CHAPTER 13
VERY OLD CONCEPT, VERY NEW MISSION
Women who stepped up were measured as citizens of the nation, not as women.…. This was a people’s war, and everyone was in it.
—COLONEL OVETA CULP HOBBY, first director of the Women’s Army Corps
FORT HUACHUCA, ARIZONA, JULY 2012—The intelligence officer turned on her computer, logged into her email, and started scrolling.
It had been several hours since she’d checked her inbox. The full day of captain’s and intelligence training had been strenuous, and Johanna Smoke leaned forward and placed her arms on the desk to let go of the weight that hours of academic pressure had created. When she reached the email with the subject line “change of orders” she stopped scrolling and stared at the words for several minutes. She blinked and read it again. Couldn’t have been right.
When she opened the message Smoke was even more convinced that the email was a mistake. The orders were short: She was to report to Fort Knox, Kentucky, in September, where she would be assigned to the 3rd Brigade Combat Team. That unit would deploy to Afghanistan the following year.
She reached for the phone, but she hung up before dialing. The three-hour time difference between Arizona and her branch manager’s office in Kentucky meant that her 5 P.M. plea for an explanation would end up an 8 P.M. voicemail. And the matter was too important to leave a message that might go unchecked.
She had just been accepted into Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The application process had taken six months: she’d handed over records documenting high marks on physical fitness tests, copies of annual evaluations, her résumé, and a mental health assessment. And after jumping through every possible hoop, she’d made it. She was set to leave Arizona for her dream assignment right after training was over. Her husband, whom she had only recently separated from, was taking his career, despite efforts, in a different direction. When she found out that he wouldn’t be waiting to greet her in North Carolina in September, she was relieved. The only reason he’d applied was because she did. Smoke made it clear that special ops was key for her. Her father had served in special ops during Vietnam, and her dad was her rock. When she had struggled in Iraq in 2009, her father’s voice of reassurance and experience was the main one she looked to for guidance. There was no other person whose footsteps were more worthy of following. She knew that special ops would be a challenge, and she wanted to run toward it. She was going to serve in that elite Fort Bragg unit, she told her husband, whether they were together in North Carolina or not.
Smoke and her husband had been in the same Fort Drum, New York, unit when she deployed to Iraq. But in the war zone they rarely saw one another. After they arrived at FOB Hammer about eighteen miles east of Baghdad, their jobs took them in completely different directions. Her husband didn’t want the two to be separated again. So he followed her lead and applied for special ops too.
But things quickly changed. The young couple, who had only been married for about three years, separated in March and filed for divorce in May. It would have been awkward if, during divorce proceedings, they’d been stationed together. The fact that she was going to Fort Bragg, and he went to Fort Knox in Kentucky (his next duty station after special ops didn’t work out for him), had been the perfect solution.
Now the words Fort Knox stared back at her from a cold, flat computer screen, and all she could feel was anxiety.
When Smoke called her branch manager early the next morning she was assured that the change in assignment was no mistake.
“You don’t understand,” she tried to explain, “Captain Smoke and I are no longer part of the Army married couples program. We don’t need to be stationed together anymore. That’s why this happened, right? Personnel thinks that, because I haven’t changed my last name yet, we’re still married?”
She abruptly sat down as she listened to the Army’s reasons for disrupting her life. She was now part of a Women in the Army (WITA) program. She would be placed on a combat team so that the Army could get a sense of how women fared under such conditions.
To get a sense of how women fared? To get a sense of how women fared?
Smoke kept repeating that phrase to herself in disbelief.
Maybe, she thought, the Army should have asked her about how she fared after she returned from Iraq two years ago. Instead, she was being forced to participate in a program that, to her, seemed like a waste of time. She’d already done what WITA was just beginning to study. The change of duty came with questionnaires about her feelings in this new combat environment—completely stupid, she thought. She was told she’d need to attend group meetings to discuss how male superiors were treating her—also, she thought, a total waste of time.
WITA studies and reviews had been used for decades and were a good predictor of changes to come. The office often acted as a liaison between policymakers, coming changes, and women in the Army—testing potential shifts, like placing women in infantry units at the company level, before changes were made official. They wanted to develop a paper trail that proved the Army had documented all potentially negative effects.
By this time women on female engagement teams, like Rodriguez and Adams, had already been on the ground participating in combat—raids, enemy searches, firefights. Those women had done more than their male counterparts in combat ever could. They were also being criticized by men who didn’t want women’s roles to change, didn’t think they deserved combat recognition, and had no idea how much women had already done to earn it—including women like Smoke, who had earlier been on the ground in Iraq in a combat role that hadn’t included FET duties.
The Army was already making very significant shifts in the way it was using female soldiers. But since his decision in 2012 to eliminate a 1994 directive that had banned women from collocating with combat units, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was forced to give the appearance that the military was controlling a transition that had already happened. And the pace of the DOD’s public transition wasn’t fast enough for many women who had for years been living and working through the hardships of combat. The 2012 Department of Defense move would only open a bit more than fourteen thousand combat jobs to women.
