson was first deployed to Iraq in 2006. She slept surrounded by sandbags to shield against mortar attacks and delivered intelligence to her special operations teams about enemy insurgents.

Wilson also assisted with the Female Engagement Teams dealing directly with the Afghan and Iraqi civilians in the war zone amid great danger that evolved from the ad hoc Lioness taskforces.

“We had to select, both psychologically and physically, the right people … We couldn’t let these first females fail and we had to make sure … We give them any kind of training that they needed and push them to believe that what they could do was possible,” Wilson explained.

“We had to also … screen out those that might not hold up under the kind of incredible scrutiny both by so many other soldiers and by the American public as well. You’ve got to find this amazing combination of skills and mentality all in one little package of one human being,” she added.

“There were only two women on these teams when they ultimately went out with the guys so the two of them had to have each other’s back as well as all of the men that they were supporting. But it made such a huge difference in a society and a culture that we were trying to learn from and get information from.”

Yet the women often ended up in combat zones with kit such as body armor tailored for men.

“I was protected but I … can’t get a weapon out … because the gear was not angled right, the pockets were not right, the equipment either kept you from breathing or it was too loose and you were sure if something comes, it’s going to hit a soft part and kill me,” said Wilson, now president of the Virginia-based Military Women’s Memorial.

“You would choose, if you thought it was going to be a more worrisome situation, to have freedom of movement as opposed to protection.”

Meanwhile, Lourdes Tiglao, who heads the Department of Veteran Affairs’ Center for Women Veterans, told the Guardian that she was one of few women with the air force’s critical care air transport team in Afghanistan after 9/11. “I felt that I had to prove myself every time that I belonged there,” said Tiglao, who was tasked with stabilizing wounded troops as part of a three-person team that operates portable intensive care units on transport aircraft. At 4ft11in, her body armor came down to her thighs.

“You’re a woman and you’re super short, and so … you feel like you can’t show any weakness because they will look at you like, ‘If you’re going to crack under pressure, how can we trust you with someone’s life?’” she said.

For others like Toni Hightower, a retired major and combat veteran who served in the army for more than 23 years, the line between displaying the hardness of a leader and the softness of someone grieving lost colleagues was often blurred.

“Anytime you’re in a leadership role … I wanted to go on hard, but not so hard as to not give my soldiers … the clarity that it is OK to grieve.”

“I wanted to give them that safe space to say, ‘I’m hard as woodpecker lips, but. … I’m hurting too, and I need you to see that’ … Not only can we be hard, we can also be soft…we show … it’s okay to be both,” Hightower, who now works at the Center for Women Veterans, added.

In 2013, then defense secretary Leon Panetta lifted the official ban on women serving in combat, formalizing what had become business as usual for so many of those deployed.

Britain signaled it would follow suit, then later phased in equality of opportunity.

Currently, women make up 16% of the US military, with more than 100 having graduated from the army’s rigorous Ranger School. In 2021, a female sailor became the first woman to successfully complete the intense 37-week navy special warfare training course.

Three million women have served in or with the US military since the American Revolution, according to a national digital register.

Yet it was only last year that the army designed a “tactical bra” for its female soldiers, which veterans say was long overdue.

To Kara Vuic, a historian at Texas Christian University who focuses on the role of women in military history, simply lifting a ban is not enough.

“Integration doesn’t mean opening the door and saying, ‘Everybody’s welcome now’ … If you want to actually integrate women into these roles, you can’t start from the presumption that women have to integrate into a culture and a practice that has been designed for men,” she said.

As improvements continue to be made, albeit slowly as some critics argue, the feminist dilemma of signing up for what can ultimately be the business of killing and being killed in war remains.

Wilson concluded: “As a nation, I think we’ve had to grapple with the idea that women, given the opportunities that we now have, also means that we die, we are gravely wounded, and we may be a prisoner of war. You can’t get equality without the downsides as well.”