[11/8/04]Women in Iraq who want to serve in their country’s military are better equipped to do so through the work of a Vicksburg reservist who has won recognition from the U.S. Army.

Patricia Morris, whose regular assignment is assistant division counsel at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Mississippi Valley Division, has been awarded the Bronze Star.

Morris, attached to the 360th Civil Affairs Brigade of Fort Jackson, S.C., recruited and supervised the training of the first three classes of women cadets since former dictator Saddam Hussein was deposed.

The State Department has documented the accomplishment in a video that is being shown to top U.S. diplomatic and military officials and to judges of the Sundance Film Festival. It will be considered for broader distribution.

Morris’ role as training liaison came near the end of a two-year deployment that began with legal-support duties in Afghanistan in July 2002.

After being reassigned to the training mission, she was sent to the Jordanian national military academy just outside Amman. Duties included everything from measuring the cadets for their uniforms to “sitting down with the princess (of Jordan) to discuss policies on sexual-harassment prevention,” Morris said. The princess is a brigadier general in the Jordanian army.

The first class was 11 women 17 to 36. They were recruited the last week of March and days later began 10 weeks of training, Morris said. “We recruited Thursday and left Saturday,” Morris says on the documentary, called “Journey of Courage.”

The first classes were recruited from college campuses. On the documentary they can be seen still wearing traditional colorful Muslim dress in their Army transport plane, many of them flying for the first time.

“It takes an interesting sort of woman to do that,” Morris said of the women and the commitment they had made.

Saddam’s regime had had women attached to its army but had not trained them at the same level as it had men, Morris said.

From March to July of this year, about 100 women were trained through the program’s first three classes. “We drew a very highly educated group of women but it was a very small group,” she said of the first class. “And I really think for the first class that was a good way to go as it turned out, because once they could succeed in all the classes and they could do the physical and the soldier things, it made it easy to convince more men in the Iraqi ministry of defense, and even some doubters within our own coalition, that women could do this.”

Jordan is a neighbor of Iraq’s to the southwest, and the Army’s Central Command lists it as a member of the coalition that deposed Saddam. New barracks have had to be built there for the Iraqi officers, who are being trained there under contract, Morris said.

Some advantages of the arrangement are that Jordan is, like Iraq, a predominantly Muslim country; that its training officers speak Arabic, the same language as the Iraqis; and that it follows Muslim tradition by training its men and women officers separately from each other.

“The training was exactly the way we would’ve wanted them to be trained,” Morris said, adding that the Army could accomplish by sending one liaison with her cadets what could otherwise have taken a whole battalion to do.

“The contribution Jordan made was incalculable,” Morris added of the training that country’s army provided.

Morris said she keeps in touch with many of the women she supervised as cadets, and that their integration into the army has been fairly slow but, under the circumstances, smooth.

“I was a mother,” she said of her relationship with her charges. “I looked in their mothers’ eyes and said I will bring their daughters back safe. There’s an investment in that.”

Morris’ graduates’ integration into the Iraqi army seems to have been slow but smooth, she said.

The documentary highlights the patriotism that motivated the Iraqi women to sign up to serve. The chance to serve as an army officer is also a good job opportunity in a country with rampant unemployment, Morris said.

“It paid well, particularly when you consider that women in Saddam’s time had almost no job opportunities,” Morris said of the job.

After the first class of women graduated, it stayed to attend a separate graduation ceremony for a class of male officers with whom the women would share a flight home. The respect the men demonstrated for the women during and after that ceremony was a hopeful sign for the country’s future, Morris said.

“They stole the show,” Morris said of the women. “They were just spectators and not participants in the graduation ceremony. But the men, the Iraqi men, for the first time saw their fellow countrywomen in uniform cheering for them and being supportive.

“And when the ceremony was over, the men rushed across the huge parade ground to come talk to the women and wanted their photos made with them. They were so proud of these women, their own fellow countrywomen, and there was absolutely no problem with the thought that they were in uniform.

“So if it will work on that level, I think it will work at the highest levels, and that’s what we’re obviously hoping for.”