When Panetta later commented on the decision during a 2013 news conference he stated, “It’s clear to all of us that women are contributing in unprecedented ways to the military’s mission of defending the nation.”
But his directive still left some two hundred thousand jobs officially closed to women.
In May of 2012 two female Army reservists, Command Sergeant Major Jane Baldwin and Colonel Ellen Haring, who had each served more than twenty years, sued the Department of Defense, stating that the policy of combat exclusion hindered advancement and retirement benefits.
Whether Smoke liked it or not, she, along with the thousands of other women serving in 2012, were operating in the world’s largest fish bowl. Everyone—civilians, foreign military units, men who wanted jobs open to women, and those who didn’t—was watching to see whether women could successfully transition into combat duties and serve side by side with men.
That combat transition had already happened for Smoke in Iraq long before she knew that a program called WITA even existed. She had been a military intelligence officer on the ground with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, Light Infantry from October 2009 to July 2010. Smoke got a Combat Action Badge for her service in the war zone.
The transition happened for other women during Operation Enduring Freedom and, before that, the Gulf War.
As she listened to her branch manager lay out the reasons why her participation in WITA was important, she began to feel Fort Bragg slipping out of her grasp. Her assignment to Fort Knox was going to happen regardless of whether she thought WITA was a waste of time. And the Army didn’t care if its experiments were too little, too late. The military also didn’t care if changing her orders meant she would have to endure a few uncomfortable moments with her soon to be ex-husband.
But Smoke did care. And she tried to tell her branch manager as much.
“Who else can I talk to? How can I get these orders changed so that I can go special ops like I’d planned?”
Her branch manager’s answer: “Essentially, no one.”
When she hung up, she was angry. She was resentful. She was a bit depressed.
But more than anything, she was tired.
She was tired of women being treated like an experiment. It was as if, Smoke thought, men wanted women to prove that they were worthy of being called fighters. And the willful ignorance of those in charge of this supposed transition prevented them from seeing that women already were.
This orders change was the latest manifestation of the military’s misguided—and all too late—attempt to bring female equality to the ranks, Smoke thought. To her it felt fake, like an overreach.
She said nothing more about it.
FORT KNOX, KENTUCKY, SEPTEMBER 2012—The small home she rented when she got to Kentucky was nothing special. It was a white split-level with a fenced-in yard for her dogs. It was about fifteen minutes from the base and the best she could find on short notice. Once she’d spotted a home in the right location, she didn’t bother looking further. She was only going to be there for a couple of years—long enough to get settled on the base and then serve a year in Afghanistan. After she returned from deployment she would reapply to special operations and go to Fort Bragg like she’d wanted to all along. Kentucky, she’d resolved, was just a pit stop.
The Army had given her a month between moving to Kentucky and reporting for duty to get her personal affairs in order. And about a week after she arrived, when she looked at the state of her living room, which had not a stick of furniture and was filled with so many unopened boxes that its cream carpet disappeared, she wasn’t sure a month would be long enough.
Smoke knew no one in the area but her ex-husband, and she wasn’t going to reach out to him for help.
She opened a few boxes of knick-knacks and, after realizing she had nowhere to place them, decided to tackle the shelving unit she’d bought just a few days before. And the only tool she had was the very small Allen wrench that was included in the box. She placed it in the screws, perfectly fitted for the tool, and put the unit together.
Then she tried to attach it to the wall. The Allen wrench didn’t fit the larger screws that were supposed to secure the shelves in place. She tried three times, and each time the unit fell to the floor. After the third try she sat in the middle of her living room and broke down. She didn’t care much about the shelf. But she did care that she was lonely and that her career plans had been stymied. And languishing in the middle of an incomplete living room, in a town where she barely knew a soul, was the perfect backdrop for her to beat herself up—something, in her quest for perfection, she did all too often. If she couldn’t handle a set of bookshelves, she thought, how in the world was she going to handle being the only female officer in a combat unit? She worried about whether she’d get along with her command. She wondered about the kind of men who would be under her command. She wasn’t used to feeling unsure about where her life was going.
Her phone rang. It was her dad.
Through sobs she explained that she didn’t have any tools. The shelf kept falling down. She felt incompetent. She was alone.
Within two days a set of power tools showed up on her doorstep with a note carefully signed “Love, Dad.”
She opened those boxes and got to work, putting her home and her life together again.
The highlight of her duty change was the fact that she would be going to the Middle East again. Preparing to deploy to Afghanistan gave her life purpose. She didn’t waste her time filling out gender-integration questionnaires or going to group meetings. She had an important mission to prepare for. The crying bouts in that small house in Kentucky stopped.
And when she got to Zabul Province she didn’t play combat as she felt the WITA program had encouraged; instead, she took on the most meaningful role of her career. She began calling herself “chief of staff” for a once-discarded woman who had become one of Afghanistan’s leading freedom fighters.