Ashley's War

by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

  “Take your seats and hurry up!”

  He flipped a switch and a screen rolled down from the ceiling. The room went quiet and on came a grainy video. Figures were moving across a dark field shrouded in the green haze of night-vision goggles. A group of Rangers were in the middle of a mission to capture an insurgent in an Afghan village. “This is what you will be doing,” he told the women. “Night after night. And this is what the next eight days are about: preparing you for those missions.”

  The CSTs sat riveted as Marks talked about training their minds for the demands of the war they were about to join. All the while, he chewed on a hunk of tobacco lodged inside his left cheek. “Combat is the highest-stakes game on the face of the planet because in the end you either have winners or you have dead people,” he said. “I don’t want to die, and I know you don’t, either. I want to be the killingest winner in the whole world. And you should, too.”

  It was the opening speech of Rangers’ pre-mission training week—PMT for short—and no one moved an inch in her seat. It was so quiet, Lane thought her classmates might be able to hear the sound of her own breathing. She wondered if Tristan or Ashley was as frightened as she was. She stole a look a few seats over at Amber and was only mildly surprised that her gung-ho teammate looked happier and more fully engaged than she had in weeks.

  Marks, a sandy-brown-haired veteran of more than twelve Ranger deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, continued.

  “You are CSTs and you have a very particular job to do on the battlefield. You have to deescalate whatever situation you are drawn into, and engage with the women and children.” He was now moving through the room, Oprah-style, using his own considerable physical presence to drive home the urgency of his words and shake them out of their comfort zones.

  “But we are not at war to pass out blankets and hugs. I need you to find out where the bad guys are, as quick as you can. It’s my job to prepare you to sit within eighteen inches of a possible enemy every single night and do your job and stay alive. That means you need to be ready to pick up your gun and use it properly. You have to be prepared to pull the trigger and kill someone without hesitation. And you have to be ready to pick up a fellow soldier who has been shot or blown up while you are still taking fire and get him out of there.”

  He was speaking at a pace that sounded like a tape recorder playing at one and a half times its normal speed.

  “War is chaos. That means you might be alone in a room with twenty women, one of whom is actually a heavily armed man in disguise. Nine times out of ten you will have other soldiers around you, pulling security. But there is a one percent chance you are going to be in that room by yourself. And you must be ready to react if that male belligerent tries to overpower you. You better be able, in that instant, to pull out your gun and shoot someone in the face without thinking about it.

  “At the end of the day, our world lives and dies by a gun,” he said. “That is the bottom line. Your job is not to be a Ranger and you are not a part of the Ranger assault team. You are not there to be a gunfighter. But we are going to put you in situations where you will have to flip that switch from ‘CST’ to killer in a heartbeat. No matter how nice and quiet and even safe the moment feels,” he continued, “you are always in the middle of a fight. Any minute the world is going to turn to shit, and you have got to keep that in the forefront of your brain. You must maintain a security mindset at all times, day and night. That is also a part of the job.”

  As he paced and talked, Marks fixed his gaze on the eyes of his students. He was surprised, even inspired, by what he saw. He had given some variation of this speech on “combat mindset” hundreds of times as a Ranger trainer, but never before had he seen every single one of his students scoot to the edge of their chairs and stare at him so intensely, as if every muscle in their bodies was participating in the listening. He could feel the intensity of their attention; they gave the impression of being desert wanderers who had finally found water. These chicks give a shit, he marveled, as he scanned their eager faces. Now Scottie felt the burden of his task, as he realized he had just a little more than a week—a fraction of the time he normally had with his Ranger trainees—to get this group 100 percent ready for the community they were about to join.

  “You will be going out at night with guys who have spent a good portion of their lives in war,” he reminded them. “They know they are the best, and they know how important they are. If Rangers have been deployed to a combat theater, things are bad. If Rangers are in your living room, that means things are really fucking bad. And in case you hadn’t noticed, we are not known for being the most subtle people in the world. We tend to tell you exactly what the fuck we are thinking about and we don’t give a shit who you are, we are going to speak our mind. We also are not used to failure. We are used to working hard enough to be the very best at what we do. Period.

