Some 67,000 American women live, work, and march alongside men in the world's first integrated peacetime Army. They do the traditional administrative and medical jobs, but they also drive and service trucks, repair missiles and helicopters, rig parachutes, jump from planes, and train troops of both genders. In periods of armed combat they will face the same risks and hardship as the men, and many of them will die.

The Women's Army Corps (WAC) was merged into the Army in 1978, and ever since then many questions have been raised about women's capability and effectiveness in this man's Army. The one question that recurs is: Can women be good soldiers? This lively and controversial book is the first to tackle that question from the point of view of the women soldiers themselves, setting their opinions and experiences in the context of women's participation in the wars of the past.

Helen Rogan is the only reporter to have gained access to a complete cycle of basic training, which she attended in spring 1979 at Fort McClellan, Alabama. She visited West Point, where the female cadets of the class of 1980 told her the full and often shocking story of their initiation, and the handful of female officers spoke candidly of their own feelings about the Academy. She traveled to posts across this country and abroad, talking to riggers and reservists, to mechanics and former prisoners of war, to colonels in the Pentagon, veteran Wacs, and a telephone operator from World War I. She watched them at work, visited them in their homes, and listened to their strongly expressed views on the Army and their place in it, and on what constitutes a perfect soldier.

Women are no strangers to war, as today's soldiers are well aware. They can be trained for almost any Army job. However, the women's success as soldiers is limited. In her exploration of the historical record, Helen Rogan convincingly demonstrates that the problems Army women face are not new. The real problems are caused not by a lack of physical or mental capability but by deep-seated attitudes and taboos.

Mixed Company sheds fresh light on the ancient battle between the sexes as it is waged in twentieth-century America and, with its suggestions for ways of keeping the All-Volunteer Force alive, holds out real hope for a cease-fire.