CHAPTER 6

THE LONG MARCH

HELMAND PROVINCE, AFGHANISTAN, NOVEMBER 2010—Sheena Adams felt the blast.

She felt the truck fly through the air and hit the ground, bouncing several times like a bucking horse as the engine fell to the ground. The butt of her weapon slammed against the center of her forehead as her head quickly jerked forward, then back. The mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle (MRAP) stopped moving.

Her head grew heavy as it dropped to her right side and she lost consciousness. After a few minutes, she wasn’t sure how long, the sergeant slowly opened her eyes and felt an intense pain pounding the back of her head.

A supply bag—the one she had placed on the floor of the MRAP before she and her FET started their journey to the rural outskirts of Salaam Bazaar near Musa Qal’ah in Helmand Province—was swinging from a busted rod.

As she turned her head she heard her Kevlar helmet scrape against her rifle. Thick smoke that had compromised her vision was dissipating. She saw, through the MRAP’s front window, fellow Marines from other vehicles in the convoy scrambling outside her truck. Slowly, outside voices, which had initially sounded like they were floating through water, grew louder, clearer. She heard her name. She heard someone in the distance calling in the vehicle’s destruction.

The hilltops breaking the flat desert told her that the convoy was still on the one pathway that led out of and into the town’s center. She saw a tire from the MRAP a few hundred feet down the road.

She tried to move her legs, but ammunition cans had landed on her thighs and shins, weighing down her lower body, pinning her in place. A sharp pain resonated through her lower back, the first sensation she’d felt below her waist. She pushed the ammo cans off her body so she could move her torso, then bent forward and moved the cans away from her shins. She was finally able to kick her legs free.

It didn’t take long for her to join the commotion inside the vehicle. The Marine to her left slowly sat up as he regained consciousness. Adams worked to free the gunner—a duty that posts Marines partially outside the vehicle and that can be the most vulnerable to attack. His legs, which had been firmly planted between Adams’s seat and another during their ride to the bazaar, were now slightly slack. The Marines in the vehicle had been calling out to one another to make sure everyone was okay. Aside from a few groans, the gunner had been unresponsive.

Adams reached for one of the quick release straps that helped keep the gunner in place and pulled. The sling he had been sitting in loosened, and he slowly fell back inside the vehicle. The four Marines worked to catch and stabilize his body.

Adams saw a lump on the gunner’s neck. His collarbone was broken. His breathing was labored.

She yelled for a medic.

The gunner had grown more responsive but was still barely audible. “I can’t move,” he mumbled. “I can’t breathe.”

ONLY A COUPLE HUNDRED members of a once-strong Taliban force remained in this most remote area of Helmand Province. In 2007 more than two thousand Taliban had ruled neighboring Musa Qal’ah and Naw Zad districts and their villages, suburbs, and farms, including Salaam Bazaar. Poppy fields in the countryside were vital for the insurgent group’s opium trade, its primary source of money. That year some four thousand troops—including American service members and International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF)—led by the British, battled for three days, killing members of the Taliban and pushing some from the district center to the mountains. Other insurgents were pushed to even more remote areas like Naw Zad’s Salaam Bazaar, an extremely rural town centered around a low-scale, run-down marketplace, considered illegal, where the Taliban dominated. When Marines traveled to and from Musa Qal’ah, it wasn’t at all unusual for insurgents from the Salaam Bazaar area to attack. The insurgents left behind in Musa Qal’ah continued to wage small skirmishes in an attempt to retake the district center. The three-day battle, waged from December 7 to 10, 2007, was one of the most significant in Helmand Province because it helped to stabilize the region.

By March 2010 control of the region had been transferred from British to American forces, and the US was working to keep the Taliban insurgency from rebuilding a powerful stronghold. American troops waged small battles throughout 2010 that kept Taliban forces weakened and on the district’s outskirts, including a thirty-six-hour skirmish in Karamanda—a northern Musa Qal’ah suburb. Regular US patrols also built on the progress made by British forces.

By September 2010, when Adams showed up, the main threats from the Taliban were occasional shootings at district bazaars and the use of IEDs, employed mainly in rural areas where US forces were most vulnerable.

At the time of that 2007 battle of Musa Qal’ah, IEDs usually killed—or severely maimed—troops who encountered them during patrols either on foot or in convoys led by lightweight military vehicles such as Humvees that weren’t designed to stand up to increasingly powerful roadside bombs.