  “My job is to prepare you to succeed. To have the mental armor that is required to do the job your country has asked you to do with the resilience you will need to get through the next eight months. You have got to find that switch that lets you know that you are at war. And then you’re gonna have to flip it back the other way when your time on the battlefield is over.”

  Marks softened his tone slightly for the last part of his speech.

  “You guys—each of you here in this room—are important to us. You are not some anonymous soldier. Look at the caliber of the CST sitting next to you, and then look around this room”—he gestured to the other Ranger trainers who were lined up against the wall. “You have got the best in Regiment standing in front of you. You were selected to go with Ranger Regiment because you are the best of the best. And all of us are excited to get you ready to go to war.”

  After weeks of being prepared for rejection and resentment from their fellow soldiers, not a woman in the room failed to notice that the tide was shifting. Holy shit, Lane thought, these guys are actually on our side.

  Scottie Marks had seen plenty of combat before he left the battlefield and assumed the responsibility of helping train future Rangers for war.

  As a young Army private first class he parachuted into Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. He was among the last to leave the country seven years later, in the wake of Operation New Dawn, as a decorated sergeant first class. His baptism by fire had been the endlessly lethal, block-by-block fight for Fallujah in 2003 and 2004. Marks had seen every phase of the war and every shift in battlefield strategy during his nine deployments to Iraq, from the very chaotic start to the extremely controlled end. Working under General McChrystal for many of his years in Iraq, he and his buddies experienced firsthand how the occasional raids had become, under the new counterterror mandate, their normal nightly routine.

  Soldiering was in Scottie’s DNA; he decided to become a Marine at the age of six. He grew up in the yawning prairies of Katy, Texas, riding bikes and playing with guns. Wherever he went, trouble found him, and Scottie relished its irresistible charms. As a teenager, he would drink beer before school. Later he switched to Gentleman Jack, the favored drink of his grandpa, a self-described hard-ass who let it be known to Scottie that real men only drink whiskey. At night, young Scottie would camp out in his room watching Night Court and dipping Copenhagen snuff. He came from tough stock: his great-grandma was a chain-smoking old Cajun who, when her cigarette ash got too long, simply tapped the butt, let the ash fall, and then rubbed it into the carpet with her slippered foot.

  His mother had Scottie when she was barely out of her teens. His father left when Scottie was a toddler. His mom hated guns and refused to let them in her house, a fact that only strengthened the boy’s love for the forbidden weapons. One afternoon when he was twelve Scottie “borrowed” his dad’s old pistol and took it out to the bayou behind his house. It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with firearms. A year later, he and a buddy stole their friend’s brother’s gun and went down to a culvert to do some shooting. It was great fun, but what t
he boys didn’t realize was that the cool, hissing sound coming from the weapon was actually the sound of a round coming back at them. Scottie got hit in his arm with a fragment of either a rock or a bullet—he never found out for sure—and started bleeding something fierce. Fear of his mother’s wrath outweighed the pain he felt, so, instead of confessing his mischief and getting her help, he made his friend stick a spoon over an open flame and seal up his wound with the metal as it melted. His mother was never the wiser.

  Scottie’s role models were all Marines and war heroes. His grandfather, a veteran of the brutal campaign of Guadalcanal, led his fellow Marines both in World War II and Korea. He finished his career as a command sergeant major at Camp Lejeune. Scottie’s uncle ran reconnaissance missions in Vietnam—a forerunner to the more elaborate raids that Special Operations Forces now undertake on a regular basis. For Scottie it was never a question that he would follow in their footsteps and join the Marine Corps.

