Authors: Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
“Lieutenant White,” she heard boom over the loudspeaker.
“Lieutenant Ashley White.”
“Lieutenant Ashley Irene White”
At last a voice answered.
“First Sergeant, she is no longer with us.”
After the roll call they lined up before a photo of each of the soldiers alongside their boots and dog tags. Tristan knelt next to Ashley’s picture and said goodbye.
A few minutes later it was over. Three soldiers gone. And now everyone back to work.
Before Tristan flew back to base that night Anne had taken her to dinner at the Asian DFAC, the same place where she and Ashley had enjoyed a meal together the night she died. Tristan pushed her lo mein noodles around her plate and listened as Anne talked drily about the threats, how IEDs lay everywhere, over the walls and throughout the orchards, and how she couldn’t wait to get back out
to find the men who had planted the device that killed their friend. While Anne spoke Tristan looked at the Buddha stickers on the dining facility’s windows and listened to new-age meditation music from 1990s-style boom boxes. She couldn’t think of any place less soothing and tranquil in all the world.
After the meal Tristan watched Anne head back to her room to suit up for that night’s work. She felt awed by her teammate’s stoicism and fearful of the risks she faced.
I am
so
glad I’m not based here, Tristan had thought as she and her CST partner flew out of Kandahar. It sounds horrible.
And then, two days after the memorial service, she was reassigned as Ashley’s replacement in Kandahar. For the next six months, this frightening place filled with ghosts and IEDs and smelling of human excrement would be her home.
Tristan walked into her new room and froze.
Ashley’s white ASICS sat there at the foot of her new bed.
She left the shoes there and moved toward the white wall locker to unpack her plastic bag of toiletries. There she found Ashley’s travel-size Jergens lotions and some hair bands. There was also a candle in the scent “Puffy Clouds.” How fitting, Tristan thought. She would safeguard it all as a reminder of her friend. And a warning to herself to never, ever get comfortable in this job.
Tristan entered the broom-closet-turned-office determined to pick any desk but the one that had been Ashley’s. The moment she sat down and opened the desk drawer she realized she had chosen exactly wrong. Inside were Smart for Life protein bars in Green Tea flavor, which Tristan immediately recognized from their summer train-up. Ashley had selected them especially for their protein-to-carb ratio.
“It seems little bits of Ashley are everywhere,” Tristan wrote in a letter home. She saw the bread maker in the corner already gathering dust from the Kandahar air and knew that no one would ever use it again. At least not while she was there.
With Anne’s coaching she got her gear set up in the ready room—every
team had different protocols and ways of doing things—and went to introduce herself to the Rangers with whom she’d be working. Ashley’s old team. They greeted her kindly, but stiffly. She was now officially “the replacement CST.”
The first night Anne accompanied Tristan, to help her get her comfortable with her new team. At the outset Tristan thought only of IEDs; she knew that every step she took could be her last. But after a while she found her rhythm. She and Anne ended up searching and talking with dozens of women and children that night and divided the work between them. They had arrived by ground, in Stryker armored vehicles, and afterward, as they returned to base, Tristan felt a surge of relief. The new base, new teammates, new terrain, she would get used to them all. Being back in action had helped. Anne was right. She could move forward now.
But not everyone could. Tristan could tell how much respect the guys had for Ashley by the way they talked about her. One of the senior Rangers, a gruff guy whose deployments she imagined reached into double digits, approached her before the first mission. “Listen, please be really careful,” he said. “No offense to you, but I can’t deal with it one more time. Ashley was so young and she had so much to offer. I just can’t go through that again.”
Tristan realized how hard Ashley’s death had been on these men. But she couldn’t promise she wouldn’t die and she didn’t think the fact that they weren’t used to women dying alongside them meant that she shouldn’t be out there. She understood the risks going in. They were all soldiers, after all. These guys knew what that meant better than anyone.
Soon Tristan picked up a pen and began writing in her notebook.
