FORT KNOX, KENTUCKY, JANUARY 2016—Johanna Smoke sat at her dining room table and fidgeted for a moment, hesitant to pick apart the war’s faults. She paused for an extended period of time before responding to the question. She’d had plenty of conversations with her father about the parallels between Vietnam’s failures and the war in Afghanistan. Her father had served as a Special Forces commander in Vietnam, and when she was still on the ground in Afghanistan he had been one of the few people she confided in. She called him after especially long days that felt directionless—ones during which insurmountable issues of security, poverty, and training made her wonder whether any of the current efforts would be enough to support the American mission or be worth the continual deaths of American soldiers.
“We never learned from Vietnam,” she recalled her father saying on many occasions. “We are doing the same things.… Occupation with a different spin.”
That was fine for her father to say. But for her to speak openly now about an Army in which she still served to a writer who could make those feelings very public—she feared that may be a step too far.
“I support my commander-in-chief,” she made clear during our conversation. She also acknowledged that her father was right on many levels. US efforts could have been more strategically aligned with the reality on the ground. Political goals should have evolved when the need to maintain troop levels became obvious. “I don’t think we should have left Afghanistan. I don’t think we left Afghanistan for the right reasons. The US presence should have sustained. We were starting to evolve and starting to learn from our mistakes. We had units that had civil affairs capacity to make a difference at the community level to suppress the Taliban and national problems. We left this black hole in the Afghan culture and country where people became reliant on military support. And now they are facing those repercussions. And now ISIS has taken over, and we’re starting from scratch.… I was not ready to leave. My commander was not ready to leave. My unit was not ready to leave.”
What she feels more comfortable talking about are the positive military changes that have evolved since her dad’s war. Deployments for all soldiers are shorter, and those deployments, thanks to the work of FET leaders like her, have included a greater number of women. The FET program pushed the Pentagon to recognize the combat work women were already doing just as well as men. And lawsuits by six military women—two of whom had been FET leaders—pushed Smoke into an infantry unit she hadn’t expected and forced Leon Panetta, defense secretary from 2011 to 2013, and Ash Carter, who took over directly after him, to publicly admit how the military had already been using its female service members.
After Smoke returned to Kentucky in 2014 from Afghanistan, where she was assigned to the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division as part of an Army effort to see how women would work with infantry units on the ground, she watched with the rest of the nation as pressure mounted for Carter to open all roles. The efforts, she thought, were overdone and a few years too late.
“I was sick and tired of all the gender integration discussion and the politics behind it,” Smoke recalled much later. By that time she had already fought in combat in both Iraq and Afghanistan. “Male commanders and leaders have been putting women in the toughest jobs during Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, so why the need for a program to mandate it?”
Smoke was understandably disheartened. Women had been sacrificing and dying as infantry troops in all but name for years. The idea that she was supposed to be happy about getting recognition for something she and thousands of other women had been doing for more than a decade was almost an affront. But mandating it went beyond validating what women had already done; indeed, it helped women begin to break through the long-standing brass (and Kevlar) ceiling.
On December 3, 2015, Carter announced that all combat roles would be open to women by January of the following year: “They will be allowed to drive tanks, fire mortars and lead infantry soldiers into combat,” he said when making the announcement during a news conference. “They’ll be able to serve as Army Rangers and Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Marine Corps infantry, Air Force parajumpers and everything else that was previously open only to men. And even more importantly, our military will be better able to harness the skills and perspectives that talented women have to offer.”
In April of 2016 women would accomplish a flurry of firsts in the Army.
On April 7 a woman enlisted for the first time in an infantry occupational specialty, helping to break the Kevlar ceiling for enlisted (nonofficer) women.
On April 28 the first women graduated from Army Ranger School. One of them took another step toward breaking the brass ceiling: she graduated from the Army’s Maneuver Captains Career Course, making her the first official female infantry officer in the branch’s history and giving her the skills needed to command a frontline unit. But the Army was still having a hard time keeping pace with the accomplishments of its determined women, and as of May 2016 she was stuck in a training brigade waiting for an assignment to an infantry unit—something that wasn’t slated to happen until the summer of 2017. And the first woman to enlist in an infantry specialty didn’t head to basic training until 2017 either, giving the Army time to fill higher-ranking infantry positions with women. About two dozen other female soldiers followed in their footsteps in 2016, graduating from West Point, Officer’s Candidate School, and ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) with commissions as infantry and armor officers.
And in January 2017 three enlisted women became the first to officially join a Marine Corps ground combat unit.
But Carter’s words also ensured that these officers and enlisted soldiers would get better access to services than some women had in the past, especially those suffering from PTSD while dealing with issues men generally don’t—pregnancy, caring for children, and balancing household duties. All units—combat or not—will know that females have seen combat and that their nightmares can be triggered by those stresses and need treatment just like any man’s.
A moment that Rodriguez could only dream about when she was on the ground in Afghanistan training women to fight as part of FET units—and pushing back against a lack of institutional support for female engagement—had come. And it had been during her lifetime.
Female soldiers are doing what “only male soldiers were allowed to do in Iraq and Afghanistan for a long time,” Rodriguez said a year after her return from Afghanistan. She recalled those FET deployments and her previous expectations for women in combat: “Now we have… female soldiers [attached to] infantry platoons and an infantry battalion. We would get excited about that. [We would think] in a couple of years it would be female soldiers in the infantry.”
There would be no Army Ranger opportunities if not for the FET. And no viable lawsuit without female engagement. These women sacrificed. They put their lives on the line for so long without asking for credit. They forced the Pentagon to erase the military’s unequal treatment of women—one that presented a public face of safety for females and supported the myth of a frontline that only men crossed and that women stayed far away from. But the reality had been different for decades: women were getting hit by IEDs, dying, attacking the Taliban while crossing into enemy territory. They were changing the nature of intelligence collection for the better and ensuring wartime progress but without the same opportunity for advancement.
FETs in Iraq and Afghanistan were, as Rodriguez said, placing bricks in a foundation. And they built that sturdy foundation, as Smoke so clearly articulated, without a mandate. The first women to graduate from Army Ranger School stood on it.
FETs did “good and created opportunities,” as Adams often said during my interviews with her. But they did so much more than that. They forced the military, known for being ahead of the civilian world on issues of integration, to rid itself of its last nod to legal discrimination.
Cracks in the Kevlar and brass ceilings were evident.