CAMP PENDLETON, CALIFORNIA, MARCH 2012—She typed as quickly as she could in order to add her ideas to the report before she forgot them. Forgetfulness is something the Marine found herself constantly battling after her return from Afghanistan. The brain injury she had sustained during an IED blast was slowly diminishing some of the mental acuity she had once taken for granted.
FETs can be used, she wrote, long after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are over in countries like Somalia and Nigeria, locations where the United States is not participating in ground combat but where women are struggling for equality and insurgencies are making it impossible for them to gain it.
The long, narrow, gray trailer that housed her small desk and beat-up chair (that was once comfortable but was now starting to exacerbate what she recently found out were slipped disks in her back) defined the boundaries of her new world. She spent much of her days trying to figure out how to save and reshape the FET program. She wanted it to be sustainable, to outlast what many saw as its current usefulness.
When she wasn’t inside the trailer, she was on the concrete lots outside, training women in combat tactics and the importance of relationship building for FETs as they prepared to take on what she had only recently left behind in Afghanistan.
In many ways she had gotten her long-held wish. She was far away from the confines of the helicopter hangar. That bay and its adjacent flight line were among the most open spaces on the base, yet during the months she worked the line the repetition of helicopter inspections and the job’s distance from the combat experiences she had craved made her feel more caged than the small trailer where she now spent most of her days. She was no longer in combat—the only thing she regretted. But she was helping to shape combat missions. And that was enough of a connection to keep her uplifted.
Adams was still typing—filling her report with data to show how much help women in sub-Saharan Africa needed—when her phone rang. It was me.
The first time I talked to Adams she was battling multiple fronts—the possible end of the FET, the deteriorating physical conditions that combat had thrust onto her body, and a gender-biased Marine Corps that was making her fight to keep her job.
“Hello.” I could only faintly hear her voice on the other line.
She walked outside of the trailer for a better connection. Of the three struggles, her dedication pushed her to talk about the FET program first.
“These units can not only help women; they can help men and kids,” Adams explained of her expanded FET protocol.
And until the Pentagon fully opened combat roles to women, Adams’s expanded FET program would be one of the few paths available for female Marines who wanted to make an impact on ground conflict in Afghanistan. Just the month before that first phone conversation the Pentagon finally admitted that women were participating in the ground conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. It struck down part of the 1994 regulation that barred women from collocating with units whose primary missions were ground combat. But that back-door admission did very little to expand opportunities for Adams or the hundreds of other women who had already given their strength and heart to the FET. It did nothing for the women she was training and sending to Afghanistan to continue the FET mission.
If the Pentagon had very loudly and publicly proclaimed the FET’s existence when the program started in 2003, women would likely have gotten better access to mental healthcare. Less than half of women surveyed between 2010 and 2011 said that the Department of Veterans Affairs met their mental health needs either “completely” or “very well.” Pregnant women have an even harder struggle, with mental illness, including PTSD, ranking twice as high for those female veterans, according to a study by the National Institutes of Health. After serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, women reported experiencing flashbacks, nightmares, and other symptoms common among combat troops. Some of those same women also reported being dismissed by the VA and commanders who didn’t understand that females were actually participating in intense battles in the Middle East.
Recognition from the Pentagon would also have given women more opportunities to excel at promotions boards. Talking frequently about FET achievements early on—as they were happening—would have shown that the military’s combat strategy was logically evolving and that the services understood the critical role women could play.
There were other avenues to the battlefield for women. And the females who chose them also were not recognized as having served in combat. Major Mary Jennings Hegar was one of the four females suing the Pentagon to open all roles to women. As a helicopter pilot, she had received a Purple Heart after her chopper was shot down during a medical rescue mission. Enemy bullets and glass from the front of the chopper pierced her right arm and leg. She convinced her team, on which she was the only female, to continue the mission.
Adams had lived among other combat Marines and Afghan women for seven months in Helmand Province. And those had been among the most meaningful months of her life. She had circumvented part of a military structure that had tried, no matter how unintentionally, to limit her ambitions.
She swiftly became the kind of leader that other FET members—or “the girls,” as Adams called them—could readily lean on for strength. The FET mission had given her an unexpected voice, and she continued to use it.
Adams now spent several hours each day writing new FET protocols. She hoped to pen a standard operating procedure that would take female engagement teams to countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia—where there was no significant US military presence but where she knew females could help save nations from insurgent threats by empowering the country’s women. When Adams wasn’t writing, she was training other US military females on current FET protocols and procedures that would prepare them for life on the ground in the worst parts of Afghanistan.
