Rivers - Beyond the call: three women on the front lines in Afghanistan

Cannonball fire burst through the trees, and Private Robert Shurtleff felt the ground shake.

It was dark. Shurtleff ducked and lifted his arms to shield his face from the mounds of dirt flying through the air. He looked quickly to his left and watched Diston, a man he had grown close to in just a few months, begin to fall. Shurtleff wanted to lunge across the mud to save him, but enemy fire stopped the private from moving. Instead, he watched Distons lifeless body fall atop one of many others, Continental and British alike, scattered across the Revolutionary War battlefield.

Shurtleff was toughlauded as one of the fastest, strongest, and most capable men in his scouting unit. He could read, a rarity in eighteenth-century America. He was the first to volunteer for dangerous missions. His fellow soldiers playfully called him Molly because of what they thought were slightly feminine characteristicshe had no facial hair and tended to shy away from the wrestling and roughhousing that other men participated in during brief moments of free time in the field.

It was 1782.

And what none of those soldiers knew was that the man everyone called Shurtleff, the one they loyally and fiercely followed into battle, was actually a woman.

Deborah Sampson was the first female known to have fought in an American war. She tried, but failed, to enlist twice (under different male monikers) before she perfected her ability to pass under the name Robert Shurtleff. Her work during the Revolutionary War proves that women have been capable of fighting in combat for the United States since the first group of men set boots to muddy ground for American freedom.

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18611865: Still unable to serve in the military but surely having heard about the work and accolades of Deborah Sampson (who became a brand, was the subject of at least one book, and toured the country lecturing about her experiences as a soldier), hundreds of women disguise themselves as men to fight in combat for both the Union and the Confederacy. As slave men sign up to fight for their freedom, slave women follow. Cathay Williams, a slave from Missouri, is forced to serve the Union Army as a cook. After her service was over, she disguises herself as a man (under the name William Cathay) and becomes a Buffalo Soldier. She is the only known ex-slave woman to have done so. She fought successfully for two years before a doctor discovered she was a woman and she was discharged. The Army refused to recognize her service or give her a pension.

1901: After three years of hiring female nurses as government contractors, the Army finally enlists its first group of women. In 1901 nurses become part of the regular Army. They are hired for three-year stints but are not allowed to become officers.

1908: The Navy establishes a nurse corps.

19141918: Some estimate more than thirty-five thousand women serve in the military during the war, with more than twenty-five thousand serving overseas throughout Europe as, among other things, nurses, secretaries, and phone operators.

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1948: Three years after the war ended, regular and reserve Army status is officially opened to all women.

The Womens Armed Service Integration Act creates a female reserve for the Army, Air Force, and Marines. Six years earlier, the Navy Womens Reserve Act created the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service).

1950: Female soldiers enter a combat theater for the first time as Army nurses, the only women allowed to do so during the war.

1951: Female reservists are forced into active duty for the first time.

1953: Fae M. Adams becomes the first female physician commissioned as an officer in the regular Army Medical Corps, as a first lieutenant.

19601973: Women serve in Vietnam as nurses training the South Vietnamese as early as 1956. By 1967 some five hundred thousand American troops, men and women, are on the ground in Vietnam. But the first female officer from the Womens Army Corps actually landed in the country five years before that. By the end of the war about eleven thousand women (mostly nurses) had been stationed in the conflict zone. Just as during World War II decades earlier, the need for troops forces a boon in progress for women in the armed forces. By 1972 all noncombat jobs are opened to women, and women are allowed, for the first time, to command men. Nearly sixty thousand troops died as a result of the Vietnam War and eight of them were women. In 1967 rules for retirement and promotion are opened to female officers in all branches.

1976: Enlistment age is reduced for women.

1979: For the first time men and women have the same qualifications for enlistment. The Womens Army Corps, no longer needed, was officially disbanded the year before. Women have been integrated into the regular Army and reserves for about thirty years.

1980: First women graduate from West Point.

1983: Four female military police officers deploy to an active combat zone; eventually one hundred women serve in Grenada. Females fly for the first time in conflict.

1988: Secretary of Defense Frank C. Carlucci issues a Standard Risk Rule that excluded women from noncombat units or missions if the risks of exposure to direct combat, hostile fire or capture were equal to or greater than the risk in the units they supported. Six years later Defense Secretary Les Aspin rescinds the rule, allowing women to serve in any units except those below brigade level whose primary mission is to engage in direct combat on the ground. This 1994 directive sets women up to serve in combat zones without acknowledging their combat roles through pay or title.

on what is supposed to be a routine mission to capture a kennel of guard dogs in Panama. But when her unit arrives, members of the Panamanian Defense Forces (PDF), which had been using the location as barracks, open fire. Bray tells her soldiers to return fire, becoming the first woman to command and lead a unit into battle. Bray and her thirty soldiers (both men and women) of the 988th Military Police Company fight for three hours during the December battle, which was on day one of the US invasion of Panama. The unit kills three PDF soldiers. Brays work, although applauded (not one American soldier died), forces public discussion about whether there is still a distinction between combat and noncombat units (tactical military police companies are supposed to fall into the latter category) during conflict. It is the first time the military questions whether frontlines still exist or shield women from direct combat.