All female MEDEVAC crew in Iraq

Thanks to Sgt. Neil Gussman (a badass in his own right), we have the story of an all-female MEDEVAC crew, working in Iraq.  I encourage you to dig around his blog, as many of his posts highlight the women with whom he serves, and the blog is well-written  in general.

Other women profiled on Sgt. Gussman’s blog:

Staff Sgt. Elisa Long, 27

Chelsea Clinton. Didn’t she turn out nice?

from wikipedia

Congratulations to her: she announced her engagement yesterday.

Michele Surprenant, social worker and mom from Decatur, GA

Ms. Suprenant has fostered and adopted two children so abused that they have significant and permanent disabilities. On a social worker’s salary, she provides excellent care and therapy for them.  How awesome is that?

The 16-year old biological mom of one of the kids has since had three more children.  Not awesome.

The women in these pictures are hard, hard ladies.

A sad commentary on the status of women in some parts of the world can be found here, where a blogger has chronicled women who have been burned by relatives or rejected suitors for such offenses as turning down marriage proposals or being the relative of a man who insulted someone else.

Brig. Gen. N. Lee S. Price, among others

Army’s first female program executive officer begins tenure

Nov 23, 2009, by Timothy Rider

The Army marked a historic milestone Nov. 20 when Brig. Gen. N. Lee S. Price became its first female program executive officer.

Price became leader of the Army’s Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications-Tactical during a Change of Charter Ceremony at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. This continued a historic era, marked notably in July 2008 when the United States Senate unanimously confirmed Gen. Ann Dunwoody as the Army’s first female four-star general.

Dunwoody became the first female four-star general of the U.S. Army more than 37 years after female Soldiers began serving alongside their male peers. About 5 percent of general officers in the Army are women, which includes mobilized Army Reserve and Army National Guard general officers.

Another notable leader aiding the advancement of women in the military is Command Sgt. Maj. Cynthia A. Pritchett, the senior enlisted leader for the Army element of the U.S. Central Command, who is the longest serving female command sergeant major in the service. Pritchett joined the Women’s Army Corps in July 1973 before it was integrated into the regular Army. She will officially retire in March 2010.

The Army’s first female general officers were promoted on June 11, 1970 when Secretary of the Army Stanely Resor promoted both Col. Anna Mae Hays, chief of the Army Nurse Corps, and Col. Elizabeth P. Hoisington, director of the Women’s Army Corps, to brigadier general.

Price will now lead a workforce of more than 1,900 employees stationed across the world and an annual budget that exceeds $6 billion in 2009. She rejoins an Army Team C4ISR community, which she said seems to “always make the impossible happen.”

PEO C3T develops, fields and sustains a vast range of capabilities fielded to units in training and in theater to regions throughout the world. These include power generation; satellite communications and network capabilities; digital tools to plan the battle; intelligence and situational awareness systems; current force radios and capabilities to sense and warn of incoming mortar attacks…

Price’s previous assignment began in July 2007 as deputy program manager for brigade combat team – network integration of the former Future Combat Systems program, now known as PEO Integration.

During the ceremony, Popps presented the Legion of Merit Award to Price for her work in delivering an integrated brigade combat team capability to the Army in her previous assignment.

She received the Army Acquisition Excellence Project Manager of the Year Award in October 2004 when she was PM for Defense Communications and Army Transmission Systems.

As PM DCATS, she managed programs valued at more than $2 billion. These included a $300 million project to build a commercial communications network in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait; fielding the first Very Small Aperture Satellite Terminals to combat-service- support troops and more than quadrupling deliveries of Land Mobile Radio systems to numerous Department of Defense forces and government agencies.

Previous to FCS, she held a three-year tenure as the deputy acquisition executive for the United States Special Operations Command…

Earlier positions include tactical integration manager for the Defense Message System, Defense Information Systems Agency, known as DISA; chief of the director’s group working for the DISA director; and project manager, Defense Information System Network-Pacific, a $2.5-billion joint services program. She also served as product manager, Theater Automated Command and Control Information Management System in Seoul, Korea.

[And my favorite part:] Price began her military career in 1975 as a private first class in the Alabama National Guard, and after being commissioned through Officer’s Candidate School, she was transferred to the Signal Corps. She entered active duty in October 1981.

