Ashley's War

by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

  “It was definitely a memorable twenty-fourth,” Ashley told the newly arrived Leda with a smile.

  Having recovered in record time from the leg injury she had sustained in pre-mission training, Leda resumed her duties as officer in charge (OIC) in September, and traveled to Kandahar as part of her whirlwind tour of all the CST outposts. Her first order of business was to visit each one of her teams in person to make sure that everyone had what she needed.

  By October, the CSTs had been in Afghanistan for almost three months and, as one officer commented, “the training wheels were off.” It was a more seasoned group of soldiers, and Leda’s role had shifted from helping them get ready for war to helping them succeed in it. While she had been back in the United States recuperating, she had tracked them closely by email and online and had coached some of them through the rough patches of integrating into their teams; now she was witnessing them in action, and she was gratified, if unsurprised, to learn about their successes.

  Leda knew that some of the CSTs felt the burden of isolation at their remote outposts. They missed the camaraderie of the summer when they all lived together and could gather as a group for meals in the dining hall, joke around, or discuss tactics. To replace that physical camaraderie, Leda turned to technology: in addition to her weekly email report, the one that she sent to JSOC leaders that cataloged what they did, learned, and located each night, she created a second, internal-only version in which the CSTs shared moments only they would understand, from ordering Spanx bodywear so uniform bottoms slid on more easily to getting caught peeing or falling into a wadi (dry riverbed) while out on mission surrounded by a team of Ranger men. Leda also launched a series of regular video teleconferences for the CSTs so they could interact with one another while sharing the “best practices” they developed on the job as well as all the gory details of their battlefield mishaps. She knew that a key aspect of her job was to keep the team unified and morale high despite the physical distances between them.

  Leda had long been a student of leadership strategies, studying everything from neurolinguistics to the work of Jim Collins and Tony Robbins. She viewed leadership in this kind of high-stress, high-intensity, high-performance environment as being all about caring for, supporting, and leading the whole person, not just his or her soldier self. The women, in turn, called on Leda for everything, small or large. When they hankered for Honey Nut Cheerios and the DFAC didn’t have any, Leda delivered. And when a young male officer began making uninvited visits to Amber at her base, it was Leda she confided in. Amber never saw the man again.

  They had never felt so taken care of in their lives.

  Throughout August and September, Leda stayed in close touch with Ashley by email and phone. The North Carolina Guardswoman had always been special to Leda, ever since the first days at the Landmark Inn when Ashley had confided her fears that her quiet shyness might somehow hinder her potential. From the moment they met at Assessment and Selection Leda was confident this officer would come into her own at war, but she hoped that her breaking-in period wouldn’t be any longer or more awkward than it had to be. Now she had come to Kandahar to see for herself how her younger friend and teammate was faring. And what she saw surprised her.

  Leda’s first inkling that Ashley was fitting in perfectly well came the morning she arrived. Standing in the barracks door she watched Ashley roll out of bed around noon, hair scraggly, T-shirt wrinkled, and black sweatpants bunched up around her shins. She looked like everyone else around her, drowning in her hoody and bleary-eyed from the rhythms of the nocturnal life that had become her new normal. She welcomed Leda with a warm embrace and in no time began describing in precise detail the previous night’s mission.

  Gone was the shy second lieutenant who had trouble addressing a group of Ranger men. In her place was an increasingly assertive, recently promoted first lieutenant who could comfortably and effectively communicate through an interpreter with Afghan women in the middle of a combat mission while searching for hidden insurgents and intel. Not only that: Ashley was eager to share with her OIC what she was learning each night and how it fit into the larger effort to end the war and make Afghanistan safer.

  She’s actually beaming, Leda thought as Ashley walked her through the evening’s pre-mission brief. It seemed incredible to Leda that after just eight weeks Ashley’s biggest concern was that her platoon leader would think she was too injured to go out that night. She had Band-Aids on her legs to cover rope-climbing burns earned at the gym. Leda assured her that no one would notice. “Those guys all have their own nicks to tend to,” she said. “Keep the Band-Aids on and let your legs heal while they can.”

  More gratifying were the reports she was receiving from Rangers around camp who said Ashley had proven tactically efficient and increasingly adept at getting what was needed each night. Just as Jason had predicted, his wife’s artless kindness and professionalism—boosted by Nadia’s experience and guidance—had proven to be powerful in winning over both the men she worked with and the women and children she met each night.

  Satisfied with what she saw and heard from the CST and the men she supported, Leda asked Ashley what her thoughts were about the future. With six months left in Afghanistan, Leda wanted all her soldiers to begin thinking about what they wanted to do next—and about how their OIC could help. Earlier that day she had put the same question to Anne, who replied that all she wanted was to keep doing CST missions as long as she could. Period.

