The major stood with her back against the white barricade, one of many tall concrete structures near the military police kennels on the base, waiting for the Stryker vehicle that was supposed to take her into a local village—her first chance as a FET leader to connect with poorer residents in lesser-served areas like Naw Bahar and Shinkay.
She spent Sundays trying to cajole the provincial governor into letting her train Afghan female police and weekdays trying to connect with as many women surrounding her FOB (a short ride from the governor’s office) as possible.
She lifted her hand to the brim of her cap to shield her eyes from the brightness of the desert sun. It was just beginning to beat down on her neck, causing beads of sweat to slowly run down her shoulders to the small of her back.
It was 9 A.M. on FOB Lagman.
Leaning against the front of the barricade, her rucksack on the ground by her feet, Rodriguez could hear the military police dogs barking inside the kennels, some of them straining at their leashes, longing to run free. Each of the K9s had a service member handler who worked with the dog every day, slept beside the dog every night, and ran with the dog each morning. Some chose to leash their dog during down time; others didn’t. But all the dogs knew that their place was beside their handlers. Their world, when they weren’t working, was the series of tents that sat on the sand- and gravel-filled pits that covered nearly a third of the base. Green Army-issue sleep cots lined the left side of the smallest sleep tents, and behind each cot sat a duffle bag with the name of the soldier who slept there. Near the space’s center, attached to each cot, was a leash that kept the K9s in place during the night. On the right side of the small sleep tents, lined up in a neat row, were green lockers. On the front of each was a different dog’s name stenciled in faded black letters. Each animal had its own set of equipment stored inside—an extensive food supply, brushes for grooming, muzzles, and extra leashes. The floors of the tents were hosed down every morning and washed out each afternoon, but that didn’t stop the smell of kennel—wet dog mixed with a faint hint of waste—from baking in the desert sun and wafting past Rodriguez as she waited for the day’s convoy to come through.
When the K9s were working, their world was much more dangerous. They sniffed out IEDs and crawled into caves that were too small for soldiers to fit through. Their goal was always to protect their handlers, to make sure that bombs hadn’t been planted in small crawl spaces or that insurgents weren’t lying in wait to blow up themselves and the Americans who surrounded them. And, as the provost marshal, it was Rodriguez’s job to make sure that the dogs and the service members who cared for them, trained them, and whose lives depended on them were well protected on the FOB. When she wasn’t working a FET mission, she, like all the women on her team, still had regular jobs to do. And the security of soldiers and detainees constantly traded places with her work with Afghan women as her primary wartime concern.
Rodriguez looked down at her watch. She had been waiting for nearly two hours. She bent over at the waist and touched the tops of her boots to stretch her back. The arches of her feet felt tight. Her heels began to throb. She lowered herself to the ground and leaned back against the barricade. In the distance, through the scrim that covered the tall metal fence surrounding the entire perimeter of the FOB, she saw several military vehicles speed past. She watched as village men wearing intricately woven turbans and sand-colored tunics walked by in one direction. Soldiers in desert uniforms passed them walking in the other. They were just close enough to the FOB for Rodriguez to see the faint outlines of their bodies. They navigated journeys beyond the sandbags piled high around the gate and the military vehicles that further separated the base from the outside world. There were no women to be seen. The relative absence of females on so many Afghan streets was still unsettling to her, even after being in the country for several months now.
Rodriguez’s eyes wandered to the observation tower that sat just behind the fence on the inside of the compound. The tall metal structure was one of six that dotted the perimeter. She could see the sun’s rays peeking through the metal rods that crossed and recrossed between the legs of the structure. Her eyes followed the base to the glass control room at the tower’s top, which hovered several hundred feet above anything else for miles. She saw a soldier sitting in the booth—one of twenty military police under Rodriguez’s direction. They manned the tower twenty-four hours a day, ready to shoot at, detain, or investigate anyone who approached or posed a threat to the FOB.
That control room, the military police officer who occupied it, and the fence topped with barbed wire were the only things separating the base from surrounding insurgent groups. The Taliban were constantly attacking, patrolling, and planting bombs in surrounding villages. Their goal was not just to control villagers for the moment but to recruit enough young men so that their forces would remain strong for decades.
