Ashley's War (20 page)

Jason pulled up to the front door of the Landmark, the same place where Ashley’s first adventures in Assessment and Selection had begun five months earlier. He pulled her rucksack and duffle out of the truck bed and set them down by the door.

“Okay, this is it,” she said, as she stood before the motel’s entrance.

“You sure you don’t want me to help you carry your bags in?” he asked.

“No, no, no,” she insisted. “You go ahead now.” He watched her make the effort to stay strong and keep from crying in front of him and the other girls. This was not a group that welcomed tears. And he knew Ashley wanted to remain composed for him as much as for herself.

He hugged her and kissed her goodbye.

“I’ll talk to you from Germany,” she said. “I think it’s okay to let you know when we’re leaving for Afghanistan.”

“Babe, I don’t think you’re going to jeopardize operational security by telling me when you’re wheels-up—I don’t think they’re tracking that!” he said. “Pump your brakes and be calm; you are going to be fine.”

“Okay, well, I’ll text you and I’ll start emailing you when we can,” she said.

The silence was uncomfortable.

“What are you going to do the rest of the day?”

Jason smiled. Who cares? he thought. You are about to go to war.

“Oh, you know, usual stuff: put some gas in the truck, cut the grass, do the laundry . . .” His voice trailed off as he realized that he would now have to do all of those things without her.

“Maybe I’ll get a pizza. I don’t know.”

The last time things were this awkward it was Jason who was about to get on a plane and go to war. I have no idea what people do when the shoe is on the other foot, he was thinking.

So he hugged and kissed her one more time.

“Don’t be a hero,” he said. “You have nothing to prove. You went and did something I have never done: be part of special operations and work with Ranger Regiment. You don’t have to prove anything to me. Just promise me you are coming home.”

“Okay,” she replied. “I’ll be okay.” Jason got in the truck and slowly drove away.

In his rearview mirror he saw Ashley reach for her bags, then disappear through the sliding glass doors of the motel. He pulled into a nearby gas station and called his dad.

“Every time I see a C-17 for the next few hours I’m going to be looking up and wondering if it’s Ashley. It’s terrible being on this side of deploying—I never thought about what she was going through when she dropped me off,” he said. “I feel like some stay-at-home dad. I’m the one who is supposed to be leaving.”

As soon as he got home he sat down in the bright yellow kitchen where two nights before she had cooked salmon and potatoes for
supper. He pulled out a calendar to start tracking the months until she returned home safely to him.

“It’s the end of August by the time they finish getting fully in-processed,” he calculated. “By the time they reach their base and really get into their jobs it will be September. The battalions will switch out in September–October so that will eat up a couple of weeks as the new guys settle in. Then we’re looking at the winter months, when the operations tempo gets a lot slower.”

He was making little scratch marks on the calendar as he thought out loud.

“If we can just make it to the winter and the first hard frost and snowfall when all the fighting quiets down, we will be fine.

“We just have to make it to November.”

II

Deployment

8

Arrival, Afghanistan

* * *

C
assie sat bumping around in her seat as the lumbering C-17 flew east to Germany’s Ramstein Air Base. Each of the CSTs had received a letter just before graduation, and Cassie now thought about its contents as she rode to war with her nearly twenty comrades-in-arms. It was a personal letter printed on gray and white stationery and was from Captain Tara Matthews, who had been program manager for the CSTs’ classroom training that summer. For nearly three years Matthews had served in special operations as a team leader in civil affairs. Matthews had come home to Fort Bragg after deploying to Afghanistan and had run the summer training program.

Matthews had been effective and efficient, but the CSTs hadn’t sensed that she possessed any deeply held views on their pathbreaking program or had considered its place in women’s long march toward combat. Then, at the very end of the course, she surprised her students by sharing this letter, just as they were on the verge of starting their own tours in Afghanistan. Matthews was older than many of the CSTs, but only by a few years. But as they read her words, they heard the voice of someone who had seen a great deal and now wanted to share what she knew with a group of women with whom she obviously felt a strong connection.

Cassie had read and reread the letter she found inside the folder holding her graduation certificate, and although the note was addressed
to the entire group, she felt that Matthews was speaking directly to her in the most personal way.

“The ultimate effects of this program on the coming generations are yet to be seen,” she had written.

“Thank you for rising to the challenge of being female warriors in today’s Army. I don’t know if you recognize that your presence here has been foretold by the generations of women that preceded us in military service to the nation, and that you walk a path in advance of a more efficient and tested generation that will strive to follow you, and carry us into the future.

“The mission has not yet run its course. Don’t limit your actions in pursuit of success. Take a measured course and a wide berth within your lines of operation. Show us all what you are capable of.”

That’s exactly what I intend to do, Cassie silently vowed.

“Know too that the eyes of the Army and, increasingly, the Nation, are on you. This is an opportunity for failure as much as it is one to succeed. Do not block out the voices of opposition, study them and defeat their words and prejudices through brilliant action.”

Cassie had felt strongly from the beginning—perhaps more than most of the other women—that the CSTs were, whether they liked it or not, a group of trailblazers who had better not mess things up for those who would come after them. And she was awed by the women who had come before them, especially one female soldier who had gone out with the Rangers on missions long before the CST program was in place. The subtext of Captain Matthews’s letter was clear: if one of them screwed up out there it wouldn’t be just her mistake; it would belong to “all women.” In her heart,
Cassie saw herself as just another soldier who was taking part in the ancient struggle to live up to her potential as a warrior. She didn’t see herself as
a female soldier
, just a soldier. But Cassie’s own path had shown her that there was still a long way to go before military women would have the same opportunities as men, from serving in infantry to attending Ranger School to trying out to become a full-fledged member of Special Operations Forces.