  But then a movie put him on a different course. In 1993 Scottie went to see the action film Sniper, in which a highly skilled master gunnery sergeant played by Tom Berenger saves the day with a perfect shot from his M4 sniper rifle. A new dream came into focus. When he was nearly old enough to enlist, he shared his plans with a close family friend, an Army soldier who was a member of Ranger Regiment. “They don’t have any of that in the Marines,” the older man told Scottie. “You want to be a sniper recon guy? That’s not going to happen with the Jarheads. What you want to do is to become a Ranger.” Then he pointed Scottie to the book To Fight with Intrepidity, which chronicles the complete history of the U.S. Army Rangers, beginning in 1622, when Rangers patrolled American settlements and offered early warnings on incoming raids, to World War II and the heroic exploits of Merrill’s Marauders and Darby’s Rangers, modeled after British commandos. Scottie was hooked.

  He signed up for the Army on February 21, 2001. Seven months later, on September 11, he was at Ranger training when he and the rest of the world learned that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In rapid succession, the United States launched not one but two wars, first in Afghanistan and sixteen months later in Iraq, and on both fronts it was the Rangers who led the way. The battlefield had dramatically changed since the first Gulf War a decade earlier, and the demands on special operations doubled, then tripled, and then continued to climb exponentially. Scottie headed to Afghanistan in 2002 and soon found himself living in a war cycle: several months in battle, a few months at home for more training, then back to war. He was indeed serving “at the tip of the spear,” as he had always dreamed.

  By 2006 General McChrystal’s shift to time-sensitive targeting of high-value insurgents—what McChrystal called “F3EA,” or “find, fix, finish, exploit, and analyze”—had changed everything for Ranger Regiment, which now focused almost exclusively on executing these raids. As a team leader Scottie Marks learned to move swiftly, without much advance preparation, in the fight to target and capture. During his early deployments his unit had had plenty of time to refine operations; they were able to devote a lot of men and a lot of planning to a single raid. All that changed when Iraq’s insurgency exploded into a deadly efficient killing machine.

  By the time McChrystal and his men redesigned the joint special operations team, team leaders like Marks no longer had the luxury of two or three days to assemble an operation and hit a target. Now they had fifteen minutes to create a plan. Each night the platoon sergeant asked Scottie’s team to design that evening’s operations—sometimes it was one mission, other times it was a whole series of them—and it was his job to deliver. As the years went on, Scottie Marks came to feel far more at home on his narrow cot at General McChrystal’s special operations headquarters in Balad, Iraq, than he did in his king-size bed at his house near Fort Benning. He missed the war when he was away; it was his one and true home.

  But one night in 2010, Marks and his team were engaged in a firefight with insurgents as they made their way to a building they needed to secure for another special operations team. As Scottie barreled out of the vehicle, ducking to avoid bullets that were hissing by him, he blew out his right knee and was forced to limp, with the help of a teammate, to the position at the rear of the building he had planned to guard. He made it through the night’s mission, which was a success—his team located and captured the men who shot at them—but shortly thereafter Marks was evacuated to Kuwait, where he underwent surgery to realign his knee. The surgery too was a success, but Scottie’s days of fast-roping out of helicopters, busting down doors, and jumping out of airplanes were officially over. His new assignment was to remain at Fort Benning and use the considerable knowledge and expertise he had learned on the ground to train the next generation of Rangers. While some of his fellow trainers complained about the assignment, Scottie found it hugely rewarding. His body may have had enough of combat after nearly forty-eight months in Iraq and Afghanistan combined, but his mind and his heart would never give up. Now he could be a gatekeeper for the Regiment, picking the new guys and training them to be superior soldiers. It was the next best thing to being a team leader in battle.

  Scottie discovered that he had a knack for uncovering talent, and found that he loved wringing the best out of the hungry young men he taught. And he never lost his passion to be the best sharpshooter in the Army; when he wasn’t teaching, he kept training himself to be as good a shot as Berenger in Sniper. He entered and won a slew of shooting competitions for active-duty special operations guys. Eventually Scottie got his dream teaching assignment: running the newly revamped marksmanship training program for Ranger Assessment and Selection. In preparation for his work, he and another Ranger traveled the country to find and learn from the best marksmanship teachers in America, and then they returned to Fort Benning to use that knowledge to develop new training tools and lessons that would meet the demands of the ever-changing battlefield. Scottie had thoroughly enjoyed the process of learning about the art of shooting and the pedagogy behind it. Soon he was nearly as proud that he could teach an eighteen-year-old Army private to be a highly skilled Ranger as he was of his own time at war.