Stepping off the FOB was always a risk, and women weren’t allowed to do so without a male soldier accompanying them—no matter her rank, no matter how competent she was at her job, no matter how much she outshined the average man in her unit when it came to performing combat duties like firing a weapon.
Rodriguez successfully oversaw and implemented strategies that shielded the base from insurgent attacks. She was the officer in charge of securing and transporting detainees. But even she had to wait every morning for a male to make space for her on his convoy so she could get off the base. Some combat soldiers were generous; others were not. Her ability to follow through on noncombat FET missions, like the information collection she was trying to do this morning, was limited. But at least the Sunday beforehand she had finally met members of the Afghan female police—a hard-fought victory.
The major glanced at her watch again.
11 A.M.
She wiped sweat off the back of her neck with a brown handkerchief. She could feel heat emanating from the barrier behind her. As she repositioned her body against the concrete, Rodriguez looked to her left and saw the sandpits soldiers used for recreation. It wasn’t unusual on a Saturday afternoon for soldiers to play touch football in one of them at the center of the base. And Rodriguez knew that as long as she could hear those sounds in the middle of Afghanistan, she must have been doing something right in her efforts to keep the FOB safe.
Rodriguez thought about the woman she had searched during an earlier mission. She wondered what had happened, if anything, to her. As provost marshal, she was also in charge of the facility, which had three cells, where her unit held detainees. She would inspect it later that day.
The fact that she couldn’t drive herself off the base, she thought, was preposterous. She was surrounded by testaments to her success as an officer. The mammoth sand-colored containers that stared back at her across the road from the barricades had been her idea. She wanted them placed there to house larger supplies vital to force protection. The concrete barricade that surrounded the base’s K9 unit and lined the main entryway onto the FOB stood there because of her strategic thinking. The dogs who, when bored, reacted to the least bit of light and sound, needed extra protection to stay focused and remain combat ready.
The irony of the morning wait, a routine that would become a cornerstone of Rodriguez’s life at Lagman, was not lost on her. Looking back on her days at the FOB, Rodriguez admitted that in many ways there were parallels between the military practice that kept her trapped on the FOB and the Taliban law that kept Afghan women—the very ones Rodriguez was assigned to protect—trapped in their homes. The Army stipulated that no American military female was allowed to leave the base without a male combat soldier. Taliban law stated that no Afghan woman was allowed to leave her home without being overseen by a male family member at all times. And although the Army practice was intended to protect and ensure safety, it hindered FET independence.
Rodriguez stood again to wake up her right leg, which had started to fall asleep. She stretched her small frame, her fingertips just clearing the top of the barricade behind her. The Army major hoped the armored vehicle she heard approaching was part of the convoy that was expected to have arrived more than an hour prior. She walked toward the gate and peeked out of the FOB through the holes in the black mesh that wrapped around the fence’s narrow metal wiring. In the distance, just beyond the sandbags and the small motor pool of vehicles, Rodriguez saw the large tires of three Stryker vehicles slowly moving closer to the front gate. But instead of the military vehicles turning right and moving through the FOB’s front entrance to navigate the main road and park near the kennels, the vehicles continued down the road. Rodriguez heard the engines crescendo and then begin to fade. She listened until she could no longer hear tires grinding against the roadway or the familiar ting and churn of the motors as the vehicles lurched forward.
She returned to the spot she had occupied all morning, sat down beside her rucksack, and continued to wait. There was still time for a different convoy to pass through the area and enter the base so that its soldiers could pick up personal supplies from the makeshift PX—a small series of connected trailers that was a scaled down, minimal version of the military shopping centers found on bases throughout the United States. Many units drove through the Qalat City area on their way to other FOBs. Just because one unit kept driving didn’t mean the next unit wouldn’t stop. She would give it another hour before giving up.
The job of at least one of the female soldiers on Rodriguez’s FET was, in fact, driving. But the military, Rodriguez said, made it impossible for her women to get the training needed to drive in Afghanistan. It took Rodriguez a few weeks just to get permission to wait for a convoy. She had developed a strategy to get around the maze of rules that showed that the military wanted FETs but wasn’t ready to fully support them.
