I spend a lot of time watching people die. Not in an abstract or academic sense. I mean in drone footage—kill videos, four‑K streams of a human being’s last moments. I watch them because it keeps my research honest, and because I used to be the man behind that feed—a drone operator in Ukraine. That job leaves a mark. The longer you do it, the more the lines between analysis and grief blur.
This week, I watched a woman die.
There was nothing cinematic about it. A Ukrainian ISR drone—probably a Mavic—hovered above a muddy strip of no‑man’s‑land. The woman had been hit hard. One leg shredded. Shrapnel in her upper chest. She coughed blood onto the mud, twitching in short spasms. There was no medic coming. No cover. No rescue. Just a pool of blood spreading in front of her as she went still.
She could have been anyone’s daughter. Someone once called her “princess.” Someone probably has her graduation photo framed in a warm kitchen. And now she was a corpse in a nameless Eastern European field, her last moments turned into content for the internet. It hit me harder than most footage does. Maybe because she was young. Maybe because she was beautiful. Maybe because watching a woman die in war feels like a rupture in the natural order, something biology and culture conspire to make unforgettable.
Despite the viral stories of female snipers and drone operators, women remain rare in the killing zones of Ukraine and Russia. Russia never formally integrated women into frontline infantry. Moscow still prefers to send its unwanted—convicts, ethnic minorities, rural conscripts—before it sends women.
Soviet history had its famous female snipers and partisans, but even in the Second World War, women were not the first wave in an assault. This war has confirmed that pattern: the Kremlin feeds the trenches with criminals and peasants, but almost never with daughters.
Ukraine is more flexible. I’ve seen female medics staged at forward aid points, and I know of women who fly drones or serve in rare rifle roles. But commanders are reluctant to put them in places like Bakhmut or Avdiivka, the true meat grinders of the Donbas. It’s not that women can’t fight; it’s that culture, command instinct, and battlefield attrition all conspire to shield them from the very worst. Yet artillery and rockets don’t discriminate. A woman can die just as easily in the rear if a shell finds her.
There are legitimate female warfighters in Ukraine—women running drones in active sectors, medics sprinting under fire, even the occasional riflewoman in a trench. But there’s also a lot of theater. Social media loves to amplify “female soldiers” who aren’t really in the fight. It’s usually obvious: if the uniform is spotless and the kit looks like it came straight from a showroom, that soldier isn’t living in the mud. I remember one woman we called “Ghost.” We had just come back from a front‑line reconnaissance mission, our uniforms stiff with sweat and dirt, unwashed for over a week. She walked over and said she was “reccy” too—makeup done, fresh lip filler, a starched uniform. Everyone cringed. We knew she wasn’t spending her nights in shell‑shaken positions. That doesn’t mean there aren’t women doing heroic work—they are. But they remain the exception, not the rule.
And maybe that’s why the death I saw on the drone haunts me. In every culture, a woman’s death in war hits differently. It disgusts us in a way a man’s doesn’t. You can call it biology or sociology, but the reaction is real. For tens of thousands of years, men have been the expendable gender in war. We still are. Women in combat break that script, and the emotional cost is sharper than most people are ready to face.
The truth that nobody likes to say out loud is that combat is physics, not policy. Western militaries love to treat gender integration as a question of rules and fairness, but trench warfare does not care about either. How many women can fireman‑carry a 205‑pound man wearing 70 pounds of gear through a trench under fire? Far fewer than men. No speech about toxic masculinity changes that. America’s post‑9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan softened the edges of that reality. We fought insurgents and terrorists with air dominance, fast medevac, and technical overmatch. Women proved invaluable in that era, especially in cultural tasks—searching local women, gathering intelligence in homes where men couldn’t enter. That wasn’t diversity politics. That was hard combat realism.
But Ukraine isn’t Fallujah. It’s Verdun with drones. It’s Europe’s largest conventional war since 1945, and it shows what a true near‑peer fight looks like. Air supremacy is contested. Medevac is slow or nonexistent. A trench might be your home and your grave. Technology can help you survive longer, but not forever.
And that brings me to the moral reckoning. If America ever finds itself in a war like this—with China in the Pacific or Russia in Europe—what happens when our daughters are in the trenches? Even with the most progressive administrations, the U.S. has never required women to register for the draft. That’s not sexism. It’s because nobody wants to imagine their daughter twitching out her last breath in a trench, filmed by an enemy drone, her death consumed by strangers online. Israel may be the closest to a compromise, with female‑majority units like Caracal and Bardelas patrolling borders and occasionally engaging in firefights. But even a nation perpetually at war stops short of sending its women to lead the deadliest urban assaults.
I can’t shake the image of that girl that I just saw die. Her life, her dreams, her family—gone. No name in the headlines. No flag‑draped coffin on the evening news. Just another piece of human wreckage in a tragic war that devours everything and everyone. I know rationally that her death is no different than the hundreds of men I’ve watched die, but it feels different. Maybe that’s right. Maybe that’s wrong. Maybe it always will. I want to see this war end, more than anything. We can see everything.
It haunts me at night, alone in this vacation condo.
What do you think? Should it matter more? Should we accept the image of our daughters dying this way, or should that remain the last line our culture refuses to cross?
Tell me in the comments. I’ll respond.