  But Ashley was contemplating a different future. She still wanted to become a physician’s assistant (PA); the only question that remained was where she would go and what program would accept her. She also needed to find out where Jason would be stationed next and if he could remain at Fort Bragg, as she very much hoped, so she could try to find a job with JSOC after her deployment ended. Leda had once mentioned the possibility of finding a civilian role as a PA within the special operations community and after working with the Rangers, Ashley loved that idea even more. It had been a privilege to serve with special operations, and she also was keen to remain in the little house with the yellow kitchen in Fayetteville. She was already training for a marathon she planned to run in Ohio once her deployment was over. Leda sensed that the future was very much on her mind.

  “There’s one other thing,” Ashley added.

  “I think I want to be a mom,” she said. Leda noticed the shift in tone from confident to nearly embarrassed as Ashley uttered the word mom. She guessed Ashley didn’t want her hard-charging OIC to think less of her because she wanted to focus on family after this was all done.

  “Ash, why are you hesitating? Were you nervous about telling me that?” Leda asked. “You want to be a mom? Of course I think that’s great. Hell, yeah, I think that is terrific!”

  Leda knew that Ashley had been poring over kinesiology books in the broom closet office whenever she wasn’t on mission or asleep, and now said that if Ashley was serious about applying to physician’s assistant school she could start her family and her studies at the same time and keep working within the special operations community. Leda mentioned several people she knew who would be helpful to Ashley as she thought through her job options and courses of study.

  “Really? You think I could still contribute to this work and be a mom?” Ashley asked. She looked thrilled, and surprised.

  “Definitely,” Leda said. “You can do it all, Ash. You are going to be a phenomenal mom.” Leda knew that the perception of special operations was of hard-fighting warriors who lived out of duffle bags and never saw their families. But many of the civilians who supported them had careers that were far more family-friendly. Leda wanted to make sure Ashley understood that she didn’t have to deploy herself to support the men whose work she so respected. She could contribute in other ways and achieve her personal goals.

  But for all her focus on a future family with Jason, Ashley still hadn’t told her own family in Ohio exactly what she was doing in Afghanistan. Beyond her conversatio
n with Josh on the fishing boat, Ashley had left them largely in the dark. Anne, who went out on her own missions every night, decided to approach her partner about the wisdom of that decision one early afternoon. Lane had moved a month earlier to another part of Afghanistan to work with another team, and it was now just the two of them in Kandahar.

  “I know that you don’t want to hear this,” Anne began. Bad weather had kept the teams grounded and the two soldiers were running around the base before hunkering down for a CrossFit workout. “But you really might want to think about telling your family what you’re doing. Or at least let Josh or Jason tell them about this job.”

  Anne knew how upset Mr. White would be; Ashley had told her, only half in jest, that her dad would have taken Jason’s baseball bat and broken her knees to stop her from leaving if he had understood the reality of her assignment. Anne didn’t want to overstep her boundaries; the nature of their work created an almost instant bond, but they had only known each other for seven months, and Anne was now raising one of the most deeply personal questions a soldier faces. Still, it was one thing for Ashley to choose not to tell her mom and dad about her work before coming to Kandahar and understanding the daily realities of the role. It was another thing now that she knew the risks.

  “This is a bad area; it’s incredibly dangerous,” Anne said. “It’s not impossible to imagine that one of us might not make it home, or might go home without all our parts.”

  Ashley nodded, her eyes on her feet, pounding the pavement. “I know,” she replied. “I know I should. I will.”

  Ashley spoke with her parents regularly, calling them faithfully every Sunday night, which was afternoon in Ohio. Her camp had a common area with computers and phones the soldiers could use to reach family and friends back home; it was one of the Army’s strategies for boosting morale among the troops. Her parents would pass the phone back and forth, sitting in their comfy loungers facing the television in the ranch house in Marlboro. The conversations always began with Ashley peppering her parents with questions about everything and everyone in their hometown, and thanking her mom for the delicious cookies and for all the coffee and bread mixes. But whenever Bob or Debbie asked her about her work she swiftly changed the subject. As they understood it, she was part of some special team and she worked at a hospital in Kandahar. That was it.

  Not long after her conversation with Anne, Ashley called her twin sister, Brittany. They had shared everything for twenty-four years and it felt strange now that thousands of miles separated them. They used email and Facebook to stay connected, but when they wanted to speak about something important—a situation they were going through or a challenge they wanted to tackle—Ashley would head to the common room and call her sister.

  “Hello?” Brittany whispered into her handset. It was 2 a.m. in Ohio and she was just leaving a patient’s room at the end of her shift as a neurology unit nurse at the local hospital. Brittany never took personal calls during her shift, but this was different; her sister was calling from Afghanistan. She popped into a patient’s bathroom to answer her phone in a whisper; the sisters agreed to speak in an hour, when Brittany was on her way home and could have an uninterrupted conversation.

  Later, Ashley thanked Brittany for sending her the photos from her first fitness and figure competition, a sport that combines female bodybuilding with gymnastics and emphasizes taut muscles rather than bulging, gigantic ones. Brittany had won the top spot her first time out. Ashley, of course, was unsurprised.

  “You looked incredible!” Ashley said, and told her she showed the pictures to her Ranger buddies. “You have some serious admirers over here; they were all talking about you.”

