This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

I went to the U.S. Army's parachute school back in the '70s. Fort Benning is where I learned to fall ungracefully from a moving aircraft. I wasn't very good at it. I have an impressive set of scars to prove it.

Fort Benning was my first real exposure to female soldiers. There hadn't been any in basic training. This made sense to me at the time. I was a product of the generation in which I was raised. Soldiering, at least when it came to fighting, was a man's job.

Women had other stuff to do — cakes to make, babies to have, records to type, and wounds to repair. Stuff like that. Bayoneting the enemy, and possibly getting shot in return, was not something they were built for.

Things changed slightly in jump school. Among the 350 or so male trainees in my company were about two dozen women of varying ranks. Like the rest of us, they volunteered to jump from aircraft in order to earn their "wings."

Since the primary purpose of jumping out of airplanes was an alternate way of going into battle, exactly why women would need this skill seemed ridiculous. Was I missing something?

Of course I was. But this time, I wasn't the only one. Lots of other guys in the company didn't like the idea either. Why didn't women stick to women stuff?

Then came the training. Lots of running, pushups, pullups, jumping off increasingly taller platforms. And getting yelled at. If you think getting yelled at isn't physically demanding, you haven't been yelled at by professionals.

The training standards for the women were lower. I don't recall exactly how much. The only thing that sticks in my mind is they didn't have to strip to the waist when the company ran every morning.

Lower physical standards bothered plenty of the men. Same job? Same pay? OK, same requirements. I bought into this argument until one day, in the middle of a run, I had an equality epiphany.

I wasn't in the army because I wanted to be. I was minding my own business when they came and got me. If I were sent to Vietnam or some other horrible place, I could get killed entirely against my will.

That's when it occurred to me that women training for combat — especially if they volunteered — was in my best interest. The more of them there were, the fewer men would be required to fill quotas. Being a guy myself, this lowered the odds of me getting hurt doing something that wasn't my idea.

It was brilliant logic. I shared it with several other guys in the company, including a Navy SEAL candidate who offered to thumb my eyeballs out of my head for even suggesting such an unmanly thing.

That was a long time ago. Since then, I have learned just how physically durable and lethal some women can be. I know because I had to fight some of them as a cop.

Apparently things are continuing to change. Last month, the U.S. Army announced the graduation of two women from its elite Ranger training course.

Forget jump wings. You have to be seriously badass to become a Ranger. It is not for wimps, including me at my physical best.

But 1st Lt. Kristen Griest and Captain Shaye Haver kept pace with their male counterparts, without lowered physical standards helping them do it. They made history.

Griest and Haver came along too late to do me any good, but that's OK. Maybe they came along in time to do their country some good.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley.