Ashley's War

by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

  “Let’s kick this thing’s ass!” That was the attitude of the moment.

  On her way to work out at the gym across from the Landmark, Leda ran into Ashley, who was heading to the same place. Both of these women were gym junkies; neither would go a day without hard-core exercise. Each started her morning with a dawn workout that included CrossFit routines and a several-mile run.

  CrossFit for most of these women was a way of life. Many of them did at least one workout a day, and sometimes two. This results-oriented fitness regimen was stacked with movements such as squats, jumps, sit-ups, handstands, and pull-ups, and reflected influences from gymnastics to rope climbing, rowing, and weight lifting. In CrossFit every exercise is measured and the routine is constantly varied, so the body gets stronger while always being forced to adapt to a new set of strength tests. The program started in California, then spread to gyms around the country, and it particularly attracted members of law enforcement, and special operations—men and women alike. Virtually all the CST hopefuls were CrossFit devotees who tracked their workouts meticulously in their quest to be stronger, faster, fitter, and tougher.

  Leda had spotted Ashley earlier that day standing by herself in the Landmark’s lobby. While most of the other women were buzzing around and talking a big game about their physical readiness for the upcoming selection, Ashley seemed content to quietly take it all in while she waited in line at the front desk for her room key. It takes a great deal of self-possession to look so at ease in that sea of type A women, Leda thought.

  Now working out next to Ashley in the gym, Leda was impressed with her raw strength, to say nothing of the ridiculously high number of dead-hang pull-ups she could bust out. Most men couldn’t make it to twenty-five as Ashley was doing now, Leda thought. She looked forward to getting to know this girl.

  She had no idea then just how intertwined their paths would become.

  The second group of fifty applicants, the active-duty soldiers, gathered at the Landmark Inn two weeks later, and included Amber Treadmont and Kate Raimann. Also there was Kristen Fisher, a military intelligence officer just months out of liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. Kristen’s father was an Air Force veteran who had impressed upon her the importance—as well as the fun and camaraderie—of serving. Like Ashley, she had turned to ROTC to pay for school. Somehow the four years of college snuck by her and before she knew it she was in the Army. She and a fellow intel officer, Rigby Allen, had both spotted the “Become a Part of History” poster at Fort Huachuca in Cochise County, Arizona, where they were training, and decided to take on the CST application process together. Polar opposites—Kristen was a bubbly former NFL cheerleader and Rigby was a self-described “roughneck” who played rugby in college—the two were just three months into their intel officer training before they arrived at the same gloomy assessment: their future held endless desk jobs, not the excitement of the front lines they had had in mind when they signed up.

  All Rigby had ever wanted was to be a soldier. She grew up in Michigan playing “army” in the woods with her older brother and sister, and dreamed of leading a real maneuver one day. Her grandfather had served in the 82nd Airborne Division and her dad was a Navy photographer for three years during Vietnam. Without them ever explicitly pushing the children to serve, both men had made it clear that being in the military and serving your country was the most important and patriotic work an American could do. After the Navy, Rigby’s father took a job as an engineer at the defense contractor Northrop Grumman. On “Take Your Kids to Work” day she and her siblings would scamper through the helicopters he designed. When she finally landed in ROTC at Western Michigan University, she felt more focused than she did in any classroom; the program trained cadets to be infantry platoon leaders, which was exactly what she had always wanted to do in life. But soon reality set in. “Then,” as Rigby later put it, “you realize you are a woman. And women can’t be infantry platoon leaders.” Stuck to a desk in Arizona, she spent so much time staring at a computer that she finally had to see a doctor about her eyestrain. That was the last straw. Rigby decided she was going to find a way to get as close to the front row as she could, and the minute she spotted that female with an M4 on the poster taped to the bathroom wall at Fort Huachuca, she knew this special operations program was her ticket out.