That year the Department of Defense—prompted by media coverage that exposed inept Pentagon protections for troops in the field—began to send significant numbers of MRAPs to the front. The rollout was slow, and by the end of 2013 roadside bombs had killed three thousand US troops and injured thirty-three thousand, according to a USA TODAY report.

MRAPs, like the one Adams had been riding in, did save lives.

While roadside bombs nearly always ripped through the light undercarriages and thinly built doors and windows of the Humvees that had been standard issue in the desert, the fortified outer casing of MRAPs provided levels of protection that troops desperately needed. Before MRAPs, service members had to fend for themselves and cobble together makeshift protections, keeping death tolls high. Troops nailed plywood to the bottoms of their vehicles and affixed sandbags to the floors of lighter trucks in hopes of making them less prone to being ripped apart. They reinforced the outer carriage of Humvees with heavier steel and metal scraps scrounged from the wreckage of obliterated Iraqi tanks. Several Army units refused to carry out certain operations in Iraq because their equipment was insufficient, calling the orders “suicide missions,” according to a 2004 60 Minutes report.

In three hundred attacks on Marine MRAPs in Iraq in 2006, not one service member died, according to a USA TODAY report.

But MRAPs came with devastating problems. Their top-heavy build made them vulnerable to tipping and rolling over. Troops were significantly more protected from death, but some injuries, especially internal ones like spinal injuries and traumatic brain injury, shot up. And the new vehicles weren’t immune to some of the same issues that plagued Humvees. Though it happened less frequently, MRAPs sustained tire explosions or rips in the front carriage. In the worst cases explosions could shatter the vehicles in two.

Some of the few remaining Taliban, who hid in the mountains and rural villages of the Musa Qal’ah and Salaam Bazaar areas, appeared to have been waiting for Adams, her crew, and the infantry team to drive through. Her team left the FOB regularly to interview women in surrounding villages, collect intelligence, and distribute medical and hygiene supplies, food, and other items many young village mothers needed.

Two months before that morning trip the sergeant had met the gunner and other members of the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines for the first time. Adams walked onto the FOB carrying not just the responsibility of leading an entire team of women but also the satisfaction that comes with fulfilling a lifelong dream that so many had said was impossible: she was a woman in combat.

Musa Qal’ah’s main forward operating base was dotted with one-story dorms that had walls of hardened stucco. A series of long, light brown tents ran in two different directions down the middle. With the addition of women in the war zone, one tent would soon have a large plywood sign outside, propped up on green sandbags with black lettering: “Females in the shower.”

On one of her first missions she left that FOB and headed toward Shir Ghazay, a small base (about five tents and two outhouses) that took most who entered it a bit longer to get used to. Along the way her team stopped overnight at Patrol Base Talibjan, their first time in that section of Musa Qal’ah District. Adams and the two women she worked with took on FET missions for an entire battalion of 260 men. Their seven-month stint meant a tireless rotation of combat missions throughout Helmand Province.

In Talibjan, Adams recalled much later, a group of Marines invited the FET to join them on a patrol that she believes was designed to break them.

Before the march began she pulled the women aside and gave them a terse but encouraging pep talk. Adams wanted to lead mainly by example, but she had the feeling that the patrol ahead would be a test.

“Whatever happens,” she said, “keep up with them. Don’t complain. And don’t you dare start crying.”

Adams stepped off the base wearing full gear—a forty-pound rucksack and body armor—and carrying her M4 rifle. The two women on her FET followed. The combat Marines she followed took a sharp left just beyond the perimeter of the base, passing tall fencing topped with barbed wire surrounding the installation, and moved twice as fast as any Marine march Adams had ever seen or participated in. The women kept up with them step for step.

The FET didn’t know it, but the patrol was on its way to a few small villages just outside of Patrol Base Talibjan. It was a journey that normally took squads about thirty minutes to march. But the FET’s journey of two hours had just begun.

Outside the base Adams saw a set of trees a few hundred feet to her right. Directly in front of the group, a few miles ahead, she saw the upper ridges of low-lying hills. They headed toward the hills.

Adams saw the right foot of the man in front of her sink into the river that separated her group from the ridges ahead. She stepped in behind him and felt tepid water soak through her boots. When the water reached knee level, she raised her weapon above her waist to protect it, unaware of just how deep the river would get. On the other side she glanced behind her to make sure her team was there. They were still marching strong.

