I am here as a soldier who has temporarily left the field of battle in order to explain… what civil war is like when civil war is waged by women.
—EMMELINE PANKHURST, suffragist, Great Britian
FORT BENNING, GEORGIA, AUGUST 20, 2015—Everyone wanted to capture the stories of the two women sitting behind microphones at a long table at the front of the room.
The sound of camera shutters filled the small space.
First Lieutenant Shaye Haver, an Apache helicopter pilot, leaned forward and glanced to her left, giving the other female at the table, Captain Kristen Griest, a military police officer, a brief two-second opening to tackle the reporter’s question first. She turned back to her microphone and allowed her voice to flow:
“To the other females who plan on coming, I hope that they come with a strong mind. That’s what it takes to get through here.”
The men who sat on each side of Griest made her small frame look almost childlike by comparison. The dark stubble on her shaved head matched theirs in length and texture. She leaned in only slightly to give her views and sat very still as she spoke. Her eyes were wide, her voice, at first, slightly hesitant:
“I just came here to be a better leader and to improve myself and I did that. And for other women who have that same goal in mind, just keep that goal in mind. Just don’t lose sight of it. And just keep reminding yourself why you’re there.”
Their tired expressions were the first tangible signs of progress the public had seen of the military’s multiyear promise to open all combat roles to women. To see if women could meet the physical and mental standards imposed on those seeking combat jobs, the Army decided to conduct a sixty-one-day experiment. It placed nineteen women in Army Ranger School to see if they could make it. No one expected that any of the women would. Haver and Griest were the only two left standing.
FEW SOLDIERS, MALE OR FEMALE, even meet the standards to get into Army Ranger School.
Griest and Haver watched several women drop out during prequalification training—a course of physical tests (push-ups, sit-ups, and a five-mile run) meant to weed out those who are unsuited before the actual two-month Ranger course starts.
After that, peer evaluations—assessments given after each phase of training by fellow squad members—have the potential to make or break a cadet’s future in the course. The weakest link in the group—the one considered the slowest, the least valuable to team cohesion, who weighed everyone down or made little to no contributions to the successful completion of a training mission—is generally given a low peer score. A failing score in phase one can get a soldier kicked out.
And performance on the Darby Queen—a two-mile obstacle course—could be the most revealing part of the first phase of training.
The cadets had to trudge through mud, crawl under barbed wire, and run through shoulder-high, mucky waters. And between each of the twenty-six obstacles cadets completed push-ups, leg lifts, and mountain climbers while drill sergeants sprayed water in their faces and counted an endless number of repetitions that soldiers had to complete with rhythmic precision. The sergeants’ goal was to break each soldier down and then build them back up into fearless leaders who could confidently rush a squad into live combat.
Griest’s face was splattered with mud. The cadet jogged in place, first row, right, in the all-male squad. She and the handful of other cadets behind her looked straight ahead, focused on the tall wooden obstacle that awaited them. Its rungs were menacing. The ropes that hung from the sides were an intimidating reminder of how difficult it would be to get to the top of the multistory structure.
“You can’t ride in my little red wagon!”
The group yelled cadence as they waited.
Griest was among the first to tackle it—the tallest and most difficult of the twenty-six obstacles on the course. She jumped on the thirty-foot-high rope that led to a small number of rungs at the top, determined. She knew she had to complete at least twenty-three of the twenty-six obstacles in order for that day to count. She would lose points for each obstacle she missed. Failure would have meant starting all over.
“Hurry up!” the drill sergeant directed his screams straight at Griest as she reached the first knot in the rope. “Hurry up, Ranger. Sometime today!”
She flung her left leg over the first rung and used it to hoist her body over the small ladder and onto the platform. Another soldier climbed over behind her, and they both ran across the wooden floorboards to a net on the other side.
They scurried across it, only to be greeted by another drill sergeant.
“Get off my obstacle!” His voice was louder and more booming than the first’s. She avoided looking directly at him and just kept moving. “Let’s go!”
A member of her squad jumped onto the rope at the end of the obstacle and lowered himself to the ground, picking up the pace as the sergeant’s words grew louder. Griest quickly lowered herself behind him and jumped the last couple of feet.
She hit another obstacle flat on her stomach.
Griest pushed herself across a dry trail covered with woodchips—face down, head first, with her hands behind her back, using only her feet to move her body forward. This time it was the US Army Ranger Creed that she and the man she was paired with recited as loudly as possible.
