Ashley's War

by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

  Mistrust between the U.S. soldiers and the Afghan forces they were there to train abounded. The grim threat of insider attacks frightened the Americans; an Afghan border guard had recently killed two NATO service members in the northern province of Faryab, and no one was sure who, exactly, was collaborating with the Taliban to pull off such acts. In the dining facility one day Nadia overheard a fellow American, a soldier, say he didn’t want to eat with the Afghan forces because he could be seen as a disloyal “defector” who might be working with the Taliban. She added this to her list of worries: that she, too, would be seen as someone with ambivalent loyalties simply because she dined or spoke with the Afghan forces to whom they would soon hand over security responsibilities. Men in the Afghan army shared with her their dreams of moving to America, and how those dreams collided with their genuine mistrust of American motives. Nadia tried to convince them that the Americans really did want to help the Afghans, and how hard the immigrant life in California had been for her family and so many others. She tried to build bridges between the Afghan men and the American soldiers who led the missions, but she found few takers. It was a cultural gap that felt nearly impossible to overcome.

  In the summer of 2011, after her first round of CST missions, she agreed to be transferred to Kandahar. She knew it was full of IEDs and the site of constant firefights, but she now trusted the special ops guys with her life. Besides, their first interpreter there had broken her wrist; she hadn’t lasted more than a few weeks in the job. And there was no one else to do it. But first, Nadia would return to California for a family wedding.

  The trip home turned out to be a disaster: Nadia found herself feeling as isolated as she had during those early days at Bagram. No one in Southern California acted like there was a war going on; it simply never came up in conversation. “Why are you so down?” her family and friends kept asking. “You seem so bitter.” But Nadia simply felt disconnected—from her family and her “real” life. I’ve just been bitch-slapped by reality, she thought as she watched the bride and her friends dancing carefree and full of joy in the wedding hall. They haven’t got a clue.

  She may have been a civilian in the conflict, but war had changed Nadia, and when she left California for Afghanistan she wondered if she would ever again feel connected to people who hadn’t seen combat.

  By midsummer she was settling in in Kandahar, and the new crew had arrived: Ashley, Lane, and Anne. Nadia was nervous; building rapport was important in a job that demanded they spend so many hours together preparing for, flying to, and, most important, placing their lives on the line during the mission. She found herself anxiously wondering what sort of women these soldiers would be. Nadia found her answer in the ladies’ room, of all places.

  The four women—Ashley, Anne, Lane, and Nadia—were in the washroom getting ready for the first meeting of the day when Anne and Lane broke out their traveling cosmetic kits. It was a small gesture, but for Nadia, it spoke volumes.

  During her years overseas she had been around a lot of military females who frankly frightened her. They conveyed the impression that any sign of femininity would be perceived as weakness. But here, in this tiny bathroom, were three incredibly fit, Army-uniformed, down-to-earth gals who could embrace being female and being a soldier in a war zone. She found it refreshing—and inspiring.

  “Oh my God, you wear makeup!” she burst out.

  Anne laughed as she put the final touches on an abbreviated makeup regimen.

  “Oh, yes, always have to have mascara on,” she replied. “I am blond and look like I have no eyelashes. I don’t want to scare people!”

  “Me, too,” Nadia answered, relieved in a way she hadn’t felt in months. “I mean, I obviously have brown hair, but I always have to do my eyeliner and fill in my eyebrows. Anything else, I don’t care, but those two things absolutely have to happen for me to be ready to face the day.”

  Then the soldiers and their terp headed to the briefing room. This is the dream team, Nadia thought. They are confident, they love the work, they are tough, and they know how to put on eyeliner. They love the guys they work with and want to help; they aren’t scared or intimidated, just ready to go out. Meeting them helped convince Nadia to stick with the job. I can totally do this, she thought. I want to see these girls succeed, and I am going to stick it out and do it for them. Already she had sprained her ankle while out on mission and gotten more than a few scrapes and bruises. She worried she would get her face banged up or much worse one of these times, but she was going to stay at least until the following March, when her contract ended once more.

  Over the next few weeks Nadia regularly went out on mission with Ashley and became one of her regular interpreters. She admired Ashley’s resilience in the face of difficulty, as when she struggled one evening with the faulty batteries in her night-vision goggles, and took in stride the fact that her warning light had been on toward the end of the mission despite fresh batteries. She saw Ashley was determined to improve her work, and had no ego barriers to overcome. The feeling was mutual, and it wasn’t long before Ashley trusted and felt comfortable asking her more experienced interpreter for advice about effectively talking with the Afghan women and children.

  If Nadia had been “the ideal terp” when she got the CST assignment, she was now, six months later, even more skilled in her work. An interpreter’s job is to hear all the nuances in the language that both sides use to communicate, but also to read their body language and facial expressions for further clues. In reply to Ashley, Nadia described what it was like from the perspective of an Afghan woman to be questioned in the middle of the night by fully armed soldiers. The last few months had showed her how much of a need there was for this job; she had seen how the Afghan women clung to the female soldiers once they realized they were women. But she also wanted to share words of caution.

