Ashley's War (10 page)

“Tristan, how in the hell are you dressed already? Did you sleep in your uniform?”

Tristan was already reaching for a batch of Handi Wipes that would serve as her mobile shower.

“Yes, I slept in it, of course,” she replied. “You don’t know when they’re going to come and tell us to get up and get moving. I want to be ready.”

Rigby took one look at her teammate and, between laughs, asked how she had managed to keep her hat on all night.

Tristan just smiled.

“Laugh away, friends, but when we are the first team to know what’s coming next because yours truly was dressed and ready to go before everyone else, you will all be seriously grateful,” she said.

A
s the days stretched on the women realized that each member of their team brought a different set of skills and talents. For Kate the physical tests had been a real challenge. Running with a full box of dummy ammunition or lifting on her shoulders the weight of a huge wooden log during one of the obstacle courses was tough for her.

But her ability to problem-solve under duress made her a real asset to the team. Early in the week the women faced an obstacle course that interspersed physical trials—climbing thirty-foot wooden walls and hiking long distances—with the kind of mental agility tests for which special operations is famous. In one exam the women had to disarm a (fake) bomb while blindfolded. Another required the soldiers to devise a way to get everyone across a rushing river using only wooden planks and rope. Kate was often the first to offer up a plan—and to give ground if someone else’s sounded more logical.

And she knew how to use her grit and courage to bolster the spirits of the other women. During one of the many long ruck marches Kate realized that a teammate was lagging. The ten women had started out in one line and were told to assume they were on their own, no talking allowed. An hour later Kate saw that her tentmate was injured; she was limping so badly she needed to lean on a tree for support. Without saying a word, the other women nodded their heads toward the young woman, making sure that each team member was aware she was in trouble. Then they took turns staying close to her so no one would finish much before the others.

The instructors were not pleased.

“Do not help her, do not touch her, this is an individual assessment,” one of the sergeants yelled. He got up close, right in their faces, and shouted from a distance of only inches, nearly spitting
his words at them. Kate had read about special operations selection processes and she knew that much of this was an act, that the instructors were testing the soldiers to see how they would deal with stress. They wanted to judge the candidates’ ability to stay together as a team when something went wrong.

“They are just mind-fucking you, don’t listen to them!” Kate yelled to the other women marching next to her. She had always been outspoken and she prided herself on being a good teammate as well as a good soldier. This may have been the all-important Assessment and Selection process, but she wasn’t going to start holding back now, even if it harmed her career. “They’re just testing you. Don’t be a jerk and leave a fellow soldier in the field.” The young woman limped alongside them, at times falling to her knees and proceeding in a crawl to give her ankle some relief, and sure enough the others stayed with her, offering encouragement and moral support.

“You are messing with the system, guys,” the instructor warned. “This is an
individual
assessment.”

Kate had no idea if this was just a part of the test or if he really meant it. And she didn’t know whether men in the same situation would be praised for surging forward or lauded for staying back to make sure all the others made it to the end. But she would leave no woman behind.

A few minutes later she helped her teammates reach the finish line. All of them.

B
y day four the all-night work sessions and all-day marching, running, and obstacle testing were beginning to take their toll on the women, and Tristan’s strategy of sleeping in full uniform was looking increasingly sensible. The instructors were testing their mental and physical mettle, and that meant some of the Ironman women weren’t faring as well as they thought they would. This was a mental game as much as a physical challenge, designed to reinforce the fact that staying focused and motivated is absolutely critical to mission
success and basic survival in war. For many aspiring CST members who soared through the athletic tests, it was the verbal jousting that proved tricky.

