By Stephanie Gutmann

February 4, 1997, and an all-too-familiar looking headline"TOP ENLISTED MAN IN THE ARMY STANDS ACCUSED OF SEX ASSAULT" occupies a prime corner of the front page of The New York Times. Just a few weeks earlier, the papers had been reporting charges of inappropriate hazing of female cadets at the Citadel. And just a few months before that, several female recruits at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground had accused drill instructors of rape and sexual harassment, unleashing a torrent of similar accusations from female soldiers around the country. In this latest case, as in so many of the others, blame will be difficult to affix.

Once more it will come down to "he said, she said." Once more there will be op-eds, hand-wringing and counselors; once more the Army will have to deploy its investigatory troops. This, just as the Army digs out from Aberdeenwhere there are still over 200 criminal charges to investigate, and a hot-line brings in new complaints every day.

What no one is publicly saying (but what everyone in the military knows) is that incidents like these an bound to recur. In a military that is dedicated to the full integration of women, and to papering over the implications of that integration as best it can, sex and sexual difference will continue to be a disruptive force. And regulating sex will become an ever more important military sideline, one whose full costs in money, labor and morale we will not really know until the forces are called on to do what they are assembled to do: fight.

The military's sex problems begin with the simple anatomical differences between men and women. Racial integration, to which the integration of women is ceaselessly compared, took the military about a century to achieve (quite successfully in the end) and that involved differences that are only skin deep. An effective fighting force depends on a steady supply of known quantities; it needs "units" made up of interchangeable elements called soldiers. Once one got over skin color, racial integration was still about integrating the same body.

But what happens when you try to absorb a population that is not, in unit terms, interchangeable? What happens when you try to integrate into a cohesive whole two populations with radically different bodies? In the elemental, unremittingly physical world of the soldier, sex differences-- masked by technology in the civilian world--stand out in high relief. Consider the female soldier not in political terms, but in the real, inescapable terms of physical structure. She is, on average, about five inches shorter than the male soldier, has half the upper body strength, lower aerobic capacity and 37 percent less muscle mass. She has a lighter skeleton, which may mean, for instance, that she won't be able to "pull G forces" as reliably in a fighter plane. She cannot pee standing up, a problem that may seem trivial, but whose impact on long marches was the subject of an entire Army research study; under investigation was a device called the "Freshette Complete System," which would allow women to pee standing up in places where foliage doesn't supply ample cover. She tends, particularly if she is under the age of 30 (as are 60 percent of military personnel) to get pregnant.

One would expect that such a sweeping social experiment (and one so expensive just refitting the U.S.S. Eisenhower to accommodate 400 new female sailors cost $1 million, for example) would hit some rough patches. But don't expect to hear about them from the military brass. Afflicted by a kind of "Vietnam syndrome" about the possibility of winning an ideological battle against the civilians who increasingly influence military policy, the brass now seem mostly concerned with trying to prove how well, as one officer put it, they "get it" where women are concerned. This week, when Army Chief of Staff General Dennis J. Reimer said he thought the service should re-examine whether the advantages of jointly training men and women outweigh the drawbacks, it was something of a bombshell. In general, the military has maintained a virtual silence about problems with the new influx of female soldiers, and, in the ranks, negative comments about integration are considered "career killers." Those who don't "get it" talk about it in the barracks and on the Internet, which has become a haven for military samizdat about sex and other dicey matters. As one soldier wrote in a typical online exchange, "examples of these latest 'revelations' [about sex between subordinates and their immediate superiors) are known to nearly everyone who has served. But we were never allowed to discuss . . . our concerns openly because it would raise issues about the efficacy of mixing girls and boys and that was politically incorrect, a career-ending taboo."

In general, the military's response to the problems of gender integration has been to recruit more women. The more women, the more feminized the culture, the fewer problems with sex, goes the thinking. (One corollary of this may be the recent decline in male enlistment. In focus groups, young men tend to cite, among other reasons for not joining up, fear of purges like the one after Tailhook and the increased presence of females in the ranks.)

The big recruitment drive has brought the percentage of women in the force to 14 percent, which may not seem like much but is up from 2 percent at the close of the Vietnam War. Women now make up 20 percent of new recruits--compared to 12 percent a decade ago. And the effort to recruit still more women is relentless. In 1991, when the Marines replaced their slogan "A FEW GOOD MEN" with "THE FEW, THE PROUD, THE MARINES," the idea was to sound more female friendly. Nowadays, much of a military recruiter's time is consumed with trying to cajole women to enlist. And in practice, unfortunately, this often means adapting--which is to say, lowering--standards without exactly admitting to doing so.

The goal for a young Marine recruiter named C.J. Chivers, for example, became just "'Get 'em on the plane.' If there were any problems, boot camp could sort it out." Chivers, whose stint as a recruiter lasted from 1992-94, adds that "invariably we would fill up the white male quotas almost immediately. So it became any woman that came in there that met the minimums, we gotta hire. What that did was take all the subjectivity out of it, an enormous part of the evaluation process. I couldn't say 'I got a bad vibe' the way I could with a guy." A recruiter also had to work hard to maintain what Chivers calls an "informal double standard" on strength differences: "Invariably the guys went down to Officer Candidate School with a near-perfect physical score while the women just cleared the minimum" even using what military brass call "gender-normed" test results and "dual," i.e. lower, standards: for example, in the Marines, fitness for women is tested with a flexed arm hang instead of pull-ups, half the number of sit-ups and a slower run.

Women have also been lured into the service with the promise of a more important role. Since 1994 more than 80,000 new jobs have been opened in positions that were formerly off-limits. Rescinding the combat exclusion law and the risk rule has allowed women to qualify to fly combat planes and to serve on combat ships. Women are still not allowed to serve on submarines, but Navy Times reports that "a review underway to examine future submarine designs may include a study on including women crew members."

And ever since the Gulf war, when women served in combat support roles, the possibility of taking that last step of knocking down barriers to the infantry has been very much in the air. Ground combat, considered the most potentially brutal, the most physically demanding and certainly the grubbiest form of combat, is seen as a crucial piece of turf by the Old Guard and plenty of the young old guard, too. Opponents of integrating ground combat tend to argue that mixed-sex units won't achieve the right kind of "cohesion," that women on the whole aren't strong enough to, say, effectively lob grenades or load tanks, and that there is, at bottom, something repugnant about a male officer ordering women barely out of their teens into harm's way. The opposing argument has been pointedly made by N.O.W. President Patricia Ireland, who maintains that exclusion promotes the view that women are weak, inferior and in need of protection. (With Patricia Schroeder, the great pro-combat warrior, in retirement, the next pro-combat push may come from a commission appointed by Army Secretary Togo D. West Jr. after the rape charges surfaced at Aberdeen. The commission's official mandate is to look at causes of sexual harassment, but the many pro-women-in-combat appointees are expected to argue the familiar exclusion-equals-lowerstatus-equals-harassment line when they make their recommendations.)

To understand why gender integration became such an unquestionable in the military culture, we have to return to 1992, the year of the Clarence Thomas hearings, the trial of Mike Tyson, "They Just Don't Get It" and the Tailhook investigations. Tailhook was officially declared a symptom of a larger problem--not an isolated event involving at most about six men--when investigators were ordered to scrutinize the "cultural" context. Through the prism of Tailhook and of sexual harassment, the culture that had long prepared men for battle suddenly looked, as then-acting Navy secretary J. Daniel Howard put it, "diseased and decaying." "What happened at Tailhook," he told reporters, "was not just a problem with the integration of men and women in our ranks. It was just as much a problem with the toleration of Stone Age attitudes about warriors returning from the sea . . . . "

Somewhere in the committees and hearings charged with studying this "cultural problem" a remedy swam into focus: men harassed women because they did not see them as equals. If women were brought in in great numbers, "the warrior culture" would be diluted. After Tailhook, the military made recruitment of women a top priority; barriers toppled, policies changed, promotions were spirited through the pipelines.

The new thinking also held that, if you got to them early enough, all kinds of "sexist attitudes" could be nipped in the bud. And early enough meant starting with boot camp. Enter Gender Integrated Basic Training. In 1992 the Navy began training all new female recruits at one of three integrated boot camps--a way, as Captain Kathleen Bruyere put it, to give recruits "a chance to make mistakes, say stupid things, and tell them we don't do that here." At Bruyere's camp in Orlando, Florida, recruits did "everything but sleep together in the same compartment"--including physical training and bunk and dress inspections. They also spent a good deal of time watching films about sexual harassment, while questionnaires like the one that stated "The Navy is a man's world. True? or False?" gave the new troops ample opportunity to "say stupid things."

