Selection Criteria: 'A Hundred Hours Of Hell'
They were whittled down to about 55 or 60 women from more than 200 at the very start, and they faced a selection process that was called "a hundred hours of hell." So that was a combination of mental agility tests and physical tests — climbing a 30-foot wall, or putting 35 or 40 pounds on your back and marching for what is called an unknown distance, so that could be 2 miles or it could be 12 — tests about cultural awareness. And they went through this in a five-day period which had little sleep and a lot of testing of who they were as people, and they were judged as a team.
Why White Didn't Tell Her Parents About Her Deployment
She really did not want them to worry. ... There wasn't a lot of a roadmap to point to in terms of what she would be doing [with the special operations teams]. Not many women had done that before her ... and she realized pretty quickly that this is real combat, right? We are going on some of the most dangerous, most critical missions to the war in Afghanistan that America is pursuing. ... There is a real moment where she talks to her husband and she talks to her brother and just says "I really want to keep this between us, I don't want people to worry."
Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, author of Ashley's War. Courtesy of Harper hide caption
itoggle caption Courtesy of Harper
What Female Soldiers Were Able To Discover
One young soldier found a woman who was sitting on a weapon that they had been looking for. Another soldier found something they were looking for in a baby's soiled diaper. Yet others were keeping young women that they had met calm during operations so that the Rangers could do their work. So very quickly they proved that there was this whole world, this whole community of Afghan women that you could access if you had American women soldiers out there talking to them.
A Foundation For Integration
We will know the answer in January of 2016 as to which jobs will open to women and whether all jobs will open to women. Right now what we know is that, in the summer of 2013, one of the special operations commanders actually cited Ashley and all of the women in these pages and said "those soldiers may well have laid the foundation for ultimate integration" — that they had done a fabulous job on the battlefield, and that they did prove that women could bring value to those kinds of mission. Those women were the softer side of the harder side of war.
women in combat
Afghanistan