Even the relentlessly upbeat Tristan was bending under the pressures of the program. She returned to the tent exhausted and demoralized after a day at the Soldier Urban Reaction Facility, established to help soldiers better navigate the cultures in which they would be operating. Tristan had been thrown during a role-playing scenario that took place in a sparsely furnished room filled with dark carpets and floor pillows meant to resemble an Afghan living space. The test encounter had started fine, but went south quickly when “husbands” of the “Afghan women” she was supposed to be interviewing burst into the room and began hitting their wives and screaming at the American soldier. Tristan simply froze where she sat, unable to conjure up, in the shrill chaos of the moment, the words and actions needed to calm the situation. Eventually she muttered something to explain why she was there, but it was too late: she had lost control of the situation. As a field artillery officer sitting at a desk and doing math problems to figure out the exact coordinates needed to fire precisely on the right location, she was not used to dealing with interpersonal crises.

It hadn’t gone much better for Tristan later that evening when the instructors interrogated her about how field artillery bears any relevance to counterinsurgency. They kept demanding increasingly specific examples. A dull film of exhaustion now coated every corner of her brain, suffocating her best thoughts. She was overwhelmed by frustration, convinced she had failed miserably and that the trainers had already found the one chink in her armor. She was 100 percent confident in her physical abilities and her endurance, but as a field artillery officer who had never deployed she hadn’t had much daily contact with COIN, or counterinsurgency. And it showed.

“Guys, I don’t know if I can do this,” she confided late that night from her bed, her head in her hands. “I know I want it, but I think I just lost my chance.”

Kate and Rigby came over to her small cot and put their arms around her shoulders. “Come on,” Kate said, “you’re doing great out there and you’re going to be even greater after this. Stay in it. One lousy test doesn’t take you off track.”

Rigby had had a grueling day as well, having pushed herself as well as her teammates through their misery. At dinner she had to prod Kristen to finish eating her MRE, or Meals, Ready to Eat, after she threw up half of it. Her body simply could not take in as much food as she needed to get through the day’s tests. “You gotta keep going,” Rigby insisted, pushing the unappetizing meal of chicken-with-something back toward her after she vomited just beside her seat. “Keep eating it.” Everyone in her tent was physically depleted from the marches and runs and mentally drained by the exams and the need to impress their assessors at every moment. But they were determined to stay in it regardless of what their bodies and their minds told them.

One night Rigby found inspiration in an unexpected place.

“Hey, you guys, check this out,” she said, running back into the tent after her visit to one of the port-a-potties that stood in a row behind their sleeping quarters. “The john has a message for us!”

“You gotta be joking!” Kate shouted. “Are you really bringing us wisdom from the shitter?”

Tristan too was preparing for a few moments of rest, in full uniform, and let out a big laugh. It was the first smile her face had found in hours.

“Yes, I am indeed, ladies,” Rigby said in her matter-of-fact tone, pushing back her glasses. “There is some
really
good stuff in there. I’ve been reading a lot of it. Think about who has sat on those toilets before us—every man who has ever gone on to join Special Forces. They know what they’re talking about when they leave that wisdom behind.”

The entire tent was listening.

“Seriously,” she continued. “Listen to this. And take it to heart, girls, as the last day approaches.”

She paused for effect.

“The mind is its own place. And itself can make a hell of heaven and a heaven of hell. Don’t quit.”

The room was pin-drop silent.

“Pretty good, isn’t it? Going to have T-shirts made for us with it when this is all done,” Rigby said. Then she jumped onto her cot. “It’s my favorite one so far. Good night, my friends, see you before I want to.”

The room went dark as someone turned off the main light.

Don’t quit indeed, thought Kate. Just one more day . . .

T
wo hours later they were awake.

“Up, up, get moving!” one of the tentmates yelled. “Cadre are out there—time to get up!”

It did not count as predawn, Kate thought; it was maybe 2 or 3 a.m. Her blistered feet burned and her body ached. Her eyes were completely dried out; they felt like glass that was being sandblasted. Meanwhile, Tristan, now recovered from her brush with hopelessness of several hours earlier, was trying to rally her troops.

“Come on, guys, let’s go,” she said, bounding from cot to cot to make sure no one was still asleep. She checked to make sure Rigby had on fresh socks since her last pair was soaked through with blood from her blisters. “This is it—last day.”

