However, more US servicemen and women have died of non-combat causes (including training exercises) than in combat:
***** In a six-month investigation of the policies and practices of the US military to prevent noncombat casualties, the Globe found that since late 1979 more than 29,000 active-duty men and women in the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force -- nearly five every day -- died due to noncombat causes ranging from training exercises to off-duty accidents, from illnesses to homicides and suicides.
In fact, measured by the Defense Department's own statistics, being in combat may have been the safest place for US servicemen and women during the past 18 years.
Only 558 soldiers, sailors and airmen have died in combat situations -- including conflicts in the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Panama and Bosnia -- or acts of terrorism since October 1979. Nearly half of those died in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983.
In fact, a recent Army analysis found that more of its soldiers had been killed from noncombat causes during World War II, and the Korean, Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars than died in battle. Yet the casualties of peace rarely draw media attention, beyond the obituary pages, and Congress has never conducted a comprehensive review of safety inside the military. It is undeniable that the military is safer now than it was 20 years ago. Yet while the number of accidents in the four service branches has dropped to its lowest point since World War II, accidents are still far and away the leading cause of death in the US armed forces.
<http://www.boston.com/globe/nation/packages/military_accidents/> *****
The same probably goes for UK soldiers.
As for women in combat, women on both sides fought bravely in the US Civil War (to take just one example), apparently with approval of their male comrades in arms:
***** New York Times 23 March 2002
When Janie Came Marching Home: Women Fought in the Civil War
By AMY DOCKSER MARCUS
Lauren M. Cook had been participating in re-enactments of famous Civil War battles for two years, and she took the hobby seriously. She spent thousands of dollars buying Civil War-period clothing. She taught herself how to play the fife, then memorized hundreds of Civil War tunes to play at battles. She bound her breasts under her uniform so no one would guess she was a woman. She even tried to adopt male mannerisms to aid her disguise. "I would always squint," she said. "Women's eyes are larger than men's, so they really give you away."
But one weekend in 1989 at a re-enactment at the Antietam National Battlefield in Sharpsburg, Md., something else gave her away. The re-enactment was taking place in an open field with no trees, and Ms. Cook had to go to the bathroom. Unable to find a spot outdoors with any privacy, she darted into a restroom. "Someone told a park ranger he saw a soldier come out of the ladies' room," Ms. Cook recounted. The ranger confronted her and said women were not allowed to portray Civil War soldiers at re-enactments. He asked her to leave the park.
Later she filed suit against the National Park Service for sexual discrimination and won. But then a more contentious debate broke out about women's roles in the Civil War. Many in the ranks of re-enactors argued that Ms. Cook should not be allowed on the battlefield because women did not serve as soldiers in the Civil War.
Ms. Cook already knew, however, that some women had disguised themselves as male soldiers during the war, including women at Antietam, where, on Sept. 17, 1862, 22,000 Union and Confederate troops were killed; it was the bloodiest single day of the war. But she had no idea how many women there were. So she set out to document the full story of women who went into combat.
"Lauren didn't just want to win in the court of law but in the court of history," says James M. McPherson, a prominent Civil War historian at Princeton University.
Now, almost 10 years later, Ms. Cook will finally present her case with the publication in September of "They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War" (Louisiana State University Press). In the book, Ms. Cook and her co-author, DeAnne Blanton, a military archivist at the National Archives in Washington, document the lives and experiences of 250 women on both sides of the conflict who went to war disguised as men. No one knows for certain how many of the three million soldiers who fought in the Civil War were women, although Ms. Cook and Ms. Blanton believe that in addition to the 250 they found, there are far more who went undetected.
Over the years, as Civil War historians have expanded their research efforts beyond the study of battles and military stratagems into social and gender issues, other books chronicling women's roles in the war have appeared. Most highlight the stories of prominent female soldiers like Sarah Emma Edmonds and Loreta Janeta Velazquez, who both wrote popular memoirs about their wartime adventures. But Ms. Cook and Ms. Blanton go beyond already published accounts or newspaper records. To write the book, the two pored over regimental histories, searched archives across the country and, most important, used unpublished diaries and memoirs given to them by the descendants of female soldiers who heard about their work and wanted the stories of their relatives told.
"The families often had the kind of information and manuscripts that are not publicly available that had been preserved over the generations," Ms. Blanton says....
