Thirteen Soldiers

by John McCain

  The course culminates in twelve days of field exercises at nearby Camp Bullis, where the extreme noise, heat, excitement, terror, and fatigue of battle are replicated as authentically as possible. To graduate, students must prove their competence in a trauma lane test, where they are timed and graded as they successively treat four life-threatening wounds: massive hemorrhaging caused by loss of limb, a blocked airway, a chest wound, and a hemorrhage without using a tourniquet. And they have to demonstrate their proficiency in these tasks while under live fire.

  On average nearly a third of students wash out of the training; in some years the fail rate has exceeded 40 percent. Those who survive the course are judged to be proficient in making complex medical evaluations and performing emergency trauma care while under extreme duress for up to seventy-two hours at a stretch. Most of them will have a chance to prove it in real combat. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan more than two-thirds of new medics could expect to deploy to one or the other conflict within six months of completing their AIT.

  Private First Class Monica Lin Brown didn’t deploy immediately to Afghanistan after she finished her AIT; she went to airborne school first. There is a great deal of improbability in Brown’s story. How could there not be? It’s the story of a slightly built, seventeen-year-old girl, who had an unsettled childhood, a self-described “girly girl” who was afraid of heights and got sick at the sight of blood, who learned to jump out of airplanes and stop a massive hemorrhage as a combat medic. She would also save two lives at great risk to her own and help change official army policy that insisted she did not belong there. It’s a story as irresistible as it is improbable.

  MONICA LIN BROWN WAS thirteen on September 11, 2001. Unlike many soldiers who enlisted in the military in reaction to that atrocity, joining the army didn’t occur to her then. It did occur to her brother Justin, who was a year older, but he had always seen himself as a soldier, even in his early childhood, playing with his GI Joes. As a teenager he studied and absorbed the “Seven Army Values” and the “Warrior Ethos.” He was impatient for the day when his childhood dream became a reality.

  Brother and sister were best friends, but Monica didn’t expect their closeness to influence her career decisions. At thirteen she didn’t have a firm idea of what she might do with her life, just that she wanted a more normal, stable life than the itinerant, disrupted childhood she had suffered.

  Her parents had divorced when she was three after her father was convicted of drug possession and distribution and sentenced to prison. She wouldn’t see her dad again until she was thirteen, and she would never have much of a relationship with him. Her mom worked night shifts as a nurse in a succession of hospitals. The family was constantly relocating. The bond between Monica and Justin grew stronger with each new school and community they had to navigate as they relied on each other for the sense of security and stability their mother was unable to provide. They helped each other adjust. They looked out for each other, and for their baby brother, Kristofer.

  After their mother was injured in a car accident, their maternal grandmother moved in with them and tried to compensate for their mother’s limitations as a parent. Still theirs continued to be an unsettled and unsettling adolescence. The family moved constantly. That kind of rootlessness can breed resentment and insecurity in children, even if at times it seems like a big adventure. It also instills self-reliance and resilience, and children who might have resented their nomadic childhood can grow up to be adults at ease with changes and disruptions that others find disquieting. It is not an ideal way to grow up, to say the least. But it does provide some advantages, even if those advantages are not apparent to the constantly uprooted child. If it does nothing else, a nomadic childhood can certainly help prepare you for the demands of a military career.

  The high school in tiny Kopperl, Texas, about an hour’s drive from Waco, was Monica’s eighth school in eleven years. She and Justin might have disliked having to start over so often, but they were good at it. They were used to making friends quickly. They were both good athletes. Monica played on the volleyball and softball teams and made the cheerleading squad. Her favorite pastime, the one she was best at, is the simplest and most solitary of sports: running. “Running is like meditation to me,” she says. “I can just think without anyone talking to me.” She was the best runner on Kopperl’s cross-country team. She was a good student too. The day after she turned seventeen and a year and a half ahead of schedule, she graduated from Brazos River Charter School in nearby Nemo, Texas, her ninth and final school, in May 2005, the same year as Justin.

  After graduation Monica and Justin went to live with their paternal grandmother, Katy Brown, in Lake Jackson, Texas, near Houston, where Monica had been born. She planned to go to college when she worked out how to pay for it. The idea of becoming an X-ray technician had lately appealed to her. An aunt worked in the field, and it seemed like interesting work that provided a good living and stability. Health care was important and honorable work, and radiology was an area of health care that didn’t involve the sight of blood. She found a training program and was waiting to turn eighteen before applying. She hadn’t figured out how to pay for it yet, but she was working on it.

  Justin had already talked to army recruiters and had put in his papers. He was going to stop by the recruiting office one afternoon in November 2005, and Monica decided she would keep him company. Justin introduced her to the recruiters. One of them asked her about her own career plans. She mentioned the X-ray tech program, and the recruiter did what any recruiter would have done: he told her she wouldn’t have to pay tuition if she were an X-ray tech in the army. He also offered her a signing bonus and promised her the adventure of her life, which would almost certainly include deployment to exotic locations in Iraq or Afghanistan.

