Kate had never contemplated another career, though occasionally she wondered why God hadn’t made her taller than five feet, since He knew she was going to be a soldier. Or male, since He knew she wanted to be infantry. Petite and blond she may have been, but Kate’s compact body was ripped with muscles. Since she was a kid people had called her a tomboy, but Kate didn’t care; all she knew was that she liked running and competing, playing soccer, basketball, and softball with her brother and sisters. A child of Title IX, she played high school football all four years at her western Massachusetts high school. Local newspapers wrote about “the girl who liked to tackle,” but secretly Kate hated football with all its concussions and endless practices. But the fact that guys in her school believed a girl couldn’t play football guaranteed Kate would never quit. Ever. No way would she give in to their doubts. Concussions be damned.
The Army was in Kate’s genes and wrapped around her family tree. Her father had spent twenty-three years as an Army pilot and he inspired all his children to follow his path. Kate and her younger siblings all headed to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point when it came time for college.
After graduation, Kate became an MP because it was the closest she could get to the infantry. MPs overseas perform the whole range of law enforcement functions for the military, from searching homes and suspects to running patrols, doing reconnaissance, and joining search operations. Now a poster on the wall was pointing the way right into the heart of the action, offering a chance to return to the purity and clarity of life at war. Kate wanted to get to Afghanistan, she wanted a mission that mattered, and she wanted to be as near to the front as possible. Here was a groundbreaking team that would let her do all three.
All across the country in the first months of 2011 this same story played out as friends of soldiers, commanding officers, and fellow warriors spread the news about a program that would match America’s toughest fighting men with a special team of women who could fill a gap that no other force could. From Florida to Alaska, North Carolina to South Korea, women answered the call. Most of them had been itching all their lives to go to war—not as nurses or typists or machinists or any of the other jobs that gradually, over decades of struggle, came to admit women, but as special operations soldiers. Or as close as they could get to them. As one CST put it: “All my life, all I ever wanted was to belong to a group of ass-kickers battling on the front lines.”
When Ashley White heard about the CST program she was running drills at the local armory in Goldsboro, North Carolina, where she was serving with the National Guard. Ashley had come to the Tar Heel State two years earlier to be with her fiancé, Jason Stumpf, a lieutenant stationed at the Fort Bragg Army base. Ashley had met Jason during her first months at Kent State University, less than an hour’s drive from her small Ohio hometown of Marlboro, at a pizza party in the offices of the school’s ROTC program. It was love at first sight, though neither did anything about it for more than a year.
It surprised everyone in Ashley’s tight-knit family when she signed up for ROTC. She had never offered the slightest hint that she wanted to serve. Her grandfather had been a Marine as a young man and a great-uncle had won a Purple Heart as a Navy corpsman in the Korean War, but the military tradition did not otherwise run through her family. Yet there was a deeply ingrained sense of duty in the White family when it came to work, along with spirited—and intense—competition among her siblings: twin sister Brittany and older brother Josh.
The Whites formed complementary and opposing forces. Debbie, Ashley’s mom, was warm and caring, a nurturer who loved swimming and diving and hiking. She worked as a school bus driver and teacher’s aide so she could arrange her days around her most important job: being a mom to her three children. The house was always filled with young people: classmates of Josh and gymnastic teammates and cousins of Ashley and Brittany. Known as “Mama Whitie” to Josh’s high school football teammates, Debbie traveled to every game in her minivan stocked with snacks for the kids. At pregame dinners Debbie always made room at her table for boys whose parents couldn’t make it.
Bob White was as tough-minded as his high school sweetheart wife was kind. He had had to be: his parents operated on the premise that children “made money, not cost money,” and put him to work as a kid in his family’s toolmaking business in Akron. He would stand on milk crates to reach the machines he was responsible for operating. Extracurriculars were discouraged; when Bob wanted to play basketball, his dad said he would have to find his own way home. That meant walking more than five miles each way, even in the dead of winter. But all that work did pay off: he bought a candy-apple-red 1973 SS Nova—his high school’s “car of the month” eight times—and won the heart of a leggy blonde named Debbie, whose parents owned a pizza shop.
Right after they were married, Bob made a promise to his wife that he would be a dedicated and engaged father. They both wanted a family. Doctors said that Debbie couldn’t have children, but after ten years of marriage Josh arrived. Three years later the twins followed. Shock greeted the September arrival of the two baby girls; the doctors had told the Whites all along to expect boys. So certain had they been that Bob and Debbie hadn’t even considered girls’ names. Bob, then working the overnight shift at his family business, sometimes caught the soap opera The Young and the Restless during the day before heading to bed. Thinking quickly he named his first beautiful baby girl after the show’s stunning fictional character Ashley Abbott. Bob kept his promise to his wife: though he would work ten-, twelve-, even sixteen-hour days to provide for his family, he made sure that he knew every detail of his children’s lives—who their friends were, how they were faring academically and in sports. Bob believed in teaching his children the value of hard work and vowed that each would have the college opportunities he hadn’t, no matter how hard he had to toil. If the kids weren’t at school, they were studying, and if they weren’t studying, they were either training for sports or working at White Tool. Nearly every weekend from the time they were teenagers, Ashley, Brittany, and Josh logged a full day on the toolmaking assembly line, helping their dad and earning money for themselves. They complained constantly, but the truth was they loved it, even as their fingernails collected a distinct type of dirt—oily and noxious—that they nicknamed “White Tool grunge.” Quiet Ashley made a name for herself as one of the White Tool “chucker chicks”—despite being left-handed, a hindrance in factory processes, she could produce 1,000 metal clips in an hour when most of the guys who ran the machines could barely reach 700. Bob attributed her success to her work ethic: when she ran the machines Ashley didn’t leave for the bathroom, for a soda break, or for a chat with her siblings.
