Kate Singh / Clark County Historical Museum

Victoria Parker's tattoos honor five soldiers in her unit who were killed in Iraq during her second deployment there.

The five men are not her brothers. But that’s what she calls them.

The five initials are not for her children. But many who spot her non-sleeved left arm ask if the tight stack of black letters represents her kids. The question bothers her.

From the top of her booming bicep — where “M.G. 27 JAN 07” is positioned — to the bottom of the bulge — where “B.E.” rests — Army Reserve Drill Sgt. Victoria Parker’s limb permanently honors the five fellow soldiers in her unit who were killed in Iraq during her second deployment there. Images of those those tattoos also went on display Tuesday as part of “Vet Ink,” an exhibit at the Clark County Historical Museum in Vancouver, Wash.

“The motto is: ‘Always remember, never forgot.’ I told them I would always remember them. And by putting it on my arm, I remember them every day. I think about them every day,” said Parker, 27, who lives in Vancouver. Her largest, accompanying tattoo depicts the “fallen soldier battle cross” — a helmet poised on a standing rifle placed inside empty, unlaced boots. That was inked from a photo she snapped of the memorial shrine set up for Army Sgt. Blair Emery (“B.E.”), killed in a roadside bomb attack in 2007 in Taji, just north of Baghdad.

“The tattoos helped me cope and move on and still honor their memories,” Parker said. “It’s no longer painful.”

“Vet Ink” is the brainchild of Susan Tissot, executive director of the museum, located in a city rich with Army roots. Before the Civil War, then-Capt. Ulysses S. Grant was quartermaster at the Columbia Army Barracks in that town. Vancouver has also served as home to part of the 104th Infantry Division.

Kate Singh / Clark County Historical Museum

Tattoos on the back of Jeremy Hubbard.

“The Army is very prevalent in everything we do — there are a lot of veterans here, a lot of Army personnel and our former mayor was a colonel in the Army. My father-in-law is a retired Naval officer,” Tissot said. “It’s a very personal exhibit.

“I knew the tattoos told a story," she added. "It’s a very touching story." 

“Vet Ink” spans military members who served from the 1950s through to today’s armed forces — 11 veterans (or active members or reserves) spanning every branch but the Coast Guard. Each panel details their time in uniform as well as when and why they decided to get tattooed.

Some of the images, like those gracing Parker’s arm, represent the “memorial” category of ink art that recall the fallen or a certain battle. Among military tattoos — a tradition that sprouted among Navy sailors generations ago but now are commonplace among post-9/11 veterans — are the other three classes: “patriotic” (flags, eagles), “spiritual” (a star, a cross, the Virgin Mary), and “identity,” (a specific unit, battalion or division), according to Kristina Wells, the museum’s collections manager.

“There’s been an interesting evolution in what tattoos the military would even accept. Our Vietnam veteran in the exhibit and one of the other 1960s service guys who took part didn’t get their tattoos until they were in their 60s. It was less accepted by the military back then,” Wells said. “If you were tattooed, you maybe wouldn’t even be accepted into the Army and Marines (during that era).”

Later, military regulations were relaxed, and banned tattoos on the neck and face.

Kate Singh / Clark County Historical Museum

Christian Nippolt-Vetter.

The ink also once carried something of a “hidden” code, especially in the Navy, according to the museum. For example, the image of a sparrow or swallow signified having traveled 5,000 or more miles. Tattoos of pigs or roosters were good-luck charms meant to prevent drowning because those animals often were carried in wooden crates, which would float if the ship ever sank.

For Parker, the tattoos also serve as a shorthand account of her combat experiences for any other veterans who spy them — an “automatic understanding” and a “unifying symbol.” She said she and fellow veterans can read one another’s service history from their ink.

But for those who haven’t served, she said, there is often misunderstanding.

“I get a lot of people asking me if they’re my kids. That’s frustrating and hurtful,” Parker said. “The female veterans, we’re so invisible. People don’t assume we’re veterans at all.”

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• Hundreds of thousands of veterans spurn free benefits

Jessica Mcgowan / for NBC News

Former Marine Paul Menefee, an Iraq war veteran, makes music in his Union City, Ga bedroom, on Feb. 15. Since transitioning to civilian life, Menefee works as a music producer in Atlanta. At home, Menefee spends most of his time in this blacked out bedroom making music and relaxing. Drawing blinds and blacking out windows is a habit Menefee started after his military service to help him feel more secure.

In the first month home from war, one Marine routinely searched his darkened bedroom for the rifle he'd left in Iraq, while another Marine shunned his favorite nightspot for fear that someone in the club might carry a gun. 

In the four weeks after their homecomings, one infantryman drove “white knuckled” at 55 mph while another soldier purposely began living even faster — losing her virginity, going blonde and drinking hard with battle buddies.

Some 34,000 service members will ship home from Afghanistan during the next year, President Barack Obama told the nation last week. 

Amid the gleeful glow of arrivals, many of those troops may quickly confront sensory overloads, social awkwardness and, perhaps, deep cravings for personal freedoms, according to interviews with four younger veterans who weathered such moments.  

“The first 30 days are interesting,” said Alex Horton, who spent 15 months in Iraq as an Army infantryman, including during the 2007 troop surge in Baghdad and Diyala Province.

Today, he works for the Department of Veterans Affairs. "I’ll call it the unraveling. That first week back you’re still high on everything, kissing your wife or girlfriend, sometimes seeing your kids for the first time. But then the tension starts to build.

“You experience culture and weather shock, and notice your senses are heightened,” said Horton, adding that another common theme — albeit something he did not go through — involves disrupting the daily routines established by a spouse and kids during a service member’s absence, and consequently, dealing with strained relationships. 

Distant from family
To that point, two veterans interviewed for this story, including Horton, said they suffered romantic breakups after returning from combat, and two got divorced. 

Jessica Mcgowan / for NBC News

Former Marine Paul Menefee, an Iraq war veteran, shows off his spiritual tattoos at home in Union City, Ga., on Feb. 15. The "Blessed" tattoo is one many Menefee has gotten after his two tours in Iraq.

"Trying to get back to my regular life was hard because I wouldn’t talk much to anybody. I didn’t want to talk about what went on in Iraq, didn't want to describe the details," said Paul Menefee, a former Marine who was deployed twice to Iraq and fought in the Battle of Fallujah in late 2004. 

"Things that happened, I didn’t want to remember. I was trying to cope in my own way, not deal with the images in my head," added Menefee, who eventually divorced his wife. "I was distant from my wife, mother, cousins, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles. At Sunday dinners, I pretty much stayed off to myself."

Old habits came home, too. During his first 30 days back at Camp Lejeune, N.C., Menefee grew jittery in a Wal-Mart checkout line because other customers were queued up behind him. He left the store immediately. He avoided nightclub outings with friends because the bar crowds seemed unpredictable.

He chose seats in the backs of restaurants so he could watch all the patrons and map each exit. At home, he kept his blinds drawn, his door locked and always looked left then glanced right when passing a hallway or an open corner. 

On interstate highways, Menefee — a truck driver in Iraq — often pulled four lanes to his left if he spotted a blown tire or crumpled, food wrapper lying on the right shoulder: The types of hiding places in which insurgents routinely planted IEDs in Iraq. While driving in an American city, he would take an early left or an abrupt right if he saw garbage or roadkill on an approaching curb.

"You don’t realize that (your senses are) very fine-tuned to your environment, everything from hearing things to seeing things," Horton said. "I imagine this is what blind people feel with their other senses. You rely on them so much (in combat), they have no business being that acute in the civilian world."

"When I got into a car and drove on a highway for the first time," Horton added, "I was white knuckled."

For former Marine Christian Gutierrez, who returned from Iraq in spring 2008, the open road at first carried a mix of old caution and fresh freedom.

During quick trips to the grocery store, he frequently would exit his car then quickly circle back, thinking he'd left his rifle in the front seat, momentarily forgetting he didn't carry a weapon anymore. 

"But I love cars and love driving. So I drove a lot because it was my time," Gutierrez said. "That moment was your moment. You had control of your car. You had control of that moment."

'Lucky I didn't die'
Soon, he bought a motorcycle to further feed that rush of independence, to expand his new-found personal space — and because combat left him with another sharp bit of wisdom: Your moments on this planet may be few.  

"Being back taught me that if I want to do something, I’d better do something right now. You never know," he said. 

That same compulsion drove Iraq veteran Laura Cannon to use her first 30 days home to mark, she said, "the beginning of a new life for me," a time in which she stepped away from both Evangelical Christianity and the strict rules under which she'd been living since enrolling at West Point.  

"I knew that if I didn't make drastic changes, being at war would be the last adventure I would ever experience," said Cannon, a former Army infantry member who was part of the 2003 Coalition invasion. "Surviving a war completely changed my perspective. I needed to start living for me. So I made a mental list of goals to accomplish. No. 1 — lose my virginity. I was 24 for God's sake!"

During her first month home, Cannon also bought an SUV, broke up with a boyfriend, dyed her hair blonde, visited Ground Zero, posted a personal best in a 5K race, and found time to "party my ass off with my war buddies — heavy drinking."

In Iraq, "there was (stuff) blowing up everywhere. I'm lucky I didn't die. I hadn't done enough with my life," she said. "I had survived a war. I had a second chance to live differently. I was not going to let others control me anymore. It was time to make more adventures and maybe get some baggage along the way. I was so far behind. Lots to catch up on."

"The rapid pace at which I compensated for my repressed life, especially in the first 30 days after the war," Cannon added, "were completely catalyzed by combat." 

