Ashley's War (14 page)

T
hree hours later the bus pulled into Fort Benning, “Home of the Infantry” and headquarters of the 75th Ranger Regiment. The 182,000-acre installation was home to nearly thirty thousand active-duty military, and the women were scheduled to be there for a week.

As the bus approached the main gate of the building where they were scheduled to stay, they found it unattended and locked tight. Clearly no one had anticipated the arrival of the CSTs.

Pacing around the building’s fence, the weary soldiers realized that someone was going to have to do something if they were going to get any sleep that night. And they were desperate for rest.

“Looks like we’re gonna have to storm the gates,” someone said.

“I’ll go under the fence!” Tristan shouted, and began shimmying her small frame under the wire with Kate coaching her through. Once in, the two opened the gate and ushered their teammates inside.

First night and already we’re breaking the china, Kate thought, smiling to herself. I can only imagine the look on the faces of the folks in charge when they see who busted into their compound tonight.

6

Training Days

* * *

A
t the end of May the soldiers were back in Bank Hall, ready for the first day of Phase 2 training for missions that would start in less than three months. The room was humming.

“Okay, listen up,” the cadre called out. He was standing in uniform at the front of the spacious classroom where sixty or so newly minted CST members, all-Army alpha females from around the globe, had taken their seats. Many recognized each other from Assessment and Selection and had exchanged hugs and high-fives. Soldiers who didn’t know each other nodded and shook hands in introduction.

Sitting next to the still-open classroom door was Lane, the Guard soldier from Nevada; she could hear the voices of male soldiers passing by on their way to other classrooms down the hall. Having glimpsed the large gathering of female soldiers inside, a few paused to peek into the room for a better look.

“What’s the deal with the bun brigade?” Lane overheard one soldier ask another.

They don’t know the half of it, she thought.

Now the women were quietly sitting at attention, facing an American flag and a gigantic whiteboard. This opening morning at the Special Warfare Center and School marked the first time the entire class had gathered as one. It was also the first time that the best candidates from the active-duty Army, Guard, and Reserves had assembled as an all-female, special operations team to train for war.

But there was one piece of noncombat business on the agenda before the class would begin.

“Before we get under way,” the instructor announced, “I want to congratulate Lieutenant White on her marriage this past weekend.” The soldiers applauded and raucously cheered as Ashley turned red with embarrassment. Only a few days earlier she had stood before more than one hundred of her dearest friends and family in bright red high heels and her beaded white dress, and promised to love Captain Jason Stumpf “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death did they part.” A rollicking party followed the ceremony and lasted well into the early morning hours. Now here she was, “honeymooning” among a bunch of soldiers headed to war. She had dreamed of a Jamaican getaway with her husband, but she and Jason had already postponed the trip once for his deployment to Afghanistan and now a second time for hers. As soon as she returned from war they were headed to the Caribbean, no more delays allowed.

The instructor then got down to business, explaining that this room in Bank Hall would be the CSTs’ home for the next six weeks. Days would begin at 6:30 a.m. in the gym and end at 5 p.m. The first course would focus on “human dynamics,” which included subjects like “cross-cultural communications,” Afghan culture and language, the role of women in Afghanistan’s history, and rural versus urban life. On deck: training in negotiation and mediation, tactical questioning and searching, and mental strategies to help manage combat stress. There would be psychological evaluations, peer evaluations, and a culminating exercise to finish the session. At the end of his introduction the cadre reminded the CSTs, almost as an afterthought, that making it to this point did not mean they were in the program. At any time soldiers could be asked to leave if instructors decided they didn’t measure up.

It’s like the first day of school all over again, Lane thought to herself. But after the last two months of preparation, she was ready for anything. Bring it, she said to herself, opening her notebook.

The instructor then launched into a description of “ARSOF,” the labyrinthine and mysterious world of elite combat troops formally known as Army Special Operations Forces. The women were on the cusp of becoming on-the-ground enablers of some of the boldest, most sophisticated teams in the United States military. At the end of the course, the teacher went on to explain, they would be asked to choose between Special Forces—the Green Berets and their Village Stability Operations—and Ranger Regiment—the direct action raiders. Ultimately the course instructors and the special operations teams would make the final call about their assignments, but part of the CST training process was understanding the difference between the special ops forces and the CSTs’ role in supporting them.

“VSOs,” the cadre said, his voice carrying across the rows of neatly arranged gray desks, “are village-stability operations. They are the centerpiece of our counterinsurgency strategy.” Counterinsurgency (COIN) was the hallmark of General McChrystal’s tenure leading U.S. forces in Afghanistan and it continued to be part of America’s strategy after he left in 2010. While counterinsurgency’s feasibility had been questioned both publicly and in military circles by the summer of 2011, when the CSTs were preparing for their first missions, much of COIN strategy remained in place alongside counterterrorism, or CT, strategy, which called for finding the insurgents where they lived. That, of course, was the place where the CSTs would be headed: into the villages and compounds.

The teacher went on to explain how the VSO missions were designed to promote stability in strategically critical rural areas—often remote and usually hostile—that insurgents had come to dominate. These operations focused on “the center of gravity”: the local population. The Green Berets leading VSO missions lived among Afghans and specialized in understanding the political and security terrain from the ground level in order to strengthen the work of local community leaders. To do this they partnered with village elders to get them the resources needed to deliver cash-for-work projects,
agricultural training sessions, and medical services. And they equipped and trained men to form local police teams to protect the village from insurgent attacks. As security, local governance, and stability improved, the counterinsurgency theory went, citizens in a community would be more connected to one another and to their government, and therefore less likely to support the insurgency.