The White family was intense with competition, from the basketball court to the football field and gymnastics meets. “If you’re not first you’re last,” Bob regularly reminded his kids. “You can’t settle for second.” “Don’t start what you can’t finish,” he would add. He wanted them to see early on how tough factory work was and how excellence could be both its own reward and a path to an easier life built on education. He was constantly telling his children that “actions trump words.” His mantra: “Don’t tell people what you’re going to do, or what kind of person you are. Just show them.”
Josh and Brittany both had natural athletic talent that propelled them into local headlines and won them medals and trophies—a whole room in the Whites’ basement was dedicated to their glittering awards. During his senior year Josh was thrilled to break his high school record for pull-ups, logging 35 straight from a dead hang, but his pride was short-lived; his freshman sister Brittany trumped his achievement with 45 pull-ups that very same afternoon.
Despite the competition, the siblings were one another’s greatest supporters and best friends. To motivate Ashley before her cross-country training runs in high school, Josh would blare Metallica’s “Seek & Destroy” as they drove to school. At night, Ashley and Brittany would creep across the hall into one another’s rooms
and swap problems, daydreams, and plans for the future.
Bob taught Ashley to push herself beyond her limits and to always do what she thought was right. But he never meant for his daughter to learn his lessons so well. When she first came to him during her freshman year at Kent State and said she wanted to join ROTC, his answer was “absolutely not.” Nothing in his own upbringing prepared him to believe that military service was the right path for his children: not the fact that ROTC would pay her tuition; or that her fellow cadets shared a camaraderie and a value system based on integrity; or that she thrived amid the intense physical challenges; or even that the discipline and high standards reminded her of the same high bar he had set for her for as long as she could remember.
When he put his foot down and said no to her first request for support, she came back with two ROTC recruiters to help make her case. They too failed to win him over.
“Ash,” he said sharply, ignoring the men who sat in his living room, “nothing is free. They are not just paying for school; you will be paying for that education with your life. There’s no guarantee you won’t have to go to Afghanistan or Iraq. And I don’t want to lose my daughter.”
But Ashley was determined. She told him she was only seeking his blessing because she respected him so deeply; she was of legal age and could sign her own paperwork to join the program without her parents’ approval. Debbie, who had once put aside her own ambitions to serve, would not stand in her daughter’s way. “I won’t stop her,” Debbie answered Bob’s entreaty. “I always regretted not joining the Navy and I don’t want her to do the same.” Eventually he relented. On the issue of ROTC he and Ashley came to see they would not agree, but would respect one another’s views.
By February 2011, Ashley was working as an athletic trainer at a local college and a medic in the North Carolina National Guard, living in a cozy starter home with Jason. But she felt something was missing. Surrounded by fellow Guardsmen who had done at least one deployment in Iraq or Afghanistan, she felt guilty about wearing the uniform without having served in at least one of the two wars America was fighting. Accepting a check and school tuition without completing the work to deserve it felt like freeloading. And that was not Ashley. Already some of the guys she commanded had jeered at her, claiming they didn’t have to take orders from some green, young officer who hadn’t ever deployed. It burned Ashley to see herself the way they did.
It was Ashley’s commander who handed her the CST flyer one Saturday afternoon after the daily drills were over. “I can’t do this, Ashley,” she said, “but maybe it’s for you.” It was the same poster Kate had seen in Georgia and hundreds of other potential young recruits had received by email from their friends and fellow soldiers. “Looks pretty interesting. And it would get your deployment out of the way.”
The timing couldn’t have been better, and Ashley, studying the photo of the intimidating soldier kneeling with her M4, was intrigued. It wasn’t long before she was determined to apply.
Now she just had to convince Jason.
Jason had always supported her. He had pushed her throughout her time at ROTC, urging her to take on the toughest challenges and to speak up when she disagreed with what she saw or experienced. Debbie said it was Jason who had made Ashley “sparkle.” For proof, she pointed to her family photo albums, which showed that until she met Jason, Ashley rarely smiled in pictures, too self-conscious to let her real self show. But with Jason she would grin with abandon come photo time.
By the time she rang Jason that Saturday from Guard drills, Ashley had not only prevailed against her formidable father, she felt ready to compete with the best women the Army had to offer no matter that she was just a second lieutenant in the National Guard. Her husband had made it possible.
“Hey, I want to tell you about this new program,” she said when he picked up the phone in their bright yellow kitchen that Saturday morning.
