Ashley's War

by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

  It was Jason, then a senior and already her boyfriend, who had put her on the Ranger Challenge team, with support from Sergeant First Class Stewart McGeahy, the NCO who oversaw the ROTC cadets. McGeahy was a veteran of the Army’s bloody fight in Fallujah, an armored cavalry guy who had seen combat close and fierce in Iraq. He recognized warriors when he saw them, even if this one—the quiet little blonde—didn’t look like any he had ever met before.

  It was Jason’s job to make the final selection for the Ranger Challenge team, and he sought out McGeahy’s advice. “You don’t see that kind of heart very often,” the older veteran observed. “I’d like to see you take her.”

  During the Ranger Challenge competition, Ashley had proven to be a real asset to the team with her physical endurance, her land navigation and rope bridge skills, and her ability to keep cool under pressure. The sweetest moment came toward the end of the final event, a ruck march with more than thirty pounds of gear. Ashley stayed in the middle of her team’s pack, not setting the pace, but not slowing it, either. And then her group passed their bigger and better-funded rival, Ohio State.

  “Oh, fuck,” one guy bellowed as Kent State passed. “We’re screwed. Pick it up!” And then, a moment later: “Holy shit, they got a female. And they are fucking passing us. Pick it up!”

  “I’m trying, dude, I can’t go any faster,” one guy huffed to his teammate. “Man, I’m hurting all over.”

  “What the fuck? Are you kidding me?” the first cadet answered. “That girl’s not complaining. Step it up. Now!”

  Jason laughed. “See you at the finish line, boys!”

  Ashley slogged along and remained expressionless. One foot after the other. Eyes straight ahead. No way she was reacting to that nonsense. As she had learned from her father as a girl, she would let her actions show what she was made of. Forget them, just focus and move on. Ashley had mastered the art of silently pushing herself onward, and she was tougher on herself than anyone else could be.

  Now, as the much more competitive CST selection process was set to begin, Ashley would channel that dedication. She had fought hard to be here, not only against the wishes of her beloved father and role model, but initially against Jason, too. Ever since her first year in ROTC he had been her biggest champion and most devoted ally. Sitting in the motel dining room surrounded by some of the Army’s toughest female warriors, she reflected back on the conversation that Saturday night after she first learned about the CST program. It was one of the most heated they had ever had.

  Over a dinner of broiled chicken she had prepared after returning home from Guard drills at the armory, Ashley gently pressed her case. Ten years of war meant that nearly everyone who served in the Guard had done at least one tour in Iraq or Afghanistan. Young officers like her who had no “combat stripes”—the gold “Overseas Service Bars” on their uniforms indicating they had served at least six months at war overseas—were noticed by others. And not in a positive way.

  “I have to do this,” Ashley said. “People at the Guard unit are making fun of me—you know I have to get this deployment out of the way. My regular unit won’t be deploying for Kuwait until 2013, and that will be a whole year of us apart. If I do this CST program, it’s just six or seven months, and it’s now. We can begin a family all the sooner.”

  Jason listened, stone-faced.

  “Listen, Jason, this is special operations,” Ashley said. “You’re the one who said they’re the best of all the guys you saw in Afghanistan. You know I’ll be working with a top-notch, professional community. I’ll knock the deployment out and come home and then we can move forward with our lives.”

  Jason reminded himself to breathe. He had just returned from a year as a field artillery officer in eastern Afghanistan, where he had seen firsthand the war’s dangers—what it was like on the battlefield and what it did to the people who made it back home. The absolute last thing he wanted was Ashley going over there. It was only now—two months after his own tour ended—that he had finally gotten used to normal life again, and that was because of Ashley. She hadn’t pressured him to talk about Afghanistan or smothered him with attention once he got home; instead, she gave him space and let him get accustomed once more to life’s daily rhythms.

  Jason had served at a particularly grueling time in the long war. The surge that was announced in December 2009 was in full swing, and he provided artillery support to both conventional and special operations units operating in the field. Insurgents regularly attacked his NATO base, lovingly referred to as “Rocket City” by the soldiers who lived there. Enemy fighters even managed to breach the base’s wire one night, sending him running to his position ready to shoot artillery if needed. Fortunately the attack ended in short order with no one on his side dead or injured, but the enemy had literally brought the fight to him, and it was sobering.

  For Jason the rules of engagement were frustrating. He understood that protecting civilians was critical to the war effort, but he knew the enemy followed no such rules and that counterinsurgency’s reluctance to use artillery firepower—for fear of civilian casualties—meant that American soldiers now had to fight without the full arsenal of the United States Army at their side. He also witnessed internal turf wars and political battles he hadn’t expected to see in wartime play out before his eyes. He still loved the Army and his men, and he remained committed to serving his country. But he returned home questioning America’s chances of success given the years of commitment the mission would require.