  And so, when it came time to train female soldiers to become Ranger enablers, it was no surprise that one of the first names to surface at Ranger Regiment’s headquarters was Scottie Marks. What his bosses didn’t know was that Marks had actually seen the need for a program like the CSTs when he was facing down al-Qaeda in Iraq. In his first few years as a Ranger, he and his fellow soldiers had little daily contact with women in the military. But once in Iraq, Marks often found himself thinking that his job would be a lot easier if he could call on female soldiers who could talk to and search women and gather actionable intelligence. In 2003 his unit lost three guys to a pregnant suicide bomber, and by 2006 as a weapons squad leader he had to do a lot of the questioning of Iraqi women whom his team encountered on raids. He knew the frightened Iraqi women were all the more terrified by his presence in their homes, and he kept thinking how much better for everyone it would be if women were doing the questioning instead.

  Weeks before the first group of CSTs were ready for training, Marks was instructing Ranger trainees as head of marksmanship for RASP, the highly respected Ranger Assessment and Selection Program. And then one morning his commander informed him he would be spending the next couple of weeks organizing some new program for female soldiers who were headed to Afghanistan with a team of Rangers they would be enabling. When Scottie asked what he was supposed to prepare them for, the response was as broad as it was practical: “They need to be able to do what anybody else can.”

  He didn’t, of course, get to Fort Bragg without some hazing from his buddies. “You’re gonna have to train girls?” they asked him. “Seriously, dude? That sucks.” But Marks wasn’t thinking about the gender issue; he had worked with a whole slew of “enablers” in the course of his ten years and dozen-plus Ranger deployments—EOD guys, who hunted for and disabled explosives, and tactical psychologic
al operations types—and he figured these girls couldn’t be that much different. They had made it this far; how bad could they be?

  Now, a couple of months later, Scottie was at Bragg preparing this first all-Army team of female enablers in a course that he and a few teammates had designed. It was to be a week of surprises for the veteran trainer and his colleagues. The first sign that things were different was the killer focus the women brought to the classroom for Scottie’s opening “combat mindset” talk. These women didn’t play around; they didn’t fidget or elbow each other. They just looked damned happy to be there and 100 percent ready to go.

  But then came the PT test. Scottie had seen their scores going in and knew they were strong; in fact, that was a huge factor influencing their selection to the Ranger side of the program. He set the distance for the first running test at two miles, and within moments of completing her run one of the CSTs was in his face. “Sergeant, this course isn’t two miles,” she threw at him. “I know what my two-mile run time is. It is not twelve twenty-five, it is twelve thirty.”

  “You want to put your kit back on and do it again?” he retorted. He sounded irritated, but in fact he was filled with respect for the soldier. These girls are intense, he thought. They reminded him of the men they were about to join. Scottie went and measured the distance of his course and in fact the soldier had been right: it was off by a whopping ten feet. She never put her kit back on, but she had proven her point just fine. The CSTs wanted no easy outs or cut corners—even if it was a matter of a few seconds.

  By the end of the third day of training Scottie Marks was a CST believer. “These girls are the best I have ever seen in my life,” he told one of his colleagues. “They are going to be our moneymakers—they’ll prove this program. They’re smart and fast and can do things that no other women can do.” He thought about the outrageous myths troops routinely repeated about African-American soldiers before President Truman’s 1948 executive order ending segregation in the armed services, including that they were cowards and lousy fighters. Fifty years of war had proven to the American public the heroic mettle of these soldiers, and Scottie Marks found himself guessing that someday, the same thing would be said about these pioneering women.