Angry Planet - Meet the women who went in with the Navy SEALs in Afghanistan

Episode Date: May 12, 2016

It was just this year that U.S. women were officially allowed in combat roles. That’s officially. But in Afghanistan, American women were on the front lines on night raids with commandos, including the Navy SEALs, six years ago. This week on War College we talk about their stories.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. This is all very living history, which does not mean that women hadn't been serving before. It just means that women hadn't officially been allowed to be in a number of roles, and these have slowly opened up over the years,

each building upon really what the generation before has showed was possible. It was just this year that U.S. women were officially allowed in combat roles. That's officially. But in Afghanistan, American women were on the front lines, on night raids with special forces, including Navy SEALs, six years ago. This week on War College, we talk about their stories. You're listening to War College. A weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines.

Here's your host, Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Reuters' opinion editor, Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt, contributing editor at Wars Boring. Today we're talking with author and journalist Gail Zemick Lemmon. Lemon is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and she's also the author of Ashley's War, the untold story of a team of women's soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield.

And the book was actually just released in paperback. So, Gail, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, it's my pleasure. I'm fans of both of your work. I really like Morris Boring. I read it. And Jason and I've worked together on pieces in the past, so I'm very glad to be here. Can you sort of tell us about your book a bit?

I just want to start from there, because you use one woman's story, Ashley White, who unfortunately was killed actually in Afghanistan, but she used her story to shed light on the role of women in the military in Afghanistan. So can you sort of just tell us the story a little bit? Sure. Ashley's War really is a team story of friendship and of service, and I think in some ways it's the ultimate story of women's friendship in the least likely place, which is on the Special Operations battlefield. It's about a team of women who were recruited, trained, and deployed.

for special operations combat missions back in 2011, while the combat ban was very much in place, to be out alongside Army Rangers and Navy SEALs. I'm the kind of experience in combat seen by less than 5% of the entire United States military. And they were recruited there by Admiral Olson, who was the first Navy SEAL to lead Special Operations Command, and by Army Special Operations Command, which I put out a recruiting poster, which is in the Ashley's War book, which said female soldiers become part of history, joined Special Operations on the battlefield in Afghanistan,

and really this group of All-Stars, this really unlikely band of soldiers who became sisters, you know, really became family in service to their country alongside Special Operations, answered that call because they were young women who had always wanted to be alongside the best of the best, at the heart of the country's mission, and to be doing something that they thought really mattered at the center of the war. And so this opportunity to be out on Ranger and Seal missions in 2011,

while women officially weren't there, was for them, life-changing. Well, can I ask you one thing that I wasn't entirely sure about, what were these women doing before they answered the call? Yeah. So the truth is that Army Special Operations didn't have enough women to fill these roles. So they were women who were doing all kinds of roles. You know, Ashley's War, once the, is this really a story about women from all across the Army Guard and Reserve, right? So Ashley White was an ROTC, a cadet who then was serving with North Carolina National Guard. Lane Mason, her roommate was enlisted, a Iraq War veteran who had run convoys in the Iraq War.

Another one of them, Ashley's partner, Ann, she had received a bronze star medal with a V-device for Valor from her 2009 Afghanistan deployment in which she led her troops through a 36-hour firefight. Another Tristan was an field artillery officer who was at Fort Sill. So you had women from all across the army, from bases from South Carolina to South Korea. And the truth is that they were really this mix of intense and feminine and funny and fierce. And they came together because they wanted to be part of this pilot program, this plane being built in mid-flight to put women on the battlefield. And I think it's important to know because the war needed them. They were recruited there by special operations because male soldiers needed

women to talk to Afghan women, to see and know and learn everything they saw and understood about their own communities because so much of that knowledge was being left unknown and unseen because of the places where the insurgency was strongest were often the most traditional. And so male soldiers could not talk to Afghan women without giving grave offense. And everybody knows whether you're in southern New York or southern Afghanistan. If you want to know what's happening in a community, you know, who do you talk to? And so their job was to be, right, it was women. And so their job was to be in the heat of a night raid to be out there talking to Afghan women, keeping women and children away from the kinetic action, from everything else happening,

and talking to them about what they were suisseeing in their neighborhoods. Did they actually ever fire their weapons in anger? Because when I read the intro to your book, you actually go over the equipment that Ashley was gearing up with. I mean, it included an M4 rifle. Correct. They all had a pistol and a rifle, absolutely. So on those kinds of special operations missions, and for those of your viewers who, you know,