  Worse, he was unable to forget what he had seen in the southeastern province of Khost: one of his men twitching in a morphine coma, his leg torn apart by rocket fire, another soldier severely injured, with a pint of Jason’s blood helping keep him alive. He relived it every night when he first returned home and he sure as hell didn’t want that for Ashley. Afghanistan changed everyone it touched, and his wife would be no different. He couldn’t bear to think of the nightmares that would accompany her back to North Carolina from whatever remote outpost would be her home for the better part of a year. Right before he deployed they had a secret wedding in a minister’s office, sealing the ceremony with a temporary ring from Walmart. This way Jason could be certain that Ashley would get his survivor benefits if something happened to him overseas. Their “real” nuptials—the big, white dress, huge party, proper Catholic mass—were planned for May, just two months away.

  And now that Jason had made it back safely she wanted to go to Afghanistan and upend their lives once more? He struggled to get his mind around this.

  “Ash, this is Afghanistan,” he finally replied. He wrapped his hands around a glass of Jack Daniel’s and Coke and worked to keep his voice steady. “These are the people who successfully fought Alexander the Great, the British, the Russians, and now they are fighting us. This is no joke. People are getting hit all the time now. Do you have any idea what you’d be getting yourself into? You don’t need to deploy now—I just got back. Let’s think about this for a while, find you a good medical deployment you can do another time, once we’ve had our wedding and honeymoon and some actual time together.” Ashley had studied sports medicine in college—often with Jason serving as her test patient—and trained as a medic at Fort Sam Houston during her ROTC years. Jason saw no reason why she couldn’t deploy as a medical officer—and one who stayed on base.

  It was Ashley’s turn to sit quietly and listen. She heard him out, but it was clear she was unmoved by his entreaties.

  “I promise,” he continued, “I’ll help you find another tour. Why do you want to go looking for trouble?”

  “I want to do this, Jason, I think this program is important and I want to go for it. I am not going to train all of these years and then not serve when my country is at war.” As she pressed her argument to the one person who had always encouraged her to speak her mind, Ashley’s eyes were now watering. “What if I wait for another deployment and then the war is over? I can get this out of the way and do something I’ll be reall
y proud of when I’m a grandma and rocking on our porch.

  “Besides,” she added, moving next to her big husky dog, Gunner, on the couch where she and Jason snuggled and watched movies on weekends, “who knows if I’ll even make the team? We don’t have to decide anything yet.”

  She motioned for Jason to join her, but he sat silently in his recliner, trying to put himself in her place. He knew his wife was tough and talented. If she wanted something she would get it. He wasn’t worried she wouldn’t be selected; what worried him was he was certain she would.

  He saw in her eyes that same look of determination, that total indifference to everything around her that had been so evident in Ranger Challenge. If she really thought this was something she had to try for, how could he do otherwise, when he loved her so much and she had done exactly the same thing for him a year earlier?

  “All right, Ash, if you want to go for this, let’s do it,” he finally said. It was long past midnight, and he was exhausted, both physically and emotionally. “But you better dig in. You’re going to have a tough fight at selection. You don’t quit. If you call me and say you need me to come pick you up because you didn’t make the cut, it had better be because you broke a bone and couldn’t walk yourself out of there. You want this? We’re going at it full throttle. No half steps.”

  This is what Ashley was thinking about at the Landmark Inn as she grabbed a yogurt and set off to find a seat with the other girls. She had promised then to give it her all, and she was ready.

  No half steps, Ashley thought. Time to dig in.

  She sat down and began introducing herself to her tablemates.

  Anne Jeremy was one of the first people Ashley met that morning. Tall, fit, and blond, she looked more like a television anchor than a soldier, but her temperament was serious, no-nonsense. She had proven herself on the battlefield at just twenty-three after Taliban rocket fire blew up and sliced through a caravan of vehicles in the supply convoy she was leading. She never felt she deserved the awards she received for her bravery and thought only of her soldiers killed in the battle, but her commanders felt otherwise after seeing her composure in leading her convoy through more than twenty-four hours of intermittent heavy arms fire and hours of prolonged enemy contact. Back at her base she went on to become her combat engineer company’s first female executive officer, or XO. Officially the role was off-limits to women, because the Army had coded the job for men only in its personnel system. But the colonel she served under in Afghanistan thought she was one of his most promising officers, so he simply left that entry in her personnel file empty while she served in the role. Her records could be corrected later.

  It was another senior officer Anne worked with in her new role who told her about the CST program. He was a tough-talking Yankee and a true professional; she credited his leadership with her success in the position. “Hey, Anne, I hear they’re letting chicks go to Q Course now.” He was referring to the Special Forces’ qualification course, a direct line to the Green Berets that had always been open only to men. “You gotta check this out, you would be great.”

  Anne was an engineer by training. She had completed the highly competitive Sapper Leader Course, a body-numbing, twenty-eight-day program that teaches combat leadership skills and small unit fighting, and had earned the right to wear the prestigious Sapper patch on her left shoulder. Sappers are trained to clear mines, deploy field defenses, and fight in close quarters. Women account for barely 3 percent of all Sapper Course students, and only 2 percent of its graduates. Not that Anne had ever thought of herself as being a “groundbreaker” or a feminist; in fact, she paid little attention to the fact that she was one of only three females in the course. She preferred to focus on her grit, not her gender, and wanted others to do the same. It was the difficulty of the Sapper Course—both mental and physical—that motivated her, and she finished strong among her male peers.