In just a short period of time she had already tweaked the protocol to adjust what women did on the ground in Afghanistan. She had developed a shorter training program—one that could be done in two weeks instead of several months. The program also introduced the idea of women keeping a foothold in their regular military occupational specialty (MOS) and just coming together when needed for FET missions. The FET assignment wouldn’t be permanent; several women would be trained in combat skills. When needed, a few of the women would be pulled from their regular jobs to go on FET missions—similar to the way FETs were assembled for some Army units under Rodriguez in 2011.
But Adams was also trying to save the FET program just as the Marine Corps was considering killing it—not because it wasn’t working but, more likely than not, because internal support was lacking. The program was touted by men and women on the ground as a success, but in 2012 the Marine Corps decided to turn FET duties over to Afghanistan. There were plenty of indicators that Afghan security forces weren’t ready—not the least of which came from the FET leaders themselves. Afghan women were still getting death threats for becoming police officers in remote areas of Zabul Province, making recruitment a challenge. When Smoke showed up, she had to repeat much of the training that Rodriquez had already done because of the AFP’s turnover rate. She worked with Jamila to push out radio messages not just to encourage voting but also out of a pressing need to recruit women for the police force.
A January 2012 assessment from NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) showed that 149 FETs from fourteen countries were struggling with “employment, institutionalization, ad-hoc requirements, standardized training [and] national caveats” and that, in addition, US FETs especially struggled with a “lack of institutional proponency.” In other words, the teams were being destroyed from within the US military by many of the obstacles that leaders like Rodriguez and Adams constantly fought to overcome: a lack of sufficient transportation, restrictions that kept female soldiers from leaving FOBs, and insufficient time for proper training. ISAF recognized the heavily entrenched discrimination that was killing any chances the FET program had of surviving, despite the intelligence and mission boon that the teams continually provided.
The boon to intelligence collection was obvious in 2010.
That year Major General Michael T. Flynn had coauthored the report detailing what was failing about intelligence collection in Afghanistan and what could improve it. He referenced the lack of sufficient intelligence staffing in the field and touted the work by FETs, among others, to fill those gaps—collecting atmospherics and grassroots-level data as well as building in-person relationships and trust among residents throughout Afghanistan. Those practices led to more information about enemy targets. That was a model, the report stated, that needed to be expanded, not diminished.
FETs had helped Afghan women circumvent gender restrictions in order to vote, get medical care, and build businesses. These women, both Afghan and American, had become expert at finding a way where often there was no way. The same US FET presence, Adams preached, could help push back Taliban-like insurgent groups in other countries.
Her strongest argument: in regions where women don’t face restrictions as severe as those in Afghanistan, FETs are still vital. Insurgents in Africa have used sexual violence and trauma against females as weapons of terror. And women and young girls in those countries may view men in uniform—including American men—as an enemy. No one would blame women in rural Nigeria, for example, for being uncomfortable if male forces approached them. One of the worst kidnappings of girls in the country’s history was perpetuated by the uniformed extremist fighters of Boko Haram—a group that has pledged its support and dedication to the Islamic State.
April 14, 2014, at the Chibok Government Girls Secondary School started like any other day. Some girls were sitting in classrooms taking notes. Upcoming graduates were studying and preparing for exams that were just around the corner. That day ended in a way that no one in that town likely would have imagined, with militants raiding the school, abducting hundreds of students, and setting the building on fire. Reports soon emerged that some of the girls were raped and forced to carry the children of their captors. Sadly, the nightmare for many of their families continues, as 195 girls are still thought to be somewhere in the forests of Nigeria.
The parallels between what happens in Afghanistan at the hands of the Taliban and in Nigeria at the hands of Boko Haram are strong: both terrorist organizations recruit young boys as fighters, both groups attack schools in order to ruin educational opportunities and advancement for young girls, and females are sometimes rejected by their families and villages after they’ve been attacked. Many of the kidnapped girls in Nigeria have also been forced into marriages with older men—in this case their captors.
The women of Chibok could have used the community support and gender empowerment of FETs long before Boko Haram—a militant group whose roots go back in Nigeria more than a decade—kidnapped girls for having the audacity to sit in a classroom. Education for girls under Boko Haram is forbidden, just as it is under the Taliban. Boko Haram has destroyed more than a thousand schools throughout the country. In areas that the terrorist organization hasn’t hit, poverty and lack of educational funding from the government keeps girls out of school. FETs have battled and succeeded in helping families overcome many of those problems in Afghanistan by building schools and providing microloans to women so they can pull themselves out of poverty. They also developed relationships with women who provided information used to prevent some attacks from happening.
