Ashley's War (11 page)

Kate now was fully motivated. Whoever she is, Kate thought, that girl knows what she’s doing. Kate pressed ahead and picked up a teammate who had dropped right in front of her.

A half hour later it was Rigby’s turn to “die.” She had already carried several of her more petite teammates to safety and joked to herself that the real test would come when they had to carry her, for while she was hardly big, she was taller and thicker than most of the other women in their tent. Finally the instructor came by and “killed” her.

By that time the temperature had climbed well above eighty degrees and the soldiers had sweated through every inch of their camouflage uniforms. Rigby’s blisters bled freely and she was soaked through with perspiration from top to bottom. It was almost a relief to lie quietly on the dirt lane, playing dead and gazing at the gray sky, waiting to get picked up by her teammates. And then she looked down and saw that her pants were soaked in blood from her waist to her knees. She felt a jolt of panic wondering if all their combat role-playing had started to play tricks on her mind. And then she burst out in laughter. She had been out there in the field for well over twelve hours and had somehow missed the fact that her period had started hours before.

Kate looked over, saw her “dead” buddy laughing, then followed Rigby’s eyes to the source of the moment’s absurdity. “Oh shit,” she said, “this one’s going to be interesting!” She was already hatching a strategy for how the team would carry her safely home.

But Rigby darted off in another direction, and behind the spare cover of a spindly North Carolina tree she dealt with her feminine hygiene.

“I just gotta take care of my business,” she shouted back. “Be there in an instant . . .” Kate looked on, trying unsuccessfully to suppress her own laughter.

“The bears are going to have a field day!” Kate shouted to her teammates.

Along with a woman’s inability to carry a comrade off the field, another reason soldiers frequently gave for keeping women out of the infantry was that their periods would attract bears out in the wild. Among Army women there was a long tradition of joking about the ridiculousness of this idea, as if a bear would find a menstrual cycle any more attractive than they did.

The male cadre was standing twenty feet from the women and watched without saying a word. His own training had taught him to be stoic at all times and to betray no spontaneous expression. This guy is good, the soldiers thought, but of course he had never dealt with an all-female selection before and this body stuff was entirely new terrain. His eyes grew large, full of what Kate later called “shock and awe,” but he stood there and simply watched as the women arranged themselves like nothing at all had happened, then got on with the task at hand.

“Okay, let’s go,” Rigby called out a minute later. Another teammate hoisted her up with help from Kate and another soldier and heaved Rigby’s torso behind her shoulders and on top of her rucksack. The fake-dead Rigby hung limp, as the team humped its way back to the staging area.

“One hundred hours of hell” had lived up to the promise of its name.

A
shley’s preparation for the hours of hell had started six years earlier when she was a freshman at Kent State and became addicted to rucking. On school breaks she would pack rocks into her backpack and head out of her family’s house in Marlboro for her own “unknown distance” road marches.

“What are you doing, Ashley?” Bob would ask. “Why would you make it heavier?”

“I’m training, Dad, trying to get stronger,” she would call back to him as she walked out the door and began to set a pace for herself on the two-lane highway that ran alongside their ranch home.

Now her years of preparation were paying off. The scale that weighed everyone’s gear before the first ruck started, tipped well above the minimum requirement when Ashley’s pack was placed on it. No way she would get penalized because the instructors found her pack was too light—if it came in underweight at the end she would have to start all over again, and she wasn’t
about
to let that happen. Ashley had prepared her body for the long ruck marches in very specific ways. Unlike running, which is nearly all cardio exertion, the rucks require abdominal and back strength. The thousands of sit-ups and crunches and hours of CrossFit she had performed in the months leading up to selection meant Ashley’s core was strong enough to bear the load of her pack without buckling. Pull-ups had built up her shoulder muscles. She may not have been a Pegasus like Tristan, but she was an outstanding athlete.