  When she first met Kristen at officer school, Rigby was surprised that the ebullient cheerleader wanted to pursue the CST program, too. She seemed unserious, a “stereotypical” Army female more focused on her marital status than her military record. But then they went on a six-mile ruck march together and the beauty queen kicked her ass. Kristen made the hike look virtually effortless despite the thirty pounds of gear she carried on her back, and instead of passing Rigby and letting her stay behind, she marched right next to her and encouraged her fellow soldier to push harder. The rugby player who thought she was so tough finished the outing with an entirely new respect for her far fitter classmate—and made a harsh rebuke to herself for falling prey to such easy prejudice.

  Rigby and Kristen had called the CST recruiter every week to plead with him to let them apply for the program despite how young and how new to the Army they both were. In the end both got the green light to attend the selection process. They made the long drive together from Arizona to North Carolina full of excitement and self-confidence. And then they walked into the motel, took one look around them, and realized they had just landed in the big leagues. “Kristen, these women are specimens,” Rigby whispered. She had just overheard one of the women in the lobby talking about the Ironman competition she had just finished.

  Rigby checked in, made her way upstairs, opened the door to her room, and was immediately confronted by a vile smell. She thought there must be a body decaying somewhere inside.

  She stepped tentatively into the room and discovered instead a smiling brunette with sparkling blue eyes sitting on one of the beds. She was decked out head to toe in running gear and was still sweating from what must have been a very long workout.

  The woman leapt to her feet and extended a hand. “Hi, how’re you doing? I’m Tristan Marsden,” she said. The breezy, peppy tone was as grating as the stench.

  “Why does it smell like that in here?” Rigby asked. She couldn’t believe the assault on her senses.

  “Oh, I am so sorry, I tried to open the window to air it out, but they’re sealed shut,” Tristan said, smiling. “I just went for a run—and it’s my sneakers. . . . I never wear socks when I run or ruck, and well, you know what happens inside the shoes . . .”

  Rigby looked at the Nikes in question and picked them up by their shoestrings.

  “These are going in the bathroom,” she said. She grabbed the plastic bag that lined the trash can, dropped the damp shoes inside, and dumped them in the bathtub. She was utterly indifferent to any offense caused by her actions.

  “I’m Rigby, by the way,” she said, now returning to the work of making an acquaintance of her roommate.

  Like Rigby, the military was in Tristan’s blood; the second oldest of five children in a tight-knit, conservative, New England Catholic family, she had grown up with her father’s Marines flag hanging in the basement weight room. By the time she was five she and her older sister could sing the Marines’ Hymn together, by heart:

  From the Halls of Montezuma,

  To the Shores of Tripoli;

  We fight our country’s battles

  In the air, on land, and sea. . . .

  Tristan had been an elite runner—an all-state standout in high school—and had her choice of colleges offering her full athletic scholarships. But while touring college campuses she felt wooed by the siren call of West Point, with its rugged beauty and history nearly as old as America itself. She was drawn to both the physical and mental challenges that West Point offered, and went on to become one of the U.S. Military Academy’s top track stars. But she was hardly a typical warrior-in-waiting. Each time a West Point graduate was killed in action the school m
ade an announcement over the public address system, and the entire community observed a moment of silence in the mess hall over breakfast. By 2008 the booming announcements became so frequent that Tristan felt haunted by the pointlessness of it all. What did any of the athletic achievement or the years of study matter when they were all going to go off and die? How could these people just keep passing the eggs when one of their own would never return home? War had sounded a lot more glamorous before those who were killed were people she knew, fellow students who had sat at that very same breakfast table only a year earlier.

  “It just seems like no one is even affected by it anymore,” Tristan told her track coach one afternoon. “Everyone just goes about their business.” Her coach tried to explain to her that that was the reality—and the risk—of being an officer in wartime. “You have to come to peace with that,” she advised.