In Afghanistan, teams worked with Army engineers and provincial reconstruction teams to rebuild schools destroyed by the Taliban. And FET leaders like Smoke learned to develop strategic political relationships that would encourage the Afghan Army to continue to protect girls on their way to school long after the US military left.
Those same strategies could have prevented the hashtag #bringbackourgirls from becoming a worldwide trend. As of 2017, three years since the girls were kidnapped, more than six have been killed. After negotiations only twenty-one girls were released. Limited US military assistance, which has included drones and some boots on the ground, doesn’t include a strategy to empower the extremist group’s most vulnerable target—women and girls.
The terror group al-Shabaab, which has links to both al-Qaeda and Boko Haram, gained a foothold in Somalia by doing many of the same things that the Taliban did to gain support in the more rural communities of Afghanistan. It preyed on the poverty and desperation of the residents by promising food and stability—basic necessities that appeal to starving young men who need to support their families. And that desperation has been used to manipulate them into the ranks of the terror group. For more than a decade al-Shabaab’s goal has been to take control of the entire nation, and the group has attempted to do that, in part, by suppressing its women.
Throughout the country’s southern regions—the only areas where al-Shabaab has consistently maintained control—the insurgency has instituted practices intended to control and terrify women, including public stoning for adultery. The same social ills that make it virtually a death sentence to be a female in Afghanistan—religious extremism, lack of education, and poverty—have infected Somalia. In 2011 the country was ranked the fifth-most dangerous place to be a woman on the planet (behind Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, and the Congo), according to a report by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Women are routinely raped and sexually assaulted, and girls as young as four are forced into the abusive ritual of genital mutilation. The death rate for women during pregnancy is one in twelve. And young girls in the most impoverished areas—just like in Afghanistan—have their childhoods and opportunities for education snatched from them way too soon.
Female soldiers in Somalia are fighting back.
Women from Uganda are taking on expanded roles in the African Union Army as gunners and patrolling Somalia’s streets in combat tanks. The UN has been calling for more female forces to fight sexual violence and promote peace and security worldwide since 2000. Female engagement teams could bring the skills they’ve gained in Iraq and Afghanistan to reach women in the southern areas of Somalia, where conditions are the most desperate. The same three-pronged strategy—reach women, gain intelligence, and train the weak Somali National Army—could work to support the African Union Army and the UN as they fight against al-Shabaab.
IN 2012 ADAMS was not only pushing the Marine Corps to more fully support female engagement but was also fighting to save her career. Her seven months in combat prevented her from putting time in on her regular job as a helicopter mechanic, and that made getting promoted difficult after she returned from Afghanistan. Taking on a risky combat tour was usually a career boost for men. But for Adams, volunteering to lead a FET and then leaving again to have a baby proved detrimental.
A phone call came to her home just after her son was born.
Her command was aware that she was interested in being promoted. But she was also told that her chances, essentially, were dwindling. The paperwork she had filled out before going on maternity leave, indicating that she wanted to go before the promotions board, was now nowhere to be found. And the sergeant who helped Adams work on her promotions package rotated out of the unit. The board was scheduled to meet during her absence. Because her FET unit deployment pulled her away from her regular duties, the promotions board, she was being told, would question her ability to fall back into the skill set the military had hired her for. It had been nearly a year since she had acted as a helicopter mechanic. When Adams hung up the phone, she was shaken. The sense of stability and accomplishment that the military had once given her had been destroyed.
The day of the boards Adams, who was at home feeding her newborn, wasn’t even on the list to compete for one of the few promotion slots available. She was approaching the ten-year mark, and becoming a staff sergeant after ten years in the Marines was mandatory. If Adams didn’t get promoted, her military career would be over. Despite her struggles, when Adams returned to work from her maternity leave, her immediate focus was on saving the FET. Her goal was to make the combat experience more meaningful for her sisters in arms, even if the changes she was trying to push through didn’t help her.
On March 20, 2012, Adams stood on the grounds of Pendleton saying good-bye to two Marines she had worked with in a previous unit and who she had just trained to go to Afghanistan.
At the end of the training session the twenty-three women who had gathered for one last day of instruction began to disperse. Adams had tapped the two women she was especially close to on their elbows and asked them to quickly follow her to an empty area just outside the gray trailer where she worked.