I sometimes when people are saying, what do those look like? I sometimes urge people to watch Zero Dark 30 that scene, right? I mean, because that's the, you know, for better and for worse, that's what those missions looked like. And so, you know, no matter, everybody had a specific role, the explosive ordinance device person, didn't have to have to fire the weapon either.

But you had weapons because you didn't know what that night was going to bring. And those missions are, you know, the kind of combat experienced by less than 5% of the entire United States military. And so whether your job is to be out there searching and questioning and talking to women and children and keeping them away from everything else, or your job is to be an EOD tech, you know, you have to have a weapon and you have to be ready for whatever that night brings. You know, there's a scene. And Ashley's where Amber has been on this all. night mission that is now turning to daybreak, which is very dangerous. And, you know, they're running

through a firefight in different villages that are trying to attack them on the way out. So you just did not know what each night was going to bring. Gail, the combat ban was lifted, you know, late last year. Do you think that this pilot program helped inform to that decision? I think very much so. Not because I think that, but there's a June 2013 press conference that's in the epilogue in which major general saccolic then of special operations command. Really, is asked about, well, how are women going to be seals and how are women going to be Rangers and what's the way forward? And he points to these teams. And he actually says, you know, those girls of the culture, young girls of the cultural support team have been really impressive. And then he says, and quote, they may well have laid the foundation for ultimate integration. So I do think they stood on the shoulders of everybody who had been there. And women had been doing these jobs in ones and two since 2001. And in fact, I was just at the National Infantry Museum for an event around Ashley's War. And, uh, Colonel Fythe Cope, who led the opening of Ranger School, was talking about the charade that everybody had gotten used to with the combat ban, you know, that everybody had been working their way around it for years in war.

And I think Ashley's where the story of these teams was watched by Special Operations Leadership to see just how it would go and whether it would work. Well, that's just such a strong contrast to so much of what you read. And what often comes out in the papers, if I can be anachronistic, but what often comes out is friction between men and women in the armed forces and an enormous amount of it. I mean, there's, and from several different, I mean, I know we could, I sort of want to talk about each in turn in a way, the sexual harassment issue, which has been tremendous and people have said actually underreported. Do you think that any of the women that you talked to, did they ever talk about having been

subject to something like that. So two of the women who were in Ashley's War were survivors of military sexual assault, and both talked about it. And in fact, Lane Mason, the Iraq veteran, actually wanted to do this ranger deployment because she wanted to put herself in the most difficult environment possible and proved to herself she would never be a victim again. That was part of her thinking. This most important piece, though, and this came up in an event we just did here in the

Council on Foreign Relations, and three of the women from the book, three of the soldiers, from the book were here. And, you know, each would say they did not face that at all in the special operations world, in part because they are so highly trained and the discipline is high, and leaders would come to them and say, listen, not everybody who wants you here, but a lot of us do, and if you need anything, if you have any issues, let me know. And honestly and truly, I think so often we underestimate the men alongside whom these women served. You know, I talk to Rangers who did 12, 13, 14 special operations deployments in the Pose Dinole. And it is not that anybody sang kumbaya and said, oh, this is a great idea when they said,

we're going to put women on these missions. But it was that it was always about the mission. Do you have the skills to be out there making a difference, adding value, saving lives, accomplishing the objective. And that was the central thing. And I think that's why there are several battle scenes in Ashley's War that a lot of Rangers wrote me about and said, you know, that's what I experienced, which is even if I didn't want them out there at the beginning, there's a story about a seal team, but didn't want one of

