A few good women: though officially barred from combat, women are increasingly fighting--and dying--alongside men in Afghanistan and Iraq.

• Author: Bumiller, Elisabeth
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

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The United States military's official policy is clear: Women aren't allowed in direct combat.

Its unofficial policy is a lot less clear. Since the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, the roles of women in the military, who make up 15 percent of the total force, have been changing: Women have patrolled streets with machine guns, served as gunners on vehicles, and driven trucks down bomb-ridden roads.

In these wars with no front lines, the potential for battle is everywhere, and many of the 25,000 female troops now stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq are fighting--and dying--alongside men. Last April, for example, 40 women volunteered for the Marines' first full-time "female engagement teams" (FET). Using a loophole in Pentagon policy, the four- and five-member female teams were "attached," as opposed to formally assigned, to male units in Afghanistan's Helmand Province, which was a Taliban stronghold at the time.

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These female Marines were critical to carrying out a counterinsurgency job no male Marine can do: winning over rural Afghan women, who for religious and cultural reasons can't interact with male troops. Afghan women exert a lot of influence in their communities, so gaining their goodwill can go a long way toward making Afghan villagers less suspicious of U.S. troops.

But in a place like Afghanistan, even drinking tea with women, helping to open schools and clinics, and gathering intelligence, puts the female Marines in the line of fire--shooting back during ambushes, dodging homemade bombs, and living on bases attacked by mortars.

"You still get that same feeling, like, 'Oh, my gosh, I'm getting shot at,'" says Lance Corporal Stephanie Robertson, 20, of her time in Marja. But after a while, "you know what to do," she says. "It's like muscle memory"

The role of women hi the military has evolved since they served as nurses in the Civil War and in support units in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In Iraq and Afghanistan, thousands of women are engaging the enemy like never before.

The idea for the female engagement teams grew out of the "Lioness" program in Iraq, which used volunteer female Marines to search Iraqi women for weapons at checkpoints and spawned similar programs in Afghanistan. But the women from Camp Pendleton in California who deployed to Afghanistan last April, and the new crop that has since replaced them, are the first full-time teams trained explicitly for...