Ashley's War (29 page)

“Really? You think I could still contribute to this work and be a mom?” Ashley asked. She looked thrilled, and surprised.

“Definitely,” Leda said. “You can do it all, Ash. You are going to be a phenomenal mom.” Leda knew that the perception of special operations was of hard-fighting warriors who lived out of duffle bags and never saw their families. But many of the civilians who supported them had careers that were far more family-friendly. Leda wanted to make sure Ashley understood that she didn’t have to deploy herself to support the men whose work she so respected. She could contribute in other ways
and
achieve her personal goals.

But for all her focus on a future family with Jason, Ashley still hadn’t told her own family in Ohio exactly what she was doing in Afghanistan. Beyond her conversation with Josh on the fishing boat, Ashley had left them largely in the dark. Anne, who went out on her own missions every night, decided to approach her partner about the wisdom of that decision one early afternoon. Lane had moved a month earlier to another part of Afghanistan to work with another team, and it was now just the two of them in Kandahar.

“I know that you don’t want to hear this,” Anne began. Bad weather had kept the teams grounded and the two soldiers were running around the base before hunkering down for a CrossFit workout. “But you really might want to think about telling your family what you’re doing. Or at least let Josh or Jason tell them about this job.”

Anne knew how upset Mr. White would be; Ashley had told
her, only half in jest, that her dad would have taken Jason’s baseball bat and broken her knees to stop her from leaving if he had understood the reality of her assignment. Anne didn’t want to overstep her boundaries; the nature of their work created an almost instant bond, but they had only known each other for seven months, and Anne was now raising one of the most deeply personal questions a soldier faces. Still, it was one thing for Ashley to choose not to tell her mom and dad about her work before coming to Kandahar and understanding the daily realities of the role. It was another thing now that she knew the risks.

“This is a bad area; it’s incredibly dangerous,” Anne said. “It’s not impossible to imagine that one of us might not make it home, or might go home without all our parts.”

Ashley nodded, her eyes on her feet, pounding the pavement. “I know,” she replied. “I know I should. I will.”

Ashley spoke with her parents regularly, calling them faithfully every Sunday night, which was afternoon in Ohio. Her camp had a common area with computers and phones the soldiers could use to reach family and friends back home; it was one of the Army’s strategies for boosting morale among the troops. Her parents would pass the phone back and forth, sitting in their comfy loungers facing the television in the ranch house in Marlboro. The conversations always began with Ashley peppering her parents with questions about everything and everyone in their hometown, and thanking her mom for the delicious cookies and for all the coffee and bread mixes. But whenever Bob or Debbie asked her about her work she swiftly changed the subject. As they understood it, she was part of some special team and she worked at a hospital in Kandahar. That was it.

Not long after her conversation with Anne, Ashley called her twin sister, Brittany. They had shared everything for twenty-four years and it felt strange now that thousands of miles separated them. They used email and Facebook to stay connected, but when they wanted to speak about something important—a situation they were
going through or a challenge they wanted to tackle—Ashley would head to the common room and call her sister.

“Hello?” Brittany whispered into her handset. It was 2 a.m. in Ohio and she was just leaving a patient’s room at the end of her shift as a neurology unit nurse at the local hospital. Brittany never took personal calls during her shift, but this was different; her sister was calling from Afghanistan. She popped into a patient’s bathroom to answer her phone in a whisper; the sisters agreed to speak in an hour, when Brittany was on her way home and could have an uninterrupted conversation.

Later, Ashley thanked Brittany for sending her the photos from her first fitness and figure competition, a sport that combines female bodybuilding with gymnastics and emphasizes taut muscles rather than bulging, gigantic ones. Brittany had won the top spot her first time out. Ashley, of course, was unsurprised.

“You looked incredible!” Ashley said, and told her she showed the pictures to her Ranger buddies. “You have some serious admirers over here; they were all talking about you.”

Sounding like the older sister she wasn’t, she told Brittany how proud she was of her, and made her promise to keep up her fitness routines and do more shows.

Brittany promised, and described the rigors of her diet and workout regimen, which sounded nearly as strict and disciplined as Ashley’s. The competitions required participants to be in razor-sharp shape and to perform choreographed routines to show off their finely toned physiques. Between her nursing job, her fitness and figure work, and preparations for a graduate program in leadership and management, Brittany was working around the clock, not unlike her sister.

Before she left for Afghanistan Ashley had mentioned to Brittany that she had won a competition of sorts, and had been selected for some elite assignment along with a group of extremely impressive women: some had served as FBI interrogators, others had gone to
war three times already. Still others had won Bronze Star Medals for Valor. She had confessed then that she was intimidated by them. Now she talked to Brittany about her teammates with the fondness of the close friends and equals they had become. She told her about her conversation with Leda and how much support she had offered her. She felt certain about wanting to become a physician’s assistant, she said, even though she wasn’t sure she was “smart enough” for all the exams and advanced study that lay ahead. Brittany interrupted her sister and said she knew Ashley would be able to handle whatever came. “You always do, Ash, you just gut it out and work harder than everyone else. You’ll ace the exams.”

“You remind me so much of Leda, my OIC,” Ashley said. “She’s athletic and outgoing and beautiful just like you. And a huge cheerleader for all of us. I’ve been so lucky to have her support these last few months. You’ll have to meet her when I get back.”

Ashley paused.

“I can’t wait to see you when I get back, sissy. Love you.”

“Good night.”

Brittany by now had reached her house. She would grab a few hours of rest, head over to lift weights at the gym, then make her way back to the hospital.

Brittany knew she would have to tell her parents about the call. She felt certain they’d want her to replay every moment of the almost normal conversation she had shared in the middle of a war with her best friend and closest confidante.

