Ashley's War (5 page)

By the early 2000s the Afghanistan war was well under way, and Amber decided to build upon what she had learned and become an interrogator. As part of her training the Army sent her to learn Farsi at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. The idea of being an interrogator appealed to Amber; she liked using her brains to keep other soldiers safe. If she couldn’t join them on the front lines she could at least give tactical support and find out about terrorists and insurgents before they had a chance to put their plans into action.

After seven years as an enlisted soldier and following graduation from college and the birth of her son, Amber decided to head to Officer Candidate School. She became a rarity in the Army: someone who has been both an enlisted soldier and an officer.

Amber was serving as an officer at South Carolina’s Fort Jackson Army base, doing a job she hated: overseeing paperwork and processing awards for returning soldiers. She was far from the action, bored by the work and stuck in a marriage that was all but over. She was just sitting around, waiting to see when her next deployment would come.

And then the CST email arrived. The timing couldn’t have been better. This was the best chance she was going to get to go out on missions with special operators, and she was fully prepared to embrace the rigor of CST selection.

It took Amber less than a minute to print out the application form and get to work.

K
ate Raimann first learned of the CST program from a flyer she spotted on a crowded poster board just outside a drab building where she worked at Fort Benning, Georgia. It featured a large photograph of a
female officer crouching with an M4 assault rifle in her hands. The headline blasted its invitation in bold block letters:
FEMALE SOLDIERS: BECOME A PART OF HISTORY
.

Approaching the poster Kate felt a surge of adrenaline and curiosity. “Join the US Army Special Operations Command,” it announced. She was already reaching into her backpack for a pen, scribbling down the website address, and hoping the ad wasn’t too good to be true. As she wrote, Kate felt something she hadn’t experienced since returning home from her deployment to southern Iraq: a sense of purpose.

Kate was an MP—military police officer—and had been home from war for just five months. Even with the twin burdens of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army gave its soldiers time at home between tours, and Kate still had several months before she had to start preparing for her next rotation. But already she yearned to get back to the fight. She missed the sense of direction, the focus, the shared mission that she felt while deployed. Here, who needed her? Her time was wasted, and so were her skills.

Kate had never contemplated another career, though occasionally she wondered why God hadn’t made her taller than five feet, since He knew she was going to be a soldier. Or male, since He knew she wanted to be infantry. Petite and blond she may have been, but Kate’s compact body was ripped with muscles. Since she was a kid people had called her a tomboy, but Kate didn’t care; all she knew was that she liked running and competing, playing soccer, basketball, and softball with her brother and sisters. A child of Title IX, she played high school football all four years at her western Massachusetts high school. Local newspapers wrote about “the girl who liked to tackle,” but secretly Kate hated football with all its concussions and endless practices. But the fact that guys in her school believed a girl couldn’t play football guaranteed Kate would never quit. Ever. No way would she give in to their doubts. Concussions be damned.

The Army was in Kate’s genes and wrapped around her family
tree. Her father had spent twenty-three years as an Army pilot and he inspired all his children to follow his path. Kate and her younger siblings all headed to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point when it came time for college.

After graduation, Kate became an MP because it was the closest she could get to the infantry. MPs overseas perform the whole range of law enforcement functions for the military, from searching homes and suspects to running patrols, doing reconnaissance, and joining search operations. Now a poster on the wall was pointing the way right into the heart of the action, offering a chance to return to the purity and clarity of life at war. Kate wanted to get to Afghanistan, she wanted a mission that mattered, and she wanted to be as near to the front as possible. Here was a groundbreaking team that would let her do all three.

A
ll across the country in the first months of 2011 this same story played out as friends of soldiers, commanding officers, and fellow warriors spread the news about a program that would match America’s toughest fighting men with a special team of women who could fill a gap that no other force could. From Florida to Alaska, North Carolina to South Korea, women answered the call. Most of them had been itching all their lives to go to war—not as nurses or typists or machinists or any of the other jobs that gradually, over decades of struggle, came to admit women, but as special operations soldiers. Or as close as they could get to them. As one CST put it: “All my life, all I ever wanted was to belong to a group of ass-kickers battling on the front lines.”