“I accept the fact that as a Ranger my country expects me to move further, faster and fight harder than any other soldier,” he said. She repeated the words, gasping for breath. “Never shall I fail my comrades. I will always keep myself mentally alert!”
Her forehead was only inches from the ground. Her mouth hung open. She was panting between syllables. She grimaced each time her boots slipped, failing to push her body as far forward as she wanted to go.
Griest stood beside her partner, holding a small black knife in her right hand. She tilted left and leaned into his gut. In a flash the male cadet maneuvered himself onto her shoulders. She scooped him up, quickly righting her upper body and straightening her legs. “Run!” With the drill sergeant’s words ringing in her ears, she moved. Wood chips shifted under the weight of her body, which was carrying the full weight of a man more than a foot taller than her.
On the other side of the course Haver took on a different challenge.
Her hands were in the air, beside her shoulders as she completed several squat repetitions.
Each time the drill sergeant yelled, “One, two, three,” Haver yelled “Ranger!”
Her voice stood out among the cacophony of the other men and women in her group.
A pair of cadets in front of her, one male and one female, get tapped out. A drill sergeant yells at them because the male cadet allowed his hands to fall below his shoulders. The two are forced to move to the end of the line. Haver and her partner move up one spot.
In a ditch Haver laid on her back at the center of a line of men doing the same. On the other side of that ditch another squad laid in the dirt. The two groups of cadets are so close that their boots are almost touching each other.
Haver holds her legs straight in the air and raises her shoulders off the ground; the only thing stopping her from sliding further into the ditch are her stomach muscles. Her neck is shaking. Her brows are furrowed. She looks to her right and her left and sees the men struggling as much as she is. That knowledge motivates her and gives her the mental strength to keep going. The drill sergeant starts counting, and she starts kicking her legs—slowly at first, then just enough to keep pace. The man to her right stops. She keeps kicking.
As dusk falls and night slowly takes over the Georgia horizon, eight women realize they’ve made it through the Darby Queen, day eight of training. They fall in line, spent, and head back to the base.
There were plenty of men who had their doubts about Griest’s and Haver’s ability to make it through the training and, more importantly, to have the backs of their male counterparts as they did it.
But the women proved repeatedly that they were more capable than some of their male counterparts. Lieutenant Michael Janowski recalled one such moment. During a twelve-mile ruck march it was Haver, not the other men in his squad, who saved him.
At mile six he started to flag. His pace slowed. He announced that the team’s automatic weapon was too heavy for him to carry any further. He was about to give up. He had pushed himself to exhaustion. Haver was also exhausted. But when Janowski called for help, she reached out and grabbed the weapon. Haver carried it, along with the thirty-five pounds on her back, for the rest of the march. She, like the rest of the men, had no water to drink for the entire maneuver.
But it was the swamps of Florida—the last phase of Ranger school—that almost brought Griest to her breaking point.
The cadet slowly lowered herself into the cold, snake-infested waters. The 105-pound ruck on her back started to pull her down. The thick, black swamp, which was chest high at its deepest point for the men who had crossed before her, reached the tip of her chin. She grabbed the rope that had been stretched across the river, tied to trees on either side, and used the slippery guide to pull herself through the same water that had killed four cadets in 1995—all of whom suffered from hypothermia.
It took Griest and her squad two hours to complete the half-mile march between the swamp’s maze of trees and shoulder-high weeds.
This is the phase when more than 30 percent of the cadets who remain either quit or fail. Those who are lucky get to start the last phase again and hope they pass the second time around—their last chance.
As she began to march away from the shore Griest reminded herself why she was there: to be a better leader, to be a stronger soldier. She had dreamed of attending Ranger School since the day she learned it existed during her time at West Point. She had graduated in 2011 and waited four years for the barrier against females to fall. There was nothing so tough, she reminded herself, that could make her quit now. Under the growing weight of her ruck she marched on. Her gait was a bit faster, her stride a bit wider, more confident.
The school is among the Army’s most grueling. It prepares soldiers to lead troops into battle and includes mock raids of homes, mountain drills, combat leadership training—all tasks that Smoke, Rodriguez, and Adams had been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan long before the school opened its doors to women. People who were shocked to see women meet Army Ranger School standards either didn’t know or didn’t believe what women returning from war had been recounting. The real question shouldn’t be whether women can make it through Army Ranger School but whether the school can effectively prepare soldiers for what’s really happening to women on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan—which, for women like Adams, who suffered a traumatic brain injury after her vehicle was blown up by an IED, can be much more gruesome.
