If all that has been said by orators and poets since the creation of the world in praise of women were applied to the women of America, it would not do them justice for their conduct during this war.
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN
CAMP DOHA, KUWAIT, 1997, 9 A.M.—A man’s voice—deep, panicked, choppy—cut through the static, and I pressed an old pair of headphones firmly against my ears, straining to catch every word. I translated his Arabic into English as quickly as my pen would allow.
My workstation, a narrow table, sat in front of a large whiteboard that was covered in a jumble of numbers and hurriedly scribbled notes. What looked like random text to most was the vital data that kept our military intelligence mission going—frequencies that allowed us to listen in on the phone conversations of enemy targets and potential terrorist networks.
I was one of five Arabic linguists the Army deployed to Kuwait to gather information. It was years after Desert Storm but only months after Operation Desert Strike—President Bill Clinton’s late 1996 cruise missile and air attack that hit Iraqi radar and communications sites in retaliation for the country’s threats against Kurds to the north. My deployment supported one of many operations that followed Clinton’s decision—operations that gave the US Army the chance to work with and train Kuwaiti forces. Notes from listeners like me were passed on to analysts, and their reports helped infantry units develop missions on the ground. The information could, among other things, give fellow soldiers warnings about the plots and locations of terror suspects. The goal was to help combat fighters head off attacks before they happened.
And until the most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, those frontline combat missions would have been carried out almost exclusively by men.
But in 2010 an International Security Assistance Force directive ensured that infantry units brought a key group of women with them. The bands of combat fighters were known as female engagement teams (FETs), and their work has been among the most important in the modern-day campaigns to push insurgent forces out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Although women had been putting their lives on the line during previous wars, they generally fought as part of the second wave (troops that helped battle residual forces after the most dangerous frontline combat missions were over).
But for FET women, combat was much more gruesome. Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and surprise village attacks meant that the frontlines were everywhere. The days of formal standoffs during which nations faced one another on a designated field of battle and fought until one side surrendered were long gone. Battle ready meant that everyone had to be prepared to fight at any time, any place. By 2010, the year female engagement and training became ubiquitous, nearly 130 women had already died as a result of direct combat. Yet there are men who still deny that women can and do fulfill combat missions. That repudiation is like a punch in the gut. It attempts to erase the work and the smarts and the perseverance that sometimes made female contributions harder fought than those of their male colleagues.
In the ground war to win over the hearts, minds, and trust of communities overrun by terrorists, FET women fought in a way that even the most skilled infantrymen in restrictive Muslim countries couldn’t—by gaining intelligence from the countries’ women. Before the FET, attempts by infantrymen to frisk and interrogate Iraqi and Afghan women breached cultural and religious norms and turned friendly villages into enemies.
At the start of both the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, members of Iraqi terror networks along with the Taliban and other insurgent groups in Afghanistan took advantage of religious restrictions, hiding important documents—bomb plots and enemy names and phone numbers—on their mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters. They used female bodies as objects to harbor terror, slowing down efforts by American troops to pinpoint and destroy enemy targets.
FET women became the American military’s secret—and, in many cases, most effective—weapon.
I spent a year and a half learning Arabic at the military’s Defense Language Institute (DLI) in Monterey, California. Other service members spent six months learning Spanish, nearly a year learning Russian. We did it so we could listen to targets all over the world. But even in the 1990s my classmates and I knew that methods of intelligence collection desperately needed to evolve. Using radio frequencies to intercept enemy communications was a practice that dated back to World War I. As technology advanced, so did the equipment, but the fundamental practice hadn’t changed: information gathering was mainly conducted by linguists at a distance and focused on listening to enemy combatants. I was often based miles away from my targets and the towns and villages in which the targets operated.