Laurie (or Lorrie?) Sullenberger, wife of the pilot of the Miracle on the Hudson

I thought it was so cool when she spoke at her husband’s first news conference after the event, and she said something like, “I heard there was a problem, but I thought, Sully can take care of it.  There was no doubt in my mind.”  My husband is so competent it bores me, so I know how this will turn out. Plane crashing?  Life flashing before your eyes?  Calm down- my husband’s on that.  We’ll be drinking coke floats and smoking cigarettes in a minute; you just watch.

Then, when they were interviewed by NBC’s Matt Lauer, she said this: “He doesn’t know I’m gonna say this, but I had joked the other day that … the hero sex really helps a 20-year-old marriage.”

Awesome!

USMC Special Forces…ladies…yeah, you read that right

MarSOC looks to women for new mission

[me: The Marines have been using Female Engagement Teams for a while, but the FET members have always been from other MOSs, training on their own time, and begging for the time off to do missions.  Now, they are official.]

By Trista Talton – Staff writer
Posted : Sunday Nov 15, 2009 11:39:35 EST

CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. — Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command is making women an integral part of spec ops teams in Afghanistan, where they’ll be used to develop a rapport with Afghan women and, it is hoped, build broader support for the frail Afghan government.

MarSOC’s first female engagement team — comprising a captain, two corporals and a Navy corpsman — will spend about nine months with 1st Marine Special Operations Battalion, which is scheduled to take command of a task force later this year that will oversee U.S. spec ops forces in northern and western Afghanistan.

By attaching female troops to spec ops teams, officials hope to better navigate local Afghan customs that often prohibit interaction between women and men who are not members of their families. Just as soon as MarSOC was notified that 1st MSOB would deploy as a task force, officials made preparations for an engagement team.

“The whole goal is recognizing that the battle in Afghanistan is getting the people to buy into the idea of a state,” said an operations officer with the Marine Special Operations Regiment, a lieutenant colonel who asked that his name be withheld for security reasons. “You’re not going to get that buy-in by appealing to half the population.”

Federal law bars women from serving in ground combat units, including front-line spec ops forces such as MarSOC teams. But in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the front lines are often blurred, female service members have found themselves dodging rounds and joining firefights alongside men.

Officials said only that “a lot” of women expressed interest in joining the team after a word-of-mouth campaign alerted them to the opportunity.

Those selected had to meet specific criteria, which included having a first-class physical-fitness test score of 225 or higher and prior combat deployments.

They train to the same standards as MarSOC “enablers” — everyone from radio operators to engineers — who deploy with spec ops companies or adviser groups. That training requires them to master two weapons, the M4 carbine and 9mm pistol. Once they join their units, they’ll do unit-specific training, learning how to approach an Afghan village, for example, and how to respond to an ambush.

Hosptial Corpsman 2nd Class Jessica Ramon, a member of MarSOC’s support group, was selected for the first engagement team. She said she and the other women have learned some Urdu and Pashto, common languages in Afghanistan, but will rely on interpreters to communicate.

“I’m kind of a little nervous just because I haven’t been there before,” Ramon said. “But I want to go, and I’m ready to go.”

Amber Bahr, 19, yet another Army cook who is all badass

What are they teaching these cooks, man?

If you were following the stories coming out of Ft. Hood, and heard a snippet about “people were tearing apart their uniforms to deliver first aid”, and “badly wounded people were treating other soldiers”, they may have all been referring to this woman:

Amber Bahr

When she was 17, just graduated from high school, and was about to join the Army, she looked like this:

An even younger Amber Bahr

When she was on the TODAY Show, she looked like this. I would love to show you what she looked like on the NBC’s TODAY Show, but their videos are a pain in the ass embed, so screw them.  Try this.

Her hometown paper had this to say about her.

She talks to the President on the telephone today.

Pakistan Fashion Week

Pakistan models defy Taliban with 1st fashion week

Chris Brummitt, November 07, 2009 06:31 AM EST

KARACHI, Pakistan — Some women strode the catwalk in vicious spiked bracelets and body armor. Others had their heads covered, burqa-style, but with shoulders — and tattoos — exposed. Male models wore long, Islamic robes as well as shorts and sequined T-shirts.