She reached into her right pocket and pulled out two bracelets—small, green, intricately braided. She looked each woman in the eyes for a few seconds before she began to speak.
“Stay safe,” she said, handing each woman a bracelet as she began her good-byes. “You guys were amazing during training. Email me as soon as you guys get there and are safe. Let me know.”
With large smiles the two women embraced Adams, holding onto their friend as tightly as possible. When they separated, Adams’s eyes welled. She had known the two women, one of whom was her best friend, for years. They were tough. She kept reminding herself of that fact during those last days of training. She was happy they were getting what they wanted—the chance to make a difference during ground combat. She was also worried about what they would encounter. She had helped the women become engagement team candidates. She was proud of the way they had grown during training. But, seeing them off, she felt like a parent pushing her children into a world that she wanted desperately to protect them from.
As they parted, the women thanked her for the training and placed the bracelets on their wrists. They weren’t to be removed until the Marines made it home from combat.
Adams had passed on a tradition that one of her commanders had passed along to her. The bracelets, made from the same cord used in parachutes, were given from one combat fighter to the next. The ritual sealed friendships. In times of struggle the bracelets helped ground troops who were lucky enough to get one strengthen their resolve. It was Adams’s way of saying, I made it through, and so can you.
The two Marines boarded a bus for the first leg of their journey to the country from which Adams had only recently returned.
The next week Adams and her husband boarded a plane for their journey to Washington, DC.
Long before lawsuits, Adams had been part of the fight for full combat equality. And now she was taking her story all the way to the Obama administration.
HOME OF JOE AND JILL BIDEN, WASHINGTON, DC, MARCH 26, 2012—The Marine slowed down once she reached the reception hall of the small Victorian home, allowing her gaze to linger on the vertical stripes of the cream-and-lemon-colored wallpaper that decorated the open area near the crisp, white staircase. As she approached the first step she looked to her left, turned the corner, and walked through an arched doorway.
She glanced up at the wall and stopped moving. The last thing she expected to see during an event honoring fifty successful women—all representing some form of progress in the military, business, education, and industry for the Women’s History Month reception—was a photo of herself.
For a moment she was frozen, unable to process the fact that as she waited to hear from the vice president of the United States and his wife, standing in their home, on the grounds of the Naval Observatory, she was looking at a scene from her own FET career reflected back at her.
She slowly ran her fingers along the right side of the glossy frame, shifting the photograph ever so slightly left, and redirecting the light that bounced off the glass, allowing her to see the familiar image a bit better.
Adams was, very briefly, back on the unpaved streets of Afghanistan, reliving a series of moments that had been captured with one flash and shown many times over—the Daily Caller, the Chicago Tribune, NBC News, Pinterest. It was one of her favorite memories:
The little boy had been about six. His hands were covered in the pale orange henna often used by Afghan women in rural areas to polish their nails and decorate their palms; his eyes were outlined with traditional black makeup (likely a homemade mix of soot and oil), thought by some rural mothers to protect their children’s eyes from evil spirits. He and his friends had surrounded Adams. One girl, the tallest in the little bunch, stood in the back; four other boys—small, smiling, their white and brown clothes covered in a thin layer of sand—flanked Adams (three on one side with their friend and one on the other). The Marine had been on patrol in Musa Qal’ah when they ran up to her—a familiar face who always brought warmth and fun. She removed her helmet and squatted in the middle of the crowd, allowing her weapon to rest naturally across the front of her body, its scope pointed toward the ground. She tilted her head back and slowly blew a sugary bubble that captivated the little boy in the middle of the crowd. His mouth was open wide with astonishment. He reached his right hand, with its tiny, henna-soaked fingers, in the bubble’s direction.
The photographer snapped. It seemed an unlikely wartime moment.
Adams felt her arms and face flush cold with goosebumps as other women walked by and glanced at the photo and then at Adams standing in front of it. The Marine remembered the joy of interacting with Afghan children. Kids in the most war-torn parts of the country were hard, burdened with worries about raids and insurgents’ bombs and battles that left their homes crumbling and families impoverished. But they were also children—open, playful, endlessly energetic, and still capable of finding wonder in bubble gum. Thinking about their well-being, during the war in 2010 and now, reminded Adams why FETs were so important. At its core the program was about nation building and ensuring a country’s progress by bringing equality to its women and educating its children.