The night before, Rodriguez sat in the creaky wooden chair in front of her desk, one of several lined up against the wall of her shared, first-floor office. She stared at the ceiling in an attempt to gather her thoughts before the meeting with her brigade commander to brief him on mission progress, something she had done every night since she had arrived in Afghanistan.
The daily report, delivered at 7 P.M., was always the same: status and location of all working dogs, status of all force protection equipment assigned to the brigade, number and status of detainees, conditions of the FOB, and the status of evidence collected to use for prosecution.
And by 7:45 she was working in a few words about her FET’s needs with an eye toward finding out when the women, who were just as ready as she was to interview the few females they’d seen on the streets of a nearby village, would be able to get regular rides.
And every night, she recalled, her efforts to move the FET mission forward were stalled. The conversations had become all too routine.
“How’s it going with the FET goals?”
“Not great, sir. My team needs equipment. We need permission to leave the base. I need permission to leave the base to go out into the local villages and find out what the women need, what the women are going through.”
“What equipment do you need?”
“We need vehicles. We need training.”
“Not possible. Those vehicles are needed by the men in the field, the combat soldiers.”
Silence.
“Can I at least get permission to leave with one of the convoys in the morning? One of the convoys that comes through to gather supplies?”
“Not yet, Rodriguez. We’ll need you for other work in the morning. Let’s just wait and play it by ear.”
“Sir, it’s impossible for me to use the women on my FET effectively if we can’t get off the base whenever we need to, not just to go on missions with the men when they need us. We have our own separate missions, some of which you have already approved and are asking us to fulfill. How are we supposed to do that?”
The brigade commander ended each briefing by saying, “I’m on your side, Rodriguez. These things take time.”
Women couldn’t take vehicles, her commander explained, away from the men who needed them. Rodriguez’s interpretation of the commander’s message: the military couldn’t be bothered with treating women like real combat soldiers, although it gave women real combat responsibilities.
Despite the obstacles, Rodriguez knew the commander was among the good guys. He was trying, but regulations beyond his control left him with few options. It was impossible for her to make the case that the women on her FET deserved more equipment and more time to complete missions. Supplies were limited. And her FET members were combat soldiers in every respect except the one that mattered most—name.
Rodriguez could hear the commander’s words—women don’t have a real combat directive, supplies are limited, you can’t take items needed by men—all day, every day. She began to dread the nightly briefings.
So she developed a plan: she would check every morning to see what time trucks were expected to arrive at the base the next day and work the rest of her schedule around the convoy schedule. That way, whenever she briefed the brigade commander, her workday conveniently left openings when convoys were expected. The plan was well thought out. But it wasn’t foolproof. There were plenty of days when convoys either weren’t expected or failed to come through.
After the 2010 ISAF directive Rodriguez was among the first FET leaders to try to formalize the Army’s female engagement team mission and create a standard operating procedure that could guide women across the United States who were preparing for deployment. FET missions always included female searches during raids. But whether a FET could fulfill other aspects of the mission, including key outreach programs, varied depending on the whims of the men commanding the combat units to which these women were attached. If the commander believed in the FET, then he helped facilitate missions; if he didn’t, the women had to fight for the opportunity to perform operations not related to direct combat missions. Around the time Rodriguez was pushing for a formal standard operating procedure (SOP), female soldiers were expected to complete FET missions between their official military duties. Being a part of the FET was considered an additional job. That standard, for Rodriguez, was another hindrance to FET mission completion. Sometimes the major was unable to pull together a FET because company commanders were unwilling to let female soldiers in their charge drop other duties. Rodriguez had to make sure all women who deployed were FET capable.
The Army and Marine Corps would eventually deploy women to Afghanistan solely to work on FET missions for seven- and nine-month rotations. More commanders began to recognize that the work FETs were doing was changing the course of the war and, in response, eventually made vehicles and helicopters more readily available for mission fulfillment.