Thirty minutes later they had reached the edge of the first and lowest hillside. By that time it was midday. Her pants had dried and so had her socks. Each was covered with a thin layer of mud that she felt cracking with every step as she climbed. The hottest part of the day was approaching, and she was beginning to feel dehydrated. She tried as much as she could to step directly in the boot prints made by the man before her, as all desert troops had been trained to do in order to avoid potential IEDs. She reached into her right pocket, pulled out her canteen, and took several gulps of water, keeping her eyes on the pathway ahead as she walked. Her T-shirt was soaked through with sweat.

By the time she reached the backroads near the village center she was breathing heavily. She hoisted her rucksack, which felt more like it was one hundred pounds instead of forty, higher onto her back. She wanted to slow down. She didn’t. She thought about the FET members behind her and repeated to herself the same words she had imparted to them at the start of their journey: Whatever happens, keep up. Don’t complain. Don’t cry. She ignored the pain in her right side and pushed forward.

Tall barriers on either side of the backroads formed a narrow path for the patrol to walk along. As the barriers ran out, the first small village came into Adams’s view.

The dusty road they were on continued toward a very small bazaar: a few rundown structures in dull browns and grays. They walked by a mosque where boys sat outside studying the Koran. Their voices and that of an elder reciting religious text filled the air surrounding the shops. Out of the corner of her eye Adams saw one of the members of her team slow down. The leader fell back to walk beside the Marine who was lagging.

“Whatever you do,” she told the FET member again, “just make sure to keep up. You can do this.”

She would give different versions of that pep talk often during her seven-month run in Afghanistan, and the women would thank her for keeping them strong.

A photo displayed on Time magazine’s website captured it well. In pink, yellow, and blue chalk on the dark, cave-like walls of Adams’s dormitory was written, “Dear Sergeant Adams, We’re glad to be on your team! You motivate me. Kristi.”

Makeshift awnings—torn pieces of cloth propped up with sticks—provided shade for a few market fronts in the village bazaar just outside of Talibjan.

The street was nearly empty.

Using the little bit of basic Pashtu they had learned during FET training, the women tried to reach out to two civilian males. In addition to talking to Afghan women, FETs also spoke to men—business owners, husbands, brothers, and fathers. Sometimes they had to speak to the men first to get access to their women. Frequently men would share more information with engagement teams than they would with male troops. Afghans, men and women, tended to find American females less threatening.

But on this trip their usual inquiries—How long have you been living and working in this area? Has the bazaar been busy lately?—were met with lukewarm replies. The men of the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines knew that the village was a resistant one. According to a Public Radio International report, it took more than two months after Adams and her FET team arrived in the country for a villager to even come onto Patrol Base Talibjan—a great accomplishment. The male combat troops had already been in the country at that point for nearly five months.

After patrolling the second village the Marines headed back toward the hillsides that had started their two-hour journey toward the village.

The squad leader didn’t spare the women on the return trip. As he cut through side streets, Adams and her team kept pace. They went back through the same rough terrain they had traversed to get to the downtown bazaars. The pace was still faster, Adams knew, than a march was generally intended to be. The distance, she would find out later, was multiple times longer than needed.

The women never fell behind.

Adams and her FET followed the men back onto Talibjan. The patrol leader removed his Kevlar helmet and revealed smudges of sand caked into the faint wrinkles on his forehead. Streaks of sweat left pale paths in the thin layer of dirt between his eyes. His hair, close shaven but usually a bit spiked on the top, was flat against his head. Adams could see slight creases in his hair from the webbing inside his headgear.

She lowered her head slightly, grabbed the hard brim of her helmet, and removed it. Her hair, which had been smoothed into a tight bun that gathered at the nape of her neck just above her collar, was smudged along her hairline. The usually neat part was muddled. When she looked up, Adams locked eyes with the Marine who led the march. He nodded—the first sign of approval she’d gotten from the men of the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines.

The next day, after they arrived at FOB Shir Ghazay, located on the southern border of Musa Qal’ah District, Adams and her FET began knocking on doors—part of a larger mission to collect data on families throughout the country. Periodically the military conducted a census to get updates on how families were progressing in troubled districts: How many people were in each home? Were they working? How many military aged males lived there?

Sending FETs to collect answers to census questions helped the military in multiple ways. It was another chance for teams to build relationships by putting a friendly, nonthreatening face on the military. The more American women did that, the more Afghan women—and men—shared information. Positive answers to some questions signaled progress. More Afghan women and men at work meant less Taliban control over a village.

