'Our gender is soldier': women in the U.S. military are still officially barred from combat. But in practice, they're fighting--and dying--alongside the men-in Afghanistan.

• Author: Norland, Rod
• Position: NATIONAL

When Specialist Devin Snyder, a 20-year-old from western New York State, was killed last June by a bomb planted on a highway, she became the 28th female American soldier to die in Afghanistan.

Servicewomen have died in all of America's wars, but usually they were support personnel such as nurses and clerks. In Afghanistan, where the front lines can be anywhere a soldier is on patrol or interacting with villagers, most women who have died were killed in combat situations, like Snyder was, despite the military's official prohibition on women in combat roles.

The same was true in Iraq, where, according to the Department of Defense, 110 female soldiers died between 2003 and December 2011, when U.S. combat forces completed their withdrawal. In both wars, roadside bombs, grenades, gunshots, or other hostile acts by the enemy accounted for 60 percent of the fatalities among female soldiers.

The nature of fighting an enemy like the Taliban (see "Afghanistan Update, p. 10) that can blend in with civilians or attack from remote hideaways in the mountains has obscured the boundaries between combat roles that are officially off-limits to women and support jobs that are often as dangerous and in some cases even more so. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Snyder's death was that it wasn't considered out of the ordinary.

"Out here, there is no male gender and no female gender," says Staff Sgt. Vincent Vetterkind, one of Snyder's fellow platoon members. "Our gender is soldier."

New Rules

The Pentagon announced in February that it will allow women to serve in dangerous jobs closer to the front lines, like medics and radio operators, but it stopped short of saying officially that they could serve in combat. That disappointed advocates for female soldiers who serve on dangerous missions in Afghanistan.

"It's a really, really tiny step forward," says Anu Bhagwati, a former Marine Corps captain and director of an advocacy group for women in the military. "We were hoping for more."

The pressure on the military to change comes principally from the fact that women are being excluded from the top ranks, where those without combat ribbons generally need not apply. The hesitancy stems from fears that women might prove physically or mentally unfit for combat, or that their presence on the front lines might undermine morale.

While there is still a debate back home about the role of women in the military, here on the ground, that battle seems to have been largely, if quietly, settled during 10 years of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan in which female soldiers have increasingly shared the same risks as their male counterparts.

"To tell you the truth, I didn't even think about that issue," says the commander of Snyder's platoon, First Lt. Riannon Blaisdell-Black, 24, of Virginia Beach, Virginia. "Out here we don't see gender, we don't see race."

Snyder was a high school track star who came from a military family in Cohocton, N.Y. She enlisted after graduation, choosing the military police because, as one of her platoonmates put it, "We had the best and biggest guns." Her physical fitness scores often exceeded the Army's perfect 300.

The military police is a common choice for women who want to get into combat. Women can also become medics or combat logistics specialists attached to infantry or armor units.

"To the average soldier who's out there on a mission, it doesn't make a difference," says battalion commander Lt. Col. Steven Kremer, whose infantry battalion has 40 women among its 600-plus soldiers. "Can that person on my left or right...