Authors: Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
Things didn’t improve much come Vietnam, where women’s uniforms crumpled in the heat and disintegrated after the repeated washings required by the tropical humidity. Most women ended up wearing men’s fatigues and boots, even though their official uniform in theater was a two-piece outfit complete with skirt and pumps. When the Women’s Army Corps director demanded that women wear the traditional outfits, a Corps major protested that “WACs are in Vietnam to do a job and not to improve the morale of male troops.” Finally a commander stepped in to de-escalate the fashion war and allowed that the WACs could keep on wearing the tropical fatigues “if desired.” Most did.
Things in the twenty-first century had most definitely improved since the days of mandatory pumps and skirts, though strange-fitting uniforms abounded. Now, in 2011, at least the CSTs could wear the same clothing as the men they went into combat with, even if they required some adjustment to make them work.
T
he next hurdle for the CSTs concerned office space. The women had been given a room on the second floor of the Tactical Operations Center, or TOC, far from the Rangers’ team rooms on the bottom level, which meant they had to run up and down the stairs all day to learn about missions, intel, and anything else that was
happening. Anne told one of the Ranger platoon sergeants that she wanted to move her teammates downstairs.
“Honestly, I don’t know if you guys can handle us—we’re kind of a crazy bunch down here,” the Ranger said, half joking. In any case, he added, there was no free office space near the team rooms.
“Oh, that’s okay,” Anne replied, undeterred. “We’ll just take over the broom closet.”
And so the CSTs spent an entire day cleaning out an old housekeeping closet that happened to be next door to the briefing room, and transformed it into the semi-official headquarters of the Cultural Support Team. It was big enough to hold a few desks and computer stations, and they settled right in. Ashley surrounded her computer with photos featuring her baby niece, Evelyn, her beautiful twin sister, Brittany, and snapshots of her and Jason. She also made it her business to keep everyone well fed, just as she had back at Bank Hall. Jason was sending regular care packages stuffed with all the sweets she loved, especially gummy bears and M&Ms, which Ashley stored in big jars positioned around the office/closet for visitors to enjoy. Ashley’s mom also sent goodies, including her rich, homemade chocolate chip cookies, which somehow managed to arrive in Afghanistan still gooey.
One day Anne was telling Ashley about how great the food was on the base where she served during her first Afghanistan tour, and Ashley had an idea. “If you get us a breadmaker . . .” she said. In no time the machine had arrived and Ashley’s mother was sending special bread mixes and all kinds of ingredients from Ohio. Ashley broke the machine in with a batch of raisin bread, and the entire hallway soon smelled of freshly baked bread. Rangers stopped in to try the treats and joked that the CSTs were just trying to torture them with the smell of home. Back in Ohio, Mrs. White would laugh over the phone with Ashley during their weekly Sunday phone calls at the fact that her daughter was baking even while she was at war. Some things never changed.
In reality everything had changed as day became night and night
became day. Each “morning” the CSTs woke up at 1 or 2 p.m. Usually they headed right to the gym for a CrossFit workout, rope climbs, and toe-to-bar leg lifts. They completed dozens of lunges, then a series of Olympic lifts and pull-ups. Then they practiced rope climbing. Ashley had raised her own thirty pull-up standard and found herself getting stronger each week. Then, when time and briefings allowed, came a long run around the base, sometimes in full kit and sometimes wearing just the Ranger workout gear of black T-shirt and shorts. After that it was time for “breakfast,” which came when most of their friends and family back home would be eating dinner. Before they commandeered a pickup truck they could use for the quick ride to one of the dining halls, the CSTs requisitioned boxes of Special K with Strawberries and packets of oatmeal they could eat in their rooms or at their desks while working on the computer. They would spend the “day” figuring out what the actual night would hold, attending intel briefings and pre-mission briefs, and getting their minds and notecards ready for the evening’s mission. By 10 p.m. they were prepping. If all went well and even close to what they had expected, they would be back on base in the early predawn hours. Then they had “dinner,” usually known as breakfast, and headed off to their post-mission brief. By the time that finished it was time to wind down, usually with an episode of
Glee
or
How I Met Your Mother
on someone’s computer in the office. Ashley often turned to the movie
Bridesmaids
for her post-mission mental recess. Then the CSTs would make the short walk back to their rooms, change for the gym, do their workouts, and finally grab a few hours of rest. The next day they’d start the whole routine all over again.
