Ashley's War (13 page)

Kate, Rigby, Kristen, and a half dozen others were already gathered on the lawn, and to cries of “TRIS-TAN!” they tackled their new colleague and fell into an impromptu group hug. Seven of their tent’s ten candidates counted among the twenty-five or so soldiers who made the cut. It had been a fine showing.

The mind is its own place, Tristan thought, remembering Rigby’s port-a-potty inspiration. Don’t quit indeed.

W
ithin a half hour the cadre led the active-duty group of twenty-five CST selectees onto a chartered bus bound for Fort Benning, Georgia. They were headed to what was officially called the CONUS Replacement Center, which everyone knew as CRC. The week promised a few days of medical and dental screening, weapons familiarization and qualification, and the issuance of uniforms and other equipment. No heavy lifting, just a lot of signing out gear and more paperwork. But they were on their way, headed into an experience that few, if any, women had ever had in the American military.

Kate found a seat toward the middle of the bus, basking in the jubilant ease that comes from having bested a life test whose outcome was uncertain. Amber, the interrogator and Bosnia veteran, was just across the aisle, and was savoring one of the most important moments of her life. She guessed that many of the other newly named CSTs were feeling the same sense of triumph and exhilaration, knowing they were on the verge of getting the best shot they would ever have to serve in war with Rangers and Special Forces, even if they still couldn’t officially
be
either. Not far from her was Kimberly Blake, the fit soldier she had met briefly in the Landmark’s elevator. Kimberly, an MP who had deployed to Afghanistan in 2005 and volunteered then to go out with Marines to search Afghan women on a three-day mission, had arrived at Camp Mackall certain she would be selected. Then she had a reality check: these girls ran two miles in thirteen minutes, marched without tiring, and, just like Kimberly, were accustomed to being number one. She felt compelled to step up her game, and by the time she reached Bank Hall that afternoon she genuinely didn’t know whether she would be chosen. Now she leaned into the headrest and tried to ignore all the noise on the bus so she could finally, after a week of high stress and sleep deprivation, get some much-needed rest.

As the charter bus, plush by military standards, began the seven-hour trip to Georgia, a movie began to roll on little flip-down screens that ran the length of the bus.

“Seriously?” Kate called out to Cassie Spaulding, a fellow MP she had met in the breakfast room at the Landmark Inn. She shook her head and began to laugh. “
Black Hawk Down
is what they play for us? I love it.”

Every woman on the bus had already seen the film at least once, but in this setting it felt more powerful than ever. Based on a book about the ill-fated mission to capture a Somali warlord in Mogadishu, the movie followed teams from Delta Force and SEALs leading the charge through the Somali capital while Rangers, who had been assigned to pull security for the mission, bravely fought their way through, block by block, after finding themselves pinned down on the city’s streets. The operation may have been a disaster, but the fight was valiant.

These
were the guys they’d soon be going to war to support. The men with whom they’d be going out on mission. This was the caliber of soldiers and SEALs they’d be going into battle with each day. Or night.

Kate settled comfortably into her seat to watch Eric Bana one more time. For now her view of Rangers at war remained on a movie screen. Soon enough it would be real life.

C
assie, Kate’s fellow MP, was sitting just two rows away. She had come to North Carolina from an Army base in the middle of nowhere, deep in Alaska, about as far as one could go and still be in the United States.

A year earlier Cassie had returned home from Iraq, where her unit was charged with running security checkpoints and doing searches. She had joined the Army eager to find her own brothers- and sisters-in-arms, but for Cassie it had been the loneliest year of her life. Being female was a special burden in war. “Perception was
reality,” went the adage, and she found that
all
socializing between men and women was discouraged by commanders to avoid even the hint of a compromising situation. She couldn’t even talk to a fellow officer about the food they were eating at the dining facility without arousing the suspicion of her commanding officer. He paid attention to every conversation she had with soldiers from other units, almost all of whom were, of course, men, and asked her afterward about the topics of their discussions. So every night Cassie sat by herself, cross-legged on the floor, for hours, filling up paperback books of crossword puzzles that her father sent in care packages.