By the time Smoke landed on the ground in 2013, the year after Rodriguez left, FET leaders would ask for permission to complete missions with the full confidence that if the mission was sound, it would get support.
But not yet.
Rodriguez and other women like her were heading FETs at a time when the struggle for legitimacy was difficult.
Her brigade commander understood the important role female soldiers played in winning the war. Yet he remained reluctant to allow Rodriguez to jump on a convoy that didn’t involve the men in her own unit.
Until that final conversation on that final night before Rodriguez’s first morning wait.
The brigade commander began the conversation as he had so many others. Her report that night, just like it had every night before, detailed the progress the military police were making on and off the FOB: a detainee had been brought into custody that day, and the investigation was ongoing; one of the Taliban suspects had been transferred for further interrogation.
When he asked about the FET she gave him the same arguments she had before, pushing, respectfully but persistently, for her soldiers’ needs. He listened, as always. But this time, reluctantly, he met her halfway. She and she alone could take the next convoy that came through. Just her. Just a scouting mission. “Keep it short,” she was told, “and remain with the men in the unit at all times.”
“Thank you, sir.” She sat back and smiled. Finally, another small victory.
Rodriguez measured progress for the group in small victories. Just getting the FET program to Afghanistan had been an uphill battle.
RODRIGUEZ HAD STARTED this last phase of her military career in a cushy office in Fresno, a reprieve from her deployment to Iraq. The office, on the seventh floor of a government building that sat across from an open-air shopping center, gave her the perfect perch to watch stay-at-home moms wheeling strollers into bookstores and women sitting through long business lunches. And even she occasionally stopped at the outdoor café only steps away from her building. As cushy as the desk assignment was, and as much as she loved the expansive windows that lined her office walls, she knew it would go by quickly. Her time was coming up soon for another deployment. She began to call the personnel office every day to see what units had openings and to make a bid for assignment to Alaska. She had gone to college in Alaska. She had met her first husband in Alaska. It was a state that held happy memories and in which she was very comfortable. She also knew that the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, located on Fort Wainwright, was slated to deploy to Afghanistan soon. She was torn. She didn’t want to leave her children again. Her son was only five, her daughter seven. But she knew that she would have to, and this time she wanted control over what unit she left with and where her children stayed during her deployment.
She was set to arrive in Alaska in September 2010.
The hardest part of that duty change was explaining to her kids that they wouldn’t be able to come with her. She often struggled with her love for the Army and her undying love for and devotion to her children. Her daughter needed special care—she was legally blind, had scoliosis, chronic lung disease, ADHD, and a moderate developmental disability. The specialty doctors her daughter needed were in Anchorage. Fort Wainwright, where she would be stationed, was in Fairbanks, which was eight hours away.
As soon as her orders came, she and Chris—her ex-husband and the father of her children—sat down with the kids in their California home to explain that mommy would be gone for a year. It was the longest stretch of time she had ever spent away from her kids. Her work had taken her on overnight trips to Monterey or other California cities that weren’t too far away. Her deployment to Iraq had lasted only six months. And whenever she was gone, even for one night, Rodriguez would talk to her kids several times via Skype—once when she arrived, at night before bedtime, and the next day before she returned.
As the sun flooded the living room of their home, her kids looked up at her, waiting for whatever news they had gathered to hear. Even though her daughter was seven, she comprehended and reacted to information like a child who was much younger. She smiled wide, her chubby cheeks forming deep dimples. Even her eyes, through her thick, dark-rimmed glasses, managed to look bright with anticipation. Her son looked toward Chris, waiting for either of his parents to speak.
“Mommy’s going to Alaska for the Army,” Rodriguez started the conversation. She wanted to say everything fast before she choked up. “I’m going to be gone for a year. But don’t worry. We’ll get to talk every day.”
“Like when you’re in Monterey?” her son asked.
“Exactly. We’ll talk on Skype every day.”
“You’re going?” her daughter was trying to understand. “But when will you be back?”
Chris jumped in to explain things again. “It will be a year,” he explained. “But you’ll see Mommy every day, and you’ll stay here with me in our home.”