  As it turned out, the army’s X-ray technician training program was filled for the year. But she was intrigued, so when the recruiter suggested she consider the army’s health care specialist training program instead, she was receptive. She signed the papers, but because she was seventeen, she needed her guardian’s permission. Their grandmother told them she was proud of them both and gave Monica her blessing. If Justin was joining the army, she reasoned, she had to let Monica go too. Justin “was older,” she explained years later to a reporter for the Washington Post, “but [Monica] was always the caretaker, always the boss.”

  The army wouldn’t let them remain together; with few exceptions, siblings are not allowed to serve in the same unit. Additionally Monica, being female, was prohibited by a 1994 Defense Department policy from serving in frontline combat units. Justin would be an infantry rifleman and would almost certainly be going to war. Monica might be a qualified combat medic, she might deploy to the same theater as her brother, but she wouldn’t be allowed to fight. There was a rule against that, a good rule, many people believed, people who didn’t think women could ever be “qualified” to serve in combat because training couldn’t replace what nature had withheld. The prohibition had become more controversial as lines between combat and combat support blurred in Iraq and Afghanistan and more and more women in uniform were doing their jobs while being shot at, but it was still the rule.

  Justin did his basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia. Monica went to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. Two duffel bags containing her uniforms and other gear were thrust at her when she arrived, and her first concern was, “Oh my God, am I going to be able to carry all this stuff?” She managed to, and, with growing confidence and satisfaction, she managed to get through nine weeks of marching, drilling, endurance training, marksmanship qualifying, live-fire exercises, and combat skills development.

  Her AIT at Sam Houston was harder. She vomited the first time she saw a tracheotomy performed. But she got through AIT too and acquired the skills she needed to treat all kinds of wounds in all kinds of high-stress situations. She passed her trauma lane test with flying colors.

  She had always loved a challenge, and she li
ked almost all of AIT, her occasional nausea notwithstanding. One of her instructors at Sam Houston, a sergeant from the 82nd Airborne Division, had a self-assured, vibrant personality, and Monica wanted to be like her, wanted the kind of confidence and dynamism you got from being really challenged and exceeding your own expectations. So she went to Fort Bragg in North Carolina, home of the 82nd Airborne, after she finished her AIT. She learned to jump out of airplanes and helicopters with a weapon, body armor, and her aid bag and got “into the best shape in her life.” She became a paratrooper, and had the maroon beret and shoulder patch to prove it. And in January 2007 Private First Class Monica Lin Brown, a 68 Whiskey in the 782nd Brigade Support Battalion, 82nd Airborne Division, was on her way to Afghanistan.

  A LITTLE OVER 11 percent of the roughly 2.5 million Americans deployed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been women. Almost three hundred thousand female soldiers, marines, airmen, and sailors in active, Reserve, and National Guard units have served in one or the other conflict, many of them in both, and many of them on more than one tour.

  On October 6, 2013, Army Captain Jennifer Moreno, a twenty-five-year-old nurse from San Diego, assigned to a Special Operations support team and on her first deployment to Afghanistan, was killed in a suicide bombing and multiple improvised explosive device (IED) ambush in the Zhari district west of Kandahar. As we write this, she was the latest of 159 American women in uniform to die in Iraq or Afghanistan. In comparison, eight women in military service died in eight years of war in Vietnam, only one of them from hostile fire. The prohibition against women in frontline combat units was lifted in January 2013, yet all but seven of the forty-nine women lost in Afghanistan and all 110 lost in Iraq were killed before the ban was lifted. Over eight hundred women have been wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan, the vast majority of them before the policy change. Many hundreds of women received the Combat Action Badge before 2013. Many have lost a limb or limbs. Many have been badly burned. Many suffered traumatic brain injuries. Posttraumatic stress seems to afflict roughly similar percentages of returning male and female soldiers; in one study a higher percentage of women veterans reported suffering emotional distress, although the overwhelming number of veterans who have committed suicide were male. The majority of female soldiers who died in Iraq or Afghanistan were twenty-five or younger, many were mothers, and most of them were killed by hostile fire. They were killed by IEDs or rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), mortars, grenades, or small arms fire, or in suicide bombings. Many of them were health care professionals. Some were military police. Some flew helicopters. Some drove trucks. Others served in bomb-disposal units and some in gun crews. Whatever their mission, wherever they were posted, they died in combat because, as they and Brown and countless other veterans have pointed out, there were no front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. Every forward operating base, camp, outpost, firebase, airfield, hospital, aid station, roadside clinic, every village and city, every patrol, convoy, and meeting with locals could be the target of enemy attacks, some planned and others just opportunistic.

  Jenny Moreno was a bright, popular kid with an infectious smile and a close-knit family, who loved being a nurse and was proud of being selected to work with Special Forces. The exclusion of women from ground combat units had been dropped before she came to the aid of a wounded Ranger and was killed by an IED. But many of the women killed before her died in similar situations. Something besides the circumstances of their death unites them. They shared patriotism and courage, of course, but this too: most of them were where they belonged, doing what they were trained to do. It cost them everything to be there, and until recently their government officially thought they should haven’t been there. But they were there. They died there, and they were as much a credit to their service, to their country, and to themselves as was any man there.

