Ashley's War (18 page)

But then came the PT test. Scottie had seen their scores going in and knew they were strong; in fact, that was a huge factor influencing their selection to the Ranger side of the program. He set the distance for the first running test at two miles, and within moments
of completing her run one of the CSTs was in his face. “Sergeant, this course isn’t two miles,” she threw at him. “I know what my two-mile run time is. It is not twelve twenty-five, it is twelve thirty.”

“You want to put your kit back on and do it again?” he retorted. He sounded irritated, but in fact he was filled with respect for the soldier. These girls are
intense
, he thought. They reminded him of the men they were about to join. Scottie went and measured the distance of his course and in fact the soldier had been right: it was off by a whopping ten feet. She never put her kit back on, but she had proven her point just fine. The CSTs wanted no easy outs or cut corners—even if it was a matter of a few seconds.

By the end of the third day of training Scottie Marks was a CST believer. “These girls are the best I have ever seen in my life,” he told one of his colleagues. “They are going to be our moneymakers—they’ll prove this program. They’re smart and fast and can do things that no other women can do.” He thought about the outrageous myths troops routinely repeated about African-American soldiers before President Truman’s 1948 executive order ending segregation in the armed services, including that they were cowards and lousy fighters. Fifty years of war had proven to the American public the heroic mettle of these soldiers, and Scottie Marks found himself guessing that someday, the same thing would be said about these pioneering women.

A
fter the running test, the CSTs faced a brutal CrossFit workout in full gear—forty-plus pounds of weight—and Scottie watched as they attacked the chin-up bar. Then the trainers decided to test the women’s limits a bit more, and moved the group to a twenty-five-foot rope that was dangling from a rafter in the gym. “Now,” Scottie announced, “this is a warm-up for fast-roping that will come later. Saddle up and get in line.”

“I don’t think a lot of you will be able to do this,” one of the trainers commented. “But let’s give it a try.” He demonstrated the
technique, calling attention as he climbed to the coordinated movement of his arms and legs and the way they worked in concert. Then he nimbly descended the thick, braided rope, using the same technique but now in reverse. It looked simple enough.

Now it was the CSTs’ turn.

The first girl, a fit soldier who had always prided herself on her strength, started up the rope but fell quickly back to the floor after making it less than a third of the way up. She shook her head as she landed. “Shit,” she muttered, then stepped away as the next girl grabbed the rope and began climbing. She made it to the halfway point, but ran out of strength, too, and dropped to the ground. The third soldier, long and lean, but with less upper-body strength, started her climb strong but then stopped as her arms refused to carry her further and her inner thigh muscles buckled. Weighed down with so much gear, she dangled on the rope for a moment or two, then finally peeled off. And then it was Ashley White’s turn.

Marks expected little from the one he dubbed the “megatron quiet blonde,” or as one teacher whispered, “sweet enough to be a Disneyland greeter.” The cherubic young Ohioan with the American-as-apple-pie cheeks stepped up to the rope without saying a word and slowly, and with great focus, began climbing. Up, up, up she went. She reached the top of the rope, touched the ceiling, then scampered back down. Most astounding: she did it all using only her arms. She reached the bottom and then repeated the climb up, touch, and descent. Then, for good measure, she did it a third time. Returning to the floor beneath the rope she wiped the sweat from her hands onto the pant legs of her uniform and nonchalantly returned to her place in line.

Holy fuck, Scottie thought to himself. His Ranger buddies were looking on with a mix of awe at Ashley’s talents and amusement at Scottie’s reaction.

Ashley saw the startled reactions from her instructors and teammates, and suddenly felt self-conscious. “I couldn’t figure out how
to use my legs,” Ashley explained, referring to her improvisational style. “Easier just to use my arms.” She shook her legs out as she spoke to relieve the muscle cramping, and looked down at her white ASICS tennis shoes.

“Well, well, well, White, shocking us all,” Marks commented, then faced the CSTs who hadn’t yet attempted the climb. “But listen up, everyone: you
should
use your legs, otherwise you’re going to get tired out there when you’re fast-roping. Don’t try White’s technique at home! Who’s up next? Okay, let’s go.”