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Critics of the Pentagon’s decision to allow women to serve in many combat positions accused the military of putting social experimentation and political correctness ahead of the fighting power of American troops.

The decision, announced Thursday by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, appeared to be met mostly with approval on Capitol Hill — and jubilation among women who have served in the armed forces.

But others, including some combat veterans, Republicans in Congress and culturally conservative groups, expressed deep reservations or outright opposition.

One former Marine infantryman, Ryan Smith, said that combat readiness could be harmed by the decision. In an Op-Ed article published Thursday in The Wall Street Journal, Smith focused on some of the more unseemly aspects of combat service.

During the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, he wrote, his unit went more than a month without showering and then was lined up naked to be pressure-washed.

“It would be distracting and potentially traumatizing to be forced to be naked in front of the opposite sex, particularly when your body has been ravaged by lack of hygiene,” Smith wrote. “In the reverse, it would be painful to witness a member of the opposite sex in such an uncomfortable and awkward position.

“The relationships among members of a unit can be irreparably harmed by forcing them to violate societal norms,” he concluded.

Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, a Marine combat veteran who served two tours in Iraq and a third in Afghanistan, said that the question was whether the change would “actually make our military better at operating in combat and killing the enemy.”

“What needs to be explained is how this decision, when all is said and done, increases combat effectiveness rather than being a move done for political purposes,” Hunter said in a statement. A spokesman told NBC News that the congressman believes the decision was rushed, and that it was unclear how the Pentagon reached its decision.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, quickly announced his support for Panetta’s decision. But he said Thursday that he wants to be sure “to make sure that the standards, particularly the physical standards, are met so that the combat efficiency of the units are not degraded.”

In remarks as he was entering a confirmation hearing for Sen. John Kerry as secretary of state, McCain said that allowing women in combat was “the right thing to do.”

When a reporter suggested that American military women were already in combat roles — more than 150 women have died and nearly 1,000 have been wounded in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — McCain said, “Well, not really.”

“It’s one thing to be some place where a rocket hits and be wounded, and it’s another thing to be out there on a night raid against al-Qaida,” McCain said. “But the fact is that this is a — I support this decision, and I think that women are fully qualified to carry out that mission.”

A senior defense official told NBC News on Wednesday that exceptions would probably remain, and that elite special operations positions among the Navy SEALs, Army Rangers and Delta Force, another branch of the Army, would probably stay closed to women.

There were about 166,000 women serving in active duty in 2011, the most recent year for which figures are available. They accounted for about 14 percent of the active armed forces. Women were most represented in the Air Force, at 19 percent, and least in the Marines, 6 percent.

There were about 36,000 women among active-duty officers, or about 17 percent.

Polls consistently show broad support for allowing women in combat roles. Support ran almost 3-to-1 in a Quinnipiac University poll conducted last February.

Still, a conservative Christian activist group, Concerned Women for America, was blunt in its opposition to the shift.

“The point of the military is to protect our country,” the group’s president, Penny Nance, said in a statement. “Anything that distracts from that is detrimental. Our military cannot continue to choose social experimentation and political correctness over combat readiness.”

Some critics of Panetta’s decision expressed concern that women would not be able to meet physical-fitness requirements of the military, or that the standards for physical fitness would be lowered, weakening the force, to make them fair to women.

Anne Coughlin, a University of Virginia law professor who helped form a group that inspired a lawsuit against Panetta last year, opposing the ban, said that she saw no merit in any of the arguments for the ban.

Arguments about unit cohesion, she said, rely on a stereotype — that men and women will get up to “mischief” in close quarters. She said that she applauded strict fitness requirements, physical and psychological, and that there was no reason to expect that the military would endanger troops by lowering them.

“Some women, just like some men, may not be able to satisfy some of those standards,” she told NBC News in a telephone interview. “It seems preposterous to me to think that the secretary of defense and the people who are in charge of designing the military standards would put the nation in peril in this way, and they are certainly not be being asked to do that.”

Related: 'It's about time!': Female veterans cheer over women's right to fight
Related: Defense chief Panetta to clear women for combat roles

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has decided to clear the way for women to serve in many combat positions in the U.S. armed forces, a senior defense official told NBC News on Wednesday afternoon.

The Pentagon chief will announce on Thursday that he is eliminating the direct ground combat exclusion — the Department of Defense policy that excluded women from assignment to units below the brigade level if the unit would be engaged in direct combat.

This will allow women to be assigned to select positions in ground combat units at the battalion level, opening approximately 237,000 individual jobs to women across service branches, including 5,000 positions for female Marines in ground combat elements.

"I support it. It reflects the reality of 21st century military operations," said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in anticipation of the announcement. 

"We are moving in the direction of women as infantry soldiers," one senior defense official said. 

Longstanding opponents of lifting the ban on women in combat lambasted the move as a show of "political correctness."