On FOB Shir Ghazay Adams heard one of the commanders warn the males that FET women would be on the base for the next few days and that the combat Marines weren’t to talk to them, hit on them, or to do or say anything inappropriate. She could feel tension as her team trekked off the base with a group of men who appeared reluctant to have the women accompany them. It was as if, she said much later, “they had pulled the short straw.”

The homes surrounding the base were minimal, built of mud and set inside compounds with hilly land and open courtyards. The doors were constructed of scrap metal found on the street. Some FET leaders described walking through neighborhoods in remote districts of Afghanistan as going back to biblical times—unadorned dwellings, unpaved streets, some folks still using animals as their main mode of transport. Donkeys and other livestock roamed freely.

At the first house a male combat Marine stepped in front of the FET and knocked on the door. The Marine wasn’t heavy on the pleasantries. Very quickly he jumped into the survey questions. The man who answered the door retreated into his home without saying a word.

The same thing happened at the next house. And at the third.

Adams finally stepped in. She knocked on the door of the fourth house, smiled, and started the conversation not with a question but by introducing herself and the members of her FET. She told the man who answered the door a bit about herself. He smiled in return. She explained that they were just trying to get to know the community. She asked if he was willing to answer a few questions. He stepped a bit further outside his door, open to the prospect of speaking with her. He answered everything required for the census. She ended the conversation by asking if there was anything the man needed, anything he was concerned about.

At that moment the male Marines took a backseat to Adams’s FET. The women knocked on twenty-five doors the first day and gathered good information from the families in each home.

When they returned to the base, members of the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines reported to command that they got more information with the FET than they had ever gotten before. They gave the same positive report over the next two days the teams worked together.

On the fourth day, as the women were leaving, the Marines asked when the team was coming back.

For Adams, military progress was seen not in data but in the smiles and invitations from the Afghans she interacted with every day. When moms opened up their homes without waiting for a knock on the door, she knew that FET objectives were getting met.

That happened often near Musa Qal’ah District headquarters, where Adams helped a family start a small clothing business. The woman of the household needed a sewing machine. She was making colorful dresses for her children by hand, and her neighbors and friends loved them. Adams suggested that the woman increase production to make money for her family who desperately needed it. Weeks after Adams helped her get a machine, the woman had made enough clothing for her husband to sell at the local bazaar. A month later relatives of that family asked Adams to meet their newborn baby. The Marine, who says such an invitation was a rarity in Afghanistan, was honored to sit in their home with her FET. She held the baby, and the mother gave her an update on the relative’s family business. Adams, who would soon become a mother herself, learned to swaddle her son by watching the young woman do the same.

In Shir Ghazay, a few weeks after her first visit, the FET leader returned to the home of another woman she had helped once before. The woman’s toddler watched the Marine sergeant and her interpreter kneel down on the bright red rug. As soon as Adams pulled out her notebook, the little girl ran into the only other room in the small, dark home. There was no furniture aside from a rug on the floor of the back room and rugs that overlapped on the floor of the front room where the mother had been most of the morning. There was an old stove in the far corner.

On a previous visit the Marine sergeant had given medicine to the daughter, who had been suffering from a cold. This time, as before, she and her translator had tea with the young mother before the conversation got too involved. The woman slowly rose to her feet as soon as she saw Adams walk through the door. As the woman approached the stove she asked Adams, through the translator, how she had been. She thanked her for taking a look at her daughter the last time she was there and updated her on the young girl’s progress: she was running around the house again, giggling. Adams took notes on the girl’s improved condition.

The woman balanced a cup and saucer in each hand as she lowered herself to the floor and crossed her legs comfortably for a chat.

Adams took a sip and savored it, one of the few moments in her day when she got to taste real Afghan tea, which she had come to enjoy. The woman mentioned that she had seen a few teenage boys hanging around on her street instead of spending the day in school, a change she had only recently noticed. The Afghan woman confirmed Adams’s suspicions that the behavior among these boys was new. She also told Adams about the teen boy who lived next door but went missing recently. Her husband, she added, had been having a hard time finding a job.

Adams didn’t write those facts down right away; instead, she looked directly into the eyes of the woman who was speaking. She smiled when her translator imparted something funny. She nodded without judgment when the stories were more stark than she had expected. She rarely took notes unless mothers were passing along medical complaints about their children. During the course of casual conversation Adams wanted to engage. More important, she wanted the Afghan women to feel comfortable, as if they could say anything to her. If the women thought Adams was reporting on their every move, natural interaction would have been lost.

