Ashley's War (16 page)

Sitting at a desk a few rows in front of the Ranger leader, Tristan couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Oh my God, we are being recruited, she thought to herself. The burly Ranger was making Amber’s argument that they actually did bring something to the mission, with a high-tech, multimedia assist to show them the intensity—and the adrenaline rush—of the fight they would be joining.

Tristan knew she belonged with the ass-kicking Rangers. Months earlier she had turned down a job training women at her base in Fort Sill because she saw no reason why she would be any better at it than a man. She was not a female soldier; she was a soldier who happened to be female, and all she wanted to do was go to work in a job—and in a place—that mattered to the mission. And that was
not
training women; it was with the Rangers tracking down insurgents in the hills of Afghanistan.

Her fellow West Pointer Kate’s heart pounded throughout the recruiting pitch because she knew deep inside that that badass video was all her. Kate loved tactics, she loved fighting, and she wanted to wear her kit and get terrorists. She had even dreamed that evening in night-vision green about using her small frame to the Rangers’ advantage by tunneling onto a target to get a bad guy.

Kimberly, the MP, had only one thought after watching that video.

I want to do this
now
. She, along with a handful of the others, was hooked.

Finally the day arrived when they learned their assignment, and there were few surprises. Among those who made the cut for the Rangers: Leda Reston, Tristan Marsden, Sarah Walden, Amber Treadmont, Kate Raimann, Lane Mason, Anne Jeremy, Kimberly Blake, and Ashley White.

When Ashley heard her name followed by the words “Ranger Regiment”
she first felt surprised, then a strong sense of satisfaction, then trepidation. She had wanted this challenge, had even confided to her teammate Kristen that she hoped she would get the assignment, though she still had her concerns about her ability to fit in. Within minutes of the announcement the new team—the first-ever all-Army group of women to officially be joining Ranger Regiment on missions and in combat every night as enablers—made their way to a picnic table outside Bank Hall to discuss the details of their pre-mission training with Leda, their new officer in charge. From the original group of sixty, they were now just twenty. “The alphas of the alphas,” someone joked.

There was one more challenge that Ashley faced after the past two months of Assessment and Selection and training, and she dreaded it. She had to share the news with Jason.

By the time Ashley arrived home, Jason was already in the living room waiting for her. He had received her text about Ranger Regiment, but when she walked through the door with a fellow CST and announced that a group of them assigned to Regiment would be heading over to Mash House for dinner, he knew that the longer discussion would have to wait. Her elation made it easy for him to hold his questions—for now. She was so happy and excited; he was left torn between feeling extreme pride in his ass-kicking wife and intense worry about what she was getting herself into.

At dinner that night Jason was again the only man, this time seated at a long table filled with more than a dozen buff female soldiers. Sitting at one end of the table next to Ashley, he found himself watching her intently. Something was different, and despite his anxieties about the reasons behind the dinner, he was feeling a deep sense of pride. Here she was, his typically reserved and quiet wife, with a group of women she hadn’t even known two months earlier, and she was in the thick of the conversation, interjecting during other women’s stories and cracking jokes with the other girls. He was surprised by how comfortable she was with her new teammates. And how popular. He heard stories from many of them about Ashley’s
performance over the past few months: how she had tried to help the other girls to learn to fast-rope in the gym, how her PT scores had impressed the trainers, who had rarely seen a woman score so high on the men’s scale. And it wasn’t just her physical prowess that inspired them; it was also her generosity. Girls told stories about her cookies and sandwiches, her loans of shoes and socks that Ashley brought for them without their ever having to ask. He realized that this CST thing was turning out to be a kind of sisterhood. It was something he never imagined women could have in the military, let alone a kinship his own wife would be part of.

Finally the couple found themselves alone, heading home in Jason’s Chevy pickup, and the topic they had shoved to the sidelines came roaring back.

“So how are you feeling about it all?” Ashley asked.

