Ashley's War (19 page)

Then he repeated the action, this time with real gusto. “All you need to do is sweep your gun underneath like this.” He now arced his gun back to brush his imaginary long, lustrous hair, then pulled his hands down the sides of his body where they met at his waist before he rapidly lifted them back up and aimed at his assailant. “Now you say, ‘I am beautiful and I love to shoot.’ Think of
Charlie’s Angels
and then pull the trigger!”

That did the trick. After they finished laughing, Ashley and the others repeated the sweep, professing their strength and taking down their assailant.

“Come on, White,” Marks taunted. “Get
aggressive
, push back. I am right here in your face!” he yelled at her. “Get serious. Shove me away and draw your weapon.”

“Roger that, Sergeant,” she said, now bellowing back. “I am beautiful and I love to shoot.”

“Angrier, White, can you handle it?”

Her cheeks and forehead began to redden and it was clear she had had enough of his goading. The next time he lunged at her the real anger showed. Her eyebrows narrowed and her mouth tightened as she shoved him back, hard enough to throw him off balance, and drew her pistol in four counts.

“That’s
it, White!” he yelled. “Excellent! That’s what I am looking for. I knew you had it in you!”

One of Scottie’s biggest concerns was how hard the CSTs were on themselves. Whether it was out on the range or in the role-playing scenarios doing searching and questioning, his trainees grew racked by frustration if they didn’t improve quickly enough. It took him almost the full week to trace the source of the frustration, which at first he attributed to old-fashioned perfectionism. When he realized what was going on, toward the week’s end, he assembled the entire group for a pep talk.

“All right, I am watching you all beat yourself up out there and I finally got it figured out,” he said. “You guys have never been around a bunch of badass motherfuckers before who were as good as you are. Every single one of you is used to being the best female in the unit, hands down and no questions asked. And now all of a sudden you aren’t.”

A few of the CSTs nodded their heads without thinking.

“Listen,” he said, “every soldier we pick is a diamond. She is an athlete. She is awesome. That’s why you are here. This is just the first time any of you in all of your Army careers has ever found yourself in a pile of diamonds. You are pissed off, you feel lousy about the fact that the girl next to you is doing better at something than you are. But you’re now a diamond among diamonds. And you’ve gotta stop being frustrated with yourselves. You
are
going to fail at things. That
is
going to happen when you are around people this good. Someone’s better than you at something and you don’t like it? Figure out why and do it better next time.

“Now get back to work.”

Later on, walking back to his barracks and reflecting on his talk, Marks smiled to himself. Maybe, he thought, these girls aren’t so different from the men I fought with after all.

A
t night, when they were done, the women replayed the events of the day and discussed the work that was still to come. Before passing out from exhaustion, some of them critiqued each other—not their actions, but their attitudes, and particularly their lack of faith in their own abilities. One evening Cassie told Tristan she had to be bolder at the firing range.

“Tristan, you have just
got
to own it when you are out there,” she said in a tone bordering on disgust. “Man up. Stop acting like such a wuss.”

Kate, who roomed just across the hall from Ashley and Amber, often overheard Amber joking with Ashley and encouraging her to be more
aggressive, clearly trying to draw out her inner alpha. Kate wondered how it had come to be that all of them equated the idea of toughness with the male version of the trait when Ashley was clearly plenty decisive when it came time to act. Here was someone who was athletic to the extreme and good at what she did. But they were so used to seeing competence accompanied by shows of masculinity and aggression that they worried whether their teammate would succeed in the theater of war. We’ve all bought into it, Kate thought. Ashley seems so comfortable in her own skin. And we are all razzing her for it.

Most of the time, though, the women reminded each other of their achievements: the run times, speed at drawing a weapon, push-up count, rope-climbing skills. At the end of one particularly difficult day, Kate summed it up: “Everybody has something that the other girl doesn’t. This is what makes us a team.”

