Ashley's War

by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

  It hadn’t gone much better for Tristan later that evening when the instructors interrogated her about how field artillery bears any relevance to counterinsurgency. They kept demanding increasingly specific examples. A dull film of exhaustion now coated every corner of her brain, suffocating her best thoughts. She was overwhelmed by frustration, convinced she had failed miserably and that the trainers had already found the one chink in her armor. She was 100 percent confident in her physical abilities and her endurance, but as a field artillery officer who had never deployed she hadn’t had much daily contact with COIN, or counterinsurgency. And it showed.

  “Guys, I don’t know if I can do this,” she confided late that night from her bed, her head in her hands. “I know I want it, but I think I just lost my chance.”

  Kate and Rigby came over to her small cot and put their arms around her shoulders. “Come on,” Kate said, “you’re doing great out there and you’re going to be even greater after this. Stay in it. One lousy test doesn’t take you off track.”

  Rigby had had a grueling day as well, having pushed herself as well as her teammates through their misery. At dinner she had to prod Kristen to finish eating her MRE, or Meals, Ready to Eat, after she threw up half of it. Her body simply could not take in as much food as she needed to get through the day’s tests. “You gotta keep going,” Rigby insisted, pushing the unappetizing meal of chicken-with-something back toward her after she vomited just beside her seat. “Keep eating it.” Everyone in her tent was physically depleted from the marches and runs and mentally drained by the exams and the need to impress their assessors at every moment. But they were determined to stay in it regardless of what their bodies and their minds told them.

  One night Rigby found inspiration in an unexpected place.

  “Hey, you guys, check this out,” she said, running back into the tent after her visit to one of the port-a-potties that stood in a row behind their sleeping quarters. “The john has a message for us!”

  “You gotta be joking!” Kate shouted. “Are you really bringing us wisdom from the shitter?”

  Tristan too was preparing for a few moments of rest, in full uniform, and let out a big laugh. It was the first smile her face had found in hours.

  “Yes, I am indeed, ladies,” Rigby said in her matter-of-fact tone, pushing back her glasses. “There is some really good stuff in there. I’ve been reading a lot of it. Think about who has sat on those toilets before us—every man who has ever gone on to join Special Forces. They know what they’re talking about when they leave that wisdom behind.”

  The entire tent was listening.

  “Seriously,” she continued. “Listen to this. And take it to heart, girls, as the last day approaches.”

  She paused for effect.

  “The mind is its own place. And itself can make a hell of heaven and a heaven of hell. Don’t quit.”

  The room was pin-drop silent.

  “Pretty good, isn’t it? Going to have T-shirts made for us with it when this is all done,” Rigby said. Then she jumped onto her cot. “It’s my favorite one so far. Good night, my friends, see you before I want to.”

  The room went dark as someone turned off the main light.

  Don’t quit indeed, thought Kate. Just one more day . . .

  Two hours later they were awake.

  “Up, up, get moving!” one of the tentmates yelled. “Cadre are out there—time to get up!”

  It did not count as predawn, Kate thought; it was maybe 2 or 3 a.m. Her blistered feet burned and her body ached. Her eyes were completely dried out; they felt like glass that was being sandblasted. Meanwhile, Tristan, now recovered from her brush with hopelessness of several hours earlier, was trying to rally her troops.

  “Come on, guys, let’s go,” she said, bounding from cot to cot to make sure no one was still asleep. She checked to make sure Rigby had on fresh socks since her last pair was soaked through with blood from her blisters. “This is it—last day.”

  The night ruled quiet and crisp. North Carolina has the brightest stars I’ve ever seen, Tristan thought. She inhaled the air and psyched herself up for the march that was soon to come. The women carried rucksacks, canteens, and fake weapons, and were poised to begin the most grueling physical and mental tests they would face in their weeklong training cycle.

  “It will be a suckfest,” Kate promised the others. “Get ready!”

  It started with a ruck that had no end. The women marched on long stretches of flat brown dirt, up rock-strewn hills and alongside murky, mud-filled creeks lined by trees on either side. For more than six hours they rucked, and as they did they watched as the pitch-black sky slowly faded and gave way to a few rays of sunlight that signaled the approaching dawn. Many suffered from bleeding feet through layers of moleskin and medical tape, but they marched on. For some, like Kate, it was tough but bearable, since the end was so near. Rigby found it hard in a way that thrilled her; she had wanted to be tested to the full extent of her physical and mental faculties, and so far the CST selection hadn’t disappointed. For Tristan, after the horrendous night before, it was a relatively easy day: rugged but entirely manageable.

  Occasionally the instructors stopped the marchers to ask them a riddle. Some of the women used the break to kneel on one knee and give their feet a rest. During one such pause, the instructor had no sooner gotten mid-sentence in his question about how to move an item across a gulch when Kate stopped to interrupt him with the answer.

  “I got it,” she blurted out. “Move this, move that, move that, you’re done.”

  Her answer was correct.

  “What the heck?” Rigby said. “How did you do that? That was amazing.”

  “It came to me like Jesus,” Kate said, stepping back to take a bow before her team, and inspire a moment of laughter. Then it was back to the march.