On the other side of the world, Ashley was off to the chow hall with Anne for her evening’s “breakfast,” then due in the briefing room to find out the details of her team’s mission that night.

13

The Lies of War

* * *

A
few hundred miles to Ashley’s north not long afterward, Kate found herself in the middle of a hell of a night.

“Is there anyone inside?” Kate asked a middle-aged Afghan woman who was standing in the huddle of women and children to the left of the compound. “Anyone still in the house?” Her nineteen-year-old interpreter, an Afghan-American from the Bronx who went by the nickname “Angel,” relayed the question.

The mission had started off a mess and gotten worse. Kate’s team was seeking a fighter who had already evaded their grasp several times. This was the second compound they had targeted that evening and since it was his own home, they believed he was likely to be hiding out there.

Two women and several children streamed out of the house as soon as the American and Afghan forces arrived, but so far no one was talking. Kate’s job was to protect the women she was speaking to while getting the information that would assist and protect the men with whom she served.
Quickly.

The Afghan forces with her special ops team had taken the lead in tonight’s mission. This was part of a broader push to have Afghan security forces lead their country’s war as the Americans began their long-planned withdrawal. Several Afghan soldiers were now inside the compound hunting for the man their intel told them was a key Taliban fighter in the region.

“Is there anyone inside?” Kate repeated.

The Afghan woman’s face remained expressionless. “She says there is no one in there,” Angel told Kate.

Kate, Angel, and the two women stood about a dozen feet from the breach. Around them sat a cluster of children, ranging in age from infant to teenager. Kate kept thinking it didn’t make sense. This guy
had
to be there. Then again, he had known enough to throw them off the trail earlier that night. Maybe he was just wasting their time some more.

And then, just a second later, came a deafening explosion, near enough to rattle the ground on which they stood.

“CST, get those women out of here
.
”

Kate heard the command over the radio a moment after the explosion. Then came the
pop-pop-pop-pop
of gun fire in a stream of percussion.

“Get up, everyone, let’s go, let’s go!” Kate spoke the words in English quietly but firmly and seconds later she heard them again in Angel’s Pashto translation. She pointed in the direction of a building that was fifty feet away, motioning Angel to move quickly. “Get them to that building to the right, at the corner!” Kate told her. They needed to get to the other side of the cement wall, just outside the compound. That should be far enough to keep them out of the firefight
and
within the line of sight so she could monitor what was happening and ensure that she and Angel didn’t get left behind when the mission ended.

“Let’s go, come on!” Angel said to the two women. She grabbed the hands of two children, one on each side, and took off running for the cover of the building. Meanwhile, the Afghan and American soldiers were returning the heavy fire that was coming from the compound. Kate and Angel had worked together long enough that the young terp knew to move everyone to shelter if shots erupted and things got hot. Kate took the rear to make sure no women or children got left behind in the chaos.

As she directed Angel, Kate scooped up a small baby, barefoot and crying. She threw the little guy over her left shoulder and took off running as the sound of gunfire grew louder behind her. Using her right arm she grabbed the hand of a small girl and drew her close to her body.

“Stay with me, stay with me!” Kate urged, hoping the child would trust and understand her movements even if she didn’t understand her words.

Suddenly Kate felt the jagged terrain take hold of her left foot. She began tumbling forward as one of her boots got trapped in a deep hole she hadn’t detected through the green film of her night-vision goggles.

The baby, Kate thought. Instinctively she held him tight against her chest as the momentum of her fall sent her spinning into a diving, forward roll. She released the little girl’s hand just in time to keep her from falling, too.

A second later Kate lay on her back with the baby tucked up against her body armor. He hadn’t moved despite the somersault and was now just looking at her wide-eyed and silent.

Kate felt the baby’s warm breath on her neck, looked up at the twinkling stars above, and heard the rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire around her, now maybe three dozen feet away.

What the fuck is my job right now? she asked herself as she hugged the baby tight and again took the hand of the little girl who was standing nearby. This is crazy.

She jumped up, the two children in tow once more, and took off at a brisk trot for the building where Angel waited for her with the adult women and the other children.

“Do we have everyone?” Kate began counting all the women and children. They had indeed managed to move all of them to safety—even if she had eaten it in front of all of them on the way there.

Kate now looked at the middle-aged woman, the one who had told her there was no one inside. She had lied right to her face, sending
the Afghan forces into a house where a shooter was lying in wait. The firefight Kate had heard—and shepherded the women and children away from —had been started by this woman’s husband.

Now Kate heard over the radio that someone had been hit. She was about to start questioning the woman about who else was inside when an Afghan soldier ran over to where they stood.

“You lied!” the soldier screamed at the Afghan woman. “You said there was nobody in there!” He stood only a few feet from her and his fury poured forth in an avalanche of rage. “You just got two Afghans shot. You didn’t get
Americans
hurt. You only killed Afghans.
Your own people
.”

The woman was not about to give him the satisfaction of tears, but her face now showed the emotion of someone who understood that her own husband, the man who started this gunfight, was unlikely to survive the night.

Kate found a secure corner of level ground for the little group, but the uneven terrain meant that flat space was in high demand. A medevac helicopter sent to tend to the wounded Afghan soldiers descended not far from where they sat. The women and children all pressed up tight against the building to give the medics space to run in and get the injured soldiers out of the building.

A few minutes later two stretchers passed within feet of where they all sat. One Afghan soldier lay silent and motionless as his brothers-in-arms carried him to the awaiting Chinook. The next stretcher passed by, even closer. Kate heard the moans of the second Afghan soldier, who was writhing from the agony of his wounds.

With nothing to do now but wait, Kate replayed in her mind that evening’s mission. A few nights earlier another Afghan woman had told her immediately that the American and Afghan team had come to the wrong compound. Her information led them directly to the correct house, where they found the insurgent they sought.