By the end of 1993, and into 1994, the Army followed suit with its own gender-integrated training. The Army may have been slower on the uptake because it had already experimented with the process in the early '80s and found that when the sexes, say, ran obstacle courses together, the women tended to have a high injury rate from trying to keep up, and the men complained that they weren't challenged.

To avoid dealing with the problems posed by differences in physical strength between men and women, the proponents of sexual integration have increasingly favored a movement to "re-evaluate" the way soldiers are trained. As Barbara Pope, then assistant secretary of the Navy for manpower and reserve affairs, put it in the early '90s, "We are in the process of weeding out the white male as norm. We're about changing the culture." And so, in some boot camps, the fundamental character of training is changing. Fort Jackson, the camp where gender-integrated training was thought to have failed in the early '80s, began to evaluate "soldierization skills" by putting more emphasis on skills like "map-making and first aid" at which female recruits excel. The result has been a kind of feel-good feminization of boot camp culture, with the old (male) ethos of competition and survival giving at least partial way to a new (female) spirit of cooperation and esteem-building.

At the instigation of a Navy weekly called Soundings, a group of middle-aged officers revisited their old basic training camp last fall to see how "the kinder, gentler Navy" was doing things. The oldsters were greeted by a commander--one Captain Cornelia de Groot Whitehead--who used her opening briefing to inform them that 40 percent of new recruits have at some time been victims of serious physical or sexual abuse, while 26 percent have contemplated suicide. Accordingly, de Groot Whitehead said, "We've decided we needed to do something different." The tourists from the "Old Navy" were bemused to learn that the infamous obstacle course of yore had been renamed the "confidence course" and moved indoors to comprise "an indoor labyrinth of pipes to crawl through, monkey bars to swing from, ladders to climb up and balance beams to sidestep over."

And at Fort Jackson, South Carolina--where, in 1995, boys and girls shared barracks--an Army Times reporter recently found that grunts no longer have to do pushups to a count. Instead, they are asked to perform "a timed exercise in which soldiers do the best they can in a set period." One drill instructor has solved the male/female strength discrepancy problem by putting young recruits in "ability groups" for their morning run. "You're not competing with the rest of the company," Colonel Byron D. Greene, the director of Plans, Training and Mobilization, told Army Times. "You are competing against yourself and your own abilities."

But life-especially military life--does not ignore physical differences. When young soldiers leave training, they are assigned jobs (called Military Occupational Specialities or MOSs), and the physical requirements of' these jobs are not nearly as forgiving as a "New Army" drill instructor. A typical Army MOS, the kind of combat support MOS a young woman might request, could involve lots of lifting and loading, of shell casings, for instance. Pat Schroeder can say what she likes, but "a shell casing," groused an Army physiologist, "is always gonna weigh ninety pounds. There's nothing we can do about that."

Female soldiers themselves know this. A 1987 Army Research Institute survey found that women are more likely than men to report that insufficient upper body strength interferes with their job performance. Twentysix percent of female light wheel vehicle mechanics, for example, said they found it "very difficult" to do their job, as opposed to 9 percent of the men in that speciality who were polled.

And, according to Army physiologist Everett Harman, "[Command Reports] have indicated that many soldiers are not physically capable of meeting the demands of their military occupational specialities. Unfortunately women fall disproportionately into this category." Attrition is particularly high, Harman said, in heavy" (requiring 100- pound lifting) and "very heavy" (over 100 pounds) MOSs like Food Service Specialist, Motor Transport Operator and Unit Supply Specialist. Retraining and reassigning a soldier has been estimated to cost about $16,000, but advising a female soldier that she may have trouble with an MOS she is considering is, sources say, one of those "career-killing" statements that bureaucratically wise officers have learned to avoid.

