Ashley's War (32 page)

Just before 2 a.m., barely an hour after she arrived, Anne headed back to the parking lot and sat in the truck, staring ahead. She would not cry that night—she had too much to do. In fact, the tears would not come for months.

But the grief enveloped her immediately.

A
lready, the word was spreading among the CSTs.

“Hey, do you know Ashley White?” a Ranger poked his head into the small tent that Tristan shared with another CST at a base in another part of Afghanistan. The entire CST class—direct action members and those who served on village-stability operations—had been separated for two and a half months and were now spread around the country.

“Oh, yeah, is she here?” Tristan replied enthusiastically. Recently, some fellow CSTs from the VSO missions had come to visit; she was thrilled at the notion that Ashley was there.

“No, she is dead, she was just killed in action,” he said.

“What?!” Tristan jumped to her feet. It was impossible, he couldn’t be right. But an instant later she had a phone call in the TOC, and it brought confirmation of the terrible news. It was Leda; she said she needed to speak urgently with Tristan, but first wanted to be sure she was in a quiet place.

“I want to let you know that First Lieutenant Ashley White has expired,” she said. She continued speaking, something about an explosion in Kandahar and Operation Enduring Freedom. But Tristan had stopped listening.

Cheese expires, milk expires, deli meat expires, Tristan thought. Beautiful twenty-four-year-olds don’t.

She put down the phone and walked toward the door of the operations center. She was suddenly feeling claustrophobic, and had to get out of there. Her mind couldn’t grasp what she now knew to be true. Heavy cloud cover had stopped them from going out on mission earlier that night, which is why the entire unit remained on base. But the clouds had passed, and now a crescent moon shone bright and clear. The stars formed a diamond-encrusted canopy overhead. Tristan stepped onto the three-hundred-meter gravel running track that circled the perimeter of her base and began running. Somehow the little track felt endless. Over and over, lap after lap, she pounded out the miles. On her iPod she played one song on a loop, Norah Jones’s “The Long Way Home.”

I’m so sorry, Ashley, she thought as she ran. Looking up at the sky, she couldn’t help but think it was Ashley who had brought the stars out to offer her some comfort. That would be just like her to think only of other people at a moment like this.

H
undreds of miles away, in another part of the country, Sarah’s XO took a rare step into the all-female hooch. He looked even more battle-exhausted than usual. Sarah was in her lightweight, half-cylinder-shaped tent known as a K-Span counting and sorting baby socks she had received from her old Girl Scout troop back home in New England to hand out to the kids she met on missions.

“Major Barrow needs to see you in the TOC.”

He had a weird expression on his face, as if he had eaten lousy food or heard bad news.

“Did something happen?” she asked.

He nodded.

“In Kandahar,” he said. Reading his expression, Sarah knew that something was very wrong.

“I know it is one of us,” she muttered to herself as she walked quickly from her quarters to the Tactical Operations Center. “I just don’t know who it is yet.”

She entered the TOC to find Leda typing frantically on her laptop. In the hurry to get the CSTs out onto the battlefield—and perhaps in the belief that they would remain far from the front lines, since the combat ban remained in force—the women had never filled out their casualty packets with paperwork stating where they would be buried and listing all of their awards. As she typed, Leda was speaking on the phone to Anne, assembling biographical details that would accompany the news release announcing Ashley’s death.

Sarah heard a snatch of Leda’s side of the conversation—“and what year did she get that award?”—and knew someone had been killed.

“Who is it?” Sarah asked Lane, who was sitting next to Leda. Lane motioned toward the door and together they walked outside.

Between sobs, Lane replied, “Zhari district.”

“IED explosion on mission.”

“Ashley.”

Throughout the night CSTs across Afghanistan learned about Ashley’s death, struggled to believe it, and put off the pain of their own grief by making sure their teammates heard the news from Leda or a fellow CST. Each of them felt the need to keep her composure, not only for Ashley but for the program itself. No CST had ever died in battle before and the scrutiny would be high; they all understood this immediately. Keep it together, they counseled themselves, as the long night wore on.