"The point of the military is to protect our country," said Penny Nance, President and CEO of Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee, a conservative lobbying group. "Anything that distracts from that is detrimental. Our military cannot continue to choose social experimentation and political correctness over combat readiness. While this decision is not unexpected from this administration, it is still disappointing."

Panetta, who is expected to leave his position as Defense Secretary in February, will call on the military services to study whether it is possible to open all jobs to women, and the services must come back with their individual plans and recommendations by May 15, a senior defense official said.  He will call for all changes to be in place, and women serving in the new roles by Jan. 1, 2016. 

But a senior defense official who spoke to NBC News said they expect exceptions to remain. Elite Special Operations positions in Navy SEALS, Army Rangers, and Delta Force were likely to remain closed to women, the official said, while the Army is likely to open up jobs for female pilots in the elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. 

Karim Sahib / AFP - Getty Images file

Female soldiers from the US 1st Cavalry on patrol in Baghdad's al-Jihad quarter in this Mar. 21, 2004, file photograph.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., called the decision "historic."

"In fact, it's important to remember that in recent wars that lacked any true front lines, thousands of women already spent their days in combat situations serving side-by-side with their fellow male servicemembers," said Murray, who heads the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee. 

In November, a group of women in the military and the non-profit American Civil Liberties Union sued the Pentagon over the policy of excluding women from combat roles. Their complaint argued that they were already serving in combat roles, but not getting recognized for it.

So far, 152 women have died while deployed in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and at least 958 have been wounded in action. 

"This is really the implementation of a policy that has been a reality for women for years," one senior defense official said.

According to the most recent Defense numbers, there are 1.4 million active duty members of the military, and nearly 15 percent of them are women. 

This new military-wide rule — distinct from a law — will replace the 1994 policy memo barring women in combat roles, which was signed by then-Secretary Les Aspin.

NBC News correspondent Kelly O'Donnell and NBC staff writer Kari Huus and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Related:

Female veterans cheer new era: ‘It’s about time!’
Women in the infantry? Forget about it, says female Marine officer

Courtesy Jesse Holder

Jesse Holder, a 173rd Airborne trooper, was wounded in 2007 while serving in Afghanistan by shrapnel from an RPG round.

Four soldiers, four battles — and, between them — four total inches separate the slim expanse between death and life.

One died because his armor plating wasn’t one inch higher. Three survived by that same tiny fraction, left to mull the unanswerable: "Why am I still here?"

In the final days of 2012, the somber tally of American service members wounded in action in Afghanistan surpassed 18,000 while the number of U.S. military men and women killed there eclipsed 2,040, according to the Department of Defense.

As Jesse Holder can attest, many of those 20,000-plus causalities are here — or are gone — based on a cold geometric fact of war: So often, everything comes down to a single inch.

"I got hit in the neck and I thought I was done," said Holder, a 173rd Airborne trooper wounded in 2007 by shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade while in Afghanistan. The round detonated just above and to the right of Holder’s head as he rode in the turret of an Army truck, patrolling a steep-walled riverbed.

"I said, out loud, 'Oh, this is it. I’m going to die right here.' Everybody in the truck was thinking the same thing because of all the blood."

He was airlifted to a makeshift hospital where a surgeon removed the metal fragment. The doctor then revealed that if the chunk had entered Holder’s neck "one centimeter to the left," it would have opened an artery. He likely would have bled to death in the truck. Instead, he was back on the line 10 days later. He never lost consciousness.

"After the fire fight," Holder said, "when you're back at your base talking about it, that's when it usually comes out: 'I was inches away.' You'll hear: 'If that glass shield hadn't been there, or if that tree hadn't deflected the bullet, I wouldn't be here now.'

"During combat, you try not to think about it. But I think that's why, when people come back, some have a hard time," added Holder, who recently published a book, "Chutes, Beer, & Bullets," recounting some of those close calls. "I've been good at compartmentalizing it, and not thinking about it. But I lost a friend like that. It was the one inch that killed him."

'It could have been me'
That buddy was Army Spc. Jacob Lowell, 22, a 173rd Airborne trooper who had been in Afghanistan for two weeks when his unit clashed with enemies armed with small arms and grenades on June 2, 2007.

Courtesy Jesse Holder

Jacob Lowell, left, is pictured with a fellow soldier. Lowell was killed in action after a bullet narrowly missed his protective armor.

"All my friends, all at one time, they got wiped out," said Holder, who was not part of that mission. "A lot of our guys didn't make it home. My good friend did die by a narrow margin. The bullet went right above Jacob’s protective armor."

The feeling dubbed "survivor guilt" is a sentiment that Dr. Harry Croft, a San Antonio-based psychiatrist, has often heard expressed during his conversations with more than 7,000 veterans diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

"I've heard lots of stories, including: 'I was so close, it could have been me.' For some, it's almost like they're saying: 'I feel worse about that than if I would have died.' So they bring home this terrible, burdensome guilt," said Croft.

