CHAPTER 5
ALWAYS WANTED TO BE A COMBAT FIGHTER
We are determined to foment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.
—ABIGAIL ADAMS
CAMP PENDLETON, CALIFORNIA, JULY 2010—Sergeant Sheena Adams stood, laptop in hand, at the front of the helicopter hangar. Her boots straddled the line where the hangar’s concrete floor ended and the outdoor tarmac began, giving her the perfect position to watch the mechanics’ daily routine before moving to work on the choppers lined up behind her on the adjoining lot.
Marines maneuvered around choppers that needed repair; their boots clomped across the mechanic shop’s hard surface. Ladders tapped lightly against the choppers’ sides as mechanics climbed to the top. The glow from industrial lamps that hung between the ceiling’s aging white slats mixed with the late-morning sun pouring into the hangar through the generous opening where Adams stood. The mix of light in the room cast bright yellow over the tops of the choppers’ dull-colored blades. Inside the hangar, mechanics did complex work. They pulled engines apart and removed transmissions.
But Adams was headed to the line—that part of the tarmac where choppers, perfectly spaced, waited for smaller, routine fixes and final inspections. She approached the first helicopter. The wiry outline of her frame became even more pronounced the closer she got to its massive metal-and-glass front. She looked down the line at the five other machines—Hueys and Cobras—prepped to fly out, some for deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Her job was vital. If choppers fly out unprepared or repairs aren’t done properly, botched mechanical work could turn what would under normal circumstances be a routine flight into a deadly task. The burden of getting it right—the idea that these deceptively simple vehicle checks could have even the smallest impact on the future of anyone who entered the chopper—was heavy.
In the short time she had performed her job as a mechanic she never managed to enjoy it. But she stayed in the position—the Marines were short on mechanics and needed as many bodies as they could convince to take on the role. Adams knew that and made the sacrifice. Detailed inspection forms had only gotten more burdensome over the eight months she’d been doing the job.
Inspecting all the choppers on the line can take hours each day. And each day the job is only a slight variation of the same routine: Adams shakes the thick metal ladder slightly to ensure its position against the side of the chopper is sturdy before she makes her way to the top. She opens a small set of tools and pulls out a flashlight to begin her inspection. She has to be familiar with each component of the Huey in order to identify what could potentially be wrong with the machine. She shines a small flashlight on the battery and runs her fingertips over the engine, picking apart the individual components in her mind. An irregularity prompts her to pull out a small notebook and pencil from her front pocket. She jots down the problem and heads back to the hangar to look up the fix in a shop manual. Her Toughbook—that military-style laptop with the hard outer casing that can be dropped on rough surfaces without breaking—is one of the few items that Adams can bring back with her on the line. In it she makes a record of her work, then slowly walks around the gray chopper. She squints, looks up briefly at a set of blades, then works her way down the line, making sure to check every moving part that corresponds to her assignment list. Her superiors will review her work when it’s done. The choppers that pass inspection will fly out, some the following morning. As part of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, Adams has completed the same routine for months.
But this morning, as she removed the black flashlight from her tool kit, her hands shook. Her sweaty palms left faint outlines on the sides of the Huey helicopters. It was the second day of negotiating what she hoped would be a journey to Afghanistan.
The day before, her shop commander had told her that there was an opening—one opening—for a female willing to travel with a FET that would be attached to a frontline infantry unit. The team would support the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines. As soon as she heard the news Adams was on a mission to convince her command to let her go.
She was a good Marine, but she wished she’d had a stronger history of military commitment. This wasn’t her first enlistment; she’d served once before but left after four years. She thought she could do more than her job at the time allowed. In the years after her separation she regretted that she hadn’t tried to re-enlist in a different specialty or put in more time that would have shown she wanted a military career, not a minimum enlistment. Now, early into her Marine Corps service, she was asking to leave the mechanic shop where she was one of only two women and a dozen or so Marines responsible for the upkeep of Cobra and Huey helicopters.
