Ashley's War (22 page)

And the assault on their senses began.

“Wow,” Ashley said, trying to keep her composure. “It really
does
smell.”

The first hot wave to hit them reeked of diesel fuel; it stormed their nasal passages and stung their eyeballs, then insinuated itself in their lungs. The second wave was purely human.

“Man, Jason told me about this but I didn’t believe it could be this bad,” Ashley said, covering her mouth and hurrying to the
transport vehicle that was waiting on the airstrip. “Think of the smell of diesel, the smell of things burning, and the smell of shit, all swimming together,” Jason had said, then he explained how decades of war had ravaged the country’s infrastructure, including its sewage systems. The temporary facilities the military set up—basically collapsible port-a-potties—required a great deal of maintenance, which usually ended up half done at best. But even Jason couldn’t have known just how prescient his words would turn out to be.

“Oh, I can’t wait to tell him
this
,” Ashley said, as she and Lane arrived at the camp where they would be living with the Rangers. It sat just downwind from the “poo pond,” a place where multiple septic systems from across Kandahar Airfield dumped the product of 1,800 portable toilets—enough to serve thirty thousand military personnel and civilians—into a huge, mud-colored, semi-treated sewage stew of feces that was roughly the size of Lake Michigan. The stench of the poo pond was aggravated by the dry, summertime Kandahari heat.

A rugged-looking young Ranger wearing the Regiment’s workout uniform of black shorts and a tan T-shirt had picked them up in his truck at the airstrip and now deposited them at their barracks.

“Hey, welcome,” he said, with a casual air. “Glad you’re here!”

Oh, God, this actually is happening, Lane thought to herself, amazed by how informal and welcoming he was. She felt like she was in a movie, one she hoped she would enjoy remembering one day when she was a lot older. Right now she just had to survive—and make sure she and Ashley proved themselves quickly.

A sergeant major was there to greet them as they hopped out of the jeep, and he was all business. “Welcome,” he said, and pointed to their barracks. “Here’s where you’ll settle in. You guys need to get your kit ready and be all set to go tomorrow. I want you on the bird out on mission tomorrow night. Let me know if that is a problem.” The way he said it, he made clear he would hold the women to
the same standards as everyone else; no special treatment. He was deadly serious about the business his Rangers did every night, and he wanted to make sure they were, too.

Both women knew that Rangers typically get thirty-six hours from their arrival in-country to their first mission, and since the first sessions back at the Landmark Inn every CST had lobbied for the same high standards to be applied to them. Ashley and Lane had discussed this on the plane from Bagram. They didn’t want to be eased in; better to get the first mission behind them as soon as possible. “We’ll be ready to go, Sergeant Major,” Lane answered without hesitating.

They made their way inside the reinforced building—at least they didn’t have to sleep in tents, Lane thought—that would be their home for the next eight months, and to their new quarters: each had a twelve-by-twelve room she would share with a roommate or two. Subtracting the space occupied by bunk beds, dressers, and a wall locker, there was little room left for moving around. Down the hall was the bathroom: four toilets, four sinks, and three showers. Only a narrow hallway separated Ashley’s room from Lane’s. If they yelled loudly enough they could speak to one another without leaving their beds.

The first female soldier they met was Meredith Rose, a medic and Iraq veteran who, it turned out, had learned the CST mission on the job. She had simply been asked by a commander one day if she thought she could “run around and catch terrorists” with the special operations guys. Meredith knew the only answer to give was “yes” and a few days later she moved to Kandahar and began going out with the Rangers to search and question women. She had been there ever since.

Meredith lost no time in organizing a tour of the barracks for the new arrivals. “We get to clean those ourselves, so keep your flip-flops handy,” Meredith said, pointing to the showers. “There are a couple of other girls living here—you’ll meet them. We all live on this hall.”

As she stepped into her room once more Ashley saw another young woman—a brunette, petite, like she was, sitting on one of the beds. Ashley put her hand out and introduced herself.

“Great to meet you,” the young woman answered. “Tracey Mack. I’m in field artillery.”

She pointed Ashley toward the other bunk across from her.

