We had no women there until the unit relieving us started moving in. This was in early 2008. When they arrived, the BN Commander had to give up his room. As he was the only one who wasn't living with multiple other people in racks packed to the gills and let the 9 women in the relieving unit live there. Then we had to have all kinds of shenanigans to accommodate them. Entire FOB had to completely change operations to deal with 9 people. That is insane to me.
I have ton of anecdotes from back in the '90s when we would train with women cross-attached from support battalions, or have them in the motor pool with us.
Once we were in the field on and off for about two months, and we had 2 female medics attached. They alternated every other week on whose turn it was to have their period. So every Friday one of them would complain that they needed to go back to the rear for the bleeds, pack up their hummer and off they'd go. The E6 medic that finally got pissed and told them to fuck off was a hero to a lot of us, but then they got on the horn to their COC and all hell broke loose. In the end he was told by senior NCO leadership in both units to STFU, and the rest of the time out there they went back to packing up on Fridays, going to the barracks to party all weekend until they finally managed to wander back on Monday sometime. We were out there playing around as OPFOR for other units, and I still remember freezing my balls off lying prone in the wet grass watching a crossroads near us, with one of those chicks on duty with me. Middle of the night, she gets on the radio whispering in a frightened voice that she can hear people sneaking up on her. It was fucking coyotes, you could hear them, you could see them, they were everywhere...FFS they were being loud as fuck that night...but she spent the entire fucking night thinking someone was lowcrawling up to her. (which, admittedly, would have been funny as fuck to have happened)
My biggest issue wasn't the physical strength issues, not really. I was either armor or cav, so we weren't normally humping a ton of shit around (unless you were a scout dismounted or something, I guess). The biggest issue, BY FAR, was that even with relatively few women around almost everyone walked around on eggshells around women because they wielded enormous power. They could bebop down to JAG and drop a dime, and you'd have people's careers fucking ruined in a heartbeat. No one wanted to risk giving a woman an excuse to complain about discrimination, so the pendulum would swing so far in the other direction that people were literally bending over backwards for them.
I met a female E6 once, who was my age. IIRC, she made E6 right at the minimums required for TIS and TIG. This was almost unheard of for men. You'd have a promotion board with 100 slots or whatever, and let's say 200 men and 5 women. Unless there was some glaring issue, those 5 women would get first dibs because IF THEY DIDN'T people were afraid that they would complain that it was due to gender bias or whatever. So this woman, nice enough I guess, walked around like she was hot shit because she was fast tracked for everything. Women would complain that they would have trouble getting promoted past a certain point @ senior NCO/Officer levels (often for combat unit reasons) but I don't remember any women minding that they got promoted super-fucking fast early in their career, either.
Maybe the culture has changed, or will change, I dunno. But if it doesn't, that's just a shitty deal all around. I have no doubt that we'll see full integration someday but I feel for guys that have to deal with the sad-sack women, and I feel for the serious/willing-to-work-harder women who have to deal with the blowback from the guys who have had to deal with the sad-sack women.