Despite speeches from Washington to the American public stating that the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan were strategically sound, actions on the ground indicated that the opposite was true. By 2010 the United States had spent more than $3 trillion on combat in Iraq, and that year the Islamic Army in Iraq (a Sunni insurgency that formed in response to the 2003 invasion of the country) claimed responsibility for attacks on US military vehicles. The 2007 surge, during which President George W. Bush sent more than thirty thousand American troops to Iraq, managed to control some militant groups, but violence returned after the operation was deemed a success and troops began to withdraw. In 2010 insurgents were regaining strength by exploiting growing dissent against the al-Maliki government, creating the basis for a return to insurgent power through ISIS. October of 2010 also saw the release of more than three hundred thousand secret documents and field reports that revealed ugly truths about the actions of American forces—the revelation that members of the military had indiscriminately killed Iraqi civilians and destroyed trust between American troops and the local population. And trust was key to gathering intelligence. Rebuilding it was one of the most important aspects of the FET mission—and one of the hardest.
For coalition forces in Afghanistan 2010 was the war’s deadliest year.
By September 520 coalition service members had been killed—nearly matching the total number of coalition deaths for the previous year. Nine Americans died in one chopper crash in Southern Afghanistan’s Zabul Province in September, killing more Americans at once than any other crash. In all, 711 coalition service members—499 of whom were American—lost their lives in Afghanistan in 2010. That year’s battles brought the total number of deaths since the war’s beginning to more than 2,000.
But even if Adams had known how deadly 2010 would be, her determination to jump into the heart of the conflict wouldn’t have faded.
Adams had always wanted to be an infantry Marine.
When she was running around her hometown in Hawaii at the age of five she dreamed of wearing combat gear, envisioned herself maneuvering through fields and escaping enemy fire. She had tried hard to internalize the feelings of pride she knew Marines must have experienced after taking down enemy forces. And even when she grew old enough to understand that for females the word Marine didn’t mean combat, that it couldn’t, she held onto the possibility that for her, somehow, one day it could.
As much as Adams tried to put thoughts of combat out of her mind, even during her first tour in the Marines, her desire to be on the ground with infantry troops grew stronger. Training in other military professions felt like a distraction. The work she was doing several months into 2010—combing through mechanics’ manuals, making notes on flight inspection sheets—had never been a part of her plan.
When her commander called her into his office and told her there was an opening on a FET that would be landing in Afghanistan in a few months, Adams fought to keep her feet planted firmly on the floor. Her first instinct was to jump up and shout. She had heard about the all-female teams months ago. They had a unique job—to fight the Taliban through frisking and building relationships with Afghanistan’s women. Filling that slot was the closest she’d get to infantry.
The women who eagerly filled the ranks of the FETs pushed the program beyond the military’s initial expectations. They started connecting with Afghan women, often through the common bond of motherhood. During scouting missions and on patrols American women would talk to Afghan moms who revealed how difficult it was for them to keep their children from getting ear infections and how hard it was to get food and blankets for their babies. American women expanded the FET mission to include classes on hygiene and baby care and medical exams for kids. The face of FET members became one of trust. Afghan women began to invite FET members into their homes when their husbands were at work—and sometimes their conversations centered on Taliban activity. At home, unable to work or leave their villages because of Taliban restrictions, mothers witnessed terror networks’ daily efforts at recruitment. They watched teenage boys who were old enough to fight disappear from their compounds, presumably forced into a local cell of the insurgency. Other Afghan women talked about needing work—some were married to men who had other wives and children and could financially support none of them; others were widows who were starving because of Taliban laws that kept them from leaving their homes and getting a job. The mission of the FET grew to include economic empowerment for the poorest of Afghan women, and that fed the military’s nation-building objectives. The FETs helped Afghan women start small businesses and make money to support their families. That assistance helped strengthen poorer villages’ economies, making them less vulnerable to the promises of financial stability that insurgent groups offered. Stronger villages became less of a target for Taliban recruiting.
Adams also knew how challenging the job was: some FET members faced resistance within combat units from infantrymen who didn’t think women belonged there. And as much as the military needed women on the ground to successfully push the Taliban out of Iraq and Afghanistan, it wasn’t fully prepared to support the effort. Combat units didn’t allow women to drive off forward operating bases, making the completion of FET missions difficult. Women had to rely on men to drive them to the villages in need of FET support, but many combat units didn’t have enough vehicles for multiple missions. If FET support was required in a village that was close by, walking there was a possibility. But even marching off the base was difficult. To leave the wire, at least eight people were needed. At times it was impossible to round that many up. The work of infantrymen always took first priority.
