Ashley's War (15 page)

But the CSTs had one big difference: their gender, which rendered them both highly suspect and highly visible. One of the goals of the training course was to prepare the women for the internal hearts-and-minds campaign they would have to wage once they arrived in Afghanistan. The instructors devised a series of role-playing
scenarios that would place the women in situations like the ones they could encounter in theater.

In one exercise, they were required to brief a Special Forces leader on the strengths and contributions the CST team brought to his mission. The idea was to get the women comfortable explaining their jobs and help them to develop a strategy for assimilating into their new teams.

“Who wants to volunteer for this one?” the instructor asked.

Amber’s hand shot up.

She walked to the front of the room and held out her hand to the Special Forces soldier playing a reluctant team leader there to test her mettle. He had graying hair and light eyes and looked a few years older than Amber.

“Go ahead,” he said, in his most uninviting tone. Amber took a seat at the small table in the front of the class.

“Given the current political climate in Afghanistan and the desire to respect the Afghan culture, the CST capability can be a real help,” she began. “Right now you aren’t able to access fifty percent of the population and so you can’t get a well-rounded picture when it comes to what’s happening in the community. You’re also not getting some information you might want on the intel side.”

The soldier sat stone-faced. He looked bored.

She inhaled, internally reloaded, and went on. “I know both intel and local knowledge are critical to the Special Forces mission, and we can really help to make a difference there because we can talk to women and children while being respectful of Afghan culture. We can help you learn more about what’s happening on the ground, as well as the challenges local families are facing, and the kinds of services they need most. I also bring language experience from training at Monterey in Farsi, which is close to Dari, so I can act as an interpreter with Dari-speaking populations without taking any of your interpreter resources.”

She waited for a response, but the soldier was unmoved. He let a few uncomfortable moments pass, then asked:

“Why should we give you resources that we need for ourselves? You aren’t bringing anything to the table that we can’t do without you, so why should we support you in this mission?”

Amber knew he was there to test her; that was the entire point of the exercise. She had promised herself she would stay calm no matter the provocation. But nothing she said was connecting, and her role-playing partner gave the impression that he had absolutely no interest in what she had to say, since he knew the world of Special Forces way, way better than she. His attitude was infuriating, and Amber could feel herself growing hotter.

She tried again.

“We are here to support the important work you are doing, and we want to further the mission,” she said. “We think that talking to women and helping you have a window on what they see and do and know will be useful.”

Nothing.

Then, finally, he said: “I’m not sure why you’re here at all. We don’t need this. What I
do
need is for every one of the precious spots I have on my team to go to people who are mission-critical. This sounds like a lot of work for very little benefit. And besides, we are going to end up having to take care of you. You think you can hang with us? You aren’t even going to be able to keep up out there. We’re going to start marching and you’re going to fall out of formation and then
we
are going to be the ones who will have to put aside our mission to take care of
you
.”

Amber felt the anger rising from the pit of her stomach. Keep your cool, she cautioned herself. Do
not
lose it, you know that is
just
what they expect you to do.

“How about your fitness level?” he asked, almost taunting her.

“I just ran a marathon six months ago,” she retorted. “I can run a mile in under six minutes. I do CrossFit every day, sometimes twice a day. Fitness is a cornerstone of serving in special operations, and I take that very, very seriously.” She heard her voice rising and fought to rein it in.

“Listen, women are just built differently than men. It’s a simple fact. You’re just going to be a liability out there,” he concluded.

That was it. Amber heard the word
liability
and it was like a switch flipped in her mind and unleashed a volcano of frustration she could no longer contain. Ever since she started in the Army more than a decade earlier men had thrown that word around in connection to female soldiers, regardless of how competent and fit the women actually were. Like many of her female colleagues, she had come to loathe these assumptions. But for Amber, it went beyond simple resentment.

As a nineteen-year-old private first class working as an intel analyst in Bosnia, she tried on numerous occasions to persuade the special ops guys to take her with them on missions to capture men indicted for war crimes. “I’ll bring along an interpreter,” she would say, “and we can talk to the women and help you find your guys.” In essence, Amber had tried then to improvise her own version of a Cultural Support Team years before they were officially created. The soldiers, mature and intelligent men who were well into their thirties, received her entreaties patiently, but explained that she “would just be a liability” to their work. And Amber knew what they meant. It was nothing personal; the truth was that she simply
wasn’t
strong enough to be out there. It was a wake-up call for her, and those words—“you’ll just be a liability”—became her motivator. Ever since that tour she had devoted herself to becoming stronger, faster, and tougher than most men her size and age. She knew she had to be better than they were to be taken seriously, and she had spent the past ten years hardening her body and her mind so she would be ready for whatever challenge she could find that would take her out into the fight.

To have done all that and
still
be told she was a liability in this brand-new program was too much. Her frustration boiled over.

“You don’t know me,” she answered, quietly at first but her voice was rising. “You don’t know what I am physically capable of.”

For a fraction of a second she considered stopping there and shutting
up before she really got herself into trouble, but Amber hurtled on. “I guarantee you that I can outscore you on a PT test.”

Now she was leaning forward in her chair, getting in his face. “I guarantee that unless you run an eleven-minute two-mile, I can run faster than you. And I can guarantee that unless you can do one hundred push-ups in two minutes, I can do more push-ups than you.”

The soldier stared back. The CST was doing exactly what he had expected.

“And
: I bet I can do more sit-ups than you,” Amber added.

Kate, watching from a few rows back, froze in her seat. She had the impression of watching a car smashing into a brick wall right before her very eyes, but in slow motion. Part of her felt that Amber should just pipe down, but another part was thankful and relieved that someone, finally, had decided to stop taking all that shit. She had grown tired of apologizing for the fact that she was a fit, battle-hungry patriot who wanted to serve her country, gender be damned. And right now, standing in front of the whole class, Amber was speaking for all of them. It may not have been an elegant performance, but it sure as hell was satisfying.

