Jeanne M. Holm

About the Author: Jeanne M. Holm, author of Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution, is a retired major general in the United States Air Force.

Of all the new realities brought home to Americans by the nightly news from Saudi Arabia, none was more startling than seeing a U.S. soldier in full battle gear, M-16 slung over the shoulder, and discovering that “he” was a “she.”

For most people, this was the first full realization that wives, sisters, daughters and mothers would actually be sent off to a combat theater to serve side-by-side with men in the tough, dirty, risky jobs of war. That some became casualties and prisoners of war was perhaps the biggest surprise of all.

Even more than events a year...