Jason hesitated, chose his words carefully, and calibrated his tone in an effort to disguise his real feelings.

“I don’t know, Ash, those guys are heavy hitters. I love those Rangers, and I truly admire what they do. You know I wanted to go to Ranger School. But it is guns-up for them. They are not hired to go give out hugs and be ‘culturally sensitive.’ Those guys are animals once they’re in the field. That is what they’re trained to do.”

“I know,” Ashley replied, “but these guys have a plan for us; they really want us there and they think we can make a difference.”

The more she spoke, the more certain he was that she didn’t fully understand what she was getting into. Jason felt his anxiety rising. By now they were home and had climbed out of the truck, but they got no farther than the entryway to the living room before the conversation turned hot and angry.

“Ash, these guys go looking for fights,” Jason said. “That is what they do for a living. Do you understand? That’s their job. Their body count is high—when I was in Afghanistan I saw their flag go to half-staff all the time because their guys were getting killed. You don’t need to be there for that.”

He was now pacing around the room. “What happened to the humanitarian stuff? When did you decide this direct action stuff was what you wanted to do? It just doesn’t feel right.”

Now it was her turn to give in to the anger.

“You
are the one who always told me I can do anything,” she said. “Is that only if it was a job you approved of? Why would you,
of all people
, want to hold me back now?

“I had just finished school when you deployed. I never told you not to go to Afghanistan even though I sat, by myself here, in this house, for a year and I never complained to you. Now when I want to do
my
duty and get my deployment done you say
, it’s too dangerous
?

“You’re just being selfish, Jason,” she said. She wasn’t quite shouting, but her voice had grown louder—and more filled with hurt. “And you know it.”

Jason fought the urge to throw his fist into the living room wall. He felt even worse when he saw Ashley’s tears start to fall.

She ran past her collection of Minnie Mouses and into the bedroom, then slammed the door behind her.

There, alone on the couch, he tried to calm himself. He watched the clock as the hours ticked by and the night passed. Never before, during all the years of their courtship or in their short and very happy marriage, had they slept in separate rooms.

As soon as the sun began to rise he called his father back home in Pittsburgh. He didn’t give him all the details, but explained that Ashley wanted to deploy on some kind of special mission that made him exceedingly nervous. Jason’s dad, who ran the family’s grocery business, had always been his role model. His father was going through a difficult time, too, having started divorce proceedings from Jason’s mother. This hadn’t surprised Jason—their marriage had been a challenge for some time—but it did sadden him, and lately he had been thinking a great deal about lasting love and how to keep it.

“Jason, this is something you really don’t want to do,” Ralph Stumpf finally replied. “You don’t want to hold your spouse back. Trust me on this. If you do that, if you hold someone back, they will eventually end up carrying a grudge. Let Ashley be what and who she is, and support her, the way she has supported you, even in those times when she was afraid that something would happen to you when you were off in Afghanistan.

“Look,” he continued, “I’ve never experienced war, you know a lot more about it than I do, but in fifty years, do you want Ashley to look back at your kids and your grandkids and feel like she missed out on one of the most important opportunities she could have had because you didn’t want her to go? Do you really want to take the risk that she might feel this sense of regret, wondering what things would have been like if she had had that experience? Everyone says ‘no regrets,’ but
everyone
has them, and if she gives this up for you, she will always look back on her life and there will always be something missing. And this program is always going to be the ‘if only.’”

“Listen, Dad,” Jason said, knowing he couldn’t dispute the soundness of his father’s argument and the deep personal experience it came from. But he was not yet ready to give in. “Here is the ‘if.’ If she doesn’t do this program, she is still here. We start a family. We move forward with our lives.”

“Come on, Jason,” his dad answered. “You guys love each other so much—it’s obvious. You all will have decades together and the children and the grandchildren will come. You’ll have a happy wife and a happy life, as the saying goes. You’ll see; it all will come in time.”

