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the n in Rangers stood for “knowledge.”) These were not touchy-feely men; they were the “blunt instrument” of special operations, guys whose idea of fun was guzzling a Rip It energy drink, working out for two hours, and then getting into a gunfight against bad guys. Nor did they bother with building foreign forces or forging relationships with locals, which was the specialty of the storied Green Berets. The Rangers had a pure and easily quantifiable mandate: you either got the insurgent you wanted or you didn’t. And by now McRaven was ready to employ any smart strategy that would make his men and their mission more effective.
    So when McRaven’s official Request for Forces landed on his desk, Olson viewed it as an immediate call to action. This was no longer about his ideas of the “yin and yang of warfare,” Olson told the men who worked for him: this was a hard requirement from a JSOC commander in the field. And everyone knew that what JSOC requested, JSOC received. Olson immediately began putting the wheels in motion, beginning with a request to the Army Special Operations Command to start training the new teams of female soldiers at its Fort Bragg headquarters. Olson divided the teams into two groups: the “direct action” side would go with counterterrorism-focused units, alongside the Rangers. The second group would accompany the more “indirect action” teams out in the hinterland where Green Berets forged relationships with local people and their leaders. These women would be part of VSOs, or Village Stability Operations.
    In the meantime, Olson consulted his lawyers about the ban on women in ground combat and learned that as long as he “attached” rather than “assigned” women to these special operations units, he could put them almost anywhere. Including on missions with Rangers.
    Finally there was the issue of the team’s name. Everyone agreed that the word female should be avoided, since that would make acceptance all the harder among the all-male units. Since the concept of teamwork was so fundamental to special operations and its distinctive sense of community, they all agreed that it should be a “team.” Another carefully selected word would help blunt the argument of those who thought the program was just a backdoor way for women to become frontline operators: support . Finally, they needed a term that would express the idea that these American female soldiers would make inroads into Afghanistan’s social fabric to reach places and people that men couldn’t: cultural .
    The Cultural Support Teams were born.
    And so it was that from Olson’s kernel of an idea about what female service members could do that men could not; from McChrystal’s desire to win and his experience on the ground; and from McRaven’s request for women to support his men, there grew a series of conversations that matured into plans that took unexpected twists and eventually produced a program that led Second Lieutenant Ashley White and her female comrades onto the battlefield in Kandahar, Afghanistan, late one night in August 2011.

2
    Hearing the Call to Serve
    * * *
    L ane Mason heard the ding of an incoming email and gazed down at her aging laptop. Tall, with ice-blue eyes, walnut brown hair, and tattooed arms, she looked like a Harley-Davidson model. A twenty-three-year-old Iraq War veteran from a small town in northeast Nevada, Lane worked for the local National Guard shepherding new recruits and transitioning them into the Guard.
    Despite motherhood Lane’s body still possessed the taut strength of the track star she had been. In high school she had led her team to the state championships year after year, but didn’t realize until it was too late that she could have ridden her athletic talent all the way to a college scholarship. Instead she signed up for the National Guard because she knew her parents could never afford her tuition. The Guard would pay for college.
    From childhood she had fended for