All the usual side conversations had stopped. The room was silent. For a half second Kate wondered if the Green Beret would accept the challenge and beat Amber into the ground with his fist.

“No, no, no, there is
no way
you can do that many push-ups. You girls don’t even have to do that many in the girl version of the PT test,” he said. “Come on. Be real.”

“Oh yes, I can,” Amber volleyed. “We can leave right now for a PT test. Let’s do it.”

She stood up and pushed her chair away from the small table, its legs scraping against the tile floor. She knew she was doing
just
what she shouldn’t, but she couldn’t stop. If someone is taunting you, telling you that you can’t do something, and you
know
that you can, how can you just sit there and spew words, when you could let your actions prove you correct?

She stared at him, then pointed to the floor.

“Let’s go, right now. Let’s do push-ups here.” Amber called out to the class, “Somebody get me a stopwatch, we are going to do push-ups.”

The Green Beret stared back in disbelief.

“That is totally ridiculous, I am not doing push-ups right here in the middle of the class. You are way out of line, soldier.”

“All right,” Amber spat back. “But let’s just be clear that that was
you
saying no.”

The Green Beret offered nothing further beyond a searing look of disgust, and finally the instructors intervened.

“Well, okay,” one of the female cadre announced in a softer tone than had been heard for the past ten minutes. “Why don’t you go ahead and sit down.”

The moment stretched on in all its awkward stillness as Amber made her way back to her seat.

“Do I have another volunteer?” the teacher asked.

As Amber sat quietly, sulking in anger and embarrassment, Lane passed her a note.

“Way to go,” it said. “That was for all of us.”

The sentiment wasn’t universally shared, of course. Sarah, the MP who had served in Europe and abandoned her dreams of becoming an Army doctor so she could get closer to battle, understood Amber’s frustrations but felt she should have been more tactful. Humility and tact, not tough-guy tactics, would win the day; going in aggressive with these guys would only alienate them further.

Even if some may have disagreed with Amber’s tactics, they all knew what it was like to drown in frustration when other people place limits on you. In fact, the desire to bust through those limits was the reason most of them showed up for Assessment and Selection in the first place.

L
ater, during a water break on the firing range, where the women had been practicing on their Beretta M9s, a few of Amber’s teammates
and the trainers searched out a spot of shade from the North Carolina summer sun. Just then an older woman whom they had met earlier in the course approached the cluster of sweaty CSTs.

“I just want you girls to know how proud of you we are,” the woman said. “In my opinion you deserve a Green Beret and you are going to be the first girls to get one.”

Amber was too mortified to even look at her trainers. “This is why they don’t want women here. These guys spend
years
getting trained to become Green Berets, they test themselves physically, mentally, and every place in between, and someone thinks that a couple weeks of training is any kind of equivalent—that we deserve anything close to the accolades that these guys get? We are no better than fresh-off-the-boat privates right now. No way in hell we are even
close
to what they do.”

And that was the rub. Amber wanted to see special operations open to women and she believed they all should have a shot at going to Ranger School but only if there were no shortcuts, no dumbing down of any of the requirements, the same standards for everyone. And everyone would have the chance to meet them.

T
he month of accelerated training wore on, and by early July, four weeks into the class, it was getting close to decision time. The choice was essentially between the patient, persistent, creative work of building relationships—the Special Forces village-stability side—versus the aggressive, fast-paced, physically intense, and potentially far more dangerous task of being there when doors burst open—the Ranger Regiment side.

By this time, most everyone instinctively knew which “side of the house” she wanted. Most leaned toward Special Forces, but not all.

The more aggressive, outspoken personalities like Cassie felt they belonged with Ranger Regiment. She knew she would be inspired, not cowed, by these soldiers and was confident she would be able to hold her own with them in the field. Ever since the now-infamous
role-playing exchange everyone assumed—correctly—that Amber wanted to go in that direction as well. Lane, too, was intrigued by the direct action side.

They all knew the Rangers tended to be a lot younger than the Green Berets and, consequently, sometimes less mature. The Rangers also had a strong identity; the roughly three thousand men of the 75th Ranger Regiment all wore a tan beret. The women would have to show they could fit in among these guys who lived for war. Fitness also was key. The Rangers marched toward their targets with anywhere from fifty to seventy pounds of gear on their backs usually in the dead of night, for miles on end and often on truly treacherous terrain. A serious misstep or the failure to keep up could quite literally cost a life—their own or, even worse in their own minds, a fellow soldier’s. The only women the Rangers were willing to consider taking out with them were soldiers who tested off the charts in fitness levels and showed that they could keep pace and stay in formation. They also needed women who were aggressive enough to want to go on night raids, but likable enough to connect with Afghan women and children during some of the most difficult moments of their lives. And they had to be mature enough to understand that while they were there to help, their mission was not to run an election or open a women’s center. Their job was to be the softer side of the hardest side of war.

Toward the end of the course, representatives from both mission sets came to brief the CSTs. The Ranger Regiment representative played a slick video shot in night-vision-goggle green that illustrated the direct action raids that were their specialty. “We are looking for the most outstanding soldiers,” the sergeant major announced, “and we want you guys to come and work with us. We need the best people we can get.” He was a stocky guy, brimming with energy. Standing at the front of the class he began to outline the traits they were seeking. “We’re
really
excited to have you join this mission,” he said, “because you can go places we can’t and talk to people we
can’t. You are going to contribute a huge amount, and we need you to get the job done. And rest assured, if you belong with us, we will find you.”