  Special operations had been a dream for her. Having seen bloody attacks in Afghanistan and lost soldiers in battle left Anne with a powerful feeling of unfinished business. She wanted back in the fight, and the Cultural Support Team was the perfect way to get there.

  Her colonel gave Anne a phone number for a civilian who was involved with the nascent CST program, Claire Russo, Matt Pottinger’s old pal from Afghanistan, who by then had been sent to Fort Bragg to help prepare candidates for the new teams. In February 2011 Russo had been quoted in a Foreign Policy article written by Paula Broadwell describing the new all-female unit headlined “CST: Afghanistan.” Within days the former Marine was fielding a barrage of calls and emails to her personal Gmail account from female soldiers who wanted to know more about this chance to work with special operations and exactly what they needed to qualify for it. Anne was among them.

  “You should come to Assessment and Selection,” Russo told her when they spoke in early 2011. “Sounds like you’d be terrific for it.” Not long afterward, Anne was sitting next to Ashley White over a bowl of cereal at the Landmark Inn.

  She looked around the motel and was astonished. Wow, all these girls could form their own little company of soldiers, she thought. She laughed as a serviceman who was staying at the motel wandered in to grab some breakfast, only to stop in his tracks, visibly startled, at the sight of thirty buff women dominating the room. He quickly turned and hurried out.

  Anne was ready. CST selection couldn’t be that much more of a mental and physical test than Sapper school, but whatever it was she felt prepared. War had changed her; most significantly, it had made nearly everything else seem easier by comparison. She welcomed whatever the week would bring.

  Leda Reston was also at the Landmark Inn that morning. She had known about the CST program before the other women, having learned about it from colleagues in the special operations unit she was working with just then. There was only one problem: the cutoff level was captain, and Leda had just been promoted to major. She was too senior for the program.

  Reston had served in the storied 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq as a civil affairs officer. Among her responsibilities was accompanying and advising the local U.S. Provincial Reconstruction Team as they opened women’s centers and vocational training schools, which were designed to build goodwill among Iraqis. In addition, her brigade commander had made her the direct liaison to all key Iraqi officials with whom they worked, including the local governor and deputy governor. No woman had ever served in this role, and Leda was determined to live up to the faith her colonel had placed in her by picking this young captain to replace a battle-seasoned major. She may have been the sole female on the colonel’s staff, but, like Anne, she thought little about it. She considered herself first and foremost a soldier entrusted with a job that could further America’s mission and keep soldiers alive if she did it well, and she was determined to succeed.

  She did that by developing solid working relationships built on mutual respect with Iraqi officials. They would call her cell phone directly at all hours of the day and night, often to warn her when ambushes lay in wait for U.S. military convoys on the most well-traveled roads. She also received valuable intel from the Iraqis about how the American forces could track down certain insurgents. This was the height of the surge in Iraq and the fight was escalating. During her service with them, the 82nd’s deployment was extended from twelve to fifteen months, a blow for many, especially those who had previously deployed and had now logged a series of holidays away from their families. Leda carefully studied her commanding officer as he led his soldiers, and absorbed everything she could about leadership and about the new rules of counterinsurgency.

  Leda was one of the few females serving in the military who fully appreciated the advantage their gender difference could bring to the fight at hand. Being a female had proven handy in Iraq; like her compatriots in Afghanistan, she inhabited that “third gender” Pottinger and Russo had identified (neither American male or Iraqi female). This enabled her to be taken seriously without being viewed as a threat. She loved being
outside the wire, mingling in Iraqi communities and developing relationships with military men and civilians alike. She also loved working with the special operations guys, whom she saw as embodying the integrity and high standards she had always hoped to find in the Army.

  Leda’s experience in Iraq had cemented her determination to deploy again, and she especially wanted to work with special ops. Already her career had taken her on a circuitous path from cross-country star—she attended a small college in Florida—to Army reservist to high school teacher and, finally, back to the military after 9/11. When she learned the Army was looking for women willing to go out on dangerous missions with special operations teams, there was no way she was going to miss out on this one-of-a-kind opportunity because of some technicality.

  Eventually she won approval from Lieutenant General John Mulholland, the decorated Special Forces commander who led his men into Afghanistan following the attacks of September 11, 2001. Mulholland now headed the Army’s entire Special Operations Command. If he would sign off on her application, no one would overrule him.

  There was only one caveat: the more senior Major Reston would have to serve as the officer in charge and handle all the team’s administrative demands as well. She agreed immediately. For a workaholic like Leda, with little need for sleep and few outlets aside from running marathons and working out at the gym, the twin jobs were hardly an issue.

  She couldn’t wait to get started, but the scene at the Landmark Inn threw her off kilter, just as it had Ashley. First: There were dozens of tough, strong, women roaming around the room, cautiously sizing each other up. Each knew that the program had a limited number of spots, so they would naturally be in fierce competition with one another. But the vibe in the room went well beyond competitiveness. Here was a group of women who cared more about being the best they could, not besting the girl next to them. A sense prevailed that this was a unique Fort Bragg event.