It was an unnatural and solitary habitat for a creature as social as she, but in a way Cassie always had been an outsider. She was a child of privilege, a comfortable American girl born to an apolitical and decidedly nonmilitary Canadian mother and a bullishly entrepreneurial American father, a Reagan Republican who sold sports cars and gave her a Chevy Silverado on her sixteenth birthday. (He offered a Ford Mustang, but she assured him she preferred the pickup.) She had grown up in Canada, Mexico, and the United States as her parents chased the American dream across North America. She excelled in competitive tennis as a teenager, taking to the court whenever she wasn’t in the woods behind her house playing Manhunt long past nightfall with a bunch of neighborhood boys. At first she had been deeply afraid of waiting for hours, alone in the dark, creepy woods, trying to avoid capture by the others, but she was certain the boys would look down on her and label her “a girl” if she admitted to any fear. So she trained herself to show no weakness, ever. She would stay hidden, come what may. No way would she allow the boys to think they were tougher than she was.

Later, in high school in Florida, Cassie felt jealous of her boyfriend, a star quarterback who was showered with fanfare and glory on the field each week. Being a girl sucks, she thought. Everything fun and daring and noble sat beyond her grasp, and at the age of nineteen, she found out that that included her dream of becoming
an infantry soldier. Nor could she go to Ranger School. It made her crazy that her gender, a simple accident of biology, put her dream job out of reach. Why wasn’t I just born a boy, she often thought to herself, so I can do what I really want to do? Seeing guys in her ROTC class who didn’t even
want
to join the infantry get assigned to the branch only heightened her sense of the unfairness of it all. It felt like a slap in the face that the Army would choose men who wanted to become medics over her, who had been chosen as ROTC battalion commander and hungered only to fight as a foot soldier.

Eventually, after graduating from the University of Central Florida, the sorority sister and women’s studies major joined the Army’s Military Police Corps thinking it would be as close as she would get to actual combat. When she heard about the CST program three years later, she knew immediately she would do anything needed to win a spot on the new team. She called everyone she thought could help her, filled out the application the same day she received it, and then wrote an extra, unsolicited essay explaining all the reasons why she had exactly the right background for this new assignment. She had MP training, combat experience in Iraq, and had studied the role of women in Afghanistan. No one would work harder in this job, she promised.

All through the selection process Cassie felt certain she would make it. The first morning at the Landmark when a fellow candidate asked if she was nervous, Cassie tersely responded, “No, I am not going to let myself be nervous and neither should you.” The expression in her tablemate’s eyes suggested that her answer had only made the soldier more anxious. Too bad, Cassie thought. This is the only place anyone should want to be right now.

Confidence had never been her issue; if anything, a surplus of it was usually her downfall, and she knew it. But she didn’t care. Nor did she apologize for knowing what she wanted, or for possessing ambition equal to an entire class of Harvard MBAs. It was in her DNA: from girlhood, her father had taught her to pursue what she
wanted. His determined, stubborn-as-hell daughter was clearly
his
child, the one whose travel to Europe he had funded; the one he had taught to read the
Wall Street Journal
every day so she would know what was happening in the world; the one he watched Fox News with every night after dinner before discussing the day’s events.

Now, all these years later, she sat with her new teammates on a chartered bus headed to CRC,
Black Hawk Down
playing in the background. Cassie pulled out her phone and texted the person she considered her best friend in the entire world.

“Dad,” she wrote, “I got selected. This is the proudest accomplishment of my life so far.”

The reply came a minute later.

“I knew you were going to make it,” he texted. “I had no doubt.”

A
couple of hours into the trip the bus stopped at a gas station along Interstate 95 South.

The women poured into the convenience store to pick up Subway sandwiches and enjoy the luxury of indoor plumbing. The sight of two dozen trim young women in uniform turned every head in the small store.