When I entered DLI in 1995 the internet was already being used as a means of terrorism recruitment. Guerilla tactics (a common approach among fractured, nonstate actors) meant that attack plans changed quickly. And that technology to share those plans was no longer limited to phones and radio frequencies. It was clear even then that strategies used by terror networks were shifting much more rapidly than long-held means of amassing and disseminating information about our enemies could handle.
But the FETs circumvented traditional means of intelligence collection used by linguists. With minimal language training (they used translators), they were able to gain information by doing what scientists say for women comes much more naturally than for men—having intimate conversations. They gathered information about terrorist activity not by listening to the enemy but by talking to the people who had observed the enemy most—the women who lived among them, were victims of their violence, and had spent years watching insurgents’ day-to-day activities.
FET members had tea with local village mothers and talked to them about their children and their medical needs. They brought them blankets, clothing, and feminine hygiene products, and they talked to women about when and where insurgents were infiltrating their neighborhoods. They asked whether their children or their neighbors’ children were in danger of recruitment. And in a matter of weeks they would have collected more immediate and actionable information than I would have in months as an Arabic linguist. As a listener, my job was a bit like throwing darts in the dark. I could spend hours, even days listening to targets who yielded no actionable information. Sometimes frequencies that appeared to belong to targets actually didn’t. Other times they did.
But in Afghanistan and Iraq the faces of FET women became the faces of trust. And trusting communities were willing to share information—the most important weapon for defeating any insurgency. Village women who had previously looked at soldiers with suspicion started welcoming FET women into their homes. Unlike their husbands, local women were willing to spill all they knew about the insurgents for fear that their sons would be recruited by them. Most Afghan women didn’t work. They spent days and weeks at a stretch inside their homes watching insurgent groups travel in and out of their communities. They had a wealth of information that their husbands lacked.
FETs picked up vital data about patterns of behavior—the roads insurgents used to enter villages, how long they stayed, when they regularly traveled through towns and when they left, and which boys insurgents attempted to recruit and their methods for doing so. FETs could tell, by observing the women, in which towns the American fight against the insurgents was working and where it wasn’t. Those were details that regular listeners couldn’t always provide. And field interrogators who didn’t have access to women in these Middle Eastern nations were having difficulty gathering the same kinds of information from men.
The moment FET members turned an old model of intelligence collection on its head marked a crucial turning point for the fight against terrorist insurgencies. The women helped build loyalty among villagers who, in some cases, picked up arms to assist the military in driving out terrorist groups. Some village elders went out of their way to help FET members once they saw the positive impact American women were having on local women. Experts in the intelligence community lauded the FETs as one of the primary examples for reshaping methods of information gathering.
FETs were among the last females to fight sexism under an American military system that refused to recognize women as combat soldiers. It was the FETs’ groundbreaking work that ultimately forced the Pentagon to end its big lie: one that denied women had been crossing into enemy territory and fighting US ground wars for decades.
But FET successes came with struggles.
FET programs were clearly making a difference, yet FET women struggled for equal rights and recognition among infantrymen. The military’s hypocritical approach to female recruits—its big lie—has haunted the institution for more than a century. Officers on the ground have always wanted to use the vital skills females provided, but the institution has rarely given women the protection, credit, and compensation they deserve. Even after the government opened full enlistment to females in the regular Army in 1948, it took another twenty years for women to get equal promotion and retirement benefits. By that time women had served as Army nurses and worked overseas as bilingual telephone operators as part of the Army Signal Corps. They went to Vietnam as early as 1956 but weren’t required to learn to shoot weapons for another two decades.
Military hypocrisy has gotten worse as the roles of women have expanded beyond operating rooms and onto battlefields. By the time FETs landed in Iraq and Afghanistan, institutional hypocrisy had reached its climax. FET women endured public comments that denied women were in combat and exclaimed they didn’t deserve to be. All the while women were committing acts of heroism that saved fellow soldiers from the rubble of IED blasts and defended men in infantry units during days-long firefights. And after the battles were over, some FETs were still denied the supplies needed to fulfill female engagement missions.