The soldiers quickly learned that no night was the same as the one that came before. This was the reality of life in special operations. That was the reason the men trained all year, and it was one of the reasons the Rangers had been so apprehensive about having the CST women attached to them. Beyond the issue of gender, their far shorter and entirely different training cycle made them seem a dangerous liability. “You don’t rise to the occasion when things go wrong,” Sergeant
Marks had told the women in pre-mission training. “You fall to your lowest level of training.” The urgency, the fear, and the sensory assault of war destroy the response instincts of most people in the heat of the moment. This truth made constant training not just important, but essential to survival and success in combat.
And yet, the handful of weeks of training in search and tactical questioning were now paying off for the CSTs at war. Each week the women shared stories on their internal email of what they found in Afghan households, the different scenarios they had faced on mission and how they had handled them. In the eastern part of Afghanistan, a week or so in, one CST discovered an AK-47 buried in the ground just beneath a woman she was searching. Kimberly and her partner, on their first night out with a decidedly skeptical team of SEALs, had found the intel items the team sought wrapped up snugly in a baby’s wet diaper. Out one night with her Ranger platoon, Cassie was called up to the front of formation to help calm a young girl whose father was known to be part of a group planning attacks on Afghans and Americans. The U.S. and Afghan forces hadn’t yet cleared the house, but the Rangers didn’t want to enter the compound while this girl was screaming at ear-piercing levels certain to wake the entire village. Cassie knelt with the girl and explained that she too was very close to her father, and she understood the girl’s desire to protect her dad. But, Cassie told the girl, her father was doing some things that were killing her countrymen and U.S. soldiers. The girl told Cassie to go to hell and spat obscenities at her in a fury of angry Pashto, but while the two women interacted, the Rangers were able to clear the house without incident.
Slowly the CSTs were waging and often winning the battle to belong: letting their work speak for itself, acknowledging that they weren’t Rangers but wanted to make a difference out there, going to the shooting range, hitting the gym, and marching their asses off each night without falling out. It was a fight every CST knew would be won slowly—and could be lost in an instant.
* * *
S
eptember arrived and with fall’s advance came a slight respite from the Kandahari heat.
Like the war in Afghanistan, the CST role itself was constantly evolving, most significantly in the makeup of its teams. Lane had just left Ashley and Anne in Kandahar for a base in another region. Sarah had moved as well. Instead of the pairings of two that had originally been envisioned, most of the women were now going out on their own with just an interpreter. The demand for CSTs from special operations was high enough that the women were spread out as widely as possible. And so as they were getting to know their fellow CST teammates better, they were also getting closer to their interpreters, the civilian women and men without whom they had no shot of doing their jobs each evening. As the CSTs came to learn, the interpreters were some of the bravest and most effective members of the special operations teams, even if their work was among the least known—and least appreciated. Demand from the entire U.S. military for Pashto-fluent and physically fit interpreters far exceeded the supply. The civilian contracting firms that specialized in recruiting the interpreters could not come near matching the surging demand from American forces.