At the National Archives, Ms. Blanton had been working with 19th-century Army records for several years when she stumbled on a file kept by a postwar clerk in the Adjutant General's office; it was about women caught serving in the armies of the Civil War. "There were handwritten notes, obituaries that were clipped out; it was a carefully kept file," Ms. Blanton says. "I had never heard of such a thing as women Civil War soldiers, and I was fascinated."
Ms. Cook, 45, had seven Indiana ancestors who fought for the Union, including one, Col. Absalom Hanks Markland, who served on the staff of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. After the war, Grant gave Markland the saddle he had used during the Civil War as a token of his esteem. Ms. Cook's middle name is Markland, after the colonel. Still, she says, she was more interested in the American Revolution than in her family's role in the Civil War.
That changed after she married. Her former husband, Frederick Burgess, is an avid Civil War buff. At their 1990 wedding, they dressed in Civil War-era clothing and cut their wedding cake with a 130-year-old officer's sword. On weekends, Ms. Cook started accompanying him to re-enactments of famous Civil War battles. Most of the other women she met there were dressed in hoop skirts and portrayed more traditional female Civil War roles, like grieving widows or sutlers, merchants who traveled with the armies and sold goods to the soldiers. Ms. Cook, a flutist, wanted to play the fife and drums during battles, something that required taking to the field dressed as a male soldier. Eventually she also learned how to shoot a musket.
One day Ms. Cook received a letter from Ruth Goodier of Chipley, Fla. Ms. Goodier said she had heard of Ms. Cook's lawsuit and supported her right to serve as a male soldier during re-enactments. She added that she knew women had fought in the war because her great-grandmother's older sister, Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, had served two years, and that she had a collection of Wakeman's letters home from the front. She also had a daguerreotype of Wakeman, dressed in her uniform, holding her musket with the bayonet attached, that had remained hidden in a family attic for years.
Ms. Cook was astounded, since no collection of letters written by female soldiers was known to exist. In the hope of getting the letters published, she started researching the life of Wakeman, who used the name Lyons Wakeman while serving in the 153rd New York Volunteer Infantry. Wakeman saw action around Washington and in the 1864 Louisiana Red River campaign before dying that year in an Army hospital from the effects of chronic diarrhea. Oxford University Press published the Wakeman letters, edited and annotated by Ms. Cook, in a 1994 book entitled "An Uncommon Soldier."
It was while researching the Wakeman letters at the National Archives that Ms. Cook and Ms. Blanton met and talked about pooling their resources and writing a book together about female soldiers. In the beginning, they simply set out to document as many as they could find. This alone was a challenge, as many of the women came from working-class backgrounds and couldn't write. Others went home after the war, married and had children, and, not wanting to seem different, never talked about their war experiences. But Ms. Blanton and Ms. Cook quickly realized that they didn't want just to tell the stories of the individual women who had served. They also wanted to set them in a context, to explore how the women fit into the broader society.
"One of the things that bothered me when I was asked to leave the Antietam battlefield after portraying a male soldier was the attitude of the park officials there," Ms. Cook recalled. "They considered Civil War women soldiers eccentrics and oddballs, that something wasn't quite right about them."
In fact, as the two women delved more deeply into how Civil War society viewed these soldiers, they were astonished to discover that, although politicians and pundits were often critical, male soldiers usually accepted their female comrades once they were unmasked. Women who were quickly discovered in the ranks and dismissed went home in disgrace, but those who managed to keep their secret for a time and serve in battle found that their fellow soldiers supported them even after their identities became known. In letters home and in wartime diaries, male soldiers praised the bravery and military prowess of the women who served with them and in many cases kept the women's identities a secret from their officers so that the women could continue to serve.
"What surprised me the most is that these women did something so unacceptable to society at that time, but they were so accepted by the men they served in the ranks with," Ms. Blanton says. "It was war, and on the battlefield people couldn't afford to indulge in social conventions."
Ms. Blanton and Ms. Cook found that especially true on the Confederate side, where manpower was short and officers were desperate to keep the ranks filled as the war dragged on. By 1864 many of the Confederate female soldiers weren't even pretending to be men anymore. They were growing their hair long again and no longer trying to conceal their figures.
For Ms. Cook, whose journey into the world of female soldiers started when she was sent home from the re-enacted battle, this was the best discovery of all. That and the evidence from their research that eight women had served disguised as male soldiers at the battle of Antietam, the highest number they documented at any one battle. Five of the eight were casualties that day.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/23/arts/23WOME.html> ***** -- Yoshie
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