For a moment the others just stood there, speechless, then Tristan stepped toward the rope and the exercise continued. Amber, Ashley’s PMT roommate, came up and patted her on the back. “Man, Ash, I didn’t know you could do that,” she said. “If I could climb like that I’d be telling
everybody
!”

The one person who wasn’t surprised by Ashley’s display of strength was Leda, who had been quietly monitoring Ashley’s progress since March. All along she knew that this was a young soldier with special talent that had yet to be fully tapped. She was glad to see that the other CSTs were impressed by Ashley’s prowess and observed that Ashley’s confidence was surging. Finally, it seemed, Ashley was realizing that she did indeed deserve her spot in this nest of high achievers.

Leda herself fared less well in the fast-rope two days later, when the trainers led the women onto a testing ground that more closely resembled real-world conditions. Wearing body armor, she stepped onto the sixty-foot-high platform—roughly equivalent to the top floor of a several-story building—and prepared to descend. But for an instant adrenaline got the best of the veteran soldier and instead of grabbing the rope and sliding steadily downward as she had in previous trainings, she jumped off and barely caught the rope in her hands as she flew down its length, smacking hard onto the ground below. Marks raced over, saw bones in her leg jutting out at a decidedly unnatural angle, and thought to himself, Broken, for sure. But
years of war had made the urgent situation his natural habitat, and he never shed his combat mindset.

“Looks like you’re fine, Leda,” he said reassuringly, as the medic who had been standing by ran toward them.

Leda, looking pale, tried to assess the situation.

“Don’t look at your leg, Reston,” Scottie commanded in a gentle but forceful tone. “Tell me what you had for lunch.”

“Chicken,” she immediately answered in a calm voice, but through clenched teeth. “I’m really sorry about this, Sergeant. I’ll be fine.” She, too, had been to war and knew how crucial it was to steady her nerves and keep her composure, no matter how dire the situation.

The medics carried Leda off and Scottie turned back to the rope. “Okay, next one up!” he shouted to Lane, who was standing on the platform awaiting her turn. Without hesitating she grabbed the rope and stepped off, but halfway down she peeled off the rope. This time Marks was ready; he saw her hands begin to slide, and swooped in to catch her just before she hit the ground. What the hell is going on here? he thought to himself. Next came Tristan, who made it almost the whole way, but ten feet from the bottom she too fell off the rope. She suffered a minor concussion but was back on her feet within a few minutes.

Finally they finished with the fast-roping, which had been as stressful for Scottie as it had been for the soldiers. Over dinner in the dining hall that night, he confessed his anxiety to a group of CSTs, including Tristan, Sarah, and Kate. “I’ve done over twelve combat deployments, and I have
never
been more scared than when I tried to teach you guys to fast-rope. My balls were in my throat the whole time!”

Sarah whispered to Kate, “Now they’re going to say, ‘See, girls can’t do this.’ I just hope they realize that all we need is more training, at least more than a day. This is just the first time some of us ever got to try it. So what if a few people got hurt? I
know
guys get
hurt doing this all the time. No one ever says that means all men can’t fast-rope.”

In fact, it was only a few months earlier, on the bus to Fort Benning when they watched
Black Hawk Down
, that the CSTs had been reminded how deadly fast-roping can be. A Ranger goes to fast-rope out of a helicopter that is facing rocket-propelled grenade fire, slips, and falls to the ground below, leaving him bleeding in the middle of streets full of hostile fire. The accident was the first in a string of calamities that plagued American forces on a tragic day that ended with eighteen soldiers killed in action.

T
he next day began with a few hours of “dry fire”—shooting guns without ammunition—and learning the “three F’s,” for fit, form, and function, a sequence that ensured their weapons worked properly and as expected. The women would train on the M4 assault rifle and the M9 pistol, the guns that Rangers take on mission. The rifle was their primary weapon and the pistol the backup in case things went south while they were in a small or enclosed space such as a living room and they found themselves suddenly under attack.

Then they hit the firing range, a desolate spot in a broad field filled with patches of dirt. The women took their places underneath a bright blue North Carolina sky, stood before their targets of brown and tan paper silhouettes, took aim, and started firing.