  By the time the march ended some of the women were dizzy with exhaustion. Others sat down for the first time in hours for their ten-minute break for mealtime—more MREs—and believed they had never eaten anything so delicious in their lives. But the break was not to last long. Another obstacle course required they scale a thirty-foot wall by hoisting one another up in the air using their cupped hands as ladders. By 3 p.m. they had been at it for close to twelve hours and there was no end in sight.

  Next on the agenda: more running. Out of boots and into track shoes. Tristan took the lead for her team and once again motivated them all to keep pushing through their mental exhaustion and physical pain. “Keep going, guys,” she urged them as they swapped footgear. “Just a little more to go.” Kate marveled at her stamina. She’s a beast, Kate thought, filled with respect for her fellow soldier’s strength.

  Finally, late in the day when some of the soldiers thought they might not be able to stay awake much longer, let alone stand up and perform yet another physical task, they reached the capstone of the Assessment and Selection training: a long run followed by a series of “buddy carries.” In the Army every soldier has to be fit enough and perpetually ready to carry a fellow soldier off the field in case the worst happens and he is injured or dead. Over the past fifty years in America, one of the central questions raised in the endless debates about whether women could serve in ground combat—even in support roles—has always been: would a woman be able to carry a large man off the battlefield under fire?

  Kate’s male Army friends had always told her that while they thought she was a great soldier, they could never trust a woman to hoist them to safety if they got shot or hurt. “It’s not personal,” they would say. “It’s just biology.”

  “But what about guys who are five-four and a hundred and thirty pounds?” Kate would respond. “Why are they okay and not girls who are the same size?” No one could ever give her a satisfactory answer to that question. Out there for CST Assessment and Selection that afternoon, Kate was determined to let her actions prove her worth. She would neither give in to her exhaustion nor fail to carry a single soldier—no matter how heavy—out o
f harm’s way.

  As the afternoon wore on the cadre took turns walking up to the soldiers in the field and pretending to shoot them. “You’re dead,” they’d say, and walk away. The soldier’s job was to fall onto the ground and go completely limp.

  In the buddy-carry, three or four soldiers encircle the fallen comrade. Depending on how she lay, one would get behind and underneath her body and grab her armpits while another took her legs. Together they would hoist her over a third soldier’s neck and that soldier would carry the “dead” soldier, forming a sort of P around her neck. Most of the women on Kate’s team were on the small side, so carrying them presented no real challenge, but still she took inspiration from Amber, who had a bunch of weapons slung over her and was carrying one of the bigger girls on her shoulders as if she were light as a feather.

  Kate now was fully motivated. Whoever she is, Kate thought, that girl knows what she’s doing. Kate pressed ahead and picked up a teammate who had dropped right in front of her.

  A half hour later it was Rigby’s turn to “die.” She had already carried several of her more petite teammates to safety and joked to herself that the real test would come when they had to carry her, for while she was hardly big, she was taller and thicker than most of the other women in their tent. Finally the instructor came by and “killed” her.

  By that time the temperature had climbed well above eighty degrees and the soldiers had sweated through every inch of their camouflage uniforms. Rigby’s blisters bled freely and she was soaked through with perspiration from top to bottom. It was almost a relief to lie quietly on the dirt lane, playing dead and gazing at the gray sky, waiting to get picked up by her teammates. And then she looked down and saw that her pants were soaked in blood from her waist to her knees. She felt a jolt of panic wondering if all their combat role-playing had started to play tricks on her mind. And then she burst out in laughter. She had been out there in the field for well over twelve hours and had somehow missed the fact that her period had started hours before.

  Kate looked over, saw her “dead” buddy laughing, then followed Rigby’s eyes to the source of the moment’s absurdity. “Oh shit,” she said, “this one’s going to be interesting!” She was already hatching a strategy for how the team would carry her safely home.

  But Rigby darted off in another direction, and behind the spare cover of a spindly North Carolina tree she dealt with her feminine hygiene.

  “I just gotta take care of my business,” she shouted back. “Be there in an instant . . .” Kate looked on, trying unsuccessfully to suppress her own laughter.

  “The bears are going to have a field day!” Kate shouted to her teammates.

  Along with a woman’s inability to carry a comrade off the field, another reason soldiers frequently gave for keeping women out of the infantry was that their periods would attract bears out in the wild. Among Army women there was a long tradition of joking about the ridiculousness of this idea, as if a bear would find a menstrual cycle any more attractive than they did.

  The male cadre was standing twenty feet from the women and watched without saying a word. His own training had taught him to be stoic at all times and to betray no spontaneous expression. This guy is good, the soldiers thought, but of course he had never dealt with an all-female selection before and this body stuff was entirely new terrain. His eyes grew large, full of what Kate later called “shock and awe,” but he stood there and simply watched as the women arranged themselves like nothing at all had happened, then got on with the task at hand.

  “Okay, let’s go,” Rigby called out a minute later. Another teammate hoisted her up with help from Kate and another soldier and heaved Rigby’s torso behind her shoulders and on top of her rucksack. The fake-dead Rigby hung limp, as the team humped its way back to the staging area.

