Ashley's War Read Online Free PDF Page B

out for their fellow soldiers—and not just on the battlefield.
    Talking about what happened to her left Lane feeling suddenly lighter. Her fellow Guard members wrote letters to tell her how much her admission had meant to them and taught them. She vowed that from that moment on she would not let the rape define who she was or what kind of person—and soldier—she would be. When the email announcing the CST program arrived, Lane felt a door opening; she believed it would offer her a rare opportunity toboth serve alongside the Army’s finest fighting units and confront her demons in the open, on the battlefield. She would put herself in the most challenging combat situation possible with the most elite fighters possible, and prove to herself she was no victim. Lane knew she was tough enough.
    “If I get to Bragg,” she vowed, “there is no way I am letting them turn me down.” She felt her old intensity return for the first time in years. “No one is keeping me out of this.”
    T wo thousand miles away, in Columbia, South Carolina, another soldier received an email from a fellow sister-in-arms. Amber Treadmont, a twenty-eight-year-old first lieutenant, had enlisted just as soon as she could, at the age of seventeen. Now a message arrived announcing that the Army was seeking exceptional females to support special operations. She read the cover note from her company commander:
If I weren’t about to become a major I would absolutely do this. You should go for it.
    Amber had wanted to be in the Army for as long as she could remember. With blond hair and blue eyes, everyone thought she looked like Heidi in the popular children’s movie, a fact that made her passion to be out shooting guns all the more surprising to those who didn’t know her. In high school in rural Pennsylvania she spent hours every week shooting targets and dreaming of the day when she could aim her weapon at a real enemy, not a piece of paper or a Coke can. But Amber was a girl, and women could not serve in the infantry. So she joined the Army’s intelligence teams, training at Fort Huachuca, a dozen miles north of the Mexican border in Arizona. Her first deployment, at the age of nineteen, was to Bosnia, where she analyzed terror networks for a task force hunting war criminals and terrorists transiting through the region. Her skills as an analystbecame known, and the FBI brought her on for three years to help with counternarcotics operations in Pennsylvania. Her team’s efforts led to the indictment of thirteen members of the infamous Bloods gang.
    By the early 2000s the Afghanistan war was well under way, and Amber decided to build upon what she had learned and become an interrogator. As part of her training the Army sent her to learn Farsi at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. The idea of being an interrogator appealed to Amber; she liked using her brains to keep other soldiers safe. If she couldn’t join them on the front lines she could at least give tactical support and find out about terrorists and insurgents before they had a chance to put their plans into action.
    After seven years as an enlisted soldier and following graduation from college and the birth of her son, Amber decided to head to Officer Candidate School. She became a rarity in the Army: someone who has been both an enlisted soldier and an officer.
    Amber was serving as an officer at South Carolina’s Fort Jackson Army base, doing a job she hated: overseeing paperwork and processing awards for returning soldiers. She was far from the action, bored by the work and stuck in a marriage that was all but over. She was just sitting around, waiting to see when her next deployment would come.
    And then the CST email arrived. The timing couldn’t have been better. This was the best chance she was going to get to go out on missions with special operators, and she was fully prepared to embrace the rigor of CST selection.
    It took Amber less than a minute to print