She was plagued with doubt about whether her kids were understanding why she was leaving them. Did they think she was going away because she didn’t love them? She wondered if she was doing the right thing. Feelings of guilt, for Rodriguez, were constant.
“I knew that when I accepted motherhood this was a possibility,” she said years later as she reflected on that departure during an interview with me. “As a commander I had sent brand-new mothers with one-year-olds on deployments. I knew I would have to do that.” But knowing she’d have to leave her kids, she admitted, never took the sting out of doing it.
As hard as the conversation was, she didn’t dream of leaving the Army or trying to avoid deployments. Getting out of the military would have meant resigning her commission as an officer, and she’d worked too hard to even entertain the idea. She was comforted in the knowledge that Chris would take care of their children.
Rodriguez’s ambition and strength, which benefited her as a soldier, sometimes made her life as a wife and mother difficult.
Chris was her second divorce.
The first time she married, Rodriguez was incredibly young. She was twenty-four, her husband was nearly fifteen years her senior, and she thought it would last forever. While his career was headed toward retirement, hers was just starting. She loved the challenge the Army brought to her life. Many of her uncles had been soldiers and Vietnam veterans. A couple dozen male cousins were soldiers. She wanted the chance to prove herself as a soldier just as others in her family had. Her first husband had climbed through the officer ranks before he retired, and she had expected him to understand her desire to do the same.
In 2001 she spent several months in Kosovo just after the armed conflict ended. After she returned, her husband was unexpectedly hospitalized. He was tired, sick, and months from retirement. He had created a good, comfortable life for them. And he didn’t understand why she preferred to work instead of enjoying the benefits of his accomplishments.
They tried counseling, which simply added to her frustration. Neither Rodriguez nor her husband could back down. As a couple, they weren’t inching toward compromise. She realized that in order to fulfill her military ambitions—leading a police unit was one of them—she couldn’t stay married, at least not to him.
Her second marriage, to Chris, lasted for eight years before his deployments as a military contractor caused too much strain for them both. While she had entered her first marriage with a twenty-four-year-old’s naiveté, she entered her second knowing that military separations meant twice as much work when couples reunited. There were no unrealistic expectations. She had married her best friend. And she needed him to get through some of the most difficult times she would encounter.
Their daughter’s early life was complicated by hospital visits and surgeries. And during one visit doctors weren’t sure the little girl was going to make it. Rodriguez stood in her daughter’s hospital room flanked by her husband and mother, waiting for the doctors to return. Her mother began to cry. Rodriguez excused herself and walked slowly out of the room. Her heart was breaking, but standing next to others, the soldier felt stifled. She couldn’t express her emotions.
She walked down the hall from her daughter’s room and turned the corner. On the wall next to a set of double doors was a small sign: PRAYER ROOM.
Instead of pews, there were rows of small folding chairs. There was a podium near the front, and behind that a large cross. Rodriguez lowered herself to the floor and began to pray. Kneeling in front of the first row of folding chairs, her chin tucked toward her chest, her eyes closed, she asked God to save her child. And in the silence, in the isolation, the tears began to flow. After doctors arrived, Chris found Rodriguez and brought her back to their daughter’s room. She leaned on him the entire way.
Chris had served several tours during peacekeeping missions before he left the Army. He tried to stay at home with their daughter while Rodriguez went back to work. But the stress of being a househusband was, for him, worse than the pressures of being in combat. He felt lost, so he went back to what he knew—serving on the ground with the military. He became a civilian contractor and left Rodriguez with the baby. When he returned to the United States, communication with Rodriguez was strained. She resented his absence, and he didn’t know how to explain why he needed to go. Instead of figuring out how to stay, he kept accepting contracts to Iraq. And each time he managed to stay away a bit longer. The last time he came back Rodriguez essentially gave him an ultimatum. She was pregnant with their second child, and she couldn’t do it all alone. She also loved him enough to let him go. She wanted him to feel happy, but she was beginning to resent him more for leaving. He decided, for her and his children, to leave contracting behind.