Enlarge photo

A model displays a creation by Pakistani designer Ismail Fareed, during the Pakistan Fashion Week, Karachi, Pakistan, Friday, Nov. 6, 2009. The fashion week is delayed due to ongoing militant violence and security fears which kept foreign guests away.

Enlarge photo

A model displays a creation by Pakistani designer Ismail Fareed, during the Pakistan Fashion Week, Karachi, Pakistan, Friday, Nov. 6, 2009. The fashion week is delayed due to ongoing militant violence and security fears which kept foreign guests away.

Enlarge photo

A model looks on while waiting at the backstage prior to present a creation by Pakistani designer Rizwan Beyg, during the Pakistan Fashion Week, Karachi, Pakistan, Friday, Nov. 6, 2009. The fashion week is delayed due to ongoing militant violence and security fears which kept foreign guests away.

As surging militant violence grabs headlines around the world, Pakistan’s top designers and models are taking part in the country’s first-ever fashion week. While the mix of couture and ready-to-wear fashions would not have been out of place in Milan or New York, many designers made reference to the turmoil, reflecting the contradictions and tensions coursing through this society.

The four-day event, which was postponed twice due to security fears and amid unease at hosting such a gathering during an army offensive in the northwest, is aimed at showing the world there is more to Pakistan than violence and at helping boost an industry that employs hundreds of thousands of people, organizers said.

Many of the models, designers and well-heeled fashionistas packing out each night said the gathering was a symbolic blow to the Taliban and their vision of society, where women are largely confinedto the house and must wear a sack-like covering known as a burqa.

“This is our gesture of defiance to the Taliban,” said Ayesha Tammy Haq, the CEO of Fashion Pakistan Week. “There is a terrible problem of militancy and political upheaval … but that doesn’t mean that the country shuts down. That doesn’t mean that business comes to a halt.”

The shows are taking place in Karachi, the country’s largest and most cosmopolitan city, in a five-star hotel just next door to the American consulate, which was bombed by Islamist militants in 2002. It’s two hours by plane from the northwest, the heartland of al-Qaida and the Taliban, and has largely been spared the violence sweeping the country over the last month.

“Unfortunately, it is the bad side of Pakistan that gets everybody’s attention,” said top Pakistani model Nadia Hussain as hairdressers and makeup artists fussed over her backstage. “It has never been this bad, I don’t know what will happen,” she said, as fellow models chain-smoked cigarettes.

While many of the city’s 12 million people live in slums, hip cafes and restaurants in wealthy neighborhoods draw sophisticated crowds of young men and women into the early hours, more often than not speaking English with each other and wearing Western dress.

While the shows in Karachi resembled fashion weeks in other parts of the world, there were no foreign designers or buyers. The organizers decided not to invite them given the precarious security situation.

“Who is going to come here with such negative stuff going on?” said Tabassum Mughal, a young designer who employs about 30 people. “Those who are here already are leaving.”

Textiles make up some 60 percent of Pakistan exports and are worth around $12 billion dollars a year. The country’s cotton and silks are among the finest in the world. But the industry has failed to grow in recent years amid political unrest, violence and chronic power shortages.

As if on cue, a power cut during the fashion week’s opening evening left the hall in darkness for several minutes.

The fashion industry represents a tiny fraction of the country’s textile exports.

“We are still doing the 30 dollar a dozen T-shirt business. There is no value added,” said Haq. “We should be employing millions of people, not hundreds of thousands of them.”

Designers presented a mix of clothes, some drawing on traditional Pakistani outfits and tribal motifs, others that had little or no sign of traditional aesthetics. In a culture where nearly all women dress modestly, many outfits were too racy for local tastes.

“This does not represent what we are as a people,” designer Ayesha Tahir Masood said. “Only 0.001 percent of Pakistani women would wear these clothes, and then only in a controlled environment when drunk out of their minds.”

Kimberly Munley, Police officer in Ft. Hood (TX)

Meet the woman responsible for stopping the carnage at Ft. Hood.  She’s looking for work in North Carolina, to be near her husband.  I hope she finds something.

Sgt. Kim Munley

UPDATE: She needs a total knee reconstruction, and can’t continue to do beat work.