We’re in the middle of a war. No, make that two wars. We have military personnel being sent back to Iraq and Afghanistan on multiple tours of duty with less than the recommended amount of rest. We have stop/loss. There is no end in sight.

If you were the United States Government, what would you do with a medic who was perfectly willing to go out on combat missions in Afghanistan and won a Silver Star for repeatedly risking life and limb to save comrades? If you said, remove her from duty because she lacks a penis, then you are ready to lead this great nation into battle, my friend.

Now, why was a woman out on combat missions in the first place since that’s against military policy?

“We weren’t supposed to take her out” on missions “but we had to because there was no other medic,” said Lt. Martin Robbins, a platoon leader with Charlie Troop, 4th Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment, whose men Brown saved. “By regulations you’re not supposed to,” he said, but [Pfc. Monica] Brown “was one of the guys, mixing it up, clearing rooms, doing everything that anybody else was doing.”

Clearly, Lt. Robbins isn’t fit to be in the U.S. military. Just look at the disaster that ensued when he sent a woman to do a man’s job:

At dusk on April 25, 2007, Brown’s platoon had just finished searching for a Taliban leader near the village of Jani Khel. The convoy of four Humvees and one Afghan National Army pickup truck had turned into a dry streambed when a pressure-plate bomb exploded under the rear Humvee.

“Two-One is hit!” Staff Sgt. Jose Santos yelled. Looking back, Brown saw the Humvee engulfed in a fireball as its fuel tank and fuel cans ignited. Insurgents about 100 yards to the east opened up with machine guns and AK-47 semiautomatic rifles, as Brown and Santos ran without cover to the burning vehicle.

Four of those injured crawled or were thrown from the Humvee, while a fifth, Spec. Larry Spray, was caught inside by his boot and was on fire. Sgt. Zachary Tellier managed to pull him out.

Brown and a colleague then grabbed Spec. Stanson Smith, who was in shock and blinded by blood from his lacerated forehead, and dragged him by his body armor into a ditch about 15 yards away. Tellier helped Spray limp over.

No sooner were they in the ditch that insurgents began firing mortars. Brown threw her body over Smith, shielding him as more than a dozen rounds hit nearby. The ammunition inside the burning Humvee then started exploding, including 60mm mortars, 40mm grenade rounds and rifle ammunition. Again, Brown lay over the wounded.

Robbins, the platoon leader, repositioned his Humvee near the injured and was incredulous that Brown had survived. “I was surprised I didn’t get killed and she’d been over there for 10, 15 minutes longer,” he recalled.

“There was small arms coming in from two different machine-gun positions, mortars falling … a burning Humvee with 16 mortar rounds in it, chunks of aluminum the size of softballs flying all around,” said Robbins, of Portsmouth, R.I. “It was about as hairy as it gets.”

Santos, the platoon sergeant, drove the pickup over to get the wounded to safety. “It was pretty much just like a miracle run,” Brown recalled. With another soldier, she hoisted Smith onto the truck, while Spray crouched behind the back window and Brown dived onto a bench in the back. There, Brown put pressure on Smith’s head, which was bleeding heavily, and also held the hand of Spray, who was charred and shaking.

“Talk to him,” she told Spray, trying to keep Smith conscious. Spray, his face contorted with pain and fear, responded: “It’s going to be okay.”

Santos drove to a more protected position, while Brown bandaged Smith and Spray, gave them IVs and readied them for the helicopters that arrived 45 minutes later. Brown “never looked around or anything,” Robbins said. “She was focused on the patients the whole time. She did her job perfectly.”

Smith and Spray were flown to the United States, and Tellier received a Bronze Star for pulling Spray from the Humvee. He was killed five months later in another firefight.

Brown stayed in the field for two more days, while U.S. Apache helicopter gunships attacked insurgents and blew up the damaged Humvee. Within a week, however, she was abruptly called back to the sprawling U.S. base in Khost.

Note the buried detail that one of the guys she saved, died in another fire-fight five months later. Hey, maybe he needed a medic and one wasn’t available.

But what you really have to love is why she was pulled from her job. She was too good at it.

“I got pulled” by higher-ups, she said, because her presence as “a female in a combat arms unit” had attracted attention.

They were perfectly happy to use her until she went and did something heroic and people found out a woman was in combat. Then she had to go.

Because the decider has said that women aren’t to serve in combat. If that’s how he felt, maybe he shouldn’t have started a preemptive war when we already had a war going on.

Of course, Bush has never shown much concern for the sexual assaults women soldiers suffer at the hands of their comrades.

Updated: Wording changed, again, this time deleted entirely because apparently I’m not doing a very good job of conveying what I mean.