  Sounding like the older sister she wasn’t, she told Brittany how proud she was of her, and made her promise to keep up her fitness routines and do more shows.

  Brittany promised, and described the rigors of her diet and workout regimen, which sounded nearly as strict and disciplined as Ashley’s. The competitions required participants to be in razor-sharp shape and to perform choreographed routines to show off their finely toned physiques. Between her nursing job, her fitness and figure work, and preparations for a graduate program in leadership and management, Brittany was working around the clock, not unlike her sister.

  Before she left for Afghanistan Ashley had mentioned to Brittany that she had won a competition of sorts, and had been selected for some elite assignment along with a group of extremely impressive women: some had served as FBI interrogators, others had gone to war three times already. Still others had won Bronze Star Medals for Valor. She had confessed then that she was intimidated by them. Now she talked to Brittany about her teammates with the fondness of the close friends and equals they had become. She told her about her conversation with Leda and how much support she had offered her. She felt certain about wanting to become a physician’s assistant, she said, even though she wasn’t sure she was “smart enough” for all the exams and advanced study that lay ahead. Brittany interrupted her sister and said she knew Ashley would be able to handle whatever came. “You always do, Ash, you just gut it out and work harder than everyone else. You’ll ace the exams.”

  “You remind me so much of Leda, my OIC,” Ashley said. “She’s athletic and outgoing and beautiful just like you. And a huge cheerleader for all of us. I’ve been so lucky to have her support these last few months. You’ll have to meet her when I get back.”

  Ashley paused.

  “I can’t wait to see you when I get back, sissy. Love you.”

  “Good night.”

  Brittany by now had reached her house. She would grab a few hours of rest, head over to lift weights at the gym, then make her way back to the hospital.

  Brittany knew she would have to tell her parents about the call. She felt certain they’d want her to replay every moment of the almost normal conversation she had shared in the middle of a war with her best friend and closest confidante.

  On the other side of the world, Ashley was off to the chow hall with Anne for her evening’s “breakfast,” then due in the briefing room to find out the details of her team’s mission that night.

  13

  The Lies of War

  * * *

  A few hundred miles to Ashley’s north not long afterward, Kate found herself in the middle of a hell of a night.

  “Is there anyone inside?” Kate asked a middle-aged Afghan woman who was standing in the huddle of women and children to the left of the compound. “Anyone still in the house?” Her nineteen-year-old interpreter, an Afghan-American from the Bronx who went by the nickname “Angel,” relayed the question.

  The mission had started off a mess and gotten worse. Kate’s team was seeking a fighter who had already evaded their grasp several times. This was the second compound they had targeted that evening and since it was his own home, they believed he was likely to be hiding out there.

  Two women and several children streamed out of the house as soon as the American and Afghan forces arrived, but so far no one was talking. Kate’s job was to protect the women she was speaking to while getting the information that would assist and protect the men with whom she served. Quickly.

  The Afghan forces with her special ops team had taken the lead in tonight’s mission. This was part of a broader push to have Afghan security forces lead their country’s war as the Americans began their long-planned withdrawal. Several Afghan soldiers were now inside the compound hunting for the man their intel told them was a key Taliban fighter in the region.

  “Is there anyone inside?” Kate repeated.

  The Afghan woman’s face remained expressionless. “She says there is no one in there,” Angel told Kate.

  Kate, Angel, and the two women stood about a dozen feet from the breach. Around them sat a cluster of children, ranging in age from infant to teenager. Kate kept thinking it didn’t make sense. This guy had to be there. Then again, he had known enough to throw them off the trail earlier that night. Maybe he was just wasting their
time some more.

  And then, just a second later, came a deafening explosion, near enough to rattle the ground on which they stood.

  “CST, get those women out of here.”

  Kate heard the command over the radio a moment after the explosion. Then came the pop-pop-pop-pop of gun fire in a stream of percussion.

  “Get up, everyone, let’s go, let’s go!” Kate spoke the words in English quietly but firmly and seconds later she heard them again in Angel’s Pashto translation. She pointed in the direction of a building that was fifty feet away, motioning Angel to move quickly. “Get them to that building to the right, at the corner!” Kate told her. They needed to get to the other side of the cement wall, just outside the compound. That should be far enough to keep them out of the firefight and within the line of sight so she could monitor what was happening and ensure that she and Angel didn’t get left behind when the mission ended.

  “Let’s go, come on!” Angel said to the two women. She grabbed the hands of two children, one on each side, and took off running for the cover of the building. Meanwhile, the Afghan and American soldiers were returning the heavy fire that was coming from the compound. Kate and Angel had worked together long enough that the young terp knew to move everyone to shelter if shots erupted and things got hot. Kate took the rear to make sure no women or children got left behind in the chaos.

  As she directed Angel, Kate scooped up a small baby, barefoot and crying. She threw the little guy over her left shoulder and took off running as the sound of gunfire grew louder behind her. Using her right arm she grabbed the hand of a small girl and drew her close to her body.

  “Stay with me, stay with me!” Kate urged, hoping the child would trust and understand her movements even if she didn’t understand her words.