Jason hung up the phone, put on his running clothes, and jogged out the front door and down the road. Even then he knew, in his heart, that she had to go, whether or not he wanted her to and even if he was right about it.

When he returned, she was still in the bedroom with the door closed. “Ash,” he said, walking into the room, “look, I’m sorry, I know I was being selfish. I won’t make you choose, it’s just that . . .”

She interrupted him.

“Listen,” she said, sitting up in the bed and looking like she hadn’t slept, either. “I know you know a lot more about all of this than I do. I know you shot artillery for these guys and you know them and you know what they do. And if you want me to stop the program I will go in on Monday and tell them I’m out. That’s it. I’ll never bring it up again. I promise. I love you and respect you that much.”

“No.” Jason shook his head. “I thought about it all night and talked it through with my dad this morning. It’s not about what I think. You want to work with those guys, that is who
you
are. You earned this chance. And I know if it were me going to work with Ranger Regiment you’d back me. I don’t like it, you know that, but you have my unconditional support.”

Ashley offered him her sideways smile.

“Just promise me you’ll be careful, and you won’t try to be a hero. That you won’t take any more risks than you have to.”

“I promise,” she said. “I promise.”

He prayed she would be able to keep that vow.

7

Diamonds Among Diamonds

* * *

O
kay, soldiers, quit screwing around,” Sergeant Scottie Marks bellowed. The twenty CSTs who had made the cut for Ranger Regiment were milling around classroom tables at a training facility sometimes used by the special operations command.

“Take your seats and hurry up!”

He flipped a switch and a screen rolled down from the ceiling. The room went quiet and on came a grainy video. Figures were moving across a dark field shrouded in the green haze of night-vision goggles. A group of Rangers were in the middle of a mission to capture an insurgent in an Afghan village. “This is what you will be doing,” he told the women. “Night after night. And this is what the next eight days are about: preparing you for those missions.”

The CSTs sat riveted as Marks talked about training their minds for the demands of the war they were about to join. All the while, he chewed on a hunk of tobacco lodged inside his left cheek. “Combat is the highest-stakes game on the face of the planet because in the end you either have winners or you have dead people,” he said. “I don’t want to die, and I know you don’t, either. I want to be the killingest winner in the whole world. And you should, too.”

It was the opening speech of Rangers’ pre-mission training week—PMT for short—and no one moved an inch in her seat. It was so quiet, Lane thought her classmates might be able to hear the sound of her own breathing. She wondered if Tristan or Ashley was
as frightened as she was. She stole a look a few seats over at Amber and was only mildly surprised that her gung-ho teammate looked happier and more fully engaged than she had in weeks.

Marks, a sandy-brown-haired veteran of more than twelve Ranger deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, continued.

“You are CSTs and you have a very particular job to do on the battlefield. You have to deescalate whatever situation you are drawn into, and engage with the women and children.” He was now moving through the room, Oprah-style, using his own considerable physical presence to drive home the urgency of his words and shake them out of their comfort zones.

“But we are not at war to pass out blankets and hugs. I need you to find out where the bad guys are, as quick as you can. It’s my job to prepare you to sit within eighteen inches of a possible enemy every single night and do your job and stay alive. That means you need to be ready to pick up your gun and use it properly. You have to be prepared to pull the trigger and kill someone without hesitation. And you have to be ready to pick up a fellow soldier who has been shot or blown up while you are still taking fire and get him out of there.”

He was speaking at a pace that sounded like a tape recorder playing at one and a half times its normal speed.

“War is chaos. That means you might be alone in a room with twenty women, one of whom is actually a heavily armed man in disguise. Nine times out of ten you will have other soldiers around you, pulling security. But there is a one percent chance you are going to be in that room by yourself. And you must be ready to react if that male belligerent tries to overpower you. You better be able, in that instant, to pull out your gun and shoot someone in the face without thinking about it.