B
ack at their base, Anne was navigating the maze of mundane administrative duties that a soldier’s death unleashes. Cassie and her
partner Isabel had been flown to Kandahar to help complete Ashley’s casualty packet, beginning with her rank and the recent CAB award. They included her dates of service with the North Carolina Guard unit and at Fort Sam Houston, where she got her medical training. They all knew one another so well that it took hardly any time at all.

One of the Rangers brought Anne a few documents his unit used for their soldiers, and offered his condolences. When he left, Anne saw that a group of men from Ranger Regiment was in the hallway, crying for their friends and teammates. Loss had won a round that night.

In the small hours of the morning, the CSTs sat in their little broom closet office, a place that was filled with reminders of Ashley. It didn’t feel real to any of them.

“Do you think they’ll shut us down?” Cassie finally asked the question that was on everyone’s mind. She knew that Ashley’s death would propel the CST program into the public eye, and the real question was: how would the American public react when it learned that a woman had been present on a direct action, special operations combat mission? The American public knew more about military dogs and their handlers than it did about anything called a CST. A lot of people were going to want to know just how a group of women had ended up in the heart of the fight against the insurgency in Afghanistan.

“I have no idea,” Anne answered. At that moment the only thing she knew for certain was that everything she and her teammates did from then on would define how their program looked to the outside world. Doing the job superbly was the most important thing they could do for Ashley. They were all soldiers, and death was part of their business. Ashley hadn’t wanted any special treatment in life, and she certainly wouldn’t have wanted it in death.

And still, no one knew how much information they could or should include about their mission, since the CST program had,
from its very beginnings, navigated a fine line with regard to the combat ban. So Anne labored over every word; her eyes stung from fatigue and heartbreak as she stared at her computer screen and typed.

1st Lt. Ashley Irene White, 24, was born Sept. 3, 1987 and was a native of Alliance, Ohio. She was killed during combat operations in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan when the assault force she was supporting triggered an improvised explosive device.

She was assigned to the 230th Brigade Support Battalion, 30th Heavy Brigade Combat Team, North Carolina National Guard, Goldsboro, N.C., and served as a member of the Cultural Support Team attached to a Joint Special Operations Task Force in Afghanistan.

This was her first deployment to Afghanistan in support of the War on Terror.

Anne’s next duty was to pack up and inventory Ashley’s room, standard procedure following a military death. She walked the football field’s distance back to their barracks and entered the small bunk that had been Ashley’s home for ten weeks. It had felt almost cozy when she crossed the hall from her room to visit Ashley earlier that day.

She unfolded an Army inventory form and began tallying:

Uniform tops

Uniform bottoms

Underwear

Medical books

Pairs of socks

She counted them all and in a slow, neat hand wrote the number of each item on the form.

Among the books and pictures was a DVD, white instead of the usual silver and stamped in black cursive letters:

Our Wedding Portraits

The proofs of Ashley’s wedding photos from that May had arrived recently. Ashley had promised to show Anne the pictures next time they had a free day.

E
arly the next morning hundreds from around Kandahar Airfield—soldiers, special operations commanders, staff, and dignitaries—gathered on the tarmac as the CSTs and Rangers prepared to send their friends and teammates home.

Bagpipes sounded the mournful notes of “Amazing Grace” over a loudspeaker as the ramp ceremony, a tradition marking the final send-off for a fallen soldier, began. The crowd stood around the three flag-draped aluminum cases on the earthen field. The base’s flag flew at half-staff.

Cassie’s CST partner Isabel and a group of Rangers volunteered to carry Ashley’s transfer case down the airfield and onto the plane that would take her to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, home to the military’s largest mortuary and the traditional first stop on American soil for military personnel killed overseas. Cassie, as the most senior officer among them, led the ceremony, placing Ashley onto the cavernous C-17. She called for the soldiers to lower the silver case to the ground and, a few moments later, to present arms and salute their fallen comrade one final time.