Recovery can be helped by "learning to reframe that event — not to forget it, but to be able to understand it in a different way," Croft said. 

Therapy can include coaxing veterans to talk about — and eventually accept — the notion that "in the heat of war, a lot of things happen, things you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy," Croft said.

What's more, combat includes the mathematical equation that thousands of deadly projectiles are whizzing back and forth, up and down; some hit vehicles; some hit trees or rocks or dirt; some hit people, and breeze an inch past human flesh.

'There's a reason I'm here'
Former Army helicopter pilot Joe Baginski has lived more than 40 years since a Vietnam mission during which he nearly was wounded or killed so often in the span of just five minutes, he can't even calculate the number of near misses. But he's put his own survival into healthy — and folksy — perspective: "I must have been smiling just right because I never got a scratch."

In November 1968, Baginski, then 21, hovered his chopper at about 75 feet in thick foliage as other men on board dropped crates of ammunition to U.S. soldiers who were running low on bullets amid a battle with a far larger North Vietnamese force. The helicopter's tail rotor spun inches from branches thick enough to bring down the craft. At the same time, North Vietnamese Army troops fired on the chopper. Bullets pierced the floor. The co-pilot was struck in the arm. A sergeant major was hit in the foot. The instrument panel and numerous gauges — directly in front of Baginksi — were obliterated in the barrage. When the ammo drop was complete, he carefully maneuvered the bird up and through the jungle canopy.

"I have no idea how many rounds we had hit on the inside of that helicopter," Baginski said. "But there had to be at least a dozen that struck that instrument panel and fragments were going anywhere. I don't know how close I came but it had to be pretty close."

For soldiers who beat heavy odds to survive harsh battles, finding deeper meaning in their post-military lives can help them deal with nagging wonders about why they came home when buddies did not, Croft said.

"They decide: 'I guess there's a reason I'm here.' That can be the impetus to move forward with life," Croft said. 

That's a sentiment embraced by John Bennett, who was dropped by a sniper's bullet in Iraq in 2005. The bullet entered his right side, shattered two vertebrae, fractured a third, and cost him his colon, his spleen, half his pancreas and his ability to walk.

"An inch to the left, it would have deflected off my ballistic armored plate and I would have been fine. And an inch to the right, it would have hit my liver and it would have more than likely killed me," said Bennett, a former infantry soldier who lives in Cascade, Mont. 

"In the earlier stages of my recovery it was a daily thought: Half inch left and I wouldn't be in this situation. And I still think about it periodically. But, I don't dwell on it," Bennett said. "I am a firm believer in everything happens for a reason. I don't know what the reason was for me to stay alive and be in this wheelchair, but it was for something. Maybe it was to help with articles like this that help others believe they can move forward, no matter what their situation is. Who knows?"

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A group of female pilots, Marines and soldiers gathered in San Francisco on Tuesday to announce the filing of a lawsuit challenging the military's policy of excluding women from many combat positions.

The four women plaintiffs, along with the Service Women's Action Network headquartered in New York, are suing the Department of Defense, and the suit names Defense Secretary Leon Panetta specifically. A representative at the DOD in Washington, D.C., was not immediately available for comment, but he did say it is common policy not to comment on ongoing litigation. 

The American Civil Liberties Union is representing Marine 1st Lt. Colleen Farrell, Marine Reserves Capt. Zoe Bedell, Army Staff Sgt. Jennifer Hunt and Air Guard Major Mary Jennings Hegar in the suit, which was filed Tuesday afternoon in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco. The four women have all served in Afghanistan or Iraq, and two are Purple Heart recipients.

Their careers and opportunities have been limited by a policy, the suit states, which does not grant them the same recognition for their service as their male counterparts. The combat exclusion policy also makes it harder for them to do their jobs, the suit alleges.

Though the Pentagon is reforming the policies directed at servicewomen, the rules still bar women in the U.S. military from specific combat positions -- positions that are available to men. 

"To this day, that same part of me doesn’t understand why someone’s gender would have any bearing at all on what job they ended up in," wrote Major Mary Jennings Hegar, who is based at Moffett Field -- about 40 miles south of San Francisco --  and is a member of the U.S. Air National Guard. "I always thought that your skills, strengths, and interests would be better qualifiers. I remember watching the news when I was in high school and hearing that they were opening combat aircraft up to women for the first time. My first thought was, “Cool! What do I need to do to get one!” followed closely by my second thought, “What changed? Why weren’t we allowed to fly in combat before?” 

Click here for more military-related coverage from NBC News.

Hegar has served three tours over two deployments to Afghanistan, and trained as a search and rescue pilot after serving five years in the Air Force. She was also awarded the Purple Heart and the Distinguished Flying Cross with a Valor Device for heroism while participating in an aerial mission near Kandahar Airfield in 2009. 