But two days after their son was born, Chris’s wanderlust returned. He deployed again, and she filed for divorce. He didn’t want to sign the papers, but he did. He signed for her. Because he knew it would make her happy. She could stop feeling angry—and feeling guilty for feeling angry—and he could be in Iraq but still be a part of his kids’ lives. They managed to make their unconventional relationship work.
TWO MONTHS AFTER she arrived at Fort Wainwright her commander informed her that she would head the FET program in Afghanistan and that she needed to develop an SOP for female engagement.
By 2010 she had heard of the FET program but had never seen an SOP. She knew that the groups of women had been used to navigate the strict gender roles in Iraq and Afghanistan, but she wasn’t sure how to work the other missions she had heard about—economic empowerment for Afghan women, building schools and educational programs for young girls, hygiene and health care for mothers—into the training.
She scribbled three things on a notepad:
• Search and seizure
• Intelligence collection
• Education and economic empowerment
She knew she could train any potential FET volunteers in the basic military police skills.
Intelligence collection, however, was not her area of expertise. The FET women would also need to learn basic Pashtu and Dari to ask simple yet pointed questions and to build trust. After spending time in Kosovo she knew that speaking the local language—or at least making an effort to—showed a level of cultural appreciation that goes a long way. FETs would need to know what types of questions to ask and how to interpret the answers, especially the more complex responses that often come through the filter of an interpreter. What information would be considered an intelligence breakthrough that was worth passing along? What information should be saved and used to inform future missions?
As a military police officer, she was familiar with questioning suspects. But in a region where intelligence collection was vital and failing to report even the smallest bit of information could cost lives, Rodriguez needed help training FET members on observing social changes in Afghan villages and figuring out what those changes could mean and how and when to report them. The FET women also needed to know how to broach Afghan women, talk to them in their homes, build trust, and find out what the women needed and how FETs could provide it for them. All those things went a long way toward getting Afghan women to talk not just about their needs but about what was happening to their sons and the sons of their neighbors, which could be the key to finding out where the Taliban had and hadn’t been and the towns and villages where young men were being recruited.
Rodriguez stared at the short list, scrutinizing it for what may have been missing. She thought about who the right people were to provide the language and intelligence training the women of the 1st Stryker Brigade would need to create a stable and effective FET.
Standing next to her window, she felt the crisp Alaska air and missed the warmth that used to spread across her bare arms when she stood close to the windows of her Fresno office. Rodriguez walked the carpet’s well-worn path back to her desk, picked up the phone, and dialed the number for a female intelligence officer she knew in a building across the base. The goal, she explained to the intelligence officer who had served in the Gulf War, was to formalize an SOP, to create a concrete set of procedures that any woman, no matter where she was stationed in the United States or headed to in the Middle East, could use. It needed to be thorough enough to lay out every single aspect of the FET mission but open enough for flexibility so that women could adjust procedures based on the needs of local females. Ten minutes later the intelligence officer and Rodriguez were sitting across from one another in the major’s office, brainstorming how they would write what turned out to be a one-hundred-page document they hoped would set the standard for American FET unit training.
Rodriguez would concentrate on the first section of the SOP. She would describe, in detail, how to search a suspect, lay out instructions on bagging and tagging evidence, and include a list of equipment that military police officers and, therefore, FET members had to carry with them at all times—including plastic gloves and metal and plastic handcuffs—in case they encountered a suspect during a routine patrol or a scouting mission in a new village—moments when they may unexpectedly come in contact with Taliban members, cells, or families. She would also write a list of basic questions that women should ask each suspect they encountered and ways to explain to Afghan women that their children also had to be searched. Approaching a child the wrong way or without first informing their mothers of what was about to happen could cause tensions that might hinder relationship building, harm future intelligence collection missions, and hamper a subsequent FET’s ability to get to know these Afghan women well enough to find out about the violence in their homes and their villages—a critical tool in rooting out possible insurgent targets and locations.
It would be up to the intelligence officer to write the second part of the SOP, which would cover intelligence collection—how to recognize atmospherics worth noting, how to approach women in their homes, how to talk to men in area villages without offending them and in ways that could lead to more information. They would both work on finding someone for the third part—a primer in Pashtu and Dari phrases and other very rudimentary aspects of the language such as the alphabet and the ability to recognize and read street signs.
