Female Soldiers

This was supposed to be an ordinary day of briefings and learning their way around Aberdeen Proving Ground, but for the 59 soldiers fresh out of basic training, there was no ignoring the sexual misconduct probe sweeping the base."

The Army yesterday dropped more criminal charges against Staff Sgt. Delmar G. Simpson, further shrinking what was once a 148-count case against the Aberdeen Proving Ground drill instructor to 58 charges just days before his court-martial begins.Of the 19 counts dropped yesterday, two were rape charges that involved the same number of female soldiers. Simpson, 32, faces 19 rape allegations involving six female recruits -- down from a high of 11 women he was accused of raping when a pretrial hearing started last month.

WASHINGTON - An amendment that would have further restricted the role of women in the military was withdrawn late last night, and the House Armed Services Committee instead agreed to take more control of which jobs women may hold on the battlefield. Rep. John McHugh, a New York Republican, offered an amendment last week to bar females from serving in so-called Forward Support Companies. Those Army units supply maintenance and medical support to soldiers in direct combat missions. As a result, McHugh and others feared women were coming closer to combat than allowed under a Pentagon policy approved 10 years ago. Army leaders and veterans groups strongly objected to McHugh's proposal, saying it would disrupt operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, where women are playing an increasingly important role.

WASHINGTON -- After earlier rejecting a proposal that he found too restrictive, Defense Secretary Les Aspin now has approved a new general policy that will allow women to serve in some ground units during combat, say Pentagon officials.Kathleen deLaski, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said yesterday that the new policy will be announced later this week -- coming just before Mr. Aspin is scheduled to resign from his post this month.Throughout his yearlong tenure, Mr. Aspin has pushed hard for opening up more combat opportunities for female soldiers and last April announced that women would be permitted to serve in combat aviation jobs and on warships.

Two former Army trainees testified in choked voices yesterday that Staff Sgt. Delmar G. Simpson pinned them down and raped them in his barracks office -- the first detailed public look at allegations at the heart of the Aberdeen Proving Ground sex scandal.According to the women's vivid and discomforting testimony, Simpson used physical force -- not the power of rank -- to have sex with them."I told him, 'No,' " one woman, a 22-year-old Army National Guard specialist, testified at Simpson's court-martial.

In a week of explicit testimony in the Aberdeen Proving Ground scandal, Staff Sgt. Delmar Simpson -- charged with 58 criminal counts, including 19 rapes -- has been portrayed as a sexual menace who painstakingly exploited the weaknesses of young female trainees.The six women who alleged rape lived in small-town America, protected places such as Geneva, Ala., Turon, Miss., and Clarksburg, Pa. They saw the Army as a place "to grow up a little bit" after high school, as one put it, and to earn money for college.

As lawyers for Staff Sgt. Delmar G. Simpson concluded their defense yesterday, a former commanding officer revealed that some sexual misconduct complaints never reached him -- an indication that procedures designed to protect Aberdeen Proving Ground female trainees had failed.Capt. Scott Alexander, who in 1995 was Simpson's commanding officer, was called as a defense witness to testify that he would have known about widespread misconduct. That was meant to be the defense's final flourish before resting a case that helped put Aberdeen at the center of a militarywide search for sexual misconduct in the ranks.

WASHINGTON - Sgt. Tara Jackson was riding shotgun this spring in a U.S. Army supply convoy snaking through the streets of Fallujah. A truck up ahead struck a roadside bomb and enemy small arms fire flashed, she recalled, and she trained her M-16 assault rifle toward the enemy. Emptying one clip, she said, she slammed in another and kept firing. Jackson, a 32-year-old Baltimore native and member of the Army National Guard's 1229th Transportation Company from Parkville, said she was in combat for about one minute.

Today, on its 37th anniversary, Roe v. Wade is still an unfulfilled promise for the women in our military. Women soldiers serving their country overseas and in the United States face impediments to accessing reproductive health care that most civilians take for granted. While military personnel must give up some rights enjoyed by civilians, there is no compelling reason for the current policies and practices that circumscribe their reproductive rights. In November, Major Gen. Anthony Cuculo III, the commander of U.S. forces in Northern Iraq, put in place a policy that made pregnancy or impregnation an offense subject to a court-martial or jail time, citing military readiness as his justification.