What Col. Ellen Haring is proposing would eventually change the way America mourns on Memorial Day. “And that’s painful, yeah,” she said, in between cutting green beans and heating up the grill for a Memorial Day barbecue at her Northern Virginia home. “But women are already dying,” she said. “The public may not realize it, but over 1,000 women have been killed or injured” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Haring, 50, is one of two Army Reserve officers who filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit last week against the Defense Department and the Army for barring women from certain combat units and other jobs solely on the basis of their gender. The suit amounts to a demand that women be given better odds at dying in combat, an interesting way to kick off the Memorial Day weekend. There are about 250,000 jobs in the U.S. military that remain closed to women. Haring encountered those locked doors as soon as she graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1984.

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