But as she called for Isabel and the Rangers to return to their feet after lowering Ashley’s casket, Cassie realized she had made a mistake: she had underestimated the sentiment of her Ranger colleagues. The men needed more time to bid their CST farewell, and two soldiers remained crouched next to Ashley’s aluminum case for a few moments longer before rising to make their final salute.

Ashley’s pallbearers filed off the plane and onto the tarmac just beneath its wing. Now that they had no work to occupy them Cassie and Isabel both felt the enormity of Ashley’s death. Cassie heard sniffles all around her as she and her fellow soldiers tried to hold back their tears for Sergeant First Class Kris Domeij, Private First Class Christopher Horns, and First Lieutenant Ashley White. As he stood in formation behind her, one of the Rangers who had carried Ashley onto the plane patted Cassie on the arm.

“She was a great soldier,” he whispered.

Throughout the ceremony Cassie, Anne, and Isabel each noted one heartening fact amid the terrible loss: Special Operations Command had made no distinction in death between Ashley—the enabler, the CST, the female—and the two Rangers who had died alongside her. The command treated them all equally: before the ceremony they placed Ranger coins on top of each casket, and afterward hung Ashley’s photo on the wall of Ranger fallen, alongside pictures of Kristoffer Domeij and Christopher Horns.

It was small comfort, but one that would have made Ashley proud.

And then the plane soared into the sky.

N
adia awoke that morning in the combat hospital to find a collection of metal pins keeping her right arm attached to the rest of her body. She had nearly lost the limb, one of the medics told her; it had hung on only by tendons. After losing three soldiers that night, the doctors had been bound and determined to avoid an amputation. But that was a detail Nadia didn’t yet know.

“Nice toenail polish,” one of the hospital staff commented. He clearly hadn’t seen red toes on any of his patients before. Nadia hadn’t bothered to ask him for a mirror, but she did wonder what her makeup looked like after all that had happened. She was sure she was a mess.

She saw a bunch of Rangers milling around, visiting fellow soldiers
who had been injured. She wondered when she was going to see Ashley. She was sure Ashley knew what had happened and could fill her in on the parts of the night she was now fighting to remember.

Then Anne appeared at her bedside. She looked tired, Nadia thought, like she hadn’t slept. In truth she had been awake for well over twenty-four hours.

“Where’s Ashley?” Nadia asked.

“She’s not here,” Anne said. She looked down while she spoke in a tone that had no emotion left in it. “She’s gone. She didn’t make it.”

Nadia’s mind sorted through shards of images from the night before: the tinfoil-covered leftovers, the rush to slip on Ashley’s Crye combat shirt, the helicopter flight, Ashley talking to one of the Rangers, the patch of grass. The helicopter flight. Now Anne was standing at her side, telling her that Ashley was gone and the Rangers had lost two men.

Nadia’s aging gear had been her saving grace. That short walk to find even footing to fiddle with her NODs had kept her from the brunt of the blast.

The IED had taken her friend and teammate and had nearly taken her own arm. Now it would take her off the battlefield. But the blast had not taken her memories.

She would think of Ashley every day.

15

A Grief Observed

* * *

T
he doorbell rang. And rang.

It took Jason a few minutes to realize that the strange sound that awakened him at the early hour of 6 a.m. was coming from his front door. It was a rental near Fort Sill in Lawton, where he was taking an officers’ artillery training course. He wondered, who on earth even knew he had come to Oklahoma?

He fumbled his way to the door still in the T-shirt and shorts he was sleeping in.

Not that he had been sleeping well. Earlier that week he learned that he would indeed be returning to Fort Bragg, which meant he and Ashley could stay in Fayetteville and the ranch home she loved. Plus, Ashley could proceed with her goal to keep working with JSOC, this time as a civilian. They had both been thrilled. She had six months left in her deployment; he now knew where he’d be working and was moving forward in his own career. The couple had planned to discuss everything by phone Friday morning, but Ashley had sent a note in the middle of the night Thursday his time saying her team had gotten in too late for her to call. She knew Jason had an artillery exam that morning and didn’t want to wake him. She wished him luck on the test and said she would call that night. He answered her email as soon as he woke up: