Bill Mandel wrote:
> Jeff: What about the women who fight like hell to be fighter
> pilots, command bombers and the like? Are they freaks? Sure, most
> women don't want that, but neither do most men. To me, the
> overall factor is that wars, until very recently, did depend upon
> certain physical capacities that men possess much more than
> women, the same capacities that enabled men to dominate women in
> domestic and other civilian life, and have certainly left
> permanent marks upon the psychology of both genders. Also until
> very recently, women in the very years they might have been
> soldiers were apt to be pregnant or nursing young children. This,
> too, affected the psychology of both genders. And unquestionably
> the gender that was most concerned with preserving life would be
> most bothered by an activity that ended it.
> Bill Mandel
That's a good question. Those women certainly are a minority, and
whether they would be in a position to bond with men has yet to be
answered in the affirmative. I think, and I speak here from speculation,
that the bonding of air force pilots and crew is more dependent on the
risks they take then the is the bonding of grunts on the ground who are
put through, collectively, a difficult period of military training which
is intended to toughen them through a process of dehumanization followed
by reconstruction into an effective fighting man willing to kill people
of another country (and, perhaps, one day, our own) without thinking
twice about it. If the process has negative after effects on the
trainee, which it most certainly has, the military will deny any
responsibility.
One result of that process, however, is a type of bonding that I have
yet to see in any other walk of life.
Jeff Blankfort
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