Are there female eod

United for Veterans. Bojangles Birthday Club. Road to Tokyo. Latest Newscasts. About Us. Investigate TV. Gray DC Bureau. Midlands native and first female Army EOD instructor has a message for young women. By Sam Bleiweis. Published: Apr. Share on Facebook. Email This Link. Share on Twitter.

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Women in flowing flowery dresses approached Cox. They smiled and had their fingers up in V-for-victory signs, but the stories they shared were horrific.

Iraqi soldiers had entered their homes, put the women on the couch and raped them, lined the men up against the wall and shot them, there in the living room. Cox was overwhelmed. We Americans think you are the hero. Her eyes went red and filled with tears. Americans are still fighting in Iraq, civilians are still caught in the middle, and Linda Cox is still working as an EOD guy.

Cox loves baseball, and we took in a Single A minor league game at the small stadium dug up against the flood levee. The Iraq War and her job endure, but American society and the military have changed dramatically since Cox joined up in After the Gulf War, Cox was promoted quickly, reaching the pinnacle of chief master sergeant in She would become a respected voice within the larger EOD community, a leader on matters of policy, as a manager at Air Training Command. Her colleague Lt.

Other military women were also making great strides at the time, moving into more obvious combat roles. Desert Storm was a watershed. The first war since Vietnam, and the military won while women served in non-administrative, non—skirt-wearing-stewardess jobs. Only after the Gulf War were women finally assigned to Navy combat ships, or allowed to fly fighter jets and attack helicopters.

The early s, however, was also the era of the Navy Tailhook sexual assault scandal and the Anita Hill hearings. Behavior previously deemed acceptable, or at least tolerated through silence, was finally being recognized as the sexual harassment it had always truly been.

Cox remembers those times, especially the hard-drinking EOD parties. This one guy, every time he got drunk, he wanted to flash you. But he did that to everybody.

Only occasionally was the harassment personal. In the late s, one old chief suggested Cox and Tina Stetson and three other female EOD techs join him for a special mission, an all-women clearance of a remote bombing range. I thought, You jackass. I politely said no. Tina and the other gals told him where to stick it. When Cox considers women joining the combat arms today, it is these types of incidents that give her pause. Will new female infantry soldiers be able to tell their superiors to stick it when they suggest all-women platoons as a gimmick?

And in day-to-day military life, joining a small obscure EOD unit of 12 is less intimidating, less disrupting, than joining an infantry company of Once Cox entered the EOD brotherhood, once she graduated and earned her crab, the hazing stopped.

Cox says policymakers are too focused on the desired end state, without putting enough attention on the actual women, real people, who will fill the units. For Cox, freedom and choice are paramount. Women should not be barred from any job, or pressed into one, either today or in some future theoretical draft. It is worth noting how much the public conversation has changed: not whether women are capable of doing the job, not whether they are strong enough to throw BDUs in the front-end loader, but what standards to use for men and women, and how to best integrate the units.

Cox's career contributed to that evolution. And I was trying to explain to him, women have been in combat for decades. Get with the times. Bomb disposal! The whole current conversation is a red herring. Female officers will set the example, provide cover for their lower-ranking female enlisted soldiers. Griest, the first female infantry officer, will have the rank to fend off the discrimination, but also the spotlight, and expectations Cox never had. After a few press conferences following her graduation from Ranger School, Capt.

Griest has declined interview requests, a choice Cox understands. Until we met in April, she had not spoken to a journalist in decades. And yet, in the end, she embodied the independence and agency they advocated, ahead of the times. For the last decade, Cox has been a consultant for CH2M Hill, a large environmental and engineering firm with contracts around the world. In that capacity, she has traveled to Wake Island dozens of times as a technical adviser for battlefield cleanup; human remains still wash up on the beach and bombs peek out of the ground like mushrooms.

But recently, after a double knee replacement, her range work has begun to slow down. Joints shot, old injuries from her days as an amateur stunt actor in Albuquerque — until their agent ran off with the money, Cox was part of a troupe that staged bar brawls to entertain patrons between music acts. Not to mention years of dirt bikes and demolition work, of course.

At the Savanna Army Depot, the cleanup is conventional. Cox and her team are finding ordnance over a century old, white phosphorous grenades and Stokes mortars.