A
s the week wore on the women grew closer to each other and to their instructors. They marched in full kit at night, shot guns, and suffered through burning workouts every morning. Marks’s other frustration, the one he never articulated publicly, was that he and his fellow instructors had so little time to prepare the women. So they stuffed a month’s worth of learning into less than two weeks: the role-playing, shooting, searching, questioning, getting the mind ready for war. While they did get a few hours of night-vision device training, he had to squeeze most of it in during the day.

Marks and the other trainers recognized that these girls wanted to be part of special operations with every part of their brains and bodies. They were now his team, Marks thought, just as all those aspiring Rangers he graduated to the next phase of selection were his guys. He felt as surprised as anyone by the very real sadness he and the other Rangers started to feel when the week wound down to its final day.

And now it was time for his closing talk.

“All right, you guys, I want you to remember to go out there and
be great.
Be amazing
, because you are. Don’t forget any of the stuff we learned this week. Don’t do stupid shit and always remember in the military perception is reality. So don’t mess with your Ranger buddy. Hang out with your CST teammate at mealtimes and every other time of day. Stay away from trouble. And for godsakes, stay in the gym. That is going to be the
very
first way that the guys you serve with measure you. So work out
really
hard every single day and show those guys you mean some serious fucking business, just like you showed all of us. I’m proud of what you did here this week. Now go and do it even better out there with your Ranger battalion. Show them you belong there. Do the work, and they will respect you and make you part of the team. Pay your rent and they’ll bring you out on mission every night. I know you’ll make a difference out there.”

Then he walked to the whiteboard and started writing.

“This is my phone number,” he said. “If anything goes wrong in Afghanistan, if anyone is mean to you, I will skullfuck them. And I mean it. Just call me.

“Now go out there and get it done,” he said. “Be
great
.”

Now
this
is what I always dreamed of when I dreamed of joining the Army, Kate thought. She wasn’t the only one who felt it had been the best week of her military career thus far.

A
few days later, as the CSTs were enjoying two weeks of leave before their deployment, tragic news seized the headlines. On August 6, 2011, a rocket-propelled grenade blasted through an Army CH-47 Chinook helicopter in the eastern part of Afghanistan. Thirty-eight Americans and Afghans died, including twenty-two Navy SEALs from SEAL Team Six. The SEALs, according to Pentagon reports, had gone in as part of a team backing up Rangers on a mission to capture insurgents gathered at a compound in Wardak Province’s Tangi valley. It was America’s single worst day of casualties in ten years at war in Afghanistan, and the worst day in history for the Navy’s special warfare unit.

Lane was home in Nevada visiting her brother and a group of his friends when she saw the television news headline. No one else seemed to notice. In the midst of preparing for war in Afghanistan herself, she couldn’t believe how little attention any of them paid to all those war dead.

“You all need to tune in,” she said to her brother and the others in the room, pointing to the TV, even though the newscast had moved on to another story. “These are the guys I’m going to be out there with. This country is still at war, despite the fact that no one even remembers it.”

Back in North Carolina, Jason and Ashley were finishing up breakfast when the news broke. Jason’s first instinct was to turn up the volume, but then he quickly switched the channel. His wife was home for just two more weeks and he wanted to focus on their time together. He had given up a spot at the five-month Maneuver Captains Career Course, once called the Infantry Officer Advanced Course, to be home with her until she left. Artillery, Jason’s unit, had to fight hard to get those slots for its guys, and Jason had lobbied to secure a space in the July course. But when he found out Ashley would be leaving in August, he decided he had to turn it down. His wife was heading to Afghanistan with special operations and there was no way he would leave her during those last weeks before she deployed. The decision to stay was easy; harder was telling his executive officer and the other commanders who had backed him that his wife was the reason he wasn’t taking the vaunted spot.

His superiors were unhappy and said so. “Don’t burn a bridge,” they said. “Don’t you realize this decision isn’t good for your career as an officer?”

Eventually he turned to his battalion commander, a man he knew from his time in Afghanistan and a leader who had a career—and a marriage—he respected.

“Hey, Stumpf, let me put it to you like this,” his commander
answered when Jason told him about the situation. “If anyone judges you for the decision you’re about to make, fuck ’em.”