Scottie began by demonstrating the correct stance and the proper foot placement for firing the M4. Then he went down the line correcting his students. He told Lane to place her feet wider apart and to keep her left hand wrapped tight around the hand guard just beneath the barrel while quickly reloading the magazine with her right. “Try it again,” he said, then moved down the row of CSTs to check on the others and demonstrate proper technique. When he had worked with them all, he returned to the top of the line and was surprised by what he saw: Lane was going through the motions just as he had told her to. “Wait a minute, Mason,” he
blurted out, “what’s going on here? You’re doing it right! What’s up with that?!”

“This is easier, Sergeant,” she matter-of-factly replied, as taken aback by his question as he was by her adherence to his instruction.

Whoah, Marks thought to himself. This is a new one. They actually listen and then they do it right.

For years Scottie had taught would-be Rangers on the firing range and watched as they did exactly what he told them not to. He long ago had come to the conclusion that all these young soldiers learned to shoot watching Mel Gibson in
Lethal Weapon
, and therefore had no idea how to correctly fire a weapon. America’s young men, he decided, were convinced they knew three things by heart and from birth: how to shoot their gun, drive their vehicle, and make sweet love to their woman. Scottie only needed to teach them one of those lifesaving skills, but it took him twice as much time as it should, and squandered much of his precious patience to boot. Now he found himself on the firing range with soldiers who required exactly one adjustment, followed by a lot of practice, before they started improving their skills and became decent marksmen. That was it. There was no ego to contend with, no pushback about how, “well, my dad taught me this so it must be right.”

Unbelievable, he thought to himself.

The CSTs paired up and, crouched on the ground with their notebooks out as if they were interviewing the women they would meet, they prepared for a scenario in which the woman turns out to be a man in a burqa and they have to draw their weapon and shoot. Over and over he had them repeat their moves, starting from a seated position, moving to their haunches, and then drawing to defend themselves from the ground.

Fighting their instincts was Marks’s first challenge.

“Drop the pen,” he yelled at one CST as he pretended to overtake her. “You have a pistol, draw it, aim, and fire!”

Some, like Cassie, Kate, Kimberly, and Sarah, were comfortable
with the Beretta M9 pistol because they had trained on it for years as MPs. But Marks quickly saw that he would need to spend more time with several others who had logged a lot fewer hours handling a gun.

Ashley, whom by now Marks thought “the sweetest girl in the world,” was still struggling with the close-quarters technique. She may have been stone quiet and incredibly nice, but Scottie saw in her eyes the flint of a real soldier and he wanted to draw out that “killer” in her. Ashley was wrestling with the pistol, but he thought it was the newness of close-retention shooting that was throwing her off; she seemed plenty comfortable firing a weapon. He just needed to help her attack the source of her concern and do enough drills to make her feel confident in her own abilities. He worked to build the muscles in her hand, instructing her to hold the gun with just her thumb and middle finger, then keep pulling the trigger. After forty-five minutes of that, over and over, Ashley asked if she could please take a quick moment to stretch her cramping forearm. Marks gave her a moment to stretch, then had her back at it. “You gotta build your forearm muscles, White,” he said. “All right; thank you, Sergeant,” Ashley answered through clenched teeth.

But still there was something missing. Then, in a flash, Scottie remembered a special technique he learned from Mike Seeklander, a friend and expert shooter who had written a number of handgun training books and specialized in close-quarters shooting.

“Okay, gals,” he said, “watch me closely.” Using Ashley as a model, he looked her dead in the eyes. “First, you gotta draw your weapon fast. White, you gotta be ready to kill me. Get mad, goddammit. Mad enough to punch me in the face and want me dead. Because if you don’t get me I am going to get you. Like this . . .” And with that he lunged toward Ashley.

“If someone is grabbing your gun you have to push their face away, wrap your arm around the back of your head, trace your body back down and around, and go underneath the gun to punch out and shoot in the pelvic area,” he said, addressing the entire assembly of buns and ponytails. “That way you avoid putting your hand in
front of the barrel so if you’re pulling the trigger very quickly you don’t end up shooting yourself in the palm.”