LEADERSHIP TEAM - Staff Sgt. Linda Ruth Freeman confers with her platoon sergeant, Sgt. 1st Class Romeo Cabbat. The pair share leadership responsibility for the 3rd Platoon of the 1498th Transport Co., California National Guard. About a third of the unit's soldiers hail from the Antelope Valley. DENNIS ANDERSON/Valley Press

Staff Sgt. Linda: 'Earrings, heels are for another time'

By DENNIS ANDERSON
Valley Press Editor

The picture is in the helmet. The rest of Staff Sgt. Linda Ruth Freeman's high-style ensemble for field operations includes a flak jacket for protection against shrapnel and shell fragments, a load-bearing vest for grenades and extra ammunition, two canteens and a gas mask. Also, an M-16 and a few 20-shot clips.

Freeman is assistant platoon sergeant of 3rd Platoon of the 1498th Transportation Co., a National Guard heavy truck unit that jokingly refers to itself as the 1st of the 498th Infantry because of all the field soldiering the unit performs.

As assistant to Sgt. 1st Class Romeo Cabbat, a former Marine DI, Freeman assists in leading a combat support unit of more than 50 soldiers, men and women serving in the ranks together, driving 45-ton trucks that deliver tanks, ammo and humanitarian relief supplies.

"We are not trying to be men," she said. "I don't know any women in the unit who want to be anything other than women, but we want to do our part and contribute to the mission."

For the 1498th Transport Co., also known as "The Big Awesome Truck Company," the mission is to deploy to the Middle East and haul humanitarian relief supplies, or tanks and ordnance, wherever they are deemed necessary in the war-torn landscape.

At 56 years old, Freeman is one of the most senior soldiers in a company of 300 National Guard troops that is heavy with seasoned soldiers. Median age in the unit is in the mid-30s, and there are as many fortysomethings as twentysomethings, with a dozen or so soldiers who are serving their country well past their 50th birthday.

Freeman chuckles.

"Old age and treachery can beat youth and inexperience, I always say."

National Guard soldiers, she said, "may not be the most lean and mean, but they have experience, they have insight, they have ethics and responsibility. They really know something about how to get a job done."

Platoon sergeant Cabbat is a former senior drill instructor at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot at San Diego and at Camp Pendleton. The SDI position is an exalted one that goes to a respected and fair but hard senior noncommissioned officer.

Cabbat's assessment of Freeman is as eloquent as it is simple.

"I'm very fortunate to have Staff Sgt. Freeman," he said. "I wouldn't change any soldier in my platoon. We are like family, and she is like family."

What motivates Freeman, who with her husband has a thriving machine shop business in her civilian world life, is a call to duty, and the pure enjoyment she relishes in the soldiering life.

"Once you make the promotions, the responsibility to have human lives in your hands really goes to your heart," she said.

Freeman joined the Army in 1974, before Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, before the United States pulled out of Vietnam, before the Department of Defense incorporated women in uniform across the ranks. Before the Army disbanded the venerable Women's Army Corps, the famed WACs who mostly served in hospitals and headquarters units.

Even with a thriving business and more than a decade out of the service, Freeman found herself longing for a return to the soldiering life.

"My husband - we weren't married yet - he asked me, 'What would you do if you were called up for active duty?' And I told him, 'I'd go, of course. Why would you ask that kind of question?' "

She smiled, and said he said, " 'Because I wanted to know what kind of person you are.' I must have given the right answer. We got married."

Freeman married Craig Coniglio.

In 1995, the fates lured her back to the Army via the National Guard "because my brother-in-law was a recruiter, and he was having a bad month, and I wasn't really thinking about it, but he said, 'Hey, you're in great shape. Think about it.' So, I thought about it."

That was when Freeman was just a kid, about 50.

"My mother asks me when am I going to grow up, and to tell you the truth, I don't know," Freeman said. "I'm too old to be here, and I guess I'm too old to know better."

But Freeman is known for being able to hold her own in the field, and being able to hold the respect of the other soldiers in her platoon. She said she doesn't have any worries about women soldiers being "too soft" for running and shooting.

"To tell you the truth, with these women in this company, I'd be inclined to think it would be the guys who might be too tenderhearted if we get in a situation."

The kind of situation Freeman refers to is something like that the Army Rangers faced in Mogadishu where angry, armed Somali mobs peppered with guerrilla fighters tried to overrun the Ranger task force sent in to capture a warlord.

"I think my soldiers, the women especially, would be the ones ready to get the shooting done," she said.

That said, she said the 1498th company suffered an emotional letdown upon discovering that it would not go to war with the warriors of the regular Army and Marine Corps. Now, the unit faces the drudgery of performing humanitarian and peacekeeping tasks in a potentially hostile environment fraught with the hazards of guerrillas, fanatics and die-hard anti-Americans.

"There's nothing over there that those people have that I want," she said. "I just hope that by our intervention, we can save one life, and make a difference for the better in those people's lives."