W
hen Ashley White heard about the CST program she was running drills at the local armory in Goldsboro, North Carolina, where she was serving with the National Guard. Ashley had come to the Tar Heel State two years earlier to be with her fiancé, Jason Stumpf, a lieutenant stationed at the Fort Bragg Army base. Ashley had met
Jason during her first months at Kent State University, less than an hour’s drive from her small Ohio hometown of Marlboro, at a pizza party in the offices of the school’s ROTC program. It was love at first sight, though neither did anything about it for more than a year.

It surprised everyone in Ashley’s tight-knit family when she signed up for ROTC. She had never offered the slightest hint that she wanted to serve. Her grandfather had been a Marine as a young man and a great-uncle had won a Purple Heart as a Navy corpsman in the Korean War, but the military tradition did not otherwise run through her family. Yet there was a deeply ingrained sense of duty in the White family when it came to work, along with spirited—and intense—competition among her siblings: twin sister Brittany and older brother Josh.

The Whites formed complementary and opposing forces. Debbie, Ashley’s mom, was warm and caring, a nurturer who loved swimming and diving and hiking. She worked as a school bus driver and teacher’s aide so she could arrange her days around her most important job: being a mom to her three children. The house was always filled with young people: classmates of Josh and gymnastic teammates and cousins of Ashley and Brittany. Known as “Mama Whitie” to Josh’s high school football teammates, Debbie traveled to every game in her minivan stocked with snacks for the kids. At pregame dinners Debbie always made room at her table for boys whose parents couldn’t make it.

Bob White was as tough-minded as his high school sweetheart wife was kind. He had had to be: his parents operated on the premise that children “made money, not cost money,” and put him to work as a kid in his family’s toolmaking business in Akron. He would stand on milk crates to reach the machines he was responsible for operating. Extracurriculars were discouraged; when Bob wanted to play basketball, his dad said he would have to find his own way home. That meant walking more than five miles each way, even in the dead of winter. But all that work did pay off: he bought a candy-apple-red
1973 SS Nova—his high school’s “car of the month” eight times—and won the heart of a leggy blonde named Debbie, whose parents owned a pizza shop.

Right after they were married, Bob made a promise to his wife that he would be a dedicated and engaged father. They both wanted a family. Doctors said that Debbie couldn’t have children, but after ten years of marriage Josh arrived. Three years later the twins followed. Shock greeted the September arrival of the two baby girls; the doctors had told the Whites all along to expect boys. So certain had they been that Bob and Debbie hadn’t even considered girls’ names. Bob, then working the overnight shift at his family business, sometimes caught the soap opera
The Young and the Restless
during the day before heading to bed. Thinking quickly he named his first beautiful baby girl after the show’s stunning fictional character Ashley Abbott. Bob kept his promise to his wife: though he would work ten-, twelve-, even sixteen-hour days to provide for his family, he made sure that he knew every detail of his children’s lives—who their friends were, how they were faring academically and in sports. Bob believed in teaching his children the value of hard work and vowed that each would have the college opportunities he hadn’t, no matter how hard he had to toil. If the kids weren’t at school, they were studying, and if they weren’t studying, they were either training for sports or working at White Tool. Nearly every weekend from the time they were teenagers, Ashley, Brittany, and Josh logged a full day on the toolmaking assembly line, helping their dad and earning money for themselves. They complained constantly, but the truth was they loved it, even as their fingernails collected a distinct type of dirt—oily and noxious—that they nicknamed “White Tool grunge.” Quiet Ashley made a name for herself as one of the White Tool “chucker chicks”—despite being left-handed, a hindrance in factory processes, she could produce 1,000 metal clips in an hour when most of the guys who ran the machines could barely reach 700. Bob attributed her success to her work ethic: when she ran the
machines Ashley didn’t leave for the bathroom, for a soda break, or for a chat with her siblings.

