Tunnel Rats vs the Taliban by Jimmy Thomson

Author:Jimmy Thomson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2015-06-20T04:00:00+00:00

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FRONT-LINE FEMALES

While the roles of sappers were evolving in the field, the entire Australian Army was undergoing a quiet revolution of a completely different kind. Women were not only joining the army, they were being accepted in combat roles.

Predictably, this caused much huffing and puffing in some quarters, with The Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan writing, under the headline ‘Women have no place in combat’: ‘A nation that sends its women into front-line combat, into close infantry, hand-to-hand fighting and killing, is a nation that either doesn’t take combat seriously or doesn’t take respect for women seriously. [The] wretched decision to make all combat roles in the Australian military available to women moves Australia closer to both outcomes. It will make our military less effective, and less respected, and it will make women less respected as well. It is a decision born of a postmodern fantasy, a kind of derangement of nature contrived by ideology against reason, common sense, military professionalism and all human experience. It is almost certainly a sign that the [then] Gillard government has more or less stopped taking defence seriously.’

Passing over the fact that there was very little, if any, hand-to-hand combat in Afghanistan or anywhere else, that women are just as capable of firing guns as men and that there are physical tests that all soldiers male or female must pass, Mr Sheridan was a bit behind the times. Long before he wrote his piece, women soldiers were ‘in harm’s way’ in other non-infantry roles in Afghanistan and perfectly capable of looking after themselves if required in a fight.

At the time of researching this book, the Royal Australian Engineers had just accepted its first two women in combat engineer roles, thereby completing another link that goes all the way back to Vietnam (more on that later). One person who might have been amused by Sheridan’s expostulations is Major Rachel Brennan, who is both a civil engineer and officer in command of 23 Squadron.

‘I went in as a second in command [2IC] of the engineer task group. Generally 2ICs look after admin and welfare, that kind of thing, but it soon morphed into being 2IC of a combat team because the engineer task group became one. So then I was, I guess, responsible for elements of the force like snipers, mortar platoon, infantry guys, cavalry guys, which was pretty overwhelming.

‘I didn’t have that much knowledge on how they operated but by the end I was comfortable in the position. When my OC would go on leave, he’d leave the combat team with me to plan for the next mission. But the first couple of times I went outside the FOB on missions, I just thought, Wow, am I meant to be doing this as a female? Like, what did I sign up for?’

Major Brennan joined the army in 2001, went to the Australian Defence Force Academy to study civil engineering, and graduated from the Royal Military College in 2004.

‘I was with 17 Construction Squadron, then in

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