In Afghanistan, Canada's female soldiers earned the right to fight, and die, as equals

In the early hours of May 17, 2006, Capt. Nich Goddard and another junior officer led more than 200 Canadian and Afghan army soldiers into Afghanistan's Panjwaii district.

By midday, Goddard became the first Canadian soldier since the Korean War to execute a fire mission in support of Canadian troop manoeuvres against a known enemy.

A few hours later, Goddard was killed in a firefight.

The 17th Canadian soldier death in Afghanistan sent shock waves across Canada. It was not Goddard's historical mission that generated headlines, though, but her gender: the 26-year-old officer's given names were Nichola Kathleen Sarah.

Canada's first battlefield death of a combat-certified female soldier represented a watershed moment for a generation, says Krystel Carrier-Sabourin, a doctoral student at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ont. "It woke people up to the fact that there were female warriors in our country's military."

Before Goddard's death, says Carrier-Sabourin, who is conducting a study into the growing role of Canadian women in combat, not much attention was paid to female combat soldiers in Afghanistan.

Six years later, in fact, there is more interest abroad than at home in what she calls the "very significant contribution" Canadian military women, both combat and non-combat, played in the decade-long Afghan mission.

"There are several American researchers studying our female soldiers, what they have labelled the 'Canadian experience,'" she says. "Americans are definitely much more interested than we are."

The attention south of the border is due largely to the fact more than 100 American women made the ultimate sacrifice in Afghanistan and Iraq: this spring, a Congress-appointed commission is expected to deliver a report to U.S. President Barack Obama recommending the American ban on women in on-the-ground combat units be lifted.

It also stands to reason that such interest, at least back in 2006, would have evaded most segments of Canadian society: that year, despite then-chief of defence staff Rick Hillier's pronouncement that "Our job is to be able to kill people," a majority of Canadians polled said they believed that our military role in Afghanistan was peacekeeping.

For more than a century, Canadian women have served important roles in the country's military. During the First World War, 43 Canadian women, attached to the military in non-combat roles, were killed.

In 1989, four years after the "equality rights" section of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms came into effect, Canada's Human Rights Tribunal ruled that women should be allowed into all military jobs, including combat units.

The only exception was submarine service, which became open to women in 2001.

The move made Canada a pioneer in the developed world. Out of the more than 13,000 women in Canada's armed forces, about 15 per cent of the total, only about two per cent are in combat roles. About nine per cent of Canadian Forces personnel sent to Afghanistan were women.

Carrier-Sabourin's research shows that 310 women were deployed in combat positions during the Afghan mission, more than triple the number seen in the previous decade of peacekeeping missions.

For those female combat soldiers, the Afghan mission proved, once and for all, that women can tackle any job as well as their male counterparts.

"I like to think we opened the eyes of not only Canadians but of other nations," says Capt. Jaime Phillips, 29, who served in Afghanistan in 2007 as an artillery troop commander with the 2RCR battle group. "I think Canadians, at least those in the military, were accustomed to women in these roles, not to mention quite supportive."

For young soldiers like Phillips, the Afghan mission has been a confidence boost. "There is nothing stopping us anymore from gaining ground professionally," says Phillips, currently a gunnery instructor at the Royal Canadian Artillery School at CFB Gagetown, N.B.

Brig.-Gen. (retired) Sheila Hellstrom remembers a time when such support was unthinkable. "I remember going to one meeting when a guy said to me, 'Sheila, can you imagine women actually shooting people?'

"I think attitudes have been changing over a number of years," she says. The fact Canadian women represented themselves well in Afghanistan proves "it's stupid to deny them whatever they want to do, if they can pass the standards," she says.

With that equality has also come equal exposure to the hazards of war. New studies from the Canadian Forces show that 13 per cent of those posted to Afghanistan report suffering from mental health issues within five years of returning; that number rose to 23.1 per cent for soldiers who experienced high levels of combat, the lion's share showing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The military-wide study also found that female soldiers fared a little worse, with 15 per cent being diagnosed with PTSD, depression and substance abuse problems.

Also, a recent study by researchers at the University of Manitoba found that women in the Canadian Forces were more likely than their male counterparts to suffer from PTSD and depression. The study, published last fall in The Journal of Psychiatric Research, theorized that military women could feel additional pressure due to their minority status and stereotyping.

Another issue that came to the fore during the Afghan mission was sexual harassment and assault.

In Afghanistan, five reports of sexual assault against female soldiers have been investigated since 2004, with only one investigation resulting in a guilty verdict.

But in one of Capt. Goddard's own letters home to her husband, Jason Beam, she mentioned six rapes she says occurred at Kandahar Airfield base in one week in early 2006.

Phillips concedes that life at the multinational base at Kandahar was "definitely not peachy keen." But she says for the most part she felt safe, especially among her male peers, with whom she felt "no hostility or discord." She also feels the military "has a good framework for investigating and prosecuting individuals who break the law."

Lt.-Col. (retired) Shirley Robinson has been paying close attention to the discussion about female combat soldiers, and says she has heard such stories before.

"This isn't about gender, it's about individual human rights," says Robinson, co-founder of the Association for Women's Equity in the Canadian Forces. "We put too much emphasis on gender in this silly society — there are some men who would run like hell in combat and there are women who would say, 'Bring it on.'"

Robinson says one legacy of the Afghan mission will be the realization that women can be warriors, that male and female soldiers can fight side by side as equals.

"Someone once asked me if I could shoot somebody, and my answer was, 'In a split second,'" says Robinson, who lives in Ottawa. "We're not a humanitarian force, we exist to protect Canada."

The combat experience of Afghanistan will also ring in a new era for women who aspire to greater heights in the military, she says. "Many of the high level jobs have been given to officers who have been in combat and in the field," says Robinson, adding there is now a new generation of combat-experienced women eligible for advancement.

"Someday we'll have a chief of defence staff who is a woman, and I will have a couple of martinis to celebrate."

Clearly, many younger Canadian women agree with Robinson. "A lot of female officer cadets now come up to me and say they chose the arms trades because Capt. Nichola Goddard inspired them to do so," says Krystel Carrier-Sabourin.