OPINION:
ASHLEY’S WAR: THE UNTOLD STORY OF A TEAM OF WOMEN SOLDIERS ON THE SPECIAL OPS BATTLEFIELD
By Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
Harper, $26.99, 320 pages
For nearly a decade, American forces fighting in Afghanistan were largely blinded by a lack of intelligence from roughly half the Pashtun population of Afghanistan; that being women. Pashtunwali (the way of the Pashtun) decrees that women be protected from the eyes and presence of men not from their immediate families. American male soldiers and Marines were prohibited from searching Pashtun women or even interrogating them. This is the case in many Muslim societies, but it is particularly severe among the Pashtun people, and most of the Taliban are Pashtuns. The Marine Corps had created an ad hoc Female Engagement Team (FET) concept early in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These teams were able to search women at checkpoints and interrogate them in an all-female setting.
By 2009, Adm. Eric Olson, the commander of the Special Operations Command, understood that he was losing about half of his intelligence exploitation opportunities because his teams could not interrogate women. He pressed for a special operations version of the Marine FET program, but initially met with resistance from within his command. Part of the problem was the ultra-male culture of Special Forces, but there were legitimate concerns that females could not pull their weight on the highly physical raid missions of Army Rangers, Navy SEALS and Marine Corps Special Operations Command (MARSOC) teams. Adm. Olson persisted, and the Cultural Support Team (CST) program was born. To get around the legal prohibition on women in combat, the CSTs would be “attached” to the special operations teams.
Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, who is an experienced and respected reporter, details the training and employment of these all-female teams in her excellent book “Ashley’s War.” Lt. Ashley White was the first CST member to die in combat; Ms. Lemmon uses her story to detail the training and experiences of Ashley and her comrades.
Adm. Olson dictated that only women who were physically capable of keeping up with special operations teams would be selected for the CSTs. Ashley and her teammates, went through an arduous selection process that included extreme physical challenges. Almost all CST candidates were high school or college athletes and all longed to excel in what was essentially a previously all-male game.
Ashley was a National Guard officer whose husband had served in combat. She excelled at the physical portion of the rigorous selection process, but some of her trainers doubted her assertiveness. A veteran ranger marksmanship instructor finally taught her to assert herself. By the time she got to Afghanistan in 2011, she was more than ready to excel; she and her teammates more than exceeded Adm. Olson’s expectations.
The CSTs were assigned to a variety of missions ranging from relatively benign Green Beret-style Village Stability Operations, to highly lethal direct action missions designed to kill or capture high-profile operations where female detainees had to be calmed and quickly interrogated.
The proverbial “long pole in the tent” was interpreters, both male and female. These were contract employees who were not required to go through the same rigorous training as their military counterparts, but who had to endure the same rigors on a mission. Ashley had a good one, who was injured on the same mission that killed her.
I asked to review this book because I served with a CST in Afghanistan. Our remote outpost was in a district that contained the only Pashtun majority population northwest of the country. Our CST consisted of an Army captain, a Marine Corps gunnery sergeant, and a civilian Afghan-American civilian interpreter from Southern California. They were superb. As a civilian State Department engagement officer, I often accompanied them on their missions as the only male in the party. I talked to the local men while they engaged the females. When the stories matched up, we usually had the truth; when they differed, we knew we might have an actionable problem that warranted further exploration.
The real question that struck me in the book was not whether volunteer women can function in combat, but whether they should be forced into combat in the future. Some liberal congressmen are pushing for a return to the draft in hopes that it will prevent America from engaging in wars of choice such as Iraq. If the prohibition on women in combat is lifted, will women be forced into the trenches? I hope the issue is moot. The all-volunteer force is working and providing superb soldiers such as Ashley White. I would not want to see my granddaughters dragged off to war involuntarily.
• Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps colonel.
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