The Green Berets have long been known as “soldier-diplomats,” since much of the work they do requires language skills and a cultural understanding of the war zone in which they fight. But they are also intensively trained in direct action and combat skills, earning them nicknames like “snake eaters” and “bearded bastards.” Most CSTs would end up with these village-stability teams, where their work would consist of meeting and talking with local women in ways that men couldn’t because of the cultural traditions that separate the genders. The female soldiers would help Special Forces to better understand local power and politics dynamics and community needs as they sought to win “hearts and minds.”

But a small number of women would go to the other side of Army special operations and join the 75th Ranger Regiment in its direct action role. Rangers focus exclusively on the “clear” part of the “clear, hold, build” tenets of counterinsurgency—a shorthand first popularized in congressional testimony by then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. They are not responsible for wooing and winning over local leaders; their job is to clear contested areas of men who support the insurgency and threaten a civilian population. The CSTs working with the Rangers would be responsible for building crucial relationships with women on the scene that would reveal the information needed to help capture insurgents. This work would be done inside the homes of Afghan women, and would take place in the midst of night raids aimed at capturing the weapons makers, fighters, organizers, funders, and insurgency leaders with whom the women lived as mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, and grandmothers. The idea behind the missions was to weaken the insurgency and give the military’s “hold and build”
work—the less “kinetic” aspects of warfare—a chance to succeed by creating the space to win over local populations through strengthening local services and reducing security threats. The men of Ranger Regiment had been deployed continuously since 9/11 and went out every night on these operations, as did other special operators, and over the years such raids had grown increasingly unpopular with both the Afghan government and its people. Even those who favored such raids as a critical tool to root out the most intransigent and dangerous insurgents worried they had the potential to create more terrorists than they eradicated. A major part of the CST role, then, was to be culturally sensitive at this tenuous and highly unpredictable moment, and be assertive and quick-thinking enough to find the information needed in the midst of this most dynamic and unpredictable kind of battle.

Every student was expected to keep a journal and to bring it to class every day to make notes about her responses to course activities, readings, and discussions. The journal would be graded at the end. Trainers provided a recommended reading list of popular titles such as
Half the Sky
by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn;
Kabul in Winter
by Ann Jones;
Three Cups of Tea
by Greg Mortenson; and Khaled Hosseini’s bestselling novel
A Thousand Splendid Suns
.

Early in the course, the CSTs received training in Pashto, one of Afghanistan’s two native languages (Dari being the other) and the one they would hear most often on their missions. They would of course be relying on interpreters to communicate with Afghan women, but being able to offer up some basic words would be a quick and powerful show of goodwill and respect. So they learned how to say “Salam Alaykum,” the traditional greeting of peace, as well as the Pashto equivalents of “my name is”—
zamaa num
; “please”—
mehrabani
; “how are you”—
tsenga yast
; “thank you”—
manana
; and “woman”—
shedza
. An Afghan-American lecturer offered the women a primer on the code of Pashtunwali and a catalog of unacceptable behaviors:

•   Do not eat in public during Ramadan.

•   Don’t rush or hurry an Afghan.

•   Do not laugh loudly in public.

•   Don’t wag or point your finger.

As the course went on, one of the students began a collection of favorite quotes in her notebook. One characterized the brand-new CST program itself: “It’s like building an airplane in flight.”

The training program for the female enablers didn’t come anywhere close to the formal preparation of Special Forces or Ranger Regiment men. To become a specialist in special operations and unconventional warfare requires training that is both extreme and extensive: for Green Berets, anywhere from 18 to 36 months and for the Regiment’s elite strike force members, just under a year. After that lengthy preparation and selection process, only around one in four candidates make it through. But the reality was America was fighting a long, costly, and unpopular war in Afghanistan and leaders like Admiral McRaven wanted to find whatever edge, whatever useful tool they could to improve the prospects of that fight. Commanders were impatient for the skills the female soldiers could provide, and they wanted the women out doing their jobs
now
.

All the CSTs were aware that their training protocol was a work in progress, and they chalked it up to the program’s newness. Aside from the language training and basic cultural education, much of the coursework struck one of the CSTs as “a whole lot of bookwork for people who were headed to war.” Claire Russo, who had played a role in shaping the program from its start, expressed in a memo her own concerns about how the training program favored “culture classes” over ones that taught “hard skills such as tactical questioning, engagement, and basic tactical movements.” Russo knew that culture varies significantly “from village to village, valley to valley and province to province” and she wanted the soldiers to have broad general knowledge. But she wanted them to be trained to defend
their lives and protect their teammates, too. “It is critical that the students leave the CST class with the skills sets they need to execute the mission and survive while doing so,” she had written.

But it wasn’t only the Afghan community that the women needed to prepare for; they also had to win the acceptance of the American men they would be serving with. From the beginning, the instructors made clear that the CSTs would be wading into their own, female version of friendly fire when they deployed in August. Many of the male soldiers they supported would want nothing to do with them, the CSTs were warned. The trainers drilled the message home: “They are going to hate you, and you are going to have to be prepared for that.” It wasn’t just that they would have to “sell” their capabilities, as every enabler did, to a corps of battle-tested veterans, some now on their tenth or eleventh deployment in nearly as many years. As a constantly increasing share of responsibility for the fight in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other terrorism hotspots around the globe landed on their shoulders, Special Operations Forces now had within their reach nearly every flavor of weaponry and intel support possible. The dramatic capture one month earlier of Osama bin Laden, carried out by a team of Navy SEALS, had only added to the allure of special operators in the American imagination and the impression that special ops forces could accomplish any mission the conventional military and leaders in Washington tossed their way, no matter how wild the odds. CSTs were only the newest group among many “enablers” that served in a support role for these fighters; there were explosive ordnance disposal specialists, information support operations, weather experts, and communications specialists, to name only a few.