Like many of the women in Captain Matthews’s course, Cassie had conditioned herself to swallow her disappointments and channel that energy into making herself better and stronger. But nothing had lessened the frustration she felt over her own suffocated potential. Until she joined the CSTs. The summer just past had been the best of her life: she, Tristan, Kate, Kristen, and Isabel—an intel officer stationed in Korea who was her roommate at selection and now her closest friend—and some of the other unmarried girls had spent nearly every night together, going to dinner and the occasional bar on weekends, then eating and working out together during the week. She was a long, long way from those lonely nights of doing crossword puzzles on the floor back in Iraq.

Cassie and her teammates had come to understand each other in ways no one else could, or probably ever would. They had forged a bond based on friendship and respect, cemented by the fact that they had never before known people like themselves. Women found them weird for wanting to go to war. Men found them threatening. For a long time Cassie thought this was a reality she alone had experienced, but then she got to know her new teammates.

And now this “band of sisters” she had come to love was about to split up and scatter to outposts across the country in teams of two and three. They wouldn’t see each other for months, and perhaps not at all during the full, eight-month deployment. Cassie was eager to get to her base and start going out on missions, but she didn’t want to think about saying goodbye to her teammates. Together they were making history, and while most of them remained focused on their
personal goals rather than the larger backdrop against which their own trajectories would play out, Cassie found herself one of the few who were keenly aware of the moment. Perhaps it was the women’s studies major in her, or possibly it was the ROTC Cadet. Or maybe it was the rucksack at her feet that was filled with books like Sebastian Junger’s
War
, Marcus Luttrell’s
Lone Survivor
, and Pete Blaber’s
The Mission, the Men, and Me
, which follow platoons of soldiers or special operations units into some of the toughest battles America’s troops have faced. Whatever it was, Cassie couldn’t help but feel that this deployment was something that somebody, someday would want to know about.

Cassie had pulled the unfortunate duty of chalk commander, meaning she was basically the airplane’s chaperone. It was her job to make sure all the names on the manifest were on the plane, and would be on tomorrow’s flight to Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. She led the gang of women in boarding the C-17, and was therefore among the first to feel the curious stares from the male soldiers who were hunting for space on the webbed seats along the plane’s sides. A huge cargo pallet carrying supplies to the troops in Afghanistan filled the plane’s midsection.

“What’s going on?” one of them asked as Cassie settled into her own spot at the front, near the stairs that led to the cockpit. “You guys nurses? This
is
the flight to Ramstein, right?”

“Not exactly, and yes, it is,” Cassie replied, offering up a half smile that indicated the conversation was over. The CSTs were by now used to being sized up as nurses or members of a softball team, and at the moment they were more concerned with getting some shut-eye than explaining themselves. As soon as the plane was airborne, most of them spread their sleeping mats and poncho liners on the freezing cold metal floor and were soon fast asleep.

Nine hours later, as the plane descended, they landed in Ramstein, not far from the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, America’s largest hospital outside the United States. Many of the most
severely injured troops from Iraq and Afghanistan stopped here for emergency treatment and care before going home.

The CSTs slept that night at the Rhine Ordnance Barracks, a military way station not far from Ramstein. Or, rather, they tried to. After lights-out, a chorus of male voices shattered the evening quiet. Cassie, Sarah, Amber, and Kate, whose bunks were clustered together, rolled their eyes in the dark.

“My girl dances dirty, but she just fucking lays there in bed,” one guy called to another in a voice that carried easily into the women’s quarters.

“Oh, I’m a bad girl,” came the reply, voiced in a high-pitched squeak designed to sound like one of these “girls.”

“You’re too hard,” the second one continued, gleefully drawing out the last word.

“Just open your mouth already,” the other one replied, dropping his voice a few octaves.

For Amber, this was the last straw after a long day. She needed rest and these clowns were standing between her and much-needed sleep.

“Hey, you, Casanovas, how about shutting the fuck up and going to bed!” she yelled in her loudest officer voice. “Some people are trying to sleep here.”

Not another word was heard until the CSTs woke the following dawn.

They boarded a transport plane for the six-and-a-half-hour flight from Ramstein and the world they knew to Bagram Airfield, the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan, and the war that waited just outside its heavily fortified gates. Ambien ruled the flight, along with headphones, as the women stretched out in the cargo area to grab the last bit of rest while they could. When the CSTs were awake they cracked jokes and swapped sarcasm about their fictional softball scores and the fact that their role was actually the “Coffee” Support Team for Ranger Regiment. Or that some would think the
letters stood for the “Casual Sex Team.” The laughter kept at bay the reality that it was combat to which they were headed, no more training or warm-up. As one of the CSTs later wrote to a friend, “I couldn’t quite ever imagine what deploying would really feel like, but I thought I would be way more nervous than this. I guess I just feel ready to get started and trust my training and my own good judgment to do the right thing. It will be a steep learning curve, and I don’t doubt that I will be yelled at a few times, but I know that’s just part of the learning process.”