Battle of the Sexes

By Jasper Craven

In our new issue, Jasper Craven explains how the Secretary of Defense (Secretary of War?) is purging the Pentagon of female leadership and relitigating the issue of women in combat.  

ON PALM SUNDAY 2005, Leigh Ann Hester woke up in a tin can six hundred miles east of Jerusalem, put on her Army fatigues, and jumped into a Humvee, which drove her outside the wire and into a war zone. Back then, Pentagon policy prohibited women from serving in direct combat roles, but Hester was in Iraq, where war lines had been blurred since the beginning of the conflict. Military brass routinely placed women in putative combat environments while formally depriving them of the recognition that their roles were just as dangerous as the combat positions in infantry, tank, and artillery units, all of which were reserved for men. Among other things, these female soldiers operated dangerous checkpoints, searched towns for explosives, and provided convoy security on frequently booby-trapped roads. While these figures pale in comparison to those on the other side of the conflict, more than 1,000 women in the U.S. military were wounded in the war on terror, and 166 died.

In 2005, Hester was practically a kid—twenty-three, with traces of acne on her cheeks and blonde hair she tied tight in a bun. She was also a sergeant in a Kentucky National Guard unit known as Raven 42. Their assignment that Sunday was convoy security. She and nine other Ravens were tailing approximately thirty supply trucks on a dusty road southeast of Baghdad. Not long into their mission, they heard the faint sounds of gunfire and explosions at the head of the convoy. As they started to speed toward the sound, the Humvee in front of Hester was hit with a rocket-propelled grenade, blocking the road and, according to the military’s account, “stopping the convoy in the kill zone.” The Ravens were outnumbered five to one by Iraqi fighters, who, per the Pentagon, wanted hostages.

Hester and her squad leader, Timothy Nein, acted quickly. She ordered a gunner to fire toward the fighters’ position in a nearby orchard, then began shooting her own M4 rifle. She and Nein subsequently directed their team to a flanking position, where, over forty-five minutes, they cleared trenches and killed combatants. While three members of her unit were wounded, all survived. Three months later, in a ceremony at Camp Liberty, in Baghdad, Hester was awarded America’s third-highest combat decoration for valor: the Silver Star. She was the first woman to receive the honor since World War II and the first woman ever to receive it for combat action.

Hester’s “conspicuous gallantry,” as the military called it, came at an inopportune time for a pack of congressional Republicans then barking from the comfort of Capitol Hill about the need to statutorily restrict women from combat. The congressional language, part of the 2006 defense authorization bill, was cowritten and championed by John McHugh, a civilian Republican from New York who wanted to “protect” America’s “mothers, sisters, wives and daughters,” specifically by preventing women in support roles from advancing to combat positions—a ban the Army staff director estimated would make twenty-two thousand jobs off-limits to women.

“People who served with Hegseth generally agree that he was a good leader and coolheaded in combat. But his conduct was not especially remarkable.”

A few months after Hester’s firefight, a brash, handsome twenty-five-year-old National Guard lieutenant named Pete Hegseth landed in Iraq, not far from where the Ravens’ convoy had been hit. He’d hustled hard to secure a slot as a platoon leader in the 101st Airborne, a division of the Army that had gone mainstream four years earlier thanks to Steven Spielberg’s Band of Brothers. (At least one former officer serving with Hegseth rightly predicted that he’d eventually parlay his deployment into public office.) There, he oversaw about forty men in a bloodthirsty brigade nicknamed Kill Company that tallied their body counts on a whiteboard. Shortly after he moved on from the company to a civil-affairs post, the brigade was ensnared in a war crimes case after soldiers let three Iraqi detainees loose and shot them in the back as they ran away.

People who served with Hegseth generally agree that he was a good leader and coolheaded in combat. But his conduct was not especially remarkable. Hegseth came away from Iraq with a Bronze Star to Hester’s Silver. His was given without valor, a lesser version of the medal that, according to the Washington Post, was “issued somewhat liberally” during the war on terror. (Some in the enlisted ranks joked that this decoration was little more than a “participation trophy” for needy officers.) Hegseth’s award citation is dry and formulaic, chock-full of the platitudes used by the White House to sell the public on the war. It asserts that Hegseth “contributed immeasurably to the success of building a free and democratic nation for the citizens of Iraq.” Hester’s citation, by contrast, reads like an excerpt from a Tom Clancy novel.

This discrepancy seems to have weighed on Hegseth. In his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Hegseth casts Hester’s actions as an aberration. He also takes issue with the military’s “political” awards process, musing conspiratorially over the fact that her star was issued relatively quickly, within a matter of months. “Nothing happens that fast,” he claims. “Unless there is an agenda.”

His objections amount to more than just professional jealousy. Hester’s performance became a symbol, one that helped to effectively squelch the movement to cut off women from the front lines. In 2014, McHugh, then Army secretary, seemingly had a change of heart, formally opening thirty-three thousand combat and other roles to women, while the following year Defense Secretary Ash Carter opened all units to women, including special-operations teams. What followed was a decade-long window in which military women were able to move up the ranks. Thousands secured slots in the special forces, while others broke into the top brass.

Now, as defense secretary himself, Hegseth is working to reverse this progress, purging the Pentagon of numerous senior women and trans people and relitigating the issue of women in combat.

Continue reading “Battle of the Sexes,” an essay by Jasper Craven, on our site.

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