  “Listen, some of those people out there could get an Oscar, they lie so well. And straight to your face, without even thinking about it,” she warned Ashley. “They’ll tell you they don’t know anything about what is happening in their homes, and sometimes they don’t, but oftentimes it turns out to be a lie. So listen to their answers. Don’t go in like a bat out of hell, all aggressive, because they will simply shut down. Sometimes these women really want to talk to you, but they are so terrified of the guys we work with and afraid of the Taliban propaganda that says American soldiers enter their homes only to attack them. You are there to keep them safe, and if you stay confident and composed you’ll be fine. They pick up on your disposition. They may be illiterate and they may never have been to school. But even if they can’t read or write they are smart when it comes to nonverbal communication, and they will be looking to read you from front to back. Never let anyone know the violence that you are capable of. Keep steady, and keep confident.”

  Just a few nights later, when the two went out on a mission together, Ashley had the chance to put all that advice—and then some—to work.

  The evening began like any other, with Ashley doing her part at the pre-mission briefing. “I am CST, I will be standing at X point at X time on this mission; my objective is to secure the women and children . . .” It had all become fairly routine for her now. She had recently written to Jason that it was surprising what one could get used to at war.

  She and Nadia boarded the bird together for a short flight. The mission was to find a man suspected of having strong connections to insurgent networks and who was helping to fund Taliban attacks. Nadia confided to Ashley that ever since so many SEALs had died in the August crash, she was terrified of flying on helicopters. A friend and fellow interpreter who frequently worked with that SEAL team had been involved with securing the crash site. Thirty people she saw every day simply never came back to base and she hadn’t been the same since. Nadia was now seized by the fear that she would be next, and every time she boarded a helicopter she instinctively did the most American thing in the world to calm her fears: she prayed. But the moment she began to w
hisper the familiar words, she realized she had to stop.

  What is racing through their minds when they hear a Muslim say “God is Great”? she asked herself, looking around at the Rangers and their military enablers who were seated all around her on the metal benches. These guys are going to think I’m a suicide bomber here to detonate myself, she thought. Her eyes filled as the reality settled in: here she was about to run off a helicopter into the black of night to fight her country’s war and she couldn’t even ask God to keep her safe because she would be seen as a “defector” by her fellow Americans. But that was the way things were. She whispered “Allahu Akhbar” to herself instead.

  Nadia had confided much of this to Ashley, who usually carried her St. Joseph’s medal and her prayer card with her on missions, and the young lieutenant had figured out the rest. She did what she could to ease the anxieties of her friend and mission partner; she would give Nadia the thumbs-up as they boarded the bird, and offer her a reassuring smile that promised it was all going to be fine, just another night’s work. It was easy to get separated out there in the dark night, among fifty people on rugged and unknown terrain, so the two stuck together when they reached the objective. When they reached the compound another translator called out to the insurgent on the loudspeaker in Pashto. All the while, Ashley never moved more than ten or twelve feet from her terp.

  Once inside, Ashley gathered the women and began by explaining, with Nadia as her voice, that she was an American soldier and she was there to keep them safe. No men would come near. She put on her blue nitrile rubber gloves and began searching the women and kids, keeping up a constant patter of questions in a gentle but confident tone. With her terp beside her, perfectly mirroring Ashley’s inflections, the team got to work.

  The women answered Ashley’s questions and she scrawled down in her notebook the information they shared. Confirming identity is notoriously hard in the villages of Afghanistan, particularly those where the insurgency is strongest, because so many people use similar nicknames, and most of the men have invented elaborate stories and created false identities to evade foreign and Afghan soldiers. That night it was Nadia’s questioning, and Ashley’s subtle recognition of what she had done, that allowed the two to swiftly confirm the insurgent’s identity without giving anything away on their faces to show the importance of what they had just learned. That confirmation allowed the Rangers to use evidence they had found in the main compound plus other items on the ground to connect this man with the attacks. And it allowed all of them to get back to base faster than they would have otherwise.

  She may have been skilled in her job that night, but it wasn’t long before nature got the better of Ashley. The importance of drinking water while on mission had been pounded into the women during their summer of training. “Dehydration is a potent enemy,” Scottie Marks had bellowed over and over again. But no one had prepared them for the reality of being out there all night for hours on end, trekking, talking, and flying, while taking in all those liquids. The body at a certain point cannot be ignored, and Ashley’s bladder had been demanding attention for hours. The Rangers, of course, had no issue; the moment a bird landed, a whole slew of soldiers would file out and relieve themselves right there, under the stars. But for women, it was a lot more complicated. Some, like Ashley’s partner Lane, trained their bladders by religiously pacing their water intake and sprinting straight to the restroom the instant they returned to base. Others used the “Shewee”—a plastic funnel that comes in “NATO green” and allows women to pee standing up. So far Ashley had held her body in check, like Lane. But this night, the metal plate of her body armor had begun pressing on her bladder and she was in agony. At last she asked a nearby Ranger if he would stand lookout while she scampered just a few feet away to answer nature’s call. All was well for a moment. And then:

  “Who the hell is taking a piss out here?” a Ranger providing overwatch—additional cover for the unit in case an enemy suddenly materialized—asked over the radio once his ears caught the sound of a bladder emptying.