Dad,
I’m writing this note; I guess in case something happens. I have witnessed second and third hand how much pain is associated
with trying to pick up the pieces if the worst should happen. I’m not sure this letter will save you much pain, but it will at least save you the pain of searching for it.
Every night before I go to sleep I think of you guys. I think about all our times as a family. Summers in Vermont. Family softball games.
You always had a way of making us believe we could do anything. Whether it was making the softball team or becoming astronauts or just squeezing by in that math modeling class, you never doubted that any of us were capable of anything we set our hearts to. I could never tell you how much that has meant.
If something is to happen to me know that I wanted to do this job and that I placed myself in this position because I felt it was something I needed to do.
I’m grateful that I had such a wonderful family and that I had parents who were ever in my corner.
Love,
Tristan
A
s November and December wore on the CSTs kept going out each night and doing their jobs, though they all sensed that higher-ups were still trying to figure out what the first CST battlefield death meant for their work.
Back in Ohio at Ashley’s funeral, one of the special operations leaders had asked Leda whether the women wanted to keep doing the job.
“Not one of us wants to stop doing this mission,” Leda answered, reminding him that each of them had accepted the risks by signing on to work with the Rangers. “Nothing would dishonor Ashley’s memory more.”
He urged her to tell the CSTs to keep “serving with pride” and to
make sure they knew the entire Special Operations Command stood behind them and wanted them to stay out there.
Leda returned to Afghanistan immediately after Ashley’s service and shared that message. The CSTs needed to put their heads down and just keep doing their job better than ever, she said. Don’t worry about anything else.
Around the same time, a special operations historian came through Kandahar to interview soldiers as part of his regular tour of bases across Afghanistan. When he sat down with Tristan, he asked how she felt when she learned of Ashley’s death.
“Did it make you want to stop doing this job?”
“Just the opposite,” she said. It made her more motivated to honor her friend and teammate’s legacy.
Then the interviewer mentioned the chatter in Washington, D.C., and on military bases about ending the CST program with the war in Afghanistan. He asked Tristan how she saw the future of the program. “Should it be developed further or is it just a necessity born out of a specific conflict, because that’s how we felt about the canine program during Vietnam.”
Oh, great, now we’re dogs! Tristan laughed to herself. But she told the historian that the program should not be dismantled, it should be expanded.
“They could really build out this job and get a whole lot more from the role if they wanted,” she said. “Our team of CSTs will keep doing this mission as long as we can.”
A
t last Christmas arrived. For Tristan, holidays had always been important; she wasn’t going to let the fact that she was at war rob her of all her holiday cheer. She sketched a Christmas tree on a piece of scrap paper and taped it to the wall in her room, then put all the neatly wrapped packages from her family back in New England beneath it.
Things had gotten easier in the eight weeks since her arrival. At
November’s end a new team of Rangers rotated in, and the platoon alongside whom Ashley had died finally got to go home after a deployment that had cost them so much and so many they loved. For this new Ranger crew, led by a fellow New England Patriots fan, Tristan was their first CST, and they had been open from the very start to her ideas and her suggestions for how she could contribute to their work. The more useful she felt she was, the better she got at the job, and the better she got at the job, the more they put her to work. Tristan and Kate instant-messaged regularly about how
nothing
that they would ever do afterward in the Army—short of Ranger school or Ranger selection opening to women one day—would ever compare to this mission.
Tristan would see Kate and all her teammates at Bagram the day after Christmas—the halfway point for their deployment. Leda had arranged the one-night, all-CST gathering; officially they had come to talk about their CST experience with their Afghan counterparts and to prepare Afghan women to do the CST job. Unofficially, Leda knew that the women needed to be around one another after Ashley’s death and in light of all the questions about the program’s future that were being raised.