From her first stride to her last, Ashley never let up. Some soldiers fell out of formation. Others were slowed by the creeping burn of played-out calf muscles that began to atrophy from overuse. The soldiers who weren’t suffering from physical discomfort struggled with the ruck’s “no talking” rule, and found relief in swapping daydreams about the foods they would eat when the week had finished (lasagna and ice cream won the day) or the jobs this suffering would lead to.

But Ashley pressed on—quiet, focused, always at the front, just as she had been from the first day of ROTC training. She relished the silence and the
clop-clop
of her Gore-Tex boots as her feet hit the ground. All around her the North Carolina fir trees stood tall, lush, and green, stretching their limbs toward the sky. They reminded her of the state park where she ran races with Josh and Brittany as kids. Her every sense was tuned in to the moment and remained there. She
heard the flapping wings of birds flying above against the steady, in-and-out pattern of her own breath and the
tap-tap-tap
of her heart.

The road ahead stretched out before her as she tracked the klicks on her pace counter. Nearly everyone else was now marching behind her. Only her tentmates Leda and Anne, the engineer, hiked alongside her, sometimes in front, sometimes slightly behind. These fittest of soldiers challenged one another by wordless example to be the best they could be.

T
hat night, nearly every soldier was struggling to stay in one piece.

Along the route medics stood by at first aid stations to monitor injuries and examine soldiers who looked hurt. Not wanting to quit the selection process and miss out on this unique opportunity, most of the CST candidates hurried past the medical teams, assuring them they were “just fine.” Even if they were lying prone on the ground, they wouldn’t admit to an injury. Those who acknowledged any pain simply vowed to defy it. But the medics checked the soldiers’ feet each evening to make certain they didn’t overlook any serious injuries.

L
ane, the Guard soldier and track star from Nevada, had been in extreme pain that morphed into agony by day three. Her Achilles tendon, which she had injured during high school track and field, was on fire. As she rucked, she considered the possibility that each step she took could be her last, but still she marched on, refusing to seek out the medic. When he made his nightly rounds, however, what he saw alarmed him.

“Hey, you know that Achilles tendon could snap at any moment,” he said. “If I were you I would quit. That is a
terrible
injury—it takes months to heal and if the damage is severe enough it might never fully recover. It’s not a good idea to risk it.”

He was holding a folder that contained all the paperwork necessary for a medical drop.

Lane gaped at him and yanked her foot away.

“Are you kidding me? I am
here.
I made it this far. I am totally fine.”

“Seriously,” she said, looking up at him as she laced her boots back up, “if it rips just glue it back together.”

A few tents down from Lane, Ashley’s team awaited their own medic check. One soldier’s blisters had worn through four layers of skin, down to what she thought must have been the dermis. Ashley put her medical training to work.

“If anyone needs her feet taped up, the doctor is in,” she announced, facing two folding chairs toward one another so her “patients” could elevate their feet while she examined their blisters and swaddled them in moleskin. Back at Kent State, Jason had often been Ashley’s guinea pig in such situations, allowing her to tape up his uninjured knees, ankles, and wrists to perfect her technique. One day she even had him come to one of her physical therapy classes so she could demonstrate her knowledge of how to palpate an injured shoulder. He joked with her later that she had just wanted to show off her handsome, shirtless ROTC boyfriend to all the girls in her class. Now Ashley was considering pursuing a job as a physician’s assistant once her Afghanistan deployment was behind her. She had confided this to Anne while helping one of their tentmates; there was something about this environment that felt inspiring to her. There in her bunk, taping her teammates’ torn-up feet at a makeshift first aid station, Ashley realized she was starting to become genuinely attached to the women in her tent. Like Rigby, she felt they were facing a trial that almost no one else on earth ever could or would understand. Even their own families.

Ashley, Leda, and Anne had become a trio that first weekend at the Landmark Inn, and Ashley wanted to introduce her new friends to Jason. She knew that if he met these remarkable women he would better understand why giving her his blessing to go forward with the selection process was so important to her. When one of the girls suggested
a group dinner on the “down” night before selection started, Ashley surprised herself by her own bold question:

“Is it okay if I invite my husband?”