the MPs, military police, who was part of the Ashley's War team, out with them. So, you know, we didn't ask for you. I'm not sure why you're here. And one of the nights they go out, they found the intel item they were looking for, wrapped up in a baby's wet diaper in the women's quarters in the compound that they were searching. And that answered, you know, more than she ever could have had any kind of conversation about as to why they were there. So I think the proof was always in, do you perform? You know, this was never about politics. It was always about purpose and about patriotism and about achieving the objective. So the objectives is interesting because it's actually, as you have talked about it,

it's an intelligence role. I mean, which is actually, I don't, when you say it that way, it sounds like I'm minimizing it. I don't mean that at all. I mean, actually keeping women and children away from being killed is not a small thing. I don't mean to imply that. And also allowing the objective to continue, allowing the mission to continue because there aren't women and children. There's a story one night, Cassie, one of the members, of the team who managed to be an ROTC cadet, a sorority sister, and a women's studies minor,

all in one person. That's amazing. And which is always amazing to me, right? And I said, but you were what? And she played tennis. You know, I mean, her dad on her 16th birthday tried to give her a Mustang and she wanted a Ford pickup instead and then would go play competitive tennis across Florida. So, you know, I mean, I think there are people who live across dimensions where we're so

used to seeing one dimension of the story and not the full person. So I am not at all minimizing sexual arrest and a military sexual assault, but what I'm saying is that it really didn't play into the narrative of this story because I think in part it was really about the objective. And you know, one night Cassie was out with this Ranger platoon and they actually brought her up to the front before the house had been cleared, before the combat had been before, you know, more than two or three other people were they in the compound. And if you know those missions, That doesn't happen a lot. But they brought her up because, you know, there was a girl who was screaming.

You know, you're going to take my dad and you can't take my dad. And, of course, the minute you start screaming in the middle of the night, everybody worries about what that means for your own safety and for the safety of the mission. And so they said, please, you know, quiet her down. And so she went into the house, was talking to the girl. The girl was, you know, cursing and spitting at her and everything. And they had a discussion about what was going on.

And, you know, whether that was a positive discussion or not, I mean, it ended calmly or not, the fact was the Rangers could keep doing their job because they could have this discussion. And Cassie said, look, I'm really close to my dad too, but your dad's doing bad things that are, you know, killing Afghans and Americans. And the girl got right back in her face and answered her. But, I mean, I think that that exchange could happen in the middle of this combat operation and allow the combat operation to go forward, I think was part of what they did every night. So did they actually speak Pashto or whatever the local language was? next question, just enough to get by. They had interpreters.

And in fact, there's one chapter of Ashley's War that is dedicated to Nadia, who is the Afghan-American translator from the OC, from Orange County, California, who thought she was going to do humanitarian missions and got to Afghanistan and realized she was going to be translating 12 hours on, 12 hours off for baghrim detainees, and eventually gets recruited to be part of what the men on her contracting, you know, company derisively. referred to as Team Pink, the cultural support team, these all women teams. And so she was the eyes and ears and voice. All right, Gail, you just interviewed the first women Army Rangers, correct? Yeah. Okay. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that and a little bit about what you see as

the new roles that are opening up for women in the military. I mean, I think you are really seeing history unfolding before our eyes. And it's fascinating, even in the year since the hardcover came out, just to see what shifts have happened. Army Ranger School, I went to cover March pre-ranger courses and then August the swamp phase of Army Ranger School in the swamps of Florida. And it is fascinating to see the shift that is happening and just how much history has unfolded in the course of 12 months.

What was fascinating to me about Ranger School is that almost overnight it went from this theoretical conversation about could women meet the highest standard, the same standard, to, okay, now that they have what happens next. And I think that development really influenced the discussion about all combat and infantry and armor roles opening up going forward. So I think you really are seeing the cultural support teams, the women in Ash's war standing on the shoulders of all the women who had been doing those jobs and one-offs since the wars

had started. Then you have these formal teams that are recruited, trained, and deployed to do these kind of work to put women that far forward on that kind of combat operation. And then you have this, you know, Ranger School really picks up where a lot of the Rangers who were at Ranger School had served with teammates who had been part of the Ashley's War, a story, members of the cultural support team. So I think you do see a history that now is going to lead to things that we've never as a country seen, which is, you know, women leading in infantry and in combat arms.