But when she returned to her dorm she wrote a summary of the information and her analysis in a report: the Taliban appeared to be recruiting.

THE MORNING OF the IED blast Adams had been the last one to step into the MRAP. She pushed the bulging tan bag—which was filled with blankets, toothpaste, and medical supplies—into a small space between the last seat on the left and the back of the vehicle, one of four trucks in the infantry convoy.

The sergeant, her FET of three, a translator, and thirteen combat Marines were headed to the remote Salaam Bazaar area. The town was so secluded that the families who lived there had no access to medical care, no running water, and no indoor plumbing. Each FET member loaded into the back of a different vehicle, insurance that if something happened to one of the vehicles—if one of the women died or was pulled out of the country because of a serious injury—the FET’s mission, for however long they remained in Afghanistan, could continue. The infantry unit wanted to find out how much progress had been made in this most remote village after attempts to push out the Taliban. The FET would find out what the people needed and how well they had been coping economically as well as attempt to strengthen the connection between the Marines and members of the village. Adams and her team would also interview the women, collect information, provide basic medical needs for the children, and hand out blankets.

But about an hour after they arrived the team realized that something in the village was wrong.

As Adams walked through the bazaar she noticed that the buildings and shops along the dusty streets were completely empty. There were no children outside playing, no men or women selling goods. It was oddly void of life.

The team stumbled upon one woman walking through the bazaar and attempted to start a conversation.

Adams introduced herself and asked the woman her name. The woman was hesitant to respond, looking back and forth between Adams and the FET translator. Unlike the welcome responses they’d gotten while patrolling downtown Musa Qal’ah, the few responses she got in Salaam Bazaar were either icy or timid.

Adams asked why downtown was so quiet.

No response.

She tried to find out whether it was normally this quiet.

Still not much of an answer.

The woman sped off, and the unit kept marching.

The deeper they got into the village, the eerier the village felt—carts that were normally full of merchandise were turned over, some were falling apart. The few people who walked by did so in a hurry and avoided eye contact. The unit was slated to march through the entire downtown area, but the mission’s leader signaled for the Marines to stop. The feeling that someone was watching them, targeting them grew too strong. Each squad headed back to their vehicle, and the convoy drove out of the district along the same road they had used to drive in.

As soon as Adams heard the IED blast, the windshield and side windows of the MRAP went completely black. She felt a series of jolts. She heard a downpour of small rocks and sand hit the roof of the vehicle. She saw the ammo cans fall onto her legs. When she came to, she unpinned herself. Then, as quickly as she could, she tugged on the straps that pulled the gunner to safety.

The Marines outside were scanning the area to ensure that no other IEDs had been planted—a must before rescuing those trapped inside the busted MRAP. After Adams yelled for a medic and realized that one wasn’t coming, she looked up and saw, through the front windshield, that people outside the vehicle were slowly backing away. One Marine stood still, a look of terror on his face.

A small piece of metal pushed up through the sand just inches from his feet. It set off the compact detector used to spot potential explosives in the field. The Marine had to determine whether the IED was real. Adams watched the man slowly lower himself to the ground. Carefully he straightened his right leg behind him, then his left. Without disturbing the sand in front of his face, he scooted himself back on his stomach until his body was fully stretched and his hands could comfortably reach the area surrounding the metal.

With short, precise strokes, and without touching the suspected explosive, he brushed light puffs of sand into the air. He needed to reveal more of the disturbed area around the object to inspect it.

Fffit.

Fffit.

Fffit.

Everything, to Adams, felt as if it was happening incredibly slowly. The area had fallen relatively silent. Commotion among the Marines outside the vehicle had, for the moment, stopped. The flat piece of metal finally came into view.

False alarm.

Adams raised her right leg, still throbbing from the impact of the blast, and used her foot to pound on the side door. Another Marine yanked on it from the outside. Everyone else in the vehicle did the same until the doors, stuck from the blast, finally opened.

Several Marines clutched the gunner and helped pull him to safety.

He was too injured to walk. Adams watched as several men carried him to a different MRAP.