“It’s not much, but it works,” she said of their little room.

“You guys hungry?” she asked. “You haven’t eaten yet, have you? Let me take you down to the Boardwalk.”

“The what?” Ashley asked.

“You’ll see,” Tracey answered.

The field artillery officer had faced her own challenge of fitting in six months earlier when she arrived in Kandahar as an untested, twenty-four-year-old second lieutenant serving as the resident expert on the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, known as HIMARS.

The daughter of an Army veteran father who had worked as an MP, a dog handler, and an investigator during his thirteen-year military career, Tracey had entered ROTC during her freshman year of college. After graduation she was devastated to receive her assignment to the Army’s field artillery branch. Like Tristan, she loved the idea of being out in the fight, but all those jobs closest to the front were still closed to women. Instead of leading people in battle, she’d be managing paper clips, Excel spreadsheets, and Xerox machines back at headquarters. Fate turned, however, to offer her an opportunity: an assignment at Fort Bragg under a particularly open-minded colonel.

“Hey, we’re excited to see you on our books,” he emailed. “Our unit needs a leader and your battery is going to deploy next year.” Tracey leapt at the chance to be a platoon leader. Even six months earlier only a handful of women in the
entire
military would have had that chance. And now she was one of them, here in Afghanistan.

When she first arrived at Kandahar in the spring of 2011, the petite and perky Lieutenant Mack knew she made an easy target for the rough-and-tumble Rangers who had lived according to combat’s clock for an entire decade. She imagined they saw her as some smiling little girl who was hard to take seriously. She, in turn, felt intimidated by their years of battlefield experience and the intense camaraderie that was born of all that time in the fight together. Any one of these men would have died for another, she thought, whether they liked him personally or not. They had seen the entrails of friends and the brains of enemies and survived fighting that had changed them as people. She considered trying to make herself more “masculine” and harder-edged for the sake of fitting in by being less upbeat, less friendly, and a lot less jocular than she truly was, but in the end she figured that being fake would be even worse than being ostracized.

So Tracey launched a mission to prove herself. She would stand alone to the side each night in the JOC and learn the rhythms of the missions as she watched them play out, in real time, on the screens before her. She saw that the Rangers were straight-shooting: their guys’ lives were on the line out there and all they cared about was what each soldier brought to the table and how well he—or she, in the case of their enablers—could do their job. One night the planes that usually provided air support to the Rangers were prevented from flying because of lousy weather and she offered up her artillery system. After three months of pitching her capability Tracey finally got to demonstrate it, as the GPS-guided artillery struck the target dead-on. Once the men who had seen her around the JOC for all those months saw that she could deliver under the extreme pressure of combat—and could take being ribbed from time to time—they accepted her.

Now here she was, introducing the new gals to KAF. She felt hardened by her last six months at war—she had seen too many
flags flying at half-staff as special operations guys got killed by IEDs or enemy gunfire. She marveled at how fresh-faced Lane and Ashley looked to her now.

“The Boardwalk is where we eat when we need a break from the DFAC,” Tracey told Ashley, using military shorthand for the on-base dining facilities. The Boardwalk was KAF’s global shopping and eating promenade. Want a hot dog? Try Nathan’s Famous. Latte? Grab one at the Canadian coffee shop Tim Hortons. Burgers and much more could be found at the Kandahar branch of T.G.I. Fridays, complete with its cheery red and white awning.

But no amount of American consumer merriment or salmon baguettes or chocolate croissants or waves of barbed wire and Hesco bastions could keep out the threats that lay in wait just beyond the fortified base. They lived in the heart of Taliban territory surrounded by an increasingly bold insurgency committed to its fight.

“Pizza or gyros?” Tracey asked Lane and her new roommate Ashley. Nothing else was open at the moment—it was 10 p.m. Nearby hung a banner featuring an attractive blond woman with glossy red lips holding her sandwich and looking enticingly into the camera with the words “GYROS (YEEROS) for HEROES” in big, dark letters above the locator, “KANDAHAR RESORT.”

“The gyros are pretty good, actually,” Tracey said.

“What’s a gyro exactly?” Ashley asked sheepishly. Tracey showed her the brown beef wrapped around the silver spit on which the lamb circled around and around. The long line of service members queuing for the seven-dollar pita sandwich spoke to its popularity. “All right, let’s try it.”

First meal in Kandahar and already it’s an adventure, Lane thought to herself as they walked back to their new rooms to finish unpacking their gear and head to bed.

She looked down at her black Timex.

Tomorrow at this time we’ll just be getting ready to go out on mission . . . Lane thought. And she remembered the words Captain Matthews had left for them.

Take a measured course and a wide berth within your lines of operation. Show us all what you are capable of.

Lane promised herself she would do no less.

9

Operation “Fit In”

* * *

H
ey, Ash, check it out!” Lane yelled. She was pushing a large box toward Ashley’s room with her boot. The girls had been eagerly awaiting this package from Fort Bragg. The carton displayed a large letter
P
encircled by a
C
, the logo of Crye Precision, a New York City–based company founded by two Cooper Union graduates in 2000 to “revolutionize the soldier” by creating a new line of camouflage uniforms and body armor for the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Forces. The Cryes were designed to work in every environment where America’s soldiers deployed, from desert to forest to swamp to city, and in every type of climate, elevation, and light condition. Members of Ranger Regiment wear the Cryes every night on mission, and the CSTs had lobbied Leda relentlessly for the same uniforms. She, in turn, had pushed relentlessly on her team’s behalf. The CSTs thought they looked ridiculous out there wearing their regular Army “MultiCams.” As if they didn’t stand out enough.

“It’s like Christmas,” Lane joked as she pulled the green and brown uniforms from the box and started handing them out to her teammates.

The soldiers laughed, but their reverence for the Cryes was real. They were undeniably proud to have the chance to wear the uniform worn by the Army’s hardest fighters. And with their built-in kneepads, the Cryes would be a big help when the CSTs took a knee after running out of the helicopter. The Crye top was another prized
item with its elbow pads and lightweight, breathable material that minimizes sweat under body armor. It also has a high, zip collar that keeps gear like rifle straps from brushing and irritating a soldier’s neck. The Rangers who popped their collars reminded Lane of John Travolta in
Saturday Night Fever
, and for weeks she would think about Tony Manero on the dance floor every time she boarded the bird alongside her platoon.

“Uh, Lane, look at this,” Ashley said, parading up and down the tiny space between their bunk beds. She was drowning in camouflage that was at least two sizes too big: the waist was a solid eight inches wider than her hips and the waistband nearly reached her armpits when she pulled the pants up. The shirt was so tight it felt like the top of a wetsuit. Thank goodness no one will ever see it, she thought, since she would always be wearing another top and full body armor over it.

She looked like a little kid borrowing her parents’ camouflage, and Lane was nearly doubled over with laughter.

Lane had the opposite issue as Ashley: her pants were tight in spots where they should have been loose and loose where they needed to be tight. The area around the groin, which featured a nylon-cotton blend zip fly with a handy Velcro closure for quick action, was somewhat puffed out because something the manufacturers had intended to cover was missing.

“I don’t think they planned on girls wearing these,” Lane deadpanned.

Ashley asked around to see if any of the Rangers had suggestions for remedying her wardrobe challenge. She got lucky and scored a handsome pair of green suspenders that did the trick; from that moment on they became her signature.

Of course, their sartorial problem was hardly a first for women in the military. In World War II, the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps had been supplied with uniforms made by manufacturers that only produced clothes for men. Women’s garment makers charged higher
prices for every item and the Army wasn’t about to pay more to outfit the ladies. One woman in the 1950s noted that the women’s uniforms looked like they “were intended for a race of giants.” Mildred McAfee, the first director of the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) in the U.S. Navy, complained they “looked like a comic opera costume.” Nothing, it seemed, would fit a woman’s form: jackets had heavy shoulder pads and were tightly fit in the chest area; skirts were too narrow for a woman’s wider hips. Shoes and neckties were deemed unfeminine. The basic design may not have been “all that bad,” one servicewoman said, but “the end product could not have been worse from any standpoint.”