The White family was intense with competition, from the basketball court to the football field and gymnastics meets. “If you’re not first you’re last,” Bob regularly reminded his kids. “You can’t settle for second.” “Don’t start what you can’t finish,” he would add. He wanted them to see early on how tough factory work was and how excellence could be both its own reward and a path to an easier life built on education. He was constantly telling his children that “actions trump words.” His mantra: “Don’t tell people what you’re going to do, or what kind of person you are. Just show them.”

Josh and Brittany both had natural athletic talent that propelled them into local headlines and won them medals and trophies—a whole room in the Whites’ basement was dedicated to their glittering awards. During his senior year Josh was thrilled to break his high school record for pull-ups, logging 35 straight from a dead hang, but his pride was short-lived; his freshman sister Brittany trumped his achievement with 45 pull-ups that very same afternoon.

Despite the competition, the siblings were one another’s greatest supporters and best friends. To motivate Ashley before her cross-country training runs in high school, Josh would blare Metallica’s “Seek & Destroy” as they drove to school. At night, Ashley and Brittany would creep across the hall into one another’s rooms and swap problems, daydreams, and plans for the future.

Bob taught Ashley to push herself beyond her limits and to always do what she thought was right. But he never meant for his daughter to learn his lessons so well. When she first came to him during her freshman year at Kent State and said she wanted to join ROTC, his answer was “absolutely not.” Nothing in his own upbringing prepared him to believe that military service was the right path for his children: not the fact that ROTC would pay her tuition; or that her fellow cadets shared a camaraderie and a value system based on integrity; or that she thrived amid the intense physical challenges;
or even that the discipline and high standards reminded her of the same high bar he had set for her for as long as she could remember.

When he put his foot down and said no to her first request for support, she came back with two ROTC recruiters to help make her case. They too failed to win him over.

“Ash,” he said sharply, ignoring the men who sat in his living room, “nothing is free. They are not just paying for school; you will be paying for that education with your life. There’s no guarantee you won’t have to go to Afghanistan or Iraq. And I don’t want to lose my daughter.”

But Ashley was determined. She told him she was only seeking his blessing because she respected him so deeply; she was of legal age and could sign her own paperwork to join the program without her parents’ approval. Debbie, who had once put aside her own ambitions to serve, would not stand in her daughter’s way. “I won’t stop her,” Debbie answered Bob’s entreaty. “I always regretted not joining the Navy and I don’t want her to do the same.” Eventually he relented. On the issue of ROTC he and Ashley came to see they would not agree, but would respect one another’s views.

By February 2011, Ashley was working as an athletic trainer at a local college and a medic in the North Carolina National Guard, living in a cozy starter home with Jason. But she felt something was missing. Surrounded by fellow Guardsmen who had done at least one deployment in Iraq or Afghanistan, she felt guilty about wearing the uniform without having served in at least one of the two wars America was fighting. Accepting a check and school tuition without completing the work to deserve it felt like freeloading. And that was
not
Ashley. Already some of the guys she commanded had jeered at her, claiming they didn’t have to take orders from some green, young officer who hadn’t ever deployed. It burned Ashley to see herself the way they did.

It was Ashley’s commander who handed her the CST flyer one Saturday afternoon after the daily drills were over. “I can’t do this,
Ashley,” she said, “but maybe it’s for you.” It was the same poster Kate had seen in Georgia and hundreds of other potential young recruits had received by email from their friends and fellow soldiers. “Looks pretty interesting. And it would get your deployment out of the way.”

The timing couldn’t have been better, and Ashley, studying the photo of the intimidating soldier kneeling with her M4, was intrigued. It wasn’t long before she was determined to apply.

Now she just had to convince Jason.