From the sound of his voice she had a feeling that persuading “Mr. Sexypants,” as she lovingly called him, was going to be an even bigger challenge than getting her father to agree to ROTC.
3
The Landmark Inn
* * *
Four weeks later, Ashley was filling her cup from a hotel coffee urn, about to begin the first day of the very first all-Army “Assessment and Selection” for the new CST program. She pulled a lever on an industrial-size milk machine and watched the white stuff pour into her coffee. She would definitely need caffeine to begin this day. It was March 2011, and this was the initial round of what would be two separate selections: the Guard and Reserves first, then, two months later, active-duty soldiers.
Gripping her cup she leaned against the Formica counter and watched as a swarm of high-octane women assembled in the breakfast room of the Landmark Inn, a hotel located on the grounds of Fort Bragg dedicated to serving soldiers, their families, and civilian guests. It was quite a sight: dozens of sweat-suit-clad Army Guard and Reservists, many of them with flushed cheeks and disheveled ponytails fresh from working out, were milling around the dining room. The high-backed chairs at the large, round tables were covered in a durable fabric designed to disguise spills of everything from maple syrup to ketchup. An arrangement of bright orange silk flowers sat at the center of each table, the only burst of cheer in an otherwise drab setting. Ashley grabbed an apple—part of a limited offering of healthy fare in this land of waffles and pancakes—and quietly observed the scene.
The women came from every region of the country, from cities, farms, and suburbs, and they came in a variety of heights and builds: some were lanky and lean, others were squat, compact, and broad across the shoulders. These girls look like they lift some serious weight, Ashley thought. They also ranged in age: some, like Ashley, had barely crossed into their twenties. Others looked nearly two decades older, but, amazingly, were no less fit. An uninformed observer would have thought he had stumbled across either a championship softball team or a women’s soccer league. But it was unusual for another reason: rarely did Army women gather in large groups. Aside from the Army Nurse Corps—none of whom were permitted to participate in that CST selection—there usually weren’t enough women in the same place at the same time to fill a conference table, let alone a hotel dining room. Women may have been serving in most Army roles by 2011, but they still accounted for just around 15 percent of all active-duty soldiers and a bit more for National Guard and Reservists. Those small numbers meant that women rarely found themselves surrounded by other women.
And then there was the alpha thing. The female soldiers who had come to take part in this CST selection had genuine swagger. Ashley spotted a trim woman whose sculpted muscles were bulging beneath a gray Army T-shirt. Thick veins lined her strong arms. Another had a book propped up against her oatmeal bowl: Get Selected for Special Forces: How to Successfully Train for and Complete Special Forces Assessment & Selection.
A buzz filled the room, even as the women tried to hide their amazement at seeing so many people just like themselves. Ashley had never before seen anything like it. She guessed that neither had anyone else who was there that morning.
Ashley didn’t know what to expect at the Landmark Inn, but she knew she would be doing a lot of paperwork—“in-processing,” in Army terms. Then at some point they would move to Camp Mackall, the World War II–era site nearby used for Special Forces selection and training. This was where the real test of the soldiers would begin. In the meantime, the CST hopefuls talked loudly and acted tough over their morning coffee. Gazing around the room, it occurred to Ashley that not a single person here looked like she had ever endured a moment of self-doubt in her entire life. More than the muscles, shoulders, and popping veins, this thought intimidated her. Ashley knew how to put on a game face—childhood gymnastics and then ROTC had taught her that—but she wondered whether she really fit in with these women, some of whom looked like they could bench-press five times their body weight and strode around like female John Waynes.
Hey, she command
ed herself. Get your mind in it, Ashley. Focus.
To do that, she took herself back four years to Ranger Challenge, where teams of the best ROTC cadets from each school competed against other colleges in the region. For years prior to Ashley’s arrival at Kent State, the Ranger Challenge team had consisted solely of men. They trained at a facility with a long military history, the Ravenna Arsenal, where more than fourteen thousand Ohioans had produced weapons during World War II. Most of the men were surprised to learn that this quiet blonde who didn’t even reach five foot three wanted to join the big boys in the competition. They couldn’t believe that “Little White” could keep up with their long strides, and throughout the training sessions they waited for Ashley to fall out of formation. But every morning the determined sophomore cadet showed up at the Arsenal to march the morning’s miles, and every morning she kept up, even when they moved the start time to 5 a.m. They were required to add first twenty, then thirty pounds of gear to weigh down their rucksacks in preparation for the actual competition. Every time team leader Jason Stumpf turned around, he expected to see Ashley way back in the rear, but there she was, right behind him in the formation, keeping pace with the guys.
The biggest test aside from rucking was the rope bridge. Cadets would string a line of knotted rope between two wooden posts and clamber across it upside down, belly up, legs straddling the rope and propelling the body to the other end. Arm over arm they raced, with fully packed rucksacks and rifles slung across their backs. Time was critical—and so was teamwork. Small and fast, Ashley had learned as a girl on the uneven parallel bars to use her stomach muscles to force her body into one line and make her weight lighter on her arms. That training meant she could zip across the rope faster than anyone could imagine.
Ashley's War Page 4