There have been two attempts made in the past fifteen years to establish "gender-neutral" strength standards and a qualifying pre-test for each MOS, but as Army Times reported, "on both occasions, the requirements were eventually abandoned when studies showed most women couldn't meet the standards proposed for nearly 70 percent of the Army specialities." In 1995, a group of military researchers were set to try again, but this time the project didn't even reach the partial implementation stage because funding was denied. Funding was also recently denied to Harman, who had applied for a grant to do a second study of "remedial strength training for women," after his first had shown promising results. Harman believes the brass do not like his approach because it admits that female soldiers are not strong enough to perform basic military tasks, which is contrary to the military's line. "At the highest level, I think they feel that if we, show that women can get stronger, then the onus would be on the women to get stronger," he says, "while it is the jobs that should be made easier."

But can the jobs be made easier? Can weapons get lighter (as some advisers are urging)--without reducing lethality? Proponents of the change-the-equipment-not-the-people view point to the highly automated Air Force. But the Air Force is not the Army, and it is not the Marines. "If you have a plane sitting on the runway and you have to load it with supplies--bombs, whatever--you can have machines that drive out there, that raise the stuff on a little elevator," Harman points out. "But out in the woods and fields a lot has to get done by hand. Even in the kitchen there are big pots weighing about 100 pounds or so. It would take a tremendous amount of research to make certain jobs lighter, because you're talking about re-engineering the whole thing. Carrying a tool box, changing a truck tire; there are certain jobs, for instance, where you have to carry a toolbox that might weigh a few hundred pounds and put it up on the wing of a plane."

Online, where military folk often say impolitic things, there is a sense of foreboding about the danger of ignoring the strength issue: "Nothing is more demoralizing," wrote one Marine, "than to have to turn your formation around to go pick up the females. This is only training. I can even put the females on remedial training and they still hold up my formations. I would hate to see how many Marines I would lose if we were in combat and had to be somewhere fast."

There is one respect, though, in which the stubborn physical realities of integrating women cannot be easily denied--and that is their capacity for childbearing. A recent article in Stars and Stripes reported that a woman had to be evacuated for pregnancy approximately every three days in the Bosnian theater from December 20, 1995, when the deployment began, until July 19, 1996. Army public relations people in Bosnia don't dispute that claim, but they also say pregnancy is no particular problem for the Army, "no different than appendicitis."

It is clearly not a problem anymore in a career sense. All branches and some of the service academies have softened policies on pregnancies and made it clear that their official stance is now completely accepting. Unfurling one such policy in February, 1995, Navy Secretary John H. Dalton told reporters that "Navy leadership recognize that pregnancy is a natural event that can occur in the lives of Navy servicewomen ... and is not a presumption of medical incapacity." The Army has followed suit, stating that "Pregnancy does not normally adversely affect the career of a soldier."

In fact, pregnancy is now so "non-adverse" that soldiers say it's sometimes used to get out of "hell tours" like Bosnia, to go home. "I know other females that have done things . . . probably to get out of going somewhere," Specialist Carrie Lambertus told Army Times. "It happens all the time."

A woman who turns up pregnant in Bosnia is shipped in short order to the U.S. or Germany. Then, according to an Army spokesman, "female soldiers have the option of either staying on active duty or applying for release [with an honorable discharge] from active duty." Those who decide to stay in the military get six weeks maternity leave. The new Navy policy also provides for help in locating a runaway dad and in establishing paternity.

In the Navy, pregnancy rates run about 8 percent of the force at any given time. A pregnant woman is al- lowed to stay onboard ship up to her fifth month; then she gets reassigned to shore duty to avoid the heavy lifting that is a sailor's lot, not to mention the hazardous chemicals in engine rooms. Of the 400 women on the first gender-integrated warship, the U.S.S. Eisenhower, twenty-four were "non-deployable" due to pregnancy at the start of a Persian Gulf tour and another fifteen were evacuated once on the water. On the U.S.S. Acadia-- dubbed "the Love Boat" by the press--thirty-six out of a total 360 female sailors aboard had to be evacuated during a Gulf tour.

And no matter how determinedly the military defines pregnancy as a non-issue, the facts of pregnancy cannot be altered. A pregnant soldier is--or soon will be--a nondeployable soldier. A General Accounting Office study of soldiers called up to go to the Persian Gulf showed that women were four times more nondeployable than men--because of the pregnancy and recovery numbers. As Lambertus puts it, "If you're in a platoon where they're moving equipment or digging, setting up tents, [pregnant soldiers] are not going to be doing anything, except maybe sitting there and answering the phone all day. That really does cause some resentment." If her commanders had wanted to make sure the unit was truly deployable "they'll have to reclassify me and send me somewhere else, which would take more money, more time. So actually, it would be cheaper for them just to wait and keep me [here]."