As she listened to her commander talk about the FET opening, an inkling of doubt about whether she would make it from Camp Pendleton to Afghanistan entered Adams’s mind. Perhaps if her job was less critical or if the opportunity had come up at a time that was less hectic, she thought, her chances of making it would have been better.
The Marines were in the process of replacing outdated helicopters. Choppers that had been in service since Vietnam were gradually being retired. The rush of helicopters flowing into her mechanic’s bay wasn’t going to stop simply because Adams wanted a coveted FET position.
Then the words she feared came out of her commander’s mouth: “I told them you weren’t interested,” he said. “You’ve only been here for a few months.” It didn’t seem, he continued to explain, like the right time for her to leave.
She stared at him for a few seconds, at first not knowing how to respond. She wasn’t even sure she had heard him clearly. His words, like a delayed echo, finally resonated. An argument for her deployment eventually came to her.
She would make a much more significant contribution to the war by working with the FET program than she could from a mechanic’s bay, she explained. In a day, the time it takes to inspect four or five choppers, she could have helped save an entire Afghan family or gathered a significant amount of intelligence that could aid in the capture of key figures in the Taliban.
Her commander’s answer did not change.
Before turning to leave his office Adams, who had never been low on courage, did something rare. She requested a meeting with the next officer in her chain of command in an attempt to overturn the decision. Her commander made an appointment for her for the next day.
As she walked into the shop that morning and stood at the opening of the helicopter hangar watching Marines climb to the tops of Hueys and listening to the constant clank, clank, clanking of boots on ladders, she knew that that day could change the course of the rest of her life. Her shaking hands were the least of her worries.
Even if she were able to convince her commanders that she deserved the chance to serve in the FET, there was no guarantee she would get the spot. She would be competing for it against fifty-four other women.
Adams walked into her battalion commander’s office feeling slightly intimidated. She looked to her right and was surprised to see her shop commander also waiting for her.
The sergeant reminded herself why she wanted to be a member of the FET. The possibility of being an infantry Marine—or the closest thing to it that the military had for females—motivated her. But giving hope to women and girls half a world away also felt like a calling. In Afghanistan girls lose their childhoods quickly. They are pushed into a world of little education and limited possibilities. Adams had long ago been told that her childhood desire to be an infantry Marine was never going to happen, that it didn’t fit societal expectations. But she never gave up on it. The wives, mothers, and young girls of Afghanistan were losing much more basic dreams. Afghanistan’s girls simply wanted permission and protection to go to school. Women wanted to walk in public without a male family member present to watch their every move. Soldiers had witnessed girls as young as twelve being forced into marriages. Adams wanted to be an example for the five-year-old Afghan girl who, like her, wanted more than society would allow. At the very least, the sight of Adams walking through villages side by side with men—holding the same weapons, wearing the same gear—would show girls that the female body didn’t need to be a prison sentence and that women’s lives could be full of possibilities.
The officers listened, sitting only a few feet away, as Adams made her case. Unlike her company commander, her battalion commander didn’t say no. Instead, his answer left her future in limbo. If she could be spared, she was told, she would be.
Adams spent the next few weeks walking the line, pulling out her flashlight, jotting down notes about engines, blades, and transmissions. Between inspections she met with various members of her command and talked about one subject, the FET, more than she’d ever talked about any subject before. She answered questions—often the same ones coming from different people—about why she wanted to leave her job to fight in Afghanistan.
One morning, four weeks after her company commander called her into his office to tell her about the opening, Adams walked toward the choppers waiting for her on the line. She heard her name echo through the large metal structure she had just left behind.
“Adams! Where’s Adams? Adams!”
She entered her company commander’s office and stood in front of his desk. Her heart wasn’t racing with anticipation. Her palms weren’t sweaty with nerves or excitement. She’d had so many of these meetings that the questions she had to answer had become routine:
“Why do you feel like you deserve to go?”
“What do you hope to accomplish?”
“What do you think your chances are of making it if we put your name on the list?”
And although she hadn’t given up hope, the thought that she would be on the next deployment to Afghanistan had become more remote.
But this time her commander said the words she had longed to hear for weeks:
“You’re going to Afghanistan.”