  Silence.

  “Hey, what’s going on out there? Who is peeing? I can hear you . . .”

  Ashley was busted, and knew she had to answer because any uncertainty while the platoon was out on the objective was unwelcome, to say the least.

  “Uh, it’s me,” she said for all to hear. “White.”

  “Oh, wow,” the Ranger answered, in a surprised tone. The last thing in the world he had expected to hear was a woman’s voice.

  “Uh, hello, White!”

  The story of the exchange spread quickly among the CSTs, particularly since it came from “the quiet one” who, now that she had done the deed publicly once, decided it really wasn’t a big deal and would do so again. For weeks it was a joke among the female soldiers: “Uh, hello, White!”

  Ashley never shared these stories with Jason—in fact she rarely spoke to him about what she was doing, given the sensitive nature of the work. To her mind, even uneventful trips to the latrine fell under the generic cone of silence. Jason always joked that Ashley had exceeded the speed limit maybe twice in her life; he could say with confidence that she would never be the loose-lipped soldier who would breach operational security.

  But she did begin to pen a letter to tell him about one mission she would never forget, which had taken place a few days earlier.

  It was her third time out with Ranger Regiment, she wrote. She and a translator—she didn’t name her—had flown by helicopter to a compound that was thought to be surrounded by IEDs, and landed just a half mile away from the objective. In districts where the risk of such explosives was high—including many around Afghanistan’s south—the special ops teams often flew in as close as they could to minimize the risk to their soldiers’ lives, by crossing as little risky terrain as possible. The men they wanted heard the helicopters landing, and the Rangers watched as thirteen fighters bolted out of the compound. The soldiers started throwing “flash bang” stun grenades to stop or at least slow them down and give the assault force a chance to catch them. But the nonlethal “bangers” didn’t do a thing except make some noise; the insurgents had a head start and were now running with their weapons. Immediately air-to-ground containment fire started to rain down to keep the men from getting away, and all hell broke loose.

  At that point, her letter continued, Ashley was standing in the open air of the main compound’s courtyard, questioning the women and children. She and her terp had finished searching everyone and now were speaking with the children and their mothers. Ashley had just begun to ask a question of one of the young wives when she heard the sound of gunfire popping all around her.

  She leapt toward the women and scooped up the kids in front of her. “Let’s go!” she yelled, as insurgents opened fire on the Rangers from the other side of the courtyard. One of the wives grabbed her arm and followed her to a corner of the courtyard.

  “By this time I was already in the main compound doing my job and all of this was happening,” Ashley wrote to Jason. Then the Americans answered from the air. “I remember when they were firing at these guys, the brass from the machine gun falling right over top of us.”

  Instinct and training took over, and Ashley threw her body on top of several children as the rat-a-tat of gunfire boomed over their heads. The women and their little ones shrieked and cried amid the chaos of rounds of machine-gun fire flying just above them.

  No one on the American side got hurt, and the women and kids were unharmed. When it was all over, Ashley wondered at the relative composure of the women, who returned to their compound and gathered in a circle on the ground.

  When she got back to their camp that night, Anne and Lane were waiting up for her. They had watched the entire mission, second by second, on a live feed in their office. The soldiers were just a bunch of blurry dots, and at the start of the action Lane had joked, “Maybe we should have her jump up and down for a second when she’s out there so we know which blip she is.” Then the
firefight began.

  “Jesus, they made contact,” Lane said. For the next few minutes they held their breath as small dots and bursts of firepower that looked like comets crossed the grainy, black-and-white feed. Lane and Anne stayed glued to their monitors until the mission ended. The war they had joined for the next eight months suddenly looked a whole lot more real.

  “Holy shit, what happened tonight, Ash?” Lane blurted out as soon as her teammate walked through their office door to prepare her post-mission brief. She wanted to hear all about it; truth was, she was a little jealous. She pulled Ashley in close in a bear hug. She could see the exhaustion in her friend’s face.

  “I dunno, I was with the women and kids . . .” Ashley’s voice trailed off; she felt no urge to share the details of what it felt like to worry about getting shot at or have hot shells ricochet off your back or hold tight a frightened child who’s staring at you wide-eyed while gunfire erupts all around. “I had no idea what was happening outside.” Then she sat at her desk and began preparing notes for her brief.

  A few days later, during a call to Jason, she mentioned—in that offhanded, selfless way that her father often called “classic Ashley”—that she had gotten her Combat Action Badge as a result of the night’s action. She was among the first CSTs on her team to get the award, a two-inch silver emblem depicting an M9 bayonet and M67 grenade surrounded by an oak leaf, but all she could say was that she didn’t think she deserved it. “I didn’t do anything,” she insisted. “Seriously, all I did was do my job, even when things were going crazy. The training just kicked in. It’s really not a big deal.”

  His response was full of pride. “Everyone at war faces their fight-or-flight moment, and you not only passed your test, you made sure the others were safe, too. I can’t wait to hear all about it, all the details of the mission you’re allowed to share and what it was like for you.