  As time went on, Tristan did come to terms with her trepidation, and by the end of her studies she was ready to deploy. The desire only grew as she watched more and more of her classmates heading to Iraq and Afghanistan. What use was she here at home? At West Point she had chosen field artillery as her specialty because at that time, seven years into the Afghanistan war, she had heard the artillery branch was opening a lot of jobs to women and it meant she would get to shoot big weapons and be in the fight. She specialized in the Multiple Launch Rocket System, an armored rocket launcher that could hit critical targets at distances both short and far. When an infantry unit was in trouble the MLRS was one of the weapons they called in for precise—and lethal—backup. But Tristan soon was disappointed to learn that the most exciting jobs—the ones that would put her in combat next to the infantrymen who called in the artillery during critical battles—remained male-only.

  By the time Tristan showed up to her first assignment out of West Point, she was already determined to find a way out of artillery. But her brigade commander had read her file along with all the other new officers and noted her mix of West Point experience and athletic fitness. Shortly after she arrived at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, he sent word that he wanted to formally interview her. “I want you to be a platoon leader,” he told her. It was a job that officially only men could hold, but Tristan, like Anne Jeremy, was clearly worth betting on. “I read your file and I think you’re the best person for the job,” the commander said. He made it clear he didn’t care if it was “coded” male-only. Army policy or not, he offered it to her.

  At first the noncommissioned officers and enlisted men Tristan led, most of them veterans of at least one war deployment, unleashed a pile of grief on her. They had never had a female platoon leader and had no intention of changing their ways for one now. Their behavior spanned from rude and crude to just plain silly, and they went out of their way to make sure Tristan overheard their colorful stories of sexual exploits and conquests. Tristan shrugged it all off and kept her focus on her work. She had heard a lot worse at West Point and had learned how to ignore it. A few weeks into her new role, after they realized she wasn’t the stereotypical, shrinking female who would take offense from their rough talk, the men moved on. But just because the men supported her presence didn’t mean the women in their lives did, and Tristan regularly received angry, sometimes drunken calls from wives ordering her to “stay away from my husband.” Tristan patiently answered that she would be very happy to, just as soon as her time as their officer ended. In the end, Tristan’s men became her biggest champions and most vocal backers, and they fully supported her when she became the battery’s first female executive officer, the number-two position in her battery. It was another job that was officially open only to men.

  And then, a little more than a year later, Tristan was walking back to her office from a brigade maintenance meeting when she saw the bold headline above the female soldier. BECOME A PART OF HISTORY, the poster beckoned. She stopped to take a closer look, and as she read the fine print a senior officer passed by and ribbed her. “Oh, yeah, Marsden, you going to go change the world? Going to go be ‘part of history’?” Ten minutes later, back in her office staring at the small mountain of administrative paperwork on her desk, Tristan felt like she was in a version of the movie Groundhog Day. Every morning she came into her office and pored over reports, paperwork, and Excel spreadsheets with training schedules. One day the same as the next wasn’t what she had hoped for when she chose West Point.

  When she told her commander—the one who had kidded her about making history—that she wanted to apply for the program, he looked up from his desk with a quizzical expression. Seeing she was serious, his reply was immediate.

  “Okay,” he said, “you got it. Let me know what I can do to help.”

  Now, only a few months later, sitting in the Landmark Inn breakfast hall with several dozen like-minded women, she finally felt like she was close to reaching her goal. She had rarely had female friends, other than one or two of the girls she knew from the track team, but she instantly connected with the women at the Landmark. Part of the bond came from the intense athleticism they shared, but it was also about the unusual mix of intensity and femininity they had in common. They were all out to push their own limits and achieve as much as they could. Incredibly, they all looked as hungry as she was to venture into the unknown and tackle a special operations mission that meant more to them than any desk job ever could.

  Back on her bed at the Landmark, trying to figure out what to make of her plainspoken new roommate, Tristan looked over at Rigby’s overstuffed bag filled with uniforms, socks, military boots, T-shirts—all items she recognized from the long list of gear each soldier had been instructed to bring to selection. She asked herself if she had any idea what she had gotten herself into? Probably not, she thought. But I’ve gotten this far. No turning back.

