Ashley's War (36 page)

“Stay with me, Ashley,” Tristan silently told her friend. “I think it’s going to be a long night.”

An hour later she was running off the Chinook and headed into what looked like the Afghan version of a trailer park, with homes all built close to one another. She and Anne, on a rare mission together, divided the labor: Anne searched the women while Tristan talked to them. It
was
going to be a long night; dozens of women and children were now standing in front of them.

Tristan flipped up her NODs and began talking to a pretty teenage girl with light green eyes and wearing a regal purple dress. She began asking her about what was happening in her neighborhood.

The night wind blew cold, and some of the other soldiers wore their puffy Army jackets. Being a New Englander long accustomed to running in twenty-degree weather, Tristan wore just a couple of layers—a waffle top, a shirt, and a vest—under her uniform.

Tristan noticed the girl looked nervous, as she bounced from one foot to another and looked over at her mother every time she spoke. When Tristan asked her once more what was happening in the house, quietly, the teenager started to talk. Yes, she said, the guy they were looking for was there in one of the houses. She didn’t know anything more than that, but of that she was certain.

Just then Tristan heard the call over the radio:

“Nothing here,” the Ranger said. “Let’s move on.”

“Platoon Sergeant, where are you?” Tristan spoke into her radio. “I just got something here. I think we should stay.”

It was rare for her to push for more time, but the Rangers had encouraged her to speak up if she had something they actually needed to know; she was part of the team. Each night before mission she
and her Ranger counterpart would exchange notes and talk about what they expected and what they were looking for as they sought to keep the pressure on the insurgent networks of Taliban and al-Qaeda guys operating around the area. Even out on the objective the Ranger and the CST would often huddle quickly to share anything critical they were learning and finding.

“Okay, we’ll give you ten more minutes,” he said; “see what you come up with.”

While Anne spoke with the girl’s mother, the teenager began telling Tristan about the men who often came around to the house, and some of the conversations she had heard.

Tristan wrote down as many details as she could. She grabbed her Ranger counterpart and he agreed: they would search the house once more, especially the back part of the compound where the animals lived.

Soon enough the Rangers unearthed more than a dozen, not yet connected, pressure-plate IEDs hidden in the ground. Even more immediately relevant to that evening’s success, they learned from the insurgent singled out by the girl in the purple dress that IEDs set to detonate lay buried all along the path they were just about to walk to the next compound.

If they had moved on as planned, they would have stepped right onto them.

That night, after her trek over brambles and through wadis and back to the helicopter that would lift them home, Tristan went to listen to the post-mission brief and offer up a quick slide on what she had learned that night. On the way out she saluted her friend once more.

“Thanks, Ash.”

A
pril came at last. For the last few weeks Tristan and Anne had joined some of the operators on their camp in “tan ops,” which entailed staying up long enough to catch the first rays of the potent
Kandahar sun. No one wanted to return home pale and wan. Or fat. Out went the Christmas cookies and care package M&Ms. No carbs. Only proteins, veggies, and energy drinks now.

Tristan couldn’t believe they’d soon be going home. She dreamt about laying around aimlessly with no place to go and spending entire days reading celebrity gossip magazines and watching TV with her sisters and brother.

I’m going to miss this place, she thought. The guys she worked with, the missions she went on, the women and children she talked to each night, the children and their beautiful eyes. The moments of compassion and caring buried among the horrible moments of war. Even the smell of the poo pond.

On their way back to America all the CSTs would meet in Bagram for one last time as a team. They would fill out the last of their paperwork and find out for certain whether they could stay on as CSTs doing the job they now knew well, felt qualified for, and loved. Tristan missed Kate and Amber and Cassie and Sarah and Kimberly and all the other girls. She couldn’t wait to hear their stories; she knew that as soon as they started to tell them it would feel as if they hadn’t been apart for the last four months.

But before she boarded a plane out of Kandahar for the last time she would write one last letter.

We are leaving today.

Everything is packed and I have returned to my room for a few short moments. Just wanted to take one last look at the bed where I spent so many hours lying awake. Where I silently thanked God for returning me every night. I wanted to look one last time at Ashley’s sneakers. Just waiting faithfully to be taken for a spin. I wanted to thank Ashley for the quiet strength she has given me over the last few months. I know we all have a lot of talking to Ashley to do in the next few weeks. I know
watching KAF disappear will be hard. We will feel like we are leaving Ashley for good. But we are not leaving Ashley anywhere. Ashley will be with all of us, wherever we go, for the rest of our lives.

Goodbye little room.

Epilogue

O
n Memorial Day 2012, Lieutenant General John Mulholland stood before an assembly of grieving families to honor the Army special operations soldiers who had given everything to their country.

“It is important that we never forget that Ashley and her brothers-in-arms were truly exceptional people,” he said during the annual ceremony held on the U.S. Army Special Operations Forces Memorial Plaza. “They had and always will have a value beyond measure; they are supremely competent in what they chose to do, were clearly committed to making a difference in the world in which they lived, and they unquestionably did so.”

Bob and Debbie White, along with Jason and Ashley’s siblings Brittany and Josh, sat among the audience on their folding chairs, holding red roses and listening as Ashley’s name took its place on the Army Special Operations Command Memorial Wall alongside SFC Kris Domeij, PFC Chris Horns, and eight other Rangers killed in action in 2011. Ashley was the first CST whose name would be etched on a nameplate and join the granite memorial to the fallen.