Tristan snacked on muffins as she listened to Leda discuss ideas being floated among special operations leaders to make the CST teams a real MOS, or Military Occupational Specialty, rather than a temporary program. She wanted to pursue whatever MOS they managed to create, and told Leda and her teammates that she thought they should just be like all the other Ranger enablers, on the same training and deployment cycle of the guys with whom they served.
Then they began to swap stories.
“I actually thought Leda was calling to yell at us for fast-roping,” Kimberly said about the call, the one she’d never forget. Official guidance had said that CSTs shouldn’t fast-rope onto an objective given the injuries team members had sustained from it
during PMT and in Afghanistan. Sliding quickly into a potentially hostile situation down a rope from a swaying bird wearing two pairs of gloves to prevent burns while holding steady all of your body weight plus fifty pounds of gear was dangerous work, and the Ranger leadership didn’t want any more CSTs hurt. But after seeing them in action—both on their missions and with the Rangers—the SEALs Kimberly worked with decided she and her teammate Maddie could handle the assignment. They showed Kimberly, Maddie, and an Afghan army officer on their team how to climb up a thin, portable ladder and then come back down on the two-inch-thick rope that ranges from fifty to ninety feet in length that they had hung from the top of a building. They repeated the exercise twice without gear and twice in full kit. Next they practiced fast-roping out of an actual, hovering helicopter by day and at night to make certain they knew what they were doing. Still, Kimberly said, she and Maddie never thought they’d get to put the training to work given the debate about what was and wasn’t allowed. Then one night they were flying to a mission when the SEALs announced they should all get ready to fast-rope in. Kimberly and Maddie had nudged each other there on the bird.
You gotta do this, Kimberly told herself in the moment, and not just for your sake but for all the other girls who can’t. Don’t go sliding down and don’t land like a jerk and don’t fall off the rope. Whatever you do don’t get hurt. And don’t you dare need a medevac to take you out of here tonight. Then she heard the command
Go
. Down, down, down she went. And then, suddenly, she felt the firm, cold earth beneath her. She balled her body up and did a combat roll away from the bird, just as the SEALs had taught, then leapt onto one knee to grab her weapon and pull security for everyone else. A moment later Maddie followed. With everyone safely descended from the bird, the team began moving toward the objective, just like any other night. But not before she and Maddie stopped to exchange
a quick high-five. Kimberly saw one of the guys laugh silently from under his green night-vision halo and shake his head at the girls’ display, as if to say, “You rookies.”
Laughter greeted the end of Kimberly’s story. Then Kate began.
One of the first nights out, she told her teammates, she and her platoon’s first sergeant stood at the end of formation. Suddenly they heard the
pop-pop-pop
of fire and the sound of grenades on the radio and ran a hundred yards to take cover in a ditch alongside the road that was nearly as deep as Kate was tall. The guys up front started shooting at the insurgents firing upon them and her first sergeant put her up against the side of the ditch facing the back column and pointed. “That’s your sector of fire,” he had told her. “I was like, ‘Fuck, yeah,’” Kate said. “That is the beauty of being a soldier. Right there in that moment with your rifle propped up against the dirt, knowing that even if you don’t get to be the guy up at the front shooting, you have a sector that is yours and you know in your heart you will shoot any enemy that comes into it. That’s how simple it is,” she finished.
She had finally found her people, Kate said. Both her CSTs and the men she admired and was prepared to die for.
“I love you guys,” Kate said. She confessed that after Ashley’s death she now checked every night to see who was going out on mission and that they made it back okay. “You mean more to me than anything.”
For Tristan the visit was the breath of fresh air that she needed. To see all her CST teammates and to know that everyone else was doing okay, too, did her heart good.
She flew once more from Bagram to Kandahar. This time the turbulence frightened her.
T
ristan had just finished listening to the rundown of what they expected on the objective that night and now she was walking back to the ready room to make sure she had everything she
needed for the evening’s mission. On the wall just outside the briefing room hung photos of all those killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ashley’s smiling face was next to Sergeant Domeij and Private Horns.