So when you look at the stories now about the women who pass through, with Ranger training. There are all kinds of, I don't know if accusations are the right word. Oh, I know them all. I was part of covering them. Absolutely. And, you know, it's really interesting because, you know, you can't talk, I don't think, I mean, choose my words carefully here. I think that there are a lot of reasons that people feel very passionately about the history of Rangers School and that its integrity is preserved at the very highest standard. And women you meet are the first ones to tell you that they do not want a lower standard. And all the men alongside whom they serve echo that,

but the women will come up to you and you have your notebook out and say, I don't want a different standard. I simply want the opportunity to meet that one. And look, I think if you start to, I've heard a lot of those allegations. I've actually asked for proof in several cases. But I think short of that, to question what they did in ranger school is not to question them. It's to question these men who are rangers who have all.

often done more than a dozen deployments in the post-9-11 wars and to question their character and their integrity and whether they lowered a standard against their will or their integrity. And I talk to them and they'll say, listen, I don't know what people are talking about. You know, there are friendships that have ended because of the passion about these debates, right, and these discussions among Rangers who have deployed over and over again. But when you talk to the people who lead Ranger Training Battalion, it's very hard for me. to say that these people who led America in war also wanted to fudge a standard to make their bosses happy. I just find that very hard to believe. And I think it's very important to tie it back to

questioning their integrity when you talk about whether a standard was changed. Right. That makes sense. I mean, I totally see what you're saying. But I do think people have proof of that, then they should come out. But I think it gets to this, the passion, this discussion arouses. You know, I have never, I am not an expert in this or never worked on this before writing. I'm not an expert in this previously to having spent, you know, three years of my life working on it, right? I mean, but I've never written about something, honestly, anywhere. Afghanistan, South Asia, elsewhere in Saudi Asia, the Middle East, the economy, the financial crisis, Washington politics, and which people have more confidence in their opinions and less tethering to a set of facts.

The one thing I do have to just be clear about, I mean, the questions that we're talking about were whether or not any of the standards were loosened, whether or not people were able to go through the course multiple times as opposed to one shot and that's it. And I think this is very important for your listeners. That is standard procedure that people go through different phases of Ranger School. And in fact, I was at a dinner with Ranger Training Battalion leaders the other night where they were walking Rangers who had gone through when you only had one shot. in the 60s, through the evolutions that started in the 1990s. So this was not done for women. I think that is incredibly important that, in fact, the people who've taken the longest to finish ranger school were not women.

Gotcha. Okay. Can we move on actually to the Marines? Do you know anything about the integration of units there? Do people in units, like the Marine units who've tried mixed battalions or together, the people you've talked to, do people come out of the training feeling comfortable? You know, I will say I have not spent a lot, a great deal of time with the Marines, much more on the Army and the Special Operation side, but I have talked to some, and I've talked to a lot of

people who've studied it. And I think what's fascinating is that it was designed, the Marine study gave them a lot of data, and it was designed to look at the average female and the average male. And as General Dunford would say, we're not talking about the average female, when we're talking about who is going to make the cut. And I also think it's important about the standards that they're held to. You know, there are a lot of people who are disappointed recently that the Marines decided to continue co-ed, I'm sorry, not a single-sex training. They're the only ones who have a boot camp that is not, that is segregated. And, you know, I think these are all conversations because at the same time, the Marines were the first ones to have female engagement teams. The Marines have led the way

over and over again on different issues, including right now, Marine Special Operations Command was the first one to have a female in the pipeline to try out to be a member of Marine Special Operations Command. That's going to happen this, I think it's this summer. So, you know, I think that you are going to see a lot of stops and starts along the way, and I think you're going to see a lot of change, but I do think that there is, the Marines have always been those who lead once the change is made. You know, I just realized I have a very stupid question. I think it's kind of basic, but I'm going to ask it anyway, because the question is when units are integrated, what exactly does that look like? Does that mean that people are actually

sharing barracks together? Does it mean that, you know, it's just that they're marching together and, you know, actually, what does it look like? So military police have been integrated for a while and they've had, you know, and we don't hear very much about that actually. And a lot of people don't even know that they are. They have been, women have been leading military police for years. I think these are all, it looks very different for everybody. I don't think everybody comes up with a one standard thing. You know, I think in some stories, certainly in Special Operations Land, and some of them, it's like, you know, there's the same barracks and there's a sheet that somebody puts up to separate the sleeping quarters.