B
ack at Bagram a month earlier, a number of the CSTs asked if they could extend their mission. But it was not to be. CST was a one-year deployment and now it was time for the soldiers to return to their home units. The next class awaited. More female soldiers had put their hands up to serve with the fighters of special operations and now it was their turn to deploy.

The problem was, returning to their pre-CST lives was the last thing many of the soldiers wanted.

Cassie couldn’t fathom going home. She had been out regularly
on missions with her strike force. She had cheered when her partner, Isabel, had been nominated by the Rangers for an IMPACT Award for finding explosives and other intel-related items that “would have been overlooked” in her absence. She even had the privilege of having one of the officers she served under inscribe her copy of Sebastian Junger’s book
War
just before she left her base.

“You are a true warrior leader and your exploits in ‘Leading the Way’ for women in combat will be told one day,” he wrote to Cassie. This officer had been one of the soldiers featured in the book she had carried with her to Afghanistan.

Next thing she knew, she found herself in an auditorium at Bagram listening to Kate explain to one of the generals who had come to offer his thanks to the CSTs that she and some of the others wanted to keep doing what they had been doing.

“Sir, with all due respect, you don’t understand,” Kate had dared to blurt out. Given the ban on women in direct action roles, “This is it for us. There is no place else for us to go. We have done nothing better and will do nothing better. And now we are being sent back to our units.
Nothing
else will compare to this.”

When they returned to Fort Bragg, Cassie walked back into the Landmark Inn, this time without the hope and excitement of her last visit. How could she possibly go back to her old Army assignment and “normal life”? Whatever that was. The only people who understood her now were her fellow CSTs. They were as much her family as her family. Maybe more so.

S
ix more CST classes followed in the years that intervened. I recently had the privilege of spending an evening with a group of women from different years of the program, nearly all of whom had served the direct action mission. The connection they shared, even among those who hadn’t before met, was obvious and immediate. What struck me that night was the same sense of intense friendship I felt the first time I met Ashley’s teammates. They finished one
another’s sentences, served as each other’s career counselors, divorce therapists, spiritual advisors, and baby shower hosts. It was clear the soldiers were bound by a bond that no one outside their small, invisible band of CSTs would ever truly understand. Leda’s leadership, Ashley’s loss, the mission they had loved and couldn’t go back to, the fact that no one outside the group of soldiers and SEALs alongside whom they served knew what they had done and seen, all combined to create an unbreakable connection forged at war and cemented at home. They were all they had and they understood why.

In the years that followed Ashley White-Stumpf’s death, being her parent became a full-time job for Bob and Debbie White. Ceremony after ceremony, memorial after memorial, they would sit in the audience and hear people honor and talk about Ashley. Sometimes they spoke as well. Each week they returned to her grave behind the church to clear the many mementos people had left her: kettle bells, silver charms, flowers, letters on lined notebook paper telling her she was their “motivation.” Their mailbox filled with letters from people who knew her in Afghanistan, had met her in Ohio, or simply had read her story in the local newspaper. At Kent State a memorial scholarship and an annual run were established in Ashley’s name. Her old high school hung her photo in a glass case. The North Carolina National Guard unveiled a granite memorial to her at the Goldsboro National Guard Armory. Her brother Josh gave a powerful speech at the Ohio Statehouse memorializing his sister and addressing the loss experienced by every family who loses a son or daughter at war. The Ohio legislature named part of Route 44 in Marlboro Township the 1st Lt. Ashley White-Stumpf Memorial Highway.

I
n January 2013 the ban on women in ground combat units officially ended. The rules had at last caught up with reality.

“A hundred and fifty-two women in uniform have died serving this nation in Iraq and Afghanistan. Female service members
have faced the reality of combat, proven their willingness to fight and, yes, to die to defend their fellow Americans,” said Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta at a news conference with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey. “Every time I visited the warzone, every time I’ve met with troops, reviewed military operations, and talked to wounded warriors, I’ve been impressed with the fact that everyone—everyone, men and women alike—everyone is committed to doing the job. They’re fighting and they’re dying together. And the time has come for our policies to recognize that reality.”

Said Panetta, “If they are willing to put their lives on the line, then we ought to recognize that they deserve a chance to serve in any capacity they want.”

Six months later, in June 2013, the Cultural Support Teams came up at a Pentagon news conference focused on integrating women into jobs that previously had been off-limits to them, including roles as special operators.

“Quite frankly, I was encouraged by just the physical performance of some of the young girls who aspire to go into the cultural support teams,” said SOCOM’s Major General Bennet Sacolick, who called the program a “huge success.” He went on to say, “They very well may provide a foundation for ultimate integration.”

By January 1, 2016, special operations command and each of the services will either fully open up all roles to women or explain the reasons why they will stay male-only. All exemptions will have to be approved by both the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

O
n Veteran’s Day 2013 First Lieutenant Ashley White-Stumpf marked another milestone: she became the first woman to have a tree dedicated to her on the Memorial Walk of Honor at the National Infantry Museum in Columbus, Georgia, just outside Fort Benning. Her fellow CSTs led by Amber and Lane raised the money for the tree and plaque in her honor. Then, almost exactly two years after
Ashley’s death, a second CST, First Lieutenant Jennifer Moreno, an Army nurse, died in action in Kandahar Province alongside two Army Rangers and an Army criminal investigator. She would join Ashley on that Memorial Walk.