Books, Arts & Manners: Girls with Guns

Ground Zero: The Gender Wars in the Military, by Linda Bird Francke (Simon & Schuster, 304 pp., $25)

LINDA Bird Francke reckons U.S. servicewomen should be grateful to Saddam Hussein; he lost the Gulf War, but his troops outflanked American forces on a more important front. Mrs. Francke writes that when two female American POWs were safely returned, “Iraqi forces had reassured the American public about the viability of women in combat.” Mrs. Francke quotes a World War II Army nurse, held in a civilian internment camp by the Japanese, about the possible fate awaiting female POWs. “The Muslims aren’t that mean. And they don’t hate women any more or as much as American men hate women,” the nurse explained in a typical example of what passes for expert opinion in this book, which amounts to a feminist indictment of males in general, and American male generals in particular.

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Kate O'Beirne

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Ground Zero: The Gender Wars in the Military, by Linda Bird Francke (Simon & Schuster, 304 pp., $25)

LINDA Bird Francke reckons U.S. servicewomen should be grateful to Saddam Hussein; he lost the Gulf War, but his troops outflanked American forces on a more important front. Mrs. Francke writes that when two female American POWs were safely returned, “Iraqi forces had reassured the American public about the viability of women in combat.” Mrs. Francke quotes a World War II Army nurse, held in a civilian internment camp by the Japanese, about the possible fate awaiting female POWs. “The Muslims aren’t that mean. And they don’t hate women any more or as much as American men hate women,” the nurse explained in a typical example of what passes for expert opinion in this book, which amounts to a feminist indictment of males in general, and American male generals in particular.