CAMP DOHA, KUWAIT, 1997, 6 A.M.—Flooding had begun 0n Camp Doha.
I made my way down the front steps of the warehouse where my team slept and headed toward the shower trailers located about a hundred feet away. The faint desert sun broke the coolness of the morning, and I felt a rush of warmth hit my skin as floodwaters bounced against my calves.
I looked to the right where, miles away, soldiers lived and worked in the kabal—a place that, as an Army linguist, I had only heard about and witnessed secondhand. I learned, since my arrival on the base, that it was rough: an area where men and women regularly got caught in sandstorms and fought harsh fifty-seven-mile-per-hour winds. The soldiers conducted training missions with Kuwaiti forces just fifty miles from Iraq’s border.
I had made the same morning trek from warehouse to trailer every day for weeks. But three days after the floods, the trek ended differently.
As usual, when I opened the narrow trailer door, the bright fluorescent ceiling lights made the floor look mottled. The rough surface made me long even more for the barracks in Fort Gordon, Georgia, where I had been stationed for only a few months when I got called up for the desert mission. To my left were three toilet stalls, each sitting across from a sink and mirror. I waved hello, as always, to the quiet woman from India who entered the latrines daily to clean them. To my right I also expected to see the usual: three empty wooden benches, flanked on either side by narrow shower stalls. At that early hour I was usually the only soldier in the trailer. But that morning, when I looked to my right, there was a woman sitting on the first bench.
She was hunched over, resting her arms on her thighs. Beige desert boots, covered in sand, sat only inches from her feet. Her frame was small and tired, and thick sand covered her uniform, which was strewn across the floor. Sand arched a trail from the door to her bench and spread around her area, popping against the floor’s surface. She had come in from the kabal. Wrapped in a towel, hair wet, she looked up and flashed a smile. I responded with a quick hello, jumped in the shower, and fifteen minutes later, when I emerged, she was still there, primping, pruning. “Sorry, I’m taking so long,” she said as she saw me trying to eke out an inch of space on a nearby bench. She moved some of her stuff out of the way, then went back to clipping her toenails. “Horrible sandstorm. Sundays are my days for doing everything from head to toe.”
I stared blankly at her for a few seconds. “It can’t be storming out there,” I said. “It’s been flooding for the past few days here. There are sandstorms out there now?”
“I don’t know what it’s been doing here,” she tilted her head toward her dust-covered boots, “but it’s storming out there.”
I was reminded of that experience thirteen years later while working on an interactive reporting project I had started in 2009 for USA TODAY on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We were eight years into our fight against terrorism, and I had been out of the Army for ten. I left the military holding on to one of my childhood goals of investigating political corruption, exposing wrongdoers, and bringing the stories of hard-working Americans to life as a journalist. By the time I got to USA TODAY I had covered, for the Washington Post, the problems faced by veterans returning from war and an alternative treatment used at Walter Reed medical center to help them. In Georgia I had written about corruption and incompetence within the Augusta/Richmond County government and its police department. I had received an award for investigating the challenges of the first female firefighters allowed to join the county’s fire department. But despite everything I had read and written about the military, as an Army veteran I was still unsatisfied with the coverage of the Iraq and Afghan wars. In my mind it was spotty (by 2009 stories about the wars had significantly slowed down), and the little that was published focused mainly on the extremes (desertions, rogue soldiers who took out communities, others who released classified documents)—and extremes never tell the most important parts of any story. There were plenty of silent heroes who, just as I and many other soldiers had done in Kuwait, woke up early every morning to navigate harsh floods and painful sandstorms without complaint. There were hundreds of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who struggled to make the right decisions in the middle of firefights, surrounded by crumbling homes full of innocent women, screaming babies, and the elderly. Sometimes they made the right calls; sometimes battle fatigue and lack of sleep forced them to make the wrong ones. Sometimes luck or prayer or the thin, subjective line between morality and political victory were the only things that put soldiers on the right side of history. There were plenty of heroic efforts that the public wasn’t hearing about.
The biggest problem: stories about the wars weren’t being told by the soldiers who were fighting them. Instead, those stories were being written by journalists who, in some cases, were stationed far from the troops and battles being waged. The Washington Post’s Iraq correspondents were handing in stories from a house near the Hamra Hotel in Baghdad. Their primary connections to the battlefield came in the form of faxed updates, press releases, local television news, and tips from sources. They also got help from Iraqi stringers to get access to stories. And although they were good, few if any of those journalists had extensive military or combat experience.
Journalists embedded within military units (and print-publication budget cuts combined with worries about danger allowed this to happen less and less) had a slight advantage. They saw battles and military life up close and could provide incredible amounts of detail. But far too often limited stints with combat units didn’t give them the time or intimacy required to really understand what it was like to be a soldier. The ravages of combat and deployment could best be told by those who were living it. Troops were using their cell phones to photograph newly forged relationships with local Afghan and Iraqi communities, make short films while on patrol, and catch the looks of fear and exhaustion on the faces of fellow Marines after dangerous encounters. I wanted to show the wars from the perspective of the troops fighting them.
I reached out to every military Times newspaper Gannett (USA TODAY’s parent company) then owned—the Army Times, the Navy Times, the Air Force Times, and the Marine Corps Times—in order to place the following promo in print and online “From the home front to the frontlines: As action in Iraq begins to unwind, send us your stories of war from Iraq and Afghanistan through photos and words.” I also modified an already existing online tool so that troops could easily upload their photos for publication and I could quickly display them on the web.
Within a week we had received dozens of photos: black-and-white pictures of final good-byes between men leaving for Iraq and their families—little girls hugging their father’s necks as wives and mothers looked on with tears in their eyes, color shots of tankers headed down desolate desert roads, a photo of an American Marine surrounded by smiling Afghan children. But among all the photos of hope and disaster, among the tragic faces and smiling ones, I encountered nothing that documented the experiences of females fighting in either war. I knew women were there and in as much danger as their male counterparts.
A few weeks later I started my work day as usual: I arrived at the office around 11 A.M. and attended a meeting, during which I and about ten other Editorial Board members debated issues such as abortion, Supreme Court decisions, and the performance of the Obama administration to hash out what USA TODAY’s opinions would be in our next series of editorials. I settled in at my desk by 1 P.M., ready to brainstorm ways to bring USA TODAY’s opinion content to life online. But first I navigated to the project URL to flip through the newest photo submissions.
Five had come in that day. The first, a sunset in Iraq, was striking. Deep orange and red hues surrounded a radio tower that stood in an isolated part of the desert. The second was of a Marine standing next to an Afghan man who was wearing a tan turban and a light blue shirt; both men smiled into the camera. I flipped through the senders’ information to find their e-mail addresses. I sent them both messages requesting answers to the following: Did you send this photo exclusively to USA TODAY? Taken by you? Can you verify your first and last name? Address? Any more details we can use in the caption?
It often took several days to hear back from service members in the field, but they all invariably, enthusiastically answered. As soon as they did, I posted the best of their submissions into the project’s photo gallery on USA TODAY’s opinion site.
Great photos. All very telling.
Until the third photo.