First Lieutenant Sarah Walden grabbed a Gatorade and a protein bar and stepped into the long, slow-moving checkout line behind her fellow soldiers. She had recently awakened from a catnap in which the sound of helicopter rotors in
Black Hawk Down
had blended into a fuzzy battlefield dream. Now she heard a man from across the convenience store call out:

“Hey, you guys Army nurses?”

Sarah laughed. She predicted this wasn’t the last time they’d get that question.

Sarah had joined ROTC and then the Army because she wanted to serve an organization whose values mirrored the ones her parents had etched in her soul from childhood: service to others, self-discipline, self-reliance, and a desire to be part of something greater
than yourself. Every year, they taught Sarah and her brother to get by using only their own instincts and nature’s wealth by spending half the summer completely off the grid in a cabin in upstate New York. Not only was it disconnected from TV, telephones, and the Internet, it also lacked central plumbing and water. They grew their own vegetables in the tough Adirondack soil and hiked for hours each day.

Sarah was a look-alike for a young Megan Follows, who starred in the film
Anne of Green Gables
. As a girl Sarah had loved, read, and memorized the books by Lucy Maud Montgomery on which the movie was based. Inspired by the feisty, independent Anne Shirley, Sarah originally wanted to be a nun, not only because of her religious faith but because she wanted to reform the church from the inside. One day she announced to her mother that she was planning to become the Catholic Church’s first female priest. When she was a little older, Sarah dreamed of becoming a soldier and a doctor. By the time she reached her teens, she realized she couldn’t manage all three—nun, soldier, and doctor—so she settled on the last two, and signed up for ROTC to help pave the way and pay for her medical studies. Her father, who spent four years in the Navy, used to amble around the house calling her “Colonel Doctor Walden.”

To no one’s surprise, Sarah excelled in ROTC. Pushing herself to the limit both physically and mentally came naturally, and was thrilling besides. As a sophomore she decided she didn’t want to spend the summer in the Army’s airborne school, which provided the traditional path for cadets. Instead she wanted to attend the more demanding air assault course. The colonel who led her ROTC program at first declined her request. He saw her as a promising leader and wanted her to succeed—and pass—whatever Army training course she signed up for that summer. Airborne school, he said, offered the best—and least risky—path forward. But the major serving beneath him saw she was serious and believed she had the grit to complete what she set out to undertake.

“If you really want to go,” the major said when she made her appeal to him, “I’ll do what I can to support you, but on one condition: you can’t fail. Promise me that, and I’ll talk to the colonel.”

A few days later he pulled Sarah aside after a morning of PT.

“You’re going to air assault school, Walden,” he said. “Don’t fuck up.”

Once her wish had been granted, Sarah experienced a new sensation: the very real fear of failure. Immediately she began weeks of intensive research and preparation at an obstacle course on the nearby grounds of West Point. On Zero Day, the first of the ten-day course, she spotted only six other women among the hundred-plus soldiers reporting for classes. By the last day, despite going hyponatremic on a ruck march after drinking so much water that she flushed out all her electrolytes, Sarah became the only female to complete the course. She couldn’t help but feel a twinge of satisfaction when the male soldier she overheard insisting to his buddies that women shouldn’t even be allowed in the Army was evacuated during the final ruck march. Sarah returned to her ROTC posting with her head held high. Preparation had been its own reward, as her parents had always taught her; she had made it through.

Eventually, Sarah realized that Army doctors had little frontline exposure to the wars America was fighting, and increasingly that’s where she wanted to be. She abandoned her med school dreams and, like Kate and Cassie, went to the division she believed would get her closest to the action: the military police. When she soon learned that her new unit, based in Europe, wouldn’t deploy she felt utterly useless. This, she thought, is not why I joined the Army. Unlike some of her commanders and fellow soldiers, she didn’t want to stay out of the two wars America was fighting. She signed up because she wanted
in
.

Now, finally, she had an assignment that might actually draw on some of her well-honed survival skills. With the CSTs, she had found her path to war, as her friends predicted. It may not have
sounded appealing to the uninitiated, but Sarah was thrilled that Afghanistan would be her ticket out of Europe.