  “One hundred hours of hell” had lived up to the promise of its name.

  Ashley’s preparation for the hours of hell had started six years earlier when she was a freshman at Kent State and became addicted to rucking. On school breaks she would pack rocks into her backpack and head out of her family’s house in Marlboro for her own “unknown distance” road marches.

  “What are you doing, Ashley?” Bob would ask. “Why would you make it heavier?”

  “I’m training, Dad, trying to get stronger,” she would call back to him as she walked out the door and began to set a pace for herself on the two-lane highway that ran alongside their ranch home.

  Now her years of preparation were paying off. The scale that weighed everyone’s gear before the first ruck started, tipped well above the minimum requirement when Ashley’s pack was placed on it. No way she would get penalized because the instructors found her pack was too light—if it came in underweight at the end she would have to start all over again, and she wasn’t about to let that happen. Ashley had prepared her body for the long ruck marches in very specific ways. Unlike running, which is nearly all cardio exertion, the rucks require abdominal and back strength. The thousands of sit-ups and crunches and hours of CrossFit she had performed in the months leading up to selection meant Ashley’s core was strong enough to bear the load of her pack without buckling. Pull-ups had built up her shoulder muscles. She may not have been a Pegasus like Tristan, but she was an outstanding athlete.

  From her first stride to her last, Ashley never let up. Some soldiers fell out of formation. Others were slowed by the creeping burn of played-out calf muscles that began to atrophy from overuse. The soldiers who weren’t suffering from physical discomfort struggled with the ruck’s “no talking” rule, and found relief in swapping daydreams about the foods they would eat when the week had finished (lasagna and ice cream won the day) or the jobs this suffering would lead to.

  But Ashley pressed on—quiet, focused, always at the front, just as she had been from the first day of ROTC training. She relished the silence and the clop-clop of her Gore-Tex boots as her feet hit the ground. All around her the North Carolina fir trees stood tall, lush, and green, stretching their limbs toward the sky. They reminded her of the state park where she ran races with Josh and Brittany as kids. Her every sense was tuned in to the moment and remained there. She heard the flapping wings of birds flying above against the steady, in-and-out pattern of her own breath and the tap-tap-tap of her heart.

  The road ahead stretched out before her as she tracked the klicks on her pace counter. Nearly everyone else was now marching behind her. Only her tentmates Leda and Anne, the engineer, hiked alongside her, sometimes in front, sometimes slightly behind. These fittest of soldiers challenged one another by wordless example to be the best they could be.

  That night, nearly every soldier was struggling to stay in one piece.

  Along the route medics stood by at first aid stations to monitor injuries and examine soldiers who looked hurt. Not wanting to quit the selection process and miss out on this unique opportunity, most of the CST candidates hurried past the medical teams, assuring them they were “just fine.” Even if they were lying prone on the ground, they wouldn’t admit to an injury. Those who acknowledged any pain simply vowed to defy it. But the medics checked the soldiers’ feet each evening to make certain they didn’t overlook any serious injuries.

  Lane, the Guard soldier and track star from Nevada, had been in extreme pain that morphed into agony by day three. Her Achilles tendon, which she had injured during high school track and field, was on fire. As she rucked, she considered the possibility that each step she took could be her last, but still she marched on, refusing to seek out the medic. When he made his nightly rounds, however, what he saw alarmed him.

  “Hey, you know that Achilles tendon could snap at any moment,” he said. “If I were you I would quit. That is a terrible injury—it takes months to heal and if the damage is severe enough it might never fully recover. It’s not a good idea to risk it.”

  He was holding a folder that contained all the paperwork necessary for a medical drop.

  Lane gaped at him and yanked her
foot away.

  “Are you kidding me? I am here. I made it this far. I am totally fine.”

  “Seriously,” she said, looking up at him as she laced her boots back up, “if it rips just glue it back together.”

  A few tents down from Lane, Ashley’s team awaited their own medic check. One soldier’s blisters had worn through four layers of skin, down to what she thought must have been the dermis. Ashley put her medical training to work.

  “If anyone needs her feet taped up, the doctor is in,” she announced, facing two folding chairs toward one another so her “patients” could elevate their feet while she examined their blisters and swaddled them in moleskin. Back at Kent State, Jason had often been Ashley’s guinea pig in such situations, allowing her to tape up his uninjured knees, ankles, and wrists to perfect her technique. One day she even had him come to one of her physical therapy classes so she could demonstrate her knowledge of how to palpate an injured shoulder. He joked with her later that she had just wanted to show off her handsome, shirtless ROTC boyfriend to all the girls in her class. Now Ashley was considering pursuing a job as a physician’s assistant once her Afghanistan deployment was behind her. She had confided this to Anne while helping one of their tentmates; there was something about this environment that felt inspiring to her. There in her bunk, taping her teammates’ torn-up feet at a makeshift first aid station, Ashley realized she was starting to become genuinely attached to the women in her tent. Like Rigby, she felt they were facing a trial that almost no one else on earth ever could or would understand. Even their own families.