“Oh, of course, I’d love to meet him,” Leda replied. And it was true: ever since she met Ashley, Leda had been wondering what Jason was like. Military couples, in which both wife and husband served in uniform, were still exceptionally rare. Happy ones rarer still.

Jason was as curious as Leda. He wanted to learn more about the CST program and meet the soldiers his wife would be joining—and competing against—in the selection process.

That night, at a steak house not far from the Landmark, Leda recognized Jason from Ashley’s photos.

“Hi there,” she said, flashing a radiant, confident smile. “I’m Leda.”

He stammered out a greeting in response, scanning the room for Ashley, and was about to tell her as politely as he could that he was a happily married man, when she continued.

“I’ve heard so much about you, I’m in selection with Ashley,” she said. “She just went to the restroom, by the way. I have to tell you, your wife is amazing.”

Jason relaxed. “Oh, great to meet you,” he said, extending his hand. “And yes, she most definitely is.”

Ashley arrived and gave her husband a big hug and kiss.

“Jason,” Leda said as they sat down to eat. “You seriously are the coolest guy in the world to come out here to dinner with all these women.”

“I consider myself lucky,” he replied, and glanced at his wife, who was smiling back at him. She was genuinely thrilled to see him in the company of her new friends. She had heard stories at the Landmark of marriages that had fallen apart under the strain of deployments, and she felt luckier than ever to have him. They spent the hour away from the Landmark talking about war: Leda shared stories about the work she had done in Iraq, downplaying her own
role throughout, and Jason mentioned he had just returned from Afghanistan. He made his way through his rib eye and mashed potatoes and was happy to see how comfortable Ashley looked around them and how ready she seemed for the assessment tests ahead.

Driving back to the hotel after meeting Jason and watching him with his wife, Leda felt even more impressed by—and fond of—Ashley. As they chatted about her upcoming wedding in Ohio, and the three-tiered white-icing, chocolate cake that her mom would be making, Leda couldn’t resist sharing her thoughts.

“You and Jason really are remarkable. I so admire the way you respect and love one another. You really have something special, Ashley.”

The bond between the two women only deepened in the days ahead as they fought their way through one bleary afternoon of ruck marching after another. On the final day of the assessment, guessing that the cadre were shuttered away somewhere in a classroom at the Special Warfare Center and School headquarters deciding their fates, the two shared a quiet moment in a remote part of the training camp.

Leda, always interested in leadership styles and what motivates people, especially someone as silently determined as Ashley, now felt comfortable asking her young friend directly some questions about herself.

“So, do you like your work there at the college?” she asked about Ashley’s work back home as an athletic trainer.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I love being around the athletes and helping them deal with all their injuries. I don’t think I want to do it forever, but for now and for a first job it’s a great experience.” She paused, weighing whether or not she felt comfortable enough to share more, then continued.

“I know they’d understand if I had to take a leave to do this deployment,” she continued. “But there is one thing about CST that worries me . . .”

They were once again at the front of the pack, engaged in a land
navigation exercise in which they had to find their way from a drop-off point in unfamiliar territory to a final destination on the map. False turns and wrong paths dotted the landscape; following the map expertly was crucial to reaching the right location in the limited amount of time allotted. This kind of exercise measures what the military calls “orienteering”: the ability to do spatial analysis under stressful conditions. For the CSTs the exercise was part of the final test of the Assessment and Selection program, but for Ashley, who had done hundreds of these exercises in ROTC, the test presented little challenge.

“I worry I’m a little bit too shy for this,” Ashley admitted as they walked toward a squiggle on the map they had received for the exercise. “I mean,
I
know I can do it, but maybe those guys will think I’m not aggressive or outspoken enough to do the job?”

“Well,” Leda asked, “how is it working with all those type A male athletes?” She had watched Ashley over the past four days and was certain she would be an asset to the team. Physically she was a beast, but she had excelled in the puzzles and obstacle courses, too. Her thoughtful nature and tendency to analyze a problem before speaking made her stand out on her team.