The intelligence officer also decided that her section should include detailed instructions on how to speak to Afghan women—but for different purposes. American FETs needed to gain a basic understanding of what normal life was like in each village so they could learn to recognize significant changes and figure out what those changes may mean. For example, if women were seen selling goods in local markets or opening and owning stalls in village stores after having been forced to stay in their homes for years, that could be a sign that the Taliban’s grip in that community was waning or that the American military had successfully forced insurgents out. In the villages where shops owned by women were disappearing, the opposite could be happening.
The FET members also had to learn how to talk to Afghan women in a way that was culturally sensitive so they would feel comfortable opening up about the work opportunities for the older male children, how frequently and where their husbands worked, and which children in the village had gone missing and how old they were. They had to learn to write reports that included the most vital information that should be passed along to the head of their intelligence units so they could be included in and analyzed with larger intelligence reports.
FET members also wanted to provide Afghan women with a means of making a living, something that many, depending on their age, had never thought possible. It was illegal in some villages for a woman to step out of her home, let alone develop the skills needed to hold down a job. Rodriguez recounted stories of widows begging on the street for money to buy food, unable to work after their husbands had died and only able to leave their homes with their youngest sons by their side. They decided to include illustrations and sample documents in the manual where they would be most helpful. The intelligence officer knew of an Army linguist who was a teaching assistant at the Defense Language Institute. They would call on her to develop the last portion of the SOP. The women had two weeks to pull the training manual together.
A month later, just before California desert training—a must before deployment to Afghanistan—Rodriguez found herself speaking in front of a room full of female soldiers. The women had been called to the auditorium for a mandatory meeting near the end of their workdays.
As Rodriguez walked the dark corridor that led to the hundred-seat multipurpose room, the hum of conversations grew louder, and she tried to guess how many women had shown up for the FET meeting. Each woman on the base had received an email about the effort and was encouraged by her command to attend. Every woman on the base needed to be familiar with the FET program and be prepared to serve. The small teams usually consisted of three to four volunteers, but Rodriguez’s plan was to train as many women as she could and then narrow the core team down to the ones who picked up the skills the fastest.
The major approached the front of the hall, and pockets of conversations began to fade between calls of “shush” echoing from the audience. She stood beside a small folding table she had set up the day before that was covered with pamphlets detailing the FET responsibilities she hoped women in the room would be eager to learn.
“Hello, everyone,” Rodriguez began. The few remaining conversations in the room faded.
“I’m Major Rodriguez. How many of you have heard of the FET? Please raise your hands.”
A good number of women raised their hands, but some of the nearly one hundred women who filled the space looked around with blank stares.
“Not everyone will be leaving on deployment in April, but we’ll need some volunteers to be a part of the female engagement team that’s needed to accompany the men on combat missions.”
The din that had quieted down so quickly began again. Knowing that some of the women had just come back from deployments, Rodriguez had expected the FET mission to be a hard sell. She was also aware that she was asking women to do work above and beyond their normal jobs. Women who were cooks, for example, would still need to be cooks in addition to putting their lives in danger during raids in ways they never had before.
“Wait,” Rodriguez recalled one woman saying, “I just got back from Afghanistan less than a year ago with another unit. You’re asking me to go again?”
Other women spoke up from the crowd with similar concerns: “I can’t leave my kids again for something that’s volunteer” and “What exactly would we be doing?”
“I know. I know,” Rodriguez cut in, raising her hands to quiet the room. “I know that some of you have just come back from deployments, that volunteering is a lot to ask many of you who have children. But this mission is a chance to do something incredibly meaningful for the women of Afghanistan and to have a direct impact on the work that intelligence and combat units are doing.”
“How long would we be gone for?” another woman asked.
“How much danger is involved?” Rodriguez heard from someone else.
“The mission would last for the entire deployment,” Rodriguez explained. “You would be searching Afghan women because the men can’t do that job. You may also be tasked with collecting intelligence information from women and observing villages. You’ll also be participating in infantry maneuvers, so there will be, as in any combat situation, a certain amount of danger.”
The room fell silent.
“Does anyone, based on what they know now, want to volunteer?”
Rodriguez saw only a few hands slowly rise.
“If more don’t volunteer, people will be selected. Training begins for everyone tomorrow. Please pick up a pamphlet that details FET duties and responsibilities on your way out.”
Rodriguez selected three women to be a part of the brigade FET (which she would lead) after the two-week training session. Twenty-one other female soldies were selected to be FETs in their respective battalions.The other women who deployed also had basic FET skills and would be used as alternates.
STANDING IN THE desert sun on FOB Lagman, Rodriguez again looked at her watch.
11:45 A.M.
The convoy still hadn’t shown. She would give it another fifteen minutes. At noon she had to inspect the kennels. She also had to walk over to the holding cells to check on some of the suspects who had been brought in several days ago. The heart of her day had to begin.
The sun beating down on her reminded her of the heat she experienced during combat training in the Mojave Desert—nearly a month of work for the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, intended to make them mission ready just before deployment to Afghanistan. She should have known that completing the FET task on FOB Lagman would be tough. Her team had been completely ignored during training in California.
The 1st Stryker Brigade’s officers had been on the base—which looked in every respect like the streets of Afghanistan, complete with dirt roads, underdeveloped downtown markets, and cave-like dwellings inside compounds—for about a month when Rodriguez’s FET women arrived in May 2011. The officers landed early to oversee the setup of communications tents, offices, living quarters, and planning and strategy. Rodriguez was ready to incorporate FET training into the combat simulation. She wanted the women on her team to train with real combat soldiers—a step beyond the rudimentary drills she had put them through in Alaska—before they were confronted in combat with real Taliban suspects.
In an early-morning planning meeting for the unit’s first simulated mission, officers discussed the training scenario: the invasion of a suspected Taliban stronghold. They had decided to put up small concrete blockades along the road to recreate difficult desert drives and unpredictable Afghan terrain. They mapped out how the soldiers would approach and surround the building and who would enter first. As provost marshal, Rodriguez decided that her military police would use three K9s on the mission. All the officers in the climate-controlled tent collectively agreed to remind soldiers that communication—silent effective communication—was a must.
“And what about the FET?” Rodriguez asked. “Where do they fit into all of this?”
The tent fell silent. Rodriguez looked around the room. No one had considered that FET members needed the same level of training as the male soldiers they would be assisting.
She was told that women weren’t serving in primary combat roles. “We’ll get to the needs of your FET females later,” one of the officers in charge of mission training stated. As much as Rodriguez pushed, later never came. Her FET entered Afghanistan with nothing close to real-world training.
Waiting for that convoy, Rodriguez was again waging a battle against her military superiors. It was, in many ways, more nefarious than the one she was waging against groups outside of the FOB. She was confronting a world that appeared to be working toward female equality but was instead setting up logistical roadblocks. Greater vehicle support alone would not be enough to bring Rodriguez and other FET women the recognition they deserved. Battlefield equality would only be achieved with the erasure of the military’s male-dominated culture. It was a culture that had, in its early years, denied women the opportunity to work as radio operators, intelligence collectors, and mechanical engineers. It had delayed weapons training for women who went to Vietnam and denied certain promotions until President Lyndon Johnson signed a law requiring opportunities for advancement in 1967. It is a culture in which sexual trauma is one of the leading causes of PTSD for women. It’s a culture that in 2010 prevented, through intimidation, 86 percent of females who were assaulted from reporting the crime. And it is a culture that denied Rodriguez some of the support she needed for her FET to follow through on its full mission in Afghanistan.
Giving Rodriguez more support would have given her team more freedom to talk to Afghan mothers and girls. And more than that, it would have given her FET members greater input in military strategy.
At every turn Rodriguez has been reminded of just how difficult change was.
She looked down at her watch again.
Noon.
She glanced through the fence one last time.
No convoy.
She would begin the routine again the next day. And the next morning, like so many others to come, Rodriguez would stand for hours, waiting for a Stryker that never showed.