Tribeca - Lioness
Team Lioness was the name given to female Army soldiers who were sent out as support teams with male soldiers in Iraq. Their missions usually involved raiding houses where insurgents were suspected to be hiding. The females were needed because cultural and religious beliefs prohibit men from patting down females. So rather than have to deal with dozens of freaked out and angry Iraqi women (as well as inciting cultural hatred), Team Lioness came along to deal with the female searches. Nothing sounds so bad, so far. However the problem with fighting an insurgent war is that there is no battlefield, there is no end to combat. So while a mission might be intended to be a simple raid, it could quickly turn into an all-out firefight. Essentially, a non-combat mission becomes a combat mission. And this is exactly what happened repetitively to Team Lioness. Now American law prohibits female soldiers from engaging in combat and, in fact, none receive front-line combat training (just like male support staff). So what happened in Iraqi to these women was most likely illegal and clearly outside their mission profile.
The documentary looks at the aftermath for some of these women and how they are trying to deal with being in combat, having to kill people, losing some essential part of what they feel makes them human. It is not prescriptive or particularly ideological: there is never a moral statement on the war in Iraqi or whether these women should have been fighting. But it still manages to raise a number of very difficult questions for its viewers. Hit the jump for more.
What the hell are we doing in Iraq? You hear about people dying, you read about people suffering from PTSD, but the full impact of what being in combat, especially anti-insurgency fighting, does to someone is not apparent in written articles (GQ had an amazing article earlier this year about someone still struggling with the aftermath of Viet Nam, which came nowhere near to packing the same emotional punch as this documentary). But seeing this women talk about, seeing their families try to cope with their changes, watching them grasp for a normal life but being unable to shake what happened to them in combat is gut-wrenching. When you realize this is happening to tens of thousands of Americans right now, the pain is even greater. The viewer impact in Lioness is even greater because these are women. It is not necessary egalitarian, but for me, and I would suspect for many people, there is a cultural association between soldiering and men. While ‘war is hell’ and does terrible things to people, we all know that women and children are supposed to be the innocents spared by the rules of war (obviously all non-combatants should be spared, but in most wars that has been women and children). And while I would never presume to say that women should not be soldiers, seeing what fighting in this war did to these women makes you recoil from the notion that fighting this war is worth it at all.
Should women be soldiers in combat zones? The documentary shows the dangerous shadowland that women are trapped in by the American military system. They are not legally allowed to receive front-line combat training, yet the very nature of the was in Iraq means that almost any mission could turn into a front-line combat mission. Traveling in a convoy between cities can erupt into a full-fledged firefight as insurgents block the road with IED’s and then ambush the convoy from the sides. As previously noted, search missions can quickly turn into days of armed combat in the streets of Iraqi cities. So Congress and the armed forces need to make up their mind. If there are going to be female soldiers fighting in wars like the Iraq war, then there need to be female soldiers who have the training and skills to survive there. Women who have volunteered to take those risks and assume the trauma of killing people, rather than women who have it thrust upon them. And if that is not acceptable, then there should not be female soldiers serving in war zones. It is obvious that the women who served as Lionesses served with valor and distinction, so it is clearly not a question of capability. But it is a question of training and intent. One story from the documentary illustrates this perfectly. All the Lionesses were Army. At some point, a Marine unit arrived in the city to help pacify it and since they did not have any female auxiliaries, the Lionesses were assigned to work with them. One of the women was out on patrol with them and was serving as rear-guard because she carried a fully automatic weapon. Now in the Army, they do tap-backs when moving on, with each person makes sure the person behind them knows that they’re moving. The Marines don’t do that. So she suddenly finds herself alone in a street that was rapidly filling with armed enemies. That’s not cool. It happened because there were not female soldiers trained to go on patrols with the Marines. If females are going to do that, they need to be trained.
Lioness is an amazing documentary. It is both deeply moving and incredibly provocative. Five out of five.