According to the suit, women make up more than 14 percent of the 1.4 million active military personnel, yet the rule categorically excludes them from more than 200,000 positions, as well as from entire career fields. Consequently, the suit states, commanders are stymied in their ability to mobilize their troops effectively. In addition, servicewomen are:

• Denied training and recognition for their service;
• put at a disadvantage for promotions;
• prevented from competing for positions for which they have demonstrated their suitability and from advancing in rank.

"That’s the problem with the military’s combat exclusion policy," Hegar wrote." It makes it that much harder for people to see someone’s abilities, and instead reinforces stereotypes about gender. The policy creates the pervasive way of thinking in military and civilian populations that women can’t serve in combat roles, even in the face of the reality that servicewomen in all branches of the military are already fighting for their country alongside their male counterparts. They shoot, they return fire, they drag wounded comrades to safety and they engage with the enemy, and they have been doing this for years. They risk their lives for their country, and the combat exclusion policy  does them a great disservice."

NBC Bay Area's Cheryl Hurd contributed to this report.

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courtesy of IFS

A new app, Flight Log, designed for the military was released Monday by IFS, a company that already works with the U.S. Army.

Now that we know horses and bayonets are (mostly) outmoded, a U.K.-based company says its new mobile military app can help American forces take another step toward the future by going more paperless in combat. 

IFS, a global “enterprise applications company” that already works with the U.S. Army, released Monday its “Flight Log” app specifically for military smartphones. It is designed, according to IFS, to help personnel aboard planes, boats and vehicles record real-time,mission data that can be relayed to a central command facility.

The on-the-go app, IFS contends, will save the military time, money and mistakes while making it unnecessary to take IT-trained troops with them on deployments to repair any tech glitches that arise in the field.

“Flight Log provides an immediate window into the back (IT) office, rather than having to take the back office with them where ever they go,” said Kevin Deal, vice president for aerospace & defense at IFS North America.

The Army already is investing in mobile apps but those generally are only applied to training, IFS said. Flight Log, which could be in hostile environments, “is very specialized in defense so we’re going to be hosting it internally to start with,” said Brendan Viggers, the company’s U.K.-based head of product management. “You need (to be part of the IFS system) to use. This is not something that we'll put on Google Play or on the Windows store.”

The app’s uses can span terrains. For example, if technical problems arise in flight, the app connects the crew immediately with military IT experts on the ground to alert them that a repair is needed as soon as the aircraft returns to base. Fliers can even take a photo of the glitch — for instance, a panel reading — and share that image with the IT staff at the base.

For land vehicles, Flight Log can help the soldiers record notes on the fly like “change a tire,” “fix a cracked wind screen,” “swap out radio” or “replace part for gun turret,” Deal said. “It’s a quick way of recording information on an app rather than putting that information on a piece of paper.

“If you put that (repair order) on paper, you have to wait for that piece of paper to go through the loop of fax machines versus instantly updating the system to let them (at the base) know you’ve found an error,” Deal added. Relying on paper-based notes to request repairs also “can lead to mistakes." 

Saving time is nice. But saving money — particularly amid all the campaign conversations about military budgets — may be more critical, and it's something Flight Log can help achieve, IFS contends.

“Say you’re working on an F-16 (aircraft) in an avionics bay,” Deal said. “You can sit there and look at a technical component that’s broken and take a picture of it with the app. After an IT member sees the picture, it may turn out that it’s not required that this problem get repaired right at that moment, which is important if you’ve got sorties you’ve got to fly. Or, if you do need to get a new part, you can look at that app and ask it: ‘Where is that part? Can I get it here quickly? If so, I’ll go ahead and make that repair now.’ So it really extends the abilities of the flight-light maintainers.”

Flight Log also gives service members a digital tool to replace mounds of paper instructions that detail highly complex pieces of military equipment. For example, the instruction manual for a C-130 military transport plane can fill an entire briefcase, IFS said. Aside from bulk, paper presents other potential problems: a soldier’s notes on a technical problem get jotted on a slip paper that eventually goes missing, or the problem is simply wrongly described in a written report. The ripple effects of such clerical mistakes can roll into waves of lost time and lost dollars, Deal said.

“Bad data is one of the biggest things that military IT infrastructures face,” Deal said. “It can actually cause you to buy the wrong parts or to procure too many of a particular item.”

Flight Log is not yet in use in the U.S. military — though IFS expects that it soon will become an icon on many service members’ phones.

“In addition to the cost-savings that come with better data accuracy, and the cost savings of (eliminating) paper-captured information, there’s also a reduction of training — and that saves money, too” Viggers said. “They can just download it from the app store and use it straight away, and nobody has to teach them how to find it or how to use it.” 

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Luke Sharrett / Redux Pictures file

A Marine second lieutenant hangs on an obstacle course during the Marine Corps' Infantry Officer Course in Quantico, Va. on July 6. Beginning in September, women officer volunteers will participate in the course as part of a study to gauge the feasibility of allowing female Marines to serve in more extensive combat roles.

