Ashley's War Read Online Free PDF

herself. Her mother’s life collapsed after her dad walked out on them when Lane was fourteen. After that, track and field raised her and kept her out of trouble. Together she and her older brother ran the household, cared for the pigs and cows on their small farm, and pushed each other every night to at least try to finish some portion of their homework.
    At the moment the email sounded she was thinking about her Guard unit, trying to figure out when it would deploy and how she would prepare her two-year-old daughter for her absence. Her unit had served in Iraq early in that war and she had led supply convoysin the south through some seriously heavy fighting. She was prepared to deploy again; with two wars on, most every Guard member had to go to Iraq or Afghanistan at least once, often more. But she did not want to go to war again with her particular unit, which she felt was not well disciplined—or prepared to protect its members.
    Now a friend from the Wisconsin National Guard was forwarding an email about a new job on something called a “Cultural Support Team.”
    “Hey, Lane, this sounds just up your alley,” she wrote.
    The subject line of the email read: “Female Volunteers for the US Army Special Operations Command Female Engagement Team Program.”
    Females in Special Ops? Lane was intrigued. Everyone knew that women couldn’t officially serve in any unit that engaged in direct ground combat, and Special Operations was among the most combat-focused parts of the American military machine. But the email made it clear the women would not be operators themselves: they would be supporting Army special ops. It went on:
Currently, the US Special Operations Community has very few trained soldiers which limits Army Special Operations Forces’ ability to connect and collaborate with this critical part of the Afghanistan society. As mitigation, US Army Special Operations Command has begun a Female Engagement Training program at Ft. Bragg, NC, to meet this critical mission requirement.
    Lane’s heart beat faster as she continued reading. She saw another benefit: the deployment was already scheduled and would last only six to eight months instead of the usual year. She would finish training by July and be back home with her daughter well before summer vacation began. Plus, anything beat driving convoys and sitting in a truck for up to twelve hours while people shot at you.Lane had mastered the art of peeing in a bottle, a skill that had yet to prove useful back at home. She was eager to do—and learn—something more.
    But Lane had another, more urgent reason for wanting to leave her Guard unit and do the CST mission. Back in Iraq, a fellow soldier in another unit had raped her. Not knowing where to turn, she had said nothing to anyone. Her marriage was already on the rocks, and she worried this might tip the fragile balance. But the experience had haunted her, and changed her. After returning home to Nevada she enrolled in college, only to find she couldn’t focus on her studies and kept suffering flashbacks. A doctor at the local veterans’ hospital told her it couldn’t be post-traumatic stress: that could only come from combat injuries, not from trauma caused by rape.
    A year after returning stateside Lane’s Guard unit played a video about rape in the military, in which experts counseled soldiers on how to spot the “predators” among them and introduced the concept of “acquaintance rape,” which put a name to Lane’s personal nightmare. Watching the video unleashed a tsunami of horrific memories Lane had been trying to suppress. She ran out of the room desperate for fresh air, eyes watering, leaving her fellow Guard members whispering to one another, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. When she returned, she sat down with her team and finally, for the first time, shared her story about Iraq. She assured them that what they were watching on that video was very real. They needed to watch