  Beyond the parade of Amazons, the first day of CST assessment and training was an otherwise dull affair, with nothing but paperwork on the agenda. By lunchtime, with all the candidates checked in, they were free to do whatever they liked until 0800 hours the next morning.

  “Kristen,” Rigby mischievously whispered to her friend as they filed out of the motel conference room. “Let’s get some of the girls and watch G.I. Jane!” Rigby had already seen the movie five or six times and still felt inspired by the sight of Demi Moore as Lieutenant Jordan O’Neil, crew cut and all, fighting for a fair shot at joining the Navy SEALs. Like Rigby and Kristen, O’Neil was an intel officer who wanted only to be out in the field. Most war movies had no female characters—this one was different. It was Hollywood, for sure, and over the top, but Rigby was inspired by the heroine’s unwillingness to quit. And they needed some inspiration right about now. The two CST candidates headed over to a sprawling Walmart near the base, and of course the movie was in stock.

  That night a few of the women piled into Rigby and Tristan’s room to enjoy Thai takeout and a double-feature: G.I. Jane and Two Weeks in Hell, a documentary about Green Beret selection. They laughed when Lillian DeHaven, the senator who arranges O’Neil’s entry into SEAL selection, complained that one of the female candidates for the program looked “like the wife of a Russian beet farmer.” And they all nodded in agreement when O’Neil announced, “I don’t want to be some poster girl for women’s rights.” None of these women was looking “to make some kind of statement,” as Ashley had told Jason. All they wanted was a shot at going to war on a mission they believed in with America’s best fighters.

  Tristan leaned back to rest her head on one of the extra-firm motel pillows as she watched Demi Moore bust out a row of free-hanging sit-ups on a Navy ship bound for the Middle East. Might as well enjoy a rest now, she thought. Starting tomorrow we’ll all be out there with old Jane getting our asses kicked.

  The next day, Tristan and the other women would find out if they would make the cut.

  4

  100 Hours of Hell

  * * *

  Get your bags into the vehicle. Now!”

  A training instructor was standing on the sidewalk before
a large military transport truck, its open bed facing the fifty soldiers who were lined up in formation holding giant rucksacks. He had come to transport the women to the real action: CST Assessment and Selection.

  Or, as the officer who designed the program called it, “one hundred hours of hell.”

  “Finally,” Amber said to herself, smiling in relief. She hoisted her pack onto one shoulder and strode toward the idling truck.

  “All right, ladies, let’s load ’er up!” she yelled to the others. Amber leapt into the open truck bed and began dragging bags toward the rear to make it easier for others to toss theirs in without creating a chaotic mess. Following her lead the soldiers formed a single line and began dropping their rucksacks in an orderly fashion. They all knew they would be graded in Assessment and Selection as individuals, but they also knew, as Admiral Olson had noted back when he put the word team in the name of their program, that collaboration was central to everything in special operations. Their instructors would be watching to see how they performed as a team and what kind of leaders they were, particularly at the most trying moments. But it all began here, at the loading area.

  For her part, after forty-eight hours lingering around the Landmark Inn, Amber was damned ready to be back at work. The former interrogator had been up since before dawn mentally readying herself for the test to come. By 7 a.m., according to her Timex wristwatch, she was done with breakfast and racing back up the stairs to her room, taking them two at a time. She grabbed her gear and jumped in the elevator, rucksack on her back and her mind in the moment. Another group of soldiers boarded on the floor below. A particularly fit young woman—one of the few African-American soldiers at selection—eyed Amber without a word, offering instead a nod of mutual respect. “Kimberly,” she said, extending her hand to introduce herself. Amber did the same. On Amber’s other side stood a six-foot-three woman who was built like a WWE wrestler. Amber had to look twice to confirm she was actually female.