This was hardly a new challenge for America’s military. The Civil War had been the last battle in which all sides spoke the same language. In the months before Pearl Harbor the United States began
recruiting second-generation Japanese-Americans and trained them in working with Army soldiers at the Fourth Army Intelligence School in San Francisco. After the 1941 attack the school was moved to Minnesota, since by that time anyone who asserted Japanese heritage was officially banned from America’s West Coast. Historians would later attest to the extraordinary contribution of the Japanese-Americans during World War II. James McNaughton wrote: “Their courage, skill, and loyalty helped win the war sooner and at lower cost to the United States than would otherwise have been possible.” During the American occupation of Japan “they helped turn bitter enemies into friends, thus securing the victory and serving as a bridge between the two cultures.” Women played an important role in this effort; the WACs recruited American women from Japanese and Chinese families, some of whom spent the war years in Camp Ritchie, Maryland, analyzing seized Japanese documents.
But the Pentagon found itself utterly unprepared for the language demands that the twenty-first-century, post-9/11 wars placed on its troops. Finding language-skilled, battle-ready translators proved a major challenge, and Afghanistan was a lot harder to staff than Iraq because the Afghan and Persian communities in the United States were only a third the size of the country’s Arabic-speaking population. Pashto, one of the two official languages of Afghanistan, is not spoken in huge swathes of the world, which complicates the task of finding translators in neighboring countries. The lost-in-translation dilemma highlighted a far broader problem: America lacked language skills in the places where it was fighting, and it was up to the military to find a solution. One of Admiral Olson’s priorities was an initiative called Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest, or MAVNI, whose goal was to increase “our level of regional expertise through the recruitment of native heritage speakers.” The translators had to be resident, legal noncitizens already based in the United States, and in exchange for their services they were promised an accelerated push through the opaque process of naturalization.
Speakers of Pashto and Dari, Afghanistan’s other national language, were eligible for the program, but there were precious few native speakers who could provide the linguistic firepower the war required. So the U.S. military and its civilian contractors went hunting for candidates in the nation’s largest Afghan-American communities, from Northern Virginia to Southern California. Private contractors paid several times what the military could, with salaries hovering around the $200,000 range, but even so it was a challenge to find people who met all the qualifications—especially women.
For the CSTs, who were busy getting used to their unusual new assignment, the ideal “terp” was a female who understood Pashtun culture; spoke American English as well as they did; grasped how special operations functioned; could relate to and connect with Afghan women and children in a hot moment; embraced the women’s mission; was athletic enough to keep up with the Ranger men while wearing body armor; and could speak most dialects of Pashto.
Ashley had the good fortune to actually get to work with the ideal terp, a young Afghan-American named Nadia Sultan.
Nadia had come to the United States in the late 1980s when she was only one month old. Her parents were Afghan refugees from Kandahar, fleeing their country’s nine-year war with the Russians, which was then taking especially bloody turns through the surrounding cities and their own neighborhood. They first stopped in Pakistan, where Nadia’s mother gave birth to her baby girl, out of concern that the United States wouldn’t let them in without health insurance. Once in America, her family spent its first few years in New York City, among a tight-knit neighborhood of Afghans; then they moved to Orange County, California, where a larger and more established community of Afghans was forging a new life. Nadia grew up a real Orange County girl; the raven-haired stunner never left the house without flawless makeup and a fresh manicure.
Nadia’s family may have left Afghanistan, but they did not shed all the traditions of their native home. Nadia and her sister were
raised in an insular Afghan-American community to study, find a job, and marry a successful fellow Afghan-American approved by their parents. After that they were to begin having babies—as soon as possible.
But once she was in college, Nadia swerved from the preordained path her parents had tried to forge for their girls. She worked at a bank while studying at the University of California and graduated at the height of the financial crisis, a time of few jobs and stiff competition. Initially she had wanted to work with the police or FBI helping to rescue abused kids. Then she had heard about the interpreting gig from an uncle in New York; several of her cousins had already accepted positions and departed for Afghanistan. Nadia decided that if she could interpret for Americans doing humanitarian work in her parents’ homeland, she would go, too, and get experience that would help her when she returned. She was energized by the idea that she could make good money doing a job she believed in while also serving the nation that had given refuge to her own family when it was too dangerous to stay in Kandahar.