Jason had never heard his commander utter a swear word in all the time he had served under him, even in the middle of the war in Afghanistan.

“Okay, sir, then I will go ahead and reverse my decision and take the September artillery course at Fort Sill,” Jason said, referring to the course that would be useful but more traditional—and consequently less helpful to his career trajectory. “It will give me an extra month with my wife.”

“I imagine I would do the same thing,” his commander replied. “Your wife is going to Afghanistan. You two are newlyweds. Enjoy the last month before she goes over there.”

Ashley was furious when Jason told her what he had done.

“I know why you did it, but you didn’t have to,” she insisted. “I would have come to see you on weekends.”

“Ash, be real,” he answered. “You would’ve been way too busy, and I would be full-on with a career course. It wouldn’t have worked. You know that.

“And besides,” he said, “I didn’t make the decision for you. I made it for us.”

Another difficult decision had to do with Ashley’s parents, Bob and Debbie. She had told them little about the CST teams because she couldn’t bear to have them worry. Jason initially tried to change her mind, urging her to at least tell them
something
about the program since she had always been so close to them, but he knew when it was time to back off, so he promised he wouldn’t say anything to them.

She did take her beloved brother Josh into her confidence. When the White kids were small, Josh would take his little sisters down to the pond near their Ohio home. Now the trio headed to Florida for a nighttime fishing expedition on a giant party boat. Ashley and Brittany both caught their first saltwater fish during that excursion, and the siblings were reveling in the day’s successful catch.

During the twenty-mile trip back to Pompano Beach, Josh and Ashley sat alone at the front of the boat, watching as the prow cut its pathway through the ocean.

“It’s going to be a bit sketchy where I’m going to be,” she began. “Jason just got back, you know, and he’s telling me the Guard units are kind of ragtag over there, and I wouldn’t be making much of a difference with them if I went to Kuwait. So I signed on for a special mission, a new one, which the Guard encouraged me to volunteer for. I’ll be with the Rangers, not kicking down doors or anything, but as an enabler. I’ll be going into more dangerous areas, getting much closer to real combat, but I’ll be with the best of the best. And I’m going with an amazing group of girls who all made it through this pretty tough selection and training process. It’s an incredible team.”

He wasn’t saying a word, so she paused, then asked: “What do you think?”

Josh knew she was telling him and only him because she knew he would understand and wouldn’t try to stop her. Ever since he was a kid he had wanted to join the military, and as a high school senior had even been accepted to West Point. But when the acceptance letter arrived his then girlfriend, now wife, had been brutally honest with Josh: he could join the Army if he wanted, but she didn’t want the life of a military wife with babies on her hips and a husband off at war. “I can’t do it,” Kate said. “I’m just not cut out for that kind of life.” So Josh found another way to serve: as a state trooper, where he confronted the danger of the unknown every single night but at home in the U.S.A.

Josh knew how important his approval and blessing were to Ashley. He didn’t have the heart to try to dissuade her, and he knew it was impossible anyway. He risked his life every night in his own job. Who was he to say she should stay home, safe and sound, when duty was calling her?

“Do it, Ash,” he said. “You’re so good at what you do. I can’t tell you I won’t worry about you every day, that I won’t feel scared every
second of your deployment. But I support you, and I understand why this is so important.”

Now it was his turn to go silent. “Actually,” he continued, “I’m envious of you. I wish I would have had the opportunity you have before you now. You’re going to be great, and you’re going to do such important things.”

And yes, he promised not to share the details with their parents.

A
few weeks later Josh, Kate, their little daughter Evelyn, Bob, Brittany, and Debbie White said goodbye to Ashley in Fayetteville just before her deployment.

Two days afterward, it was Jason’s turn to see his wife off to war. They drove in his pickup to the Landmark, where the CSTs would meet to head to Pope Air Force Base, just outside Fayetteville. He tried to make small talk on the way and so did she. She reminded him she had left a list on the refrigerator of things around the house she wanted him to do while she was away.