The night ruled quiet and crisp. North Carolina has the brightest stars I’ve ever seen, Tristan thought. She inhaled the air and psyched herself up for the march that was soon to come. The women carried rucksacks, canteens, and fake weapons, and were poised to begin the most grueling physical and mental tests they would face in their weeklong training cycle.

“It will be a suckfest,” Kate promised the others. “Get ready!”

It started with a ruck that had no end. The women marched on long stretches of flat brown dirt, up rock-strewn hills and alongside murky, mud-filled creeks lined by trees on either side. For more than
six hours they rucked, and as they did they watched as the pitch-black sky slowly faded and gave way to a few rays of sunlight that signaled the approaching dawn. Many suffered from bleeding feet through layers of moleskin and medical tape, but they marched on. For some, like Kate, it was tough but bearable, since the end was so near. Rigby found it hard in a way that thrilled her; she had wanted to be tested to the full extent of her physical and mental faculties, and so far the CST selection hadn’t disappointed. For Tristan, after the horrendous night before, it was a relatively easy day: rugged but entirely manageable.

Occasionally the instructors stopped the marchers to ask them a riddle. Some of the women used the break to kneel on one knee and give their feet a rest. During one such pause, the instructor had no sooner gotten mid-sentence in his question about how to move an item across a gulch when Kate stopped to interrupt him with the answer.

“I got it,” she blurted out. “Move this, move that, move that, you’re done.”

Her answer was correct.

“What the heck?” Rigby said. “How did you do that? That was amazing.”

“It came to me like Jesus,” Kate said, stepping back to take a bow before her team, and inspire a moment of laughter. Then it was back to the march.

By the time the march ended some of the women were dizzy with exhaustion. Others sat down for the first time in hours for their ten-minute break for mealtime—more MREs—and believed they had never eaten anything so delicious in their lives. But the break was not to last long. Another obstacle course required they scale a thirty-foot wall by hoisting one another up in the air using their cupped hands as ladders. By 3 p.m. they had been at it for close to twelve hours and there was no end in sight.

Next on the agenda: more running. Out of boots and into track shoes. Tristan took the lead for her team and once again motivated
them all to keep pushing through their mental exhaustion and physical pain. “Keep going, guys,” she urged them as they swapped footgear. “Just a little more to go.” Kate marveled at her stamina. She’s a beast, Kate thought, filled with respect for her fellow soldier’s strength.

Finally, late in the day when some of the soldiers thought they might not be able to stay awake much longer, let alone stand up and perform yet another physical task, they reached the capstone of the Assessment and Selection training: a long run followed by a series of “buddy carries.” In the Army every soldier has to be fit enough and perpetually ready to carry a fellow soldier off the field in case the worst happens and he is injured or dead. Over the past fifty years in America, one of the central questions raised in the endless debates about whether women could serve in ground combat—even in support roles—has always been: would a woman be able to carry a large man off the battlefield under fire?

Kate’s male Army friends had always told her that while they thought she was a great soldier, they could never trust a woman to hoist them to safety if they got shot or hurt. “It’s not personal,” they would say. “It’s just biology.”

“But what about guys who are five-four and a hundred and thirty pounds?” Kate would respond. “Why are they okay and not girls who are the same size?” No one could ever give her a satisfactory answer to that question. Out there for CST Assessment and Selection that afternoon, Kate was determined to let her actions prove her worth. She would neither give in to her exhaustion nor fail to carry a single soldier—no matter how heavy—out of harm’s way.

As the afternoon wore on the cadre took turns walking up to the soldiers in the field and pretending to shoot them. “You’re dead,” they’d say, and walk away. The soldier’s job was to fall onto the ground and go completely limp.

In the buddy-carry, three or four soldiers encircle the fallen comrade. Depending on how she lay, one would get behind and underneath her body and grab her armpits while another took her legs.
Together they would hoist her over a third soldier’s neck and that soldier would carry the “dead” soldier, forming a sort of P around her neck. Most of the women on Kate’s team were on the small side, so carrying them presented no real challenge, but still she took inspiration from Amber, who had a bunch of weapons slung over her and was carrying one of the bigger girls on her shoulders as if she were light as a feather.