Meet the FETs

As the French have discovered, bracing someone in a burqa is a bit dicey: is this a housewife going to market or her husband with explosives around his waist? In Afghanistan, one can't cope with this problem by banning facial coverings, so the U.S. Marines have deployed Female Engagement Teams to do the bracing. Here's a great video from the NYT today. (You see what a newspaper can do when it does the news instead of ideological oversight?) Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

First, let your hair grow

Elisabeth Bumiller has an engaging story in the New York Times about what the US Marines painfully call a Female Engagement Team, which no doubt will be rendered and pronounced as FET. They're training at Fort Pendleton CA for deployment to the 'Stan. The idea--more than eight years after the Marines landed--is that if American women accompany American men into Afghan villages, then Afghan women are less likely to take fright. The Marines think of everything: “If you have a pony tail,” said Marina Kielpinski, the instructor, “let it go out the back of your helmet so people can see you’re a woman.” Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Girlie GI

I’m not a great fan of a gender-neutral military, perhaps because all of my descendants are of the female persuasion. Anyhow, there are a whole raft of reasons why, during most of recorded history, warfare has been a masculine pastime. But even I must admit that there are aspects of warfare that benefit from a woman’s touch. Can you imagine GI Joe replacing this splendid young Marine in Afghanistan? Blue skies! – Dan Ford