Two Female Soldiers Poised to Graduate From Ranger School
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

Two female soldiers will graduate this week from Ranger School in Fort Benning, Ga., the first women to have made it through the Army’s premier leadership course and one of the most challenging and exhausting training programs in the military, Army officials said on Monday.

Their success — and the experience of 17 other women who began the course in April but have not made it that far — is expected to inform a major decision that the Army and other services must make by the end of the year: Whether to seek to continue to keep women from serving as combat infantrymen and in other military jobs that have been off-limits.

While only about 3 percent of active-duty soldiers in the Army have earned their Ranger tabs, doing so is considered an unofficial prerequisite for many infantry commands. And it is an explicit requirement for leading combat troops in the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment, the service’s premier light-infantry unit.

Completing Ranger School also can significantly enhance careers even for officers who do not serve in combat units.

Yet under existing military rules, no women — even the two about to graduate from Ranger School — can serve as infantry or tank officers, or to try out for the Ranger regiment, which has its own selection process.

This was the first year women have been allowed to attend Ranger School. The two who graduate on Friday — the Army has not identified them, but both are young officers who attended West Point — made it through a nine-week course of intense physical conditioning and 20-hour days that began at Fort Benning and then moved to the mountains of Georgia and to the swampy Florida Panhandle. Cumulatively, the students hiked roughly the distance from New York City to Boston with heavy packs. About 4,000 officers and enlisted soldiers start Ranger school every year, but only two out of five graduate.

In 2013 the Pentagon announced that it would lift its formal ban on women in combat, and the Army and the other services have until Jan. 1 to decide which jobs they still want to keep off-limits to women. They must provide a rationale for each position they want to keep restricted, and the defense secretary will ultimately decide whether to approve requests for exemptions.

The policy shift reflected a reality that has been obvious to hundreds of thousands of soldiers, Marines and other service members who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan: Women have for years played increasingly significant roles in combat. They have fought insurgents in dangerous areas as top-gunners in Humvees and door-gunners on helicopters.

They have served on female engagement teams with the Marines, and in cultural support teams that accompany Rangers, Navy SEALs and other special operators on raids.

Some women even perform intelligence gathering as part of SEAL Team 6’s top-secret Black Squadron.

“We’ve all been doing it for the last 13, 14 years, out of necessity,” Col. David G. Fivecoat, the commander of the Army’s Airborne and Ranger training brigade, said earlier this month. He was overseeing the current Ranger class as it made its way through the final “swamp phase” deep inside Eglin Air Force Base, at Camp James E. Rudder.

As a battalion commander in Afghanistan five years ago, Colonel Fivecoat said he made sure two female soldiers were assigned to each of his combat maneuver companies so that when needed, they could search Afghan women and children, a task that enraged locals when done by male soldiers.

The Army has taken pains to emphasize that the female soldiers have had to meet precisely the same standards as the males, including the initial physical tests — 49 push-ups, 59 situps, six chin-ups, and a five-mile run in no more than 40 minutes.

The two women have had to repeat some tasks and phases, and they have taken longer to make it to graduation than most students who ultimately make it through Ranger School. But Army officers say it is not uncommon for male students to have to redo as many portions of the course as the women have.

美菁英軍校 首見2女兵完訓

美國兩名女兵本周五將自專門培育美國陸軍菁英並以嚴格紀律著稱的遊騎兵學校訓練課程畢業，成為首批完成訓練的女兵，為美國陸軍史寫下新頁。

法新社報導，遊騎兵學校的訓練課程相當艱難，訓練出來的士兵號稱擁有美國陸軍中最強健的體魄，結訓後可加入菁英特種部隊第75遊騎兵團。不過，由於該團對於女性士兵的限制尚未廢除，所以即將畢業的這兩名女兵現在仍無法加入，但許多其他特種部隊單位已敞開大門，歡迎她們加入。

遊騎兵學校今年首度邀請女兵加入訓練，主因是美國國防部應總統歐巴馬2013年的要求，所有武裝部隊在2016年前必須提供女兵實戰職位。美國國防部統計顯示，女兵占美國陸軍總員額比率約為15%。自從決定開放實戰方面職位給女性以來，在原先不開放的331,000多個職位目前已大約開放了91,000個。

今年4月時，共有19名女性加入遊騎兵學校這項為期61天的艱苦訓練課程，但最終有17名遭到淘汰。

訓練課程分成數個階段，頭4天進行魔鬼行軍、導航演習以及體能測試項目，有些階段則必須重複通過才能進入下一階段訓練。此外，受訓士兵每天訓練時間為20小時左右，僅睡3個多小時，並必須攜帶重達40公斤裝備及巡邏320多公里。

美國陸軍部長麥克修17日恭賀所有遊騎兵學校畢業生，表示不論在任何階層，每個結訓的畢業生均展現出能夠成功領導團隊的身心上的堅韌特質。這項課程已證明，不論男女皆可展現自身全部潛力。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/18/us/two-female-soldiers-poised-to-graduate-from-ranger-school.html

2015-08-19．聯合報．A13．國際．編譯陳韋廷