Today I am breaking radio silence to bring you a story every American should know, but very few do. Perhaps it is very fitting that I do so over Independence Day weekend.
I've been on a non-fiction kick for most of the year, listening to memiors from naval commanders past and present, and an inside look at the Military Working Dog program. Then I came across a book by journalist Gayle Tzemach Lemmon about a group of remarkable soldiers that almost no one in this country knows about.
If it wasn't already clear, I'm a bit of a military history buff. I can name virtually every variant of aircraft employed by all five branches of the military, and know the name and hull number of half the ships in the Navy. But until I read a news article about this book, I had never heard of the Cultural Support Teams, a group of all-female soldiers who deploy to Afghanistan attached to Special Operations units, typically Army Ranger strike teams but they also work with Green Berets and Navy SEALs. I won't go into a great deal about them, I think you should let Lemmon tell you about them first hand, with all of the thousands of hours of travel and interviews she did to bring their stories to life.
The Ashley the book's title refers to is Ashley White, a fresh-faced young 2nd Lieutenant in the North Carolina National Guard who, along with a hundred other women, answered the call for a new secret program being set up by Special Operations Command at the behest of no less that Admiral William McRaven himself (McRaven oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and had the CST's been operational at that time I have little doubt one would have accomanied the SEALs on that fateful mission). They are to accompany Spec Ops forces on raids into the lawless border regions of Afghanistan and fulfill a mission requirement only they, as women, can do: search and interrogate the women and children of rural Afghanistan, who are forbidden to speak to men not related to them. Only half of the women complete the grueling selection process at Fort Bragg, then they are rushed through an abbreviated training program and quickly deployed to some of the hottest spots in Afghanistan, where the information they could provide is desperately needed to combat a resurgent Taliban and their associated Al-Qaeda fighters.
We meet many remarkable women in this book, but the story centers on Ashley, who becomes a much beloved figure by her fellow CSTs, her Afghan-American interpreter, and eventually the Rangers she fought alongside, not only for her extraordinary physical strength but her quiet professionalism and compassion.
At first the book almost reads like a puff piece, an overly inspirational, hoo-rah tale of the underdogs who overcame prejudice and proved themselves worthy. But Lemmon is a skilled writer, and halfway through she infects the story with a very subtle, almost imperceptible sense of foreboding, and you ever so slowly get a feeling that this story may not have a happy ending. It slowly builds and builds, the tension in the narrative ratcheting up, churning your stomach as it leads up to an inevitable climax you can tell by then is coming and you'd give anything to avoid. But this is not a novel. These are real people and real events and the past cannot be changed.
When the CST's were first deployed in 2011, the ban on women serving in direct combat operations was still in effect, but it was by then, especially for the CSTs, an exercise in semantics. That, more than anything else, is what led to the ban being dropped and all military occupations were opened to women. It was not out of political correctness or a social experiment, as so many detractors have said. The experiment was already conducted in the mountains of one of the most hostile and unforgiving places on Earth, and by all accounts it was a resounding success. These women proved once and for all they could integrate successfully with America's most elite male soldiers and fight along side them shoulder to shoulder. The weapons caches, insurgents, and booby-trapped IEDs they were able to find, with their unique capabilities, no doubt saved the lives of countless Coalition forces and innocent civilians.
"I brought my daughter with me to show her women can be heroes too", says a stranger to a grieving mother at the funeral of her daughter. The mother's first inkling of what her daughter was really doing overseas did not come until it was an elite Army Ranger who met them at Dover Air Force Base as the first fallen CST made her long, final journey home, to tell them she would be afforded the same honors as the male Rangers who died alongside her. There are now several women's names inscribed on the Special Operations memorial wall at Fort Bragg, a testament to their sacrifice and a reminder to whoever the first female Special Operators end up being, that their new opportunities were paid for in blood.
The fact that their story is almost wholly unknown probably doesn't bother the women of the Cultural Support Teams, as they embody the "Quiet Professional" that is the standard among Special Forces. But I think it's something every American should know. So check out Ashley's War, and learn all about this remarkable note in American history.
-Mike, out.
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