Reprinted from The Washington Times , 5am -- April 27, 1998
Army says close no longer counts in grenades
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
T
he Army has leveled the playing field for one of the most basic soldiering skills: tossing a hand grenade.
Requiring male and female recruits to throw the explosive the same distance -- about 100 feet --is part of a program to introduce added rigor at boot camp. Physical fitness had become so lax in military training that Defense Secretary William S. Cohen expressed his displeasure publicly.
But ending grenade gender-norming stemmed more from the complaints of powerful members of Congress who toured training posts in the aftermath of the Army's sex scandal at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and other training bases.
Rep. Steve Buyer, Indiana Republican and chairman of the House National Security subcommittee on military personnel, returned from his trip to condemn the Army for maintaining one standard for male recruits and a lower one for women.
"I sent a message to the Army last year that I was not pleased with their hand-grenade policy," said Mr. Buyer, an Army reserve officer. "I found that the standard of successfully throwing a hand grenade was being routinely waived for female recruits. This was not acceptable. I am pleased the Army is now enforcing the standard for all recruits, regardless of gender."
Fort Jackson, S.C., one of the Army's two principal mixed-sex training posts, moved to even the test in a complicated policy change.
Recruits throw grenades in two separate settings in the sixth week of an eight-week course. To graduate, each must be able to pull the pin from and throw two live grenades. The distance is not measured, but each must pass the test to graduate.
In the afternoon, they navigate a course, tossing dummy grenades in seven different scenarios. For years, the Army never required a passing grade to graduate. Now it does.
"You had to negotiate it, but you didn't have to pass it," said Col. Jack Carter, chief of staff at Fort Jackson.
"All we said is, 'We have all this training anyway, why don't you have to do it to graduate?'" Col. Carter added. "If anything, it increased the number of kids who are at training on a given day, so more show up. And it was a way to introduce more rigor."
The first stop on the course is the distance test. Previously, women had to hurl the object 75 feet. Now, it must go 100. But even a failing grade may not matter because soldiers can flunk that test, but still graduate by succeeding on at least five other stops on the course.
Col. Carter did not know what percentage of men and women are reaching the 100-foot mark, but he noted that women "are not as good at throwing grenades. You just have to practice more. They're doing OK. There's a lot of folks that can't throw it that far, men and women."
To trainers like Col. Carter, the grenade toss is less important at Fort Jackson than it is at the Army's all-male combat-arms training centers for infantry, tanks and artillery. Soldiers there are trained for direct land combat, from which women are now banned.
Recruits at Fort Jackson and other sex-integrated training centers are preparing for combat support jobs.
"The average soldier will never throw a grenade in anger," Col. Carter said. "So how important is it for a communications guy or a truck driver to throw a live hand grenade? It is probably not all that crucial. Infantry, yes. But we don't train infantry at Fort Jackson."
The military has moved to toughen training in response to embarrassing news reports and government inquiries that concluded mixed-sex boot camp had gone soft.
The Aberdeen scandal, in which instructors sexually preyed on young female recruits, sparked a reassessment of mixing the sexes at the start of basic training. Citing poor discipline, a Pentagon-appointed commission recommended separating men and women at the small-unit level. But Mr. Cohen has delayed a final decision while the services move to improve training and better separate men and women in the barracks.
"The physical standards have not been demanding enough," Mr. Cohen told a Pentagon news conference last month. "And I have been rather surprised to find that I, perhaps, can do more of the physical activity than some of the recruits, even at my advanced age [57]. And I think that that does not bode well for those young people."Copyright 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
Reprinted with permission of
The Washington Times.
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