  PRIVATE MONICA BROWN REPORTED to the hospital at Forward Operating Base Salerno in Khost Province, Afghanistan, on February 7, 2007. Salerno is situated on three hundred flat acres in the shadow of the jagged mountain peaks along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. In 2007 it was one of the biggest and oldest FOBs in Afghanistan, a small city of canvas and plywood with a population of three thousand, and a major hub of coalition operations. It had an airstrip, helo pads, airplane hangers, well-staffed medical facilities, a big chow tent, decent food in ample quantities, a good-sized, well-equipped gymnasium, a PX, a chapel, a movie theater (with a large-screen TV and DVD player), a café, and a restored mosque. Taliban and al Qaeda attacked it so often with rockets and mortars its harassed inhabitants nicknamed it “Rocket City.” A few days before Brown arrived there, a suicide bomber had killed himself and a dozen others at Salerno’s front gate.

  Brown helped medical staff treat trauma patients, both soldiers and local civilians. The first patient she worked on was a local male with a gunshot wound. “That’s when the switch flipped,” she recalled, “and . . . everything changed over from training to me really liking the job.”

  In March she was temporarily detailed to an isolated outpost with the 4th Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment in rugged, volatile Paktika Province. The squadron needed a female medic to provide basic medical care to Afghan women in the villages they patrolled. Female medics and corpsmen were often temporarily assigned to combat units to treat Afghans in their homes or in clinics the army set up to help build local relationships crucial to a successful counterinsurgency. Male medical personnel aren’t permitted to examine Afghan women in the extremely patriarchal society, especially in the remote, poorest locations where the Taliban is strongest. Female soldiers often helped in home searches and interrogations too. They shared the same risks and hardships male soldiers faced on the missions, the same threat of ambush, the same threat of death or injury from enemy fire or IEDs. They ate the same food, slept on the same stony ground, felt the same fears.

  Brown arrived in the advent of spring, when the snow was starting to melt in the Toba Kakar Mountains, the apricot trees were beginning to bloom, and the Taliban were launching another offensive. It was a dangerous place to be, and it got more dangerous every day Brown was there. Taliban and Haqqani network fighters are plentiful there. Paktika’s rugged terrain offers abundant hiding places and hard-to-detect routes into the country from Pakistan. One of the important tribes in the province, the Sulaimankhel, was hostile and a reliable source of recruits for the Haqqani. Suicide bombings were common.

  Living conditions in the outpost were pretty primitive. Soldiers were crowded together in tents behind Hesco barriers—wire mesh containers filled with dirt that served as the walls of the command observation post. They were without power or running water. They ate MREs (meals ready to eat) or local dishes Afghan soldiers and interpreters sometimes provided. The aid tent where Brown worked was only forty square feet. And she was the only woman there. She loved it, she told the Washington Post.

  Brown wasn’t there very long when she started going on patrols as a line medic with Delta and Charlie troops. That wasn’t in her job description or consistent with official policy, but nobody bothered about that, not out there. Medics were in scarce supply at the outpost, and as someone in Charlie Troop commented afterward, she was one of the best there. They went looking for Taliban, weapons caches, and bomb makers for three, four, and five days at a time, returned for a day’s rest and resupply, and went back out again. She loved that too, hunting bad guys, sleeping under the stars. She carried her own weight, she later insisted to the 60 Minutes reporter Lara Logan. “I expected to be treated like one of the guys. So, that’s how I got treated.”

  She hadn’t run into any serious trouble yet. No IEDs, no ambushes, no firefights. She had been on patrol almost constantly for several weeks, and she still did not know for certain if she could do the job. She had not had to keep someone alive while someone else was trying to kill her.

  On the afternoon of April 25, 2007, she had been out two days on a patrol with 2nd Platoon from Charlie Troop. The platoon’s medic had gone on leave
, and Brown was the best of the available replacements. They had received a tip there might be a couple members of a bomb-making cell and some weapons in a little village in the Jani Khel district. It would be their last stop of the day before spending the night at an Afghan National Army camp. They searched a dry well before entering the village and searching a few homes. If there were Taliban there they had been warned in advance and made their escape. The streets were empty, but the Afghans they encountered in their homes were noticeably hostile. Their welcome worn out the moment they appeared, the soldiers were as happy to vacate the area as its inhabitants were to see them leave.

  They traveled in a column of four up-armored Humvees and an Afghan Army Ford pickup truck. Approximately a hundred meters separated each vehicle from the next, a distance considered prudent in hostile country, where, in the words of the army manual for convoy tactics, you want “to reduce the number of vehicles in the kill zone,” in the event you are attacked or drive over a mine. As the sun started to set, the convoy took another precaution a couple of miles outside the village: they pulled off the road into an adjacent wadi, a dry riverbed. As a general rule, you are less likely to encounter an IED if you drive off-road. The Taliban believe ours is a road-bound army. They are right for the most part, and it is a liability in the asymmetrical wars the army has fought this century. But soldiers adjust their tactics to the threat, and when a wadi or open field can get them to where they need to be, they’ll take it.