Come September, a small group of young female Marines will break through one of the last bastions of macho in the U.S. military. They’ll be the first class of female officers to take part in the grueling Infantry Officer Course in Quantico, Va., a test of both physical fitness and mental will that prepares the corps’ future platoon leaders.

All of these women will be volunteers, and their training will be closely watched. The new coed class has sparked suggestions that such training could lead to integrating women in the Marine infantry, with some saying they “would make excellent grunts.”

But at least one female Marine officer, a former college hockey player and battle-tested engineering unit commander still on active duty, says placing women in infantry units is just a bad idea.

Courtesy of USMC

Capt. Katie Petronio says women have no place in the Marine Corps infantry.

“Infantry is one of those fields we need to leave alone.” Marine Capt. Katie Petronio told msnbc.com. 

Petronio was just back from Afghanistan last year — where she worked shoulder to shoulder with infantrymen — when she heard people arguing that it was a violation of rights to restrict women from combat. The rights advocates missed the point, she said.

“It would just keep me up at night when I’d heard these bleeps or opinions,” Petronio said. “I felt if I didn’t do anything about it that my silence was consent and if this would’ve have passed, I wouldn’t have done my due diligence in getting my point across.”

She was compelled to write what became a widely cited article in the privately published Marine Corps Gazette provocatively titled “Get Over It! We Are Not All Created Equal.” 

The article details her personal experiences during deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, making the case that the physical rigors of infantry are not for women.

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“Can women endure the physical and physiological rigors of sustained combat operations,” she wrote, “and are we willing to accept the attrition and medical issues that go along with integration?”

Even though she was a standout Bowdoin athlete and could bench press 145 pounds and squat 200 pounds, was ranked 4th out of a class of 52 in Officer Candidate School and excelled at Marine Corps fitness tests, Petronio's deployment in combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan took a brutal toll on her 5-foot-3-inch body. 

Related: Pentagon's new rules deploy women closer to combat

In Iraq, she developed severe restless leg syndrome, and a spine injury pressed on her nerves. In Afghanistan she was the senior Marine in her engineering unit working 16-hour days for weeks at a time building patrol bases.

Courtesy of USMC

Marine Corps Capt. Katie Petronio, right, poses with children at Patrol Base Mateen, Afghanistan.

"By the fifth month into the deployment, I had muscle atrophy in my thighs that was causing me to constantly trip and my legs to buckle with the slightest grade change,” she wrote. “My agility during firefights and mobility on and off vehicles and perimeter walls was seriously hindering my response time and overall capability. It was evident that stress and muscular deterioration was affecting everyone regardless of gender; however, the rate of my deterioration was noticeably faster than that of male Marines and further compounded by gender-specific medical conditions.” She lost 17 pounds on an already lean body.

Her article has supporters and detractors, but Petronio said she’s just relating her own experience to avoid any sort of blanket policy that could end up putting lives in peril.

“People just think I’m just closed minded and I’m a sexist and I’m not looking to expand opportunities for females,” Petronio told msnbc.com. “And that is absolutely not true. There are a lot of jobs in the Marine Corps right now that could be open to females. My big point is there needs to be a distinct line when it comes to the infantry.”

The decades-long debate over changing roles of women in the military reached a turning point in 2011 when Congress directed the Pentagon to take a hard look at policies that restrict female service members. In February, the Defense Department relaxed some restrictions, moving women closer to combat, but a fuller review of combat jobs is under way.

It turns out that though women have fought and died in every American war, and many female troops performed with valor under fire in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a lack of data to back any service-wide decision on which close-to-combat jobs would ultimately be open to them.

“We needed some data, some good recent Marine Corps data,” Maj. Shawn Haney, a Marine Corps spokeswoman, told msnbc.com. “There’s data from other services and other countries but we’re a little different.”

Even now, about 44 women across the Marine Corps are serving in jobs normally closed to women as part of the research program, Haney said.  

But whether women will join the ranks of grunts in the future is unclear.

“This has a lot do to with physical standards,” Haney said. “This is the Marine Corps. This isn’t JV. We've got to make sure we’re doing the right thing for the institution and the individual.”

As one female Marine told msnbc.com, "No one questions why there aren't any females in the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, etc. Olympic athletes are the elite of the elite. No one questions why the women compete against women and men against men. Those are great sports and achievements. But lives and missions aren't on the line. In our world, if you move slower one day, you don't get bumped off the medal stand, you could die or get someone else killed."

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WASHINGTON -- Two female soldiers filed suit on Wednesday to scrap the U.S. military's restrictions on women in combat, claiming the policy violated their constitutional rights.

Command Sergeant Major Jane Baldwin and Colonel Ellen Haring, both Army reservists, said policies barring them from assignments "solely on the basis of sex" violated their right to equal protectio under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

"This limitation on plaintiffs' careers restricts their current and future earnings, their potential for promotion and advancement, and their future retirement benefits," the women said in the suit filed in U.S. District Court.

Pentagon's new rules deploy women closer to combat

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Army Secretary John McHugh are among the defendants. Baldwin is from Tallahassee, Florida, and Haring lives in Bristow, Virginia.

The Pentagon unveiled a new policy in February that opened up 14,000 more positions to women in the military. It still barred them from serving in infantry, armor and special-operations units whose main job is front-line combat.

NBC News: Pentagon to open more military jobs to women

Defense Department spokesman George Little declined to comment on the lawsuit. He said Panetta was "strongly committed to examining the expansion of roles for women in the U.S. military, as evidenced by the recent step of opening up thousands of more assignments to women."

Women make up about 14.5 percent of active-duty military personnel. More than 800 women have been wounded and more than 130 killed in fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the lawsuit said.

"The linear battlefield no longer exists," Baldwin and Haring said. They alleged that women are engaged in combat even when it is not part of their assigned roles.

From wannabe housewife to managing $822 billion military budget

Army Chief of Staff General Raymond Odierno said last week the Army was considering letting women attend its elite Ranger School and opening up infantry and armor positions to women.

Report: Growing number of military women see combat, serve in leadership roles

More than 200 women had begun reporting to maneuver battalions and combat teams last week, he said.

The case is Baldwin et al v. Panetta et al in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, No. 12-cv-00832.

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Some restrictions on women serving in combat roles in the military will be relaxed, the Pentagon said on Thursday, reflecting the reality that women have served, and died, in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Defense Department would still prohibit women from serving in infantry, armor and special operations units, whose main function is to engage in front-line combat, defense officials said. But women will be allowed to move closer to the trenches by stationing them near direct ground troops in jobs such as tank mechanic and field artillery radar. Previously, women had been billeted away from smaller combat units.

NBC News: Pentagon to open more military jobs to women

The move is a reaction to what the Pentagon calls the “non-linear and fluid” nature of the modern battlefield.

In addition, the Pentagon said it will develop “gender-neutral physical standards" for all service members, which the military will use in assigning future jobs.

“Women are contributing in unprecedented ways to the military’s mission. Through their courage, sacrifice, patriotism and great skill, women have proven their ability to serve in an expanding number of roles on and off the battlefield,” Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said in a statement. “We will continue to open as many positions as possible to women so that anyone qualified to serve can have the opportunity to do so.”

Report: Growing number of military women see combat, serve in leadership roles

"It's a tiny step," Anu Bhagwati, executive director of the Service Women’s Action Network and former Marine, told The Washington Post. "It’s a bit of a slap in the face. We’re already doing this stuff.”

Nearly 12 percent of U.S. forces deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan were women. They represented about 2 percent of U.S. military deaths in those wars.

Under a policy adopted in 1994, women are allowed to serve in combat units as medics, intelligence officers and other jobs at the brigade level, which is a force of around 3,500 people.

But a woman could not be assigned to perform the same job in a battalion, which can be as small as a few hundred troops and whose forces are more likely to be directly exposed to combat.

The military has sometimes gotten around the rules by attaching women to battalions, which allowed them to work in the smaller units but kept them from officially receiving credit for being in combat.

Since combat experience is a factor in promotions and job advancement in the military, women have had greater difficulty than men in moving up to the top ranks, officials said.

The Pentagon's plan to change its rules now goes to Congress, which may review the policy shift before it goes into effect, probably sometime this summer. During that period, Congress potentially could take action to oppose the policy changes.

"We believe it's very important to explore ways to offer more opportunities to women in the military," Pentagon Press Secretary George Little told Reuters. "It doesn't stop today. We'll continue to look for ways to open more positions to women in the military."

The decision on whether women should formally serve in combat positions will be determined in future reviews, officials told NBC News.

NBC News' Jim Miklaszewski and Courtney Kube and Reuters contributed to this report.

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WASHINGTON - More military jobs will be opening up to women as the Pentagon on Thursday releases findings from a congressionally mandated report on whether they should be assigned to combat roles, officials said.

Pentagon officials said they will announce that more than 14,000 jobs across the services will now be open to women – from communications to intelligence to mechanics -- but that does not mean they will be in direct combat roles, yet.

The decision on whether women should formally serve in combat positions will be determined in future reviews, the officials told NBC News.

Report: Growing number of military women see combat, serve in leadership roles

Since women can already serve in most jobs in the Air Force and the Navy, most of these new positions will be for women in the Army and Marine Corps, officials said.

Women have been serving and dying in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since the conflicts began. Activists maintain that the military claims those women are "attached" to the combat units, but not "assigned" to them.

Jim Miklaszweski is NBC News' chief Pentagon correspondent. Courtney Kube is NBC News' Pentagon producer.

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