Then there is the matter of how one gets pregnant in the first place--the matter of what happens when you take men and women, aged on average 18 to 25, away from what are generally smalltown homes, ship them to exotic ports of call, house them in the catacomb-like berthing areas of ships, in coed tents or in crowded barracks and then subject them to loneliness, boredom and high stress. The fantasy of civilian activists like Pat Schroeder is that the result will look something like the bustling, efficient bridge of the Starship Enterprise. The reality is apt to look more like "a big high school'--which is the way a sailor named Elizabeth Rugh described her ship, the newly integrated U. S. S. Samuel Gompers.

Troops in Bosnia and Herzegovina (there were 1,500 female troops in the first deployment) generally live in coed tents with eight to ten people. Ranks are mixed, privates bedded down next to superiors. Troops are not allowed to drink alcohol or eat in restaurants, but they are allowed to have sex--as long as they are single and not doing it with a subordinate (or superior) in their chain of command. In a solemn statement provided to Stars and Stripes, Army spokesman Captain Ken Clifton wrote that "the Army does not prohibit heterosexual relations among consenting single soldiers ... but it does not provide facilities for sexual relations."

Lack of official facilities does not seem to be a great obstacle. "Where there's a will there's a way!" Captain Chris Scholl told Stars and Stripes. Favorite locations, he said, include the backs of Humvees parked on a deserted air strip, tents, latrines, even underground bunkers--if you can hack standing up to your ankles in icy water. "It's going on all over the place," said Scholl. "They've locked us down so what else is there to do?"

And there is, of course, the problem of nonconsensual sex. A Defense Department spokesman says "there is no way to get a good number" on the frequency of rapes and sexual assaults in the armed forces, because each service keeps its own numbers and defines things slightly differently. Still, it is clear that the Aberdeen case was not an isolated incident. The Army recorded twenty-four incidents it categorized as "sexual assaults" involving U.S. soldiers in the Gulf war; these cases range from that of a 24-year-old specialist who had been on overnight guard duty in the desert with a male soldier and awoke to find him fondling her under the blanket they had shared for warmth to that of a 21-year-old private who was raped at knifepoint by a sergeant.

The making of a soldier is a rough, hands-on, invasive process-- a preparation for what may be a very rough end. "[T]he training, the discipline, the daily humiliations, the privileges of 'brutish' sergeants, the living en masse like schools of fish," wrote James Jones in his essay "The Evolution of a Soldier," "are all directed toward breaking down the sense of sanctity of the physical person, and toward hardening the awareness that a soldier is the chattel (hopefully the proud chattel but a chattel all the same) of the society he serves."

Soldiers abuse each other-in training, in command, in hazing rituals. It is a self-regulating mechanism; finding the weak links, then shaming them or bullying them to come up to par, is one way a unit ensures, or tries to ensure, its own survival, since on the battlefield one's life depends on one's buddies' performance.

Meanwhile, the brass attempt to operate on both tracks, to honor the standards of both the civilian and the military world. They know they must encourage "cohesion" in their mixed-gender units, but they know, too, that they must avoid the wrong kind of cohesion--the kind that could stimulate jealousies, lovers' spats and . . . babies: So they end up sending a rather scrambled message, something like "Women are different but they're not different"; "We have the same expectations for women but you cannot treat them the same."

"Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war," roared Shakespeare's Marc Antony. Something tells me he wasn't talking about 19-year-old girls. "Let the dogs loose," read a piece of locker-room samizdat (observed by writer Kathy Dobie) at a coed basic training program in Florida. Men ache to unleash their dogs of war. Women generally have to be exhorted or trained to--then, good students and employees that they are, they can probably manage a semblance of dogginess at least for a while. But do we really want them to? Can a man of say, 35, be trained not to stay his hand when he needs to send a 20-year-old girl onto a mortar-strafed field? Can the impulse which, still, impels men to try to protect women be overridden? Do we want it to be? Won't sex always gum up the works? Would we really prefer if it didn't?