President Obama’s decision to admit women GIs into combat reminds us of the first time your editor wrote about the question. That was back in 1980, when President Carter proposed registering women for the draft. By Jove, he knew all the tricks of restricting a president to one term. At the time we were fresh enough from our days as the lowest-ranking soldier of the entire United States Army that we were still mistaking every doorman in epaulets as a general to be skulked past. And even after all these years we can remember the joy of seeing, if only when we had the occasional breakfast at the mess at the Third Field Hospital in Saigon, a female nurse or two.

In other words, we had no problem with the idea of women in a war zone. As to whether they should be in combat, we don’t have any objection to it in principle. It does, though, strike us as illogical to think in terms of a “right” to be in combat, whether it is a right for women, men, or anyone else. Once war has been levied, our own view is that the right policy in filling out our combat units is to give the commanders such a pick of our population as they in their best judgment reckon would be best to win the fight. If they want to include women, we’re all for it, and if not, we wouldn’t take umbrage. Victory in the war is the over-riding thing.

When your editor wrote about this in 1980, there was cautionary talk from serious combat veterans, who felt that placing women in combat would bring out a protective streak in male soldiers and, in effect, sap the instinct to advance. We don’t belittle such concerns. But we don’t share them. Nor the concerns about canoodling in the ranks. At the time your editor, in a piece called “Skirting the Question of Women and War,” acknowledged that two GIs of the opposite sex could get “trapped overnight in the same foxhole, without their sergeant.” After that, he speculated, it’s difficult to say what could happen. But he argued against moralizing and quoted a little quatrain:

’Twould be a tragic irony,

And one we must abhor,

If it turns out to be the case

That love’s not fair in war.