Yes, she can, but risk too great

I had taken a hard tumble during the Sunday morning, point-to-point ride across broken ground, but fortunately my horse had not bolted away, allowing me to regain saddle and complete the course. While my friends settled down with mugs of beer and ham sandwiches, I made my way to the Duty Medical Officer’s room, Army Hospital, Deolali (Maharashtra). After examining my bruises, Capt (Ms) Farida Mendonza cheered me up that there was no bone injury. After the mandatory anti-tetanus injection and an ointment rub, she pronounced in a gentle voice, ‘You will soon be stiff as a plank for a few days,’ and then with a smile added, ‘but fit to ride next Sunday!’

This episode occurred way back in 1958. When I returned from a spell in Ladakh to Jalandhar Cantt in 1968, adjoining the Officers’ Mess was a sprawling bungalow lived in by Lt Col (Mrs) Farida Pai, AMC. Was she the same, I wondered. Out of curiosity, I called on the woman officer, and indeed she was! She had married a Major, a friend of ours.

Over the next few days, I sensed that Colonel (Mrs) Pai was the buzz of the cantonment, being the first woman officer of the Indian Army, in command of a unit of some 500 jawans. And what is more, her unit was adjudged as the best administered among all headquarters corps troops entities. And her battalion basketball team had won the championship for the year!

There is no doubt that in today’s context of granting gender equality in command appointments of combat units, if Colonel Pai was to take the field in a live combat zone, she will be as much an inspiration to her jawans as any male officer would. But if in the fog of battle, she was taken POW, it is also a certainty that her gender sensibilities will be brutalised.

I am drawn to this conclusion by two narratives of war crimes from the not-too-distant past. The first narrative was of an odious experience of two US army women officers who were part of the US-led ‘Desert Storm’, a brief war to evict Saddam Hussein from his ill-gotten occupation of Kuwait. A helicopter piloted by Captain Rhonda L Cornum was shot down over Iraqi territory. The crew survived but was taken POW. Rhonda’s testimony after her release makes for a chilling reading — she had fractured both legs, broken one knee and had a bullet through one shoulder. But despite the agony from multiple injuries, both Rhonda and her equally traumatised woman co-pilot were sexually violated throughout their captivity.

Then there was a Pentagon report in the decade of 2000, published by Time magazine, which alluded that about 70% women officers of the US armed forces were sexually harassed during their service, and 30% were violated. With this backdrop, let us abjure the idea of enrolling women in live combat zone roles.