Three of the four vehicles in the convoy sat in a perfect row, one several feet behind another, along the side of the roadway. The one Adams had been riding in was in pieces. Its engine was on the ground in front of what was left of the vehicle’s body. A tire sat just up the roadway. The sun was beginning to go down, and Adams, her head still throbbing, could hear an infantry Marine, in the first vehicle, trying to get assistance after he had called in the attack:

“Our convoy has been hit by an IED! One man is injured.”

Before he got a response Adams heard gunfire.

She ran behind the second vehicle parked along the roadway and laid on her stomach, hiding part of her body behind one of the tires. She left just enough of her shoulders and head exposed to see her target. Resting her elbows on the ground, she looked through her weapon’s scope and saw an insurgent stand up on the roof of a building a few hundred feet away. He raised his rifle in her direction. She remained steady, took a deep breath, fired, and watched him drop.

She could hear gunfire raining down on the convoy from the opposite direction. Her fellow Marines were rapidly returning shots.

Another insurgent stood up on the roof of an adjacent building. Adams and the infantry Marine crouched beside her both fired in the insurgent’s direction. He quickly fell.

Two other Taliban operatives stood in rapid succession. Adams fired several rounds but missed.

She reloaded her weapon, quickly pulled the scope up to her right eye, took a deep breath, and fired several more rounds. She watched the man furthest away fall. The Marine to her right continued firing, and the insurgent closest to them dropped out of sight.

Silence. Adams scanned right. Nothing. She scanned the horizon to her left. Still nothing. She lowered the scope and looked to her immediate right to make sure her fellow Marine was okay. Before she had the chance to speak, enemy fire resumed, this time from a different direction.

The seventeen Marines scrambled to change their formation.

Eight of them shot at the insurgents still popping up in the distance as Adams ran and then dropped to the ground to join a staggered line of fellow fighters to her right. She dug her elbows into the sand to prop up her weapon, then fired several shots in rapid succession to provide cover for other Marines as they moved forward to form another line several feet ahead. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a FET member join her line and start shooting. The team of seventeen held their ground for another thirty minutes.

As darkness fell and the evening call to prayer began, the insurgents retreated.

After the nearly hour-long skirmish the rescue squad they called for still hadn’t shown.

One of the squad leaders placed another call.

The response came: all other companies in the area were on missions. There was no tow vehicle available. Adams’s team would have to wait.

She grabbed a packaged meal and sat in the back of the second MRAP in the convoy. She opened the packet of French toast, heated it up, and ate quickly, knowing that her shift to stand on night watch was coming up in two hours—not much time to sleep. The adrenaline rush from the firefight was fading, and her pounding headache slowly returned. She could feel all the bruises on her legs and arms from the ammo cans that fell on her during the crash. She was sore. She ate in silence, then rested near the back of the vehicle. She felt someone tap her shoulder. She grabbed her weapon and changed places with the Marine who had been standing guard outside the vehicle. Adams took every fourth shift for the rest of the night.

As the sun rose the next morning the rapid pops returned.

Taliban insurgents had surrounded them again, slightly closer this time.

Adams ran to the side of the vehicle where she had been standing guard. She knelt by the rear gate to get a better look at her target. As she prepared to fire, a bullet hurtled toward the Marine to her right. It skimmed the dirt between them and hit the back of the vehicle only inches from Adams’s face. Together the two rapidly returned fire.

There were fewer Taliban fighters, and their closer proximity made them more vulnerable to gunfire. Not feeling as safe as they had the night before, they quickly retreated.

A squad leader called again that afternoon to see whether another rescue team had been sent.

The team had been on its way but had to retreat after getting hit by an IED. They would send another team as soon as one was available. They didn’t know when that would be.

At midnight a rescue team finally showed.

As the vehicles pulled up, one of the FET Marines warned them to move quickly. “We’re surrounded by the Taliban,” she said.

The group wasted no time hooking the wrecked vehicle onto the tow truck.

Adams and the infantry unit formed a 360-degree perimeter around the vehicles, prepared to return fire. Taliban insurgents popped up on rooftops again, firing as rapidly as they could, trying hard to take one of the Marines out before the group left. The FET leader climbed into the back of the last MRAP, and the convoy, now with six vehicles, sped out of the area.

The team followed the one road out of the town center and back to the FOB. The hum of the vehicle’s tires exacerbated the pounding in Adams’s head. She lifted her hands to the sides of her face and rubbed her throbbing temples—the first signs of a traumatic brain injury that would follow her from Afghanistan all the way to the halls of Congress.