No amount of training can prepare someone to watch other Marines (or soldiers, or airmen) get blown up—which Adams did.
In the face of doubt from some of their peers, social media taunts stating that standards must have been lowered, and government scrutiny, Haver and Griest met Army Ranger standards. And along the way they earned respect from the men in their squad, getting higher peer evaluation scores than many of their fellow graduates, according to data released by the Army Times three months after the women graduated. Two of the nineteen women who started in the school graduated. Only ninety-four of the more than three hundred men made it through.
That training milestone solidified what real-life experiences already told us—that women can fight, lead, and excel under the stresses of combat. And in places like the Middle East—where cultural restrictions have drastically changed war tactics—real life tells us something that training can’t: that women participating in combat are essential to war strategy.
In 2015 requests came for female Marines on the ground during deployments in Afghanistan. When there were no FETs to send, Marine units at Camp Pendleton returned to the very ideas Adams had touted three years before: shorter training times and assignments that sent women not just to Afghanistan, but to other countries that were in need of the special skills FETs had to offer—training women in gender-restrictive countries and engaging with female populations to gain useful information. That year they started sending FETs back to the Middle East.
FORT BENNING, GEORGIA, AUGUST 21, 2015—“Company! Attention!”
The graduates moved in unison, signaling the ceremony’s official start. A collective stomp echoed and trailed off into the woods behind them.
“Rangers!” The ninety-four men and two women yelled an affirmation of the title they’d worked for sixty-one days to achieve.
In the bleachers, in front of the grassy area where the soldiers stood, a small group of friends and family members had gathered—all bonded by the fact that in some way their sons, daughters, and fellow soldiers were a part of history.
“You have people who will question the standards of Ranger School,” said graduation speaker and 1985 Army Ranger School graduate Major General Scott Miller.
“Tell the truth about what you see and what you do. There’s an Army depending on us for correct information. Ladies and gentlemen… standards remain the same. A five-mile run is still five miles. The times don’t adjust. A twelve-mile road march is still twelve miles.… The swamps remain intact. There was no pressure from anyone above me to change standards.… Many of those who began with you did not finish.… You’re leaving Victory Pond here today with a small piece of cloth on your shoulders. But more importantly you carry the title of Ranger from here on out.… Congratulations. Very well done. When I shake your hand, I know there’s something very special behind that handshake. Rangers lead the way.”
Guests milled around the parade grounds, taking selfies, hugging graduates, reconnecting with fellow soldiers they hadn’t seen since their own graduations.
The two female graduates beamed, posed for photos, and shook Miller’s hand as he walked by to congratulate them. Their achievements made them instant celebrities among the crowd—soliciting compliments and questions from the friends and family members of other guests.
In the middle of the chaos Haver’s father pushed a large, silver safety pin through the gold-and-black Ranger tab and onto the sleeve of the woman’s camouflaged uniform. Griest’s mother did the same for her daughter. They hugged, and as the melee died down, the relatives returned to their seats so that the final moments of the ceremony could begin.
Haver and Griest lifted their voices with the rest of the Ranger Class of 8-15 to recite the Ranger Creed. The last part especially reflected the leadership demonstrated by the two women who, according to the men who served with them, were ready to pick up the slack when others in their squads fell behind.
“I will never leave a fallen comrade.… Readily will I display the intestinal fortitude required to fight on the Ranger objective and complete the mission, though I be the lone survivor.”
Some of the graduates would become leaders in the 75th Ranger Regiment—an elite infantry unit that participates in joint special operations and raids. It was the ultimate ranger assignment they had all been training for.
Haver and Griest would return to their units—each with an extra badge, but no extra combat duties.
The 75th Ranger Regiment still refused to open its doors to women.
In September the Pentagon officially lifted the Army Ranger School’s gender ban.
In October a third female—Major Lisa Jaster, an engineer—graduated.
As part of the ceremony Jaster’s husband, an officer in the Marine Corps Reserves, pushed the traditional large silver safety pin through his wife’s uniform. With a proud smile, as Jaster stood with her arms loosely wrapped around their two children, he pinned the black-and-gold Ranger tab to the shoulder of her right sleeve.
Haver and Griest, who returned to Fort Benning for the ceremony, watched with broad smiles. As soon as Jaster’s husband stepped back, the two women raced toward her. The three friends, who all attended West Point, embraced for several seconds—putting an endcap on a grinding experience of scrutiny and doubt and support and pride.
A history-making club that only a few could understand.