I think, you know, and in some cases, you know, there is a separate toilet that's established. I mean, there's not, I've not heard much more that's much more elaborate than that. But, you know, talk to MPs. I would urge you to have an MP on here, too, who can talk to you firsthand about what that looks like. And they've had integration for years in military police in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and many other parts of the world. As McChrystal noted in Ashley's War, women have been serving in Delta for a long time. Is that right? Right?

We just don't know it. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Just we don't see or know them. This actually speaks to a question I wanted to ask, and I kind of wanted you to tell our audience about you've, this to a lot of. lot of people, I think these changes may seem like they're new and they're happening very fast. But as you've said, and you've kind of been discussing with us, you said the cultural support

teams have stood on the shoulders of everyone that's come before them. And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about some of the historical, you know, some of the times that women have served in the American military in the past, in some of these people that the cultural support team is standing on. Yeah. So, you know, more than 40,000 women deployed in the first Gulf War, more than 300,000 women have deployed in the post 9-11 wars. In Vietnam, obviously women were serving World War II. Women were prisoners of war, which also I think a lot of people don't know. So, I mean, this is all a history that has been building upon itself,

but it's recent history, right? The first group of women to enter West Point was 1976. The first group of women to graduate from West Point was 1980. This is all very living history, which does not mean that women hadn't been serving before. It just means that women hadn't officially been allowed to be in a number of roles, and these have slowly opened up over the years, and each building upon really what the generation before has showed was possible. So do you think that that means that things will continue to get better? I mean, if we're going not just, will more roles open up, but do you think that the Army or the armed forces in general will find, more comfort? Do you think they'll figure out the issue with sexual harassment? Well, I think it's a

question of leadership. He's always been a question of leadership. And I do think, you know, it's interesting, Chairman Dempsey, when they first lifted the combat ban in 2013, was talking about these two classes of citizens that had been created by the combat ban. He talked about it within the sexual harassment, the military sexual assault context. I'd urge people to go back and look at that. The transcript of him saying, like, you know, we've created these two separate classes of warriors. And, and, you know, I think that that has enabled some to see others as lesser. I think the Army leadership in some ways is well ahead of the American public. And I think battlefield reality is well beyond where the American public knows, in part,

because think about it, less than 1% has fought 100% of 14 years of war. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. It also goes along with what I think surprised people when the upper echelons in the military were so open to the idea of gay and lesbian soldiers serving openly. Yeah. I think the expectation is often that the military is a more conservative organization than the rest of the public. Yeah, and I think that, look, the military has often been on the front of change, you know, in the front end of social change, whether it's racial or now we see this conversation

about women on the battlefield. the battlefield changed years ago. What didn't change was regulation and policy. And so recently, Rob O'Neill was a Navy SEAL who was in the Esquire piece about killing bin Laden, Shihda bin Laden shooter, and I know there are lots of discussion around that story.

He was doing an interview in which an anchor said, aren't you opposed to women? And he said, women were out with me on seal missions. Some of the women in Ashley's war. We're out with me on seal missions in 2011. No, I don't think any of this is a big deal. as long as you meet the standard. So I think in some ways, the people who are closest to it

have been leading at the front. And I think that the distance we have from these wars has only reinforced an outdated notion of who fights them and why. Gail, I just want to say thank you so much for joining us today. You're a terrific guest, and, I mean, it's a fascinating story, too. Thanks for listening to this episode of War College. You can find us on Twitter. Our handle is at war underscore college.

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