The wall was lined with other female engagement photos, and she walked slowly past them all.
In the open reception hall, just on the other side of the staircase, Vice President Joe Biden stood on a small platform beside his wife, hands tucked behind his back, waiting to speak. His dark blue suit popped against the deep maroon of Jill Biden’s dress. Adams stood a few feet away to his right with four other FET women—one small corner in the crowd of honorees standing in front of the couple. Adams’s focus was fully on the Second Lady, whom she had met the year before when Jill Biden visited Marines at Camp Pendleton as part of her effort to reach out to veterans and military families. Adams had spoken to the Second Lady about the FETs and their work in Afghanistan. The Marine wasn’t at all surprised when her unit commander recommended that she fly to Washington for the Women’s History Month event after Biden’s staff called asking for the best representatives of the FETs to attend. By that time she had been named Marine of the Year, had received a Combat Action Ribbon, and had been one of many service members invited by the NFL to attend the Super Bowl. Reporters for several newspapers and magazines had interviewed her, and her story had been told all over the country. She was getting used to the calls.
During her Women’s History Month speech the Second Lady, according to a report on the White House site, talked about the collective “courage, strength and resilience” of all the women in the room. Then she turned to her right, shifting the crowd’s attention to Adams, Corporal Mary Walker, Sergeant Jamie Isaacson, and Captain Angela Nelson—other FET females in attendance. Raising her right hand in their direction, Jill Biden spoke of the FETs’ heroic efforts in Afghanistan. She emphasized the work the women had successfully accomplished with the country’s female population. Adams helped one woman start a business. The women gathered information from the previously unheard voices of mothers and wives. They helped empower women to educate their daughters.
“These women,” she explained of the FET members in a video created during the event and posted on the White House website, “are a whole new generation of pioneers.”
The honorees turned their attention to one another just after the speeches ended. As Adams traveled deeper into the crowd, she glanced to her right and saw a member of Congress walk past. To her left were women from Lockheed Martin.
She stopped briefly to talk to a group of women she’d never met before, one of whom inquired about what she’d done in Afghanistan. She wanted to know what Adams’s duties, outside of her connections to Afghan women and children, had been.
“You were just a female Marine, right? You didn’t see combat—you just dealt with women and children?”
The woman paused, nodding very casually and smiling at Adams as if she already knew the answer to her question. Her goal, apparently, was confirmation that her assumptions had been correct.
As Adams explained the firefights she’d been through and talked about the explosive device that tore her vehicle apart, she watched the smile on the woman’s face slowly fade. The eyebrows of a few other women raised as Adams kept talking.
They clearly had not expected to hear about combat. Adams could feel her face turn red. The last thing she wanted was to make people feel uncomfortable.
Even in a room full of strong, trailblazing women, there were some who weren’t prepared to hear the truth about females in combat. Adams was asking civilian architects and artists, politicians and engineers—many of whom had accomplished firsts in their fields—to comprehend things they couldn’t begin to imagine. Her work, some of her proudest achievements, existed in the dark caves, blown-up streets, embattled mountains, and crumbled schools an entire world away. That fact distanced her, just a little bit, from many of the women in the room.
Their silence, after she finished speaking, wasn’t an attempt to shun her, she realized. It was an attempt to understand. And perhaps push back—even if unintentionally—against an unexpected and somewhat frightening answer.
“A lot of people don’t understand that I was a female grunt, and they look at me like I’m crazy,” Adams said years later. “They respect us for what we did, but they don’t understand us. They don’t want to hear what you did.”
She excused herself from the conversation and mingled with others, taking care not to give too much detail about her combat work.
Before she left the Bidens’ home at Number One Observatory Circle in Washington, she and three other FET members were whisked off to a separate room that was dark except for a few large camera lights pointed at a small chair. Behind the chair was a black backdrop.
Adams sat down, and a member of the White House staff stood beside a camera in front of the Marine to record her thoughts on the female engagement teams and women taking on expanded combat roles.
“I don’t like to be considered anything different,” Adams said in the video, parts of which were posted on the White House website. “A Marine’s a Marine. But we are able to do something by cultural aspects in Afghanistan that males aren’t able to do.… [The female engagement team] is everything I ever wanted when I joined.”
The next day Adams and her husband headed back to their home in California and to their three-month-old son.
Adams returned to her narrow, gray work trailer feeling uplifted. She sat at her desk and again worked quickly to write a new protocol she hoped would allow women to fight for other women in troubled spots all over the world.