Liz Carlin, a Marine combat photographer, stood in front of a desert-colored tanker. She had an M4 rifle in her right hand and a huge smile planted on her face. A thick layer of desert dust covered her uniform. I rushed to catalog her photos (there were three) and experiences with those I had collected from men. I was about to click away from that first photo to look up the sender’s contact information when the expression on Carlin’s face caught my attention: there was something slightly familiar about her smile. Had I, at some point, served with a Liz Carlin? No. She looked too young to have been in the military for more than two or three years. Was she the friend of a friend? Not likely. I clicked on the sender’s information. It was submitted by an editor from a Delaware newspaper who had published a feature story on Carlin. There were two other photos attached. One was of Carlin standing in the living room of her family home with her sisters. They were wearing short-sleeved shirts and silly hats. The story, published in May 2010, explained that Carlin was celebrating Christmas with her family because she had been in Iraq and then Afghanistan during the holidays. I flipped back to the main photo and looked at Carlin’s desert uniform. Sand dusted her weapon. My mind flashed back to that morning in Kuwait. Desert dust popping off a bathroom floor. And a woman trying desperately to rid her body of any memory of the harsh sandstorm she had encountered. Carlin had that same smile. The same tell-tale signs of a sandstorm covered her body.
I tracked down Carlin’s number (she had left the war zone and was by then stationed in North Carolina) and called her a week later to get more information for the caption to go with her photo. When I asked her about her experiences, one of the first things she described were Iraq’s sandstorms. I was reminded of the kabal on the outskirts of Kuwait’s Camp Doha. I had tried, thirteen years earlier, to imagine what it would have been like to withstand those fifty-seven-mile-per-hour winds and the thick clouds of dust they kicked up. Now, listening to a fellow service member recount her life during a different war in the same region of the world, I was finally getting my answers. Carlin called the layers of sand that had swirled around her “moon dust.” She often encountered it as she sought shelter in blown-out buildings away from her forward operating base (FOB) during combat missions.
By the end of the frontlines/home front photo project, I had collected more than one hundred photos and had given some of those who served a platform through which to tell their stories of war. But the photos felt like just a beginning. I wanted to know more about the experiences of the Marines, airmen, and soldiers who sent them. And I was sure our readers did as well. The few words contained in the captions that accompanied their photos weren’t enough. My desire to learn more was the first incarnation of this book. My goal was to interview all the folks who had sent their photos of war and get the deeper stories. I wanted to find out what caused them to join the military, how they felt about serving their country in a time of war, what led up to the snapshots they sent to us, and what happened after.
I knew after that first conversation with Carlin that I wanted to hear more from her. I called her again and reached out to several of the men who sent photos so I could begin collecting their narratives. But the more I talked to Carlin about the work of American women in Iraq and Afghanistan, the more I realized there was a much bigger story of females in combat that I, a woman who had served after an earlier war, wasn’t familiar with. She mentioned that American women reached out to women in Afghanistan as part of a new mission using female engagement teams. American women also collected information. I asked her for more details. She seemed shocked.
“Wait, you’ve never heard of the FET?” she questioned.
“No. I really haven’t.”
She recounted stories of missions that prioritized humanitarian aid for abused and impoverished women that I’d never encountered in any narrative I’d heard or read about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They participated in combat missions.
I scrambled to make note of every detail.
Women working in intelligence was nothing new.
But the addition of tactics that relied on combat skills to collect intelligence far surpassed anything I had done in Kuwait.
LAUREL, MARYLAND, 2011—The book began in earnest on a late morning in October. I sat down at the dining room table in my small Maryland condo and opened my laptop. It was the first official call I would make to Carlin for the new version of the book and the first time I would hear the more intense details about the FET. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed her number. As she spoke from her home in North Carolina, I heard a freedom in her voice that hadn’t been present before. Her tone was soft, calm. She had traded in her desert togs and combat camera for a paintbrush and canvas. Months after she left Afghanistan she started working on a painting, the cushier side of a combat photographer’s role that most people never hear about.
A violent storm began rolling into Laurel, Maryland. As I asked my first question, a strong gust of wind pushed its way through the open windows of my home and forced my bedroom door to slam shut. I jumped slightly out of my chair, startled by the sound that echoed through the condo. I thought briefly about the sandstorms she and I had previously discussed and told myself that a storm at this exact moment must have been a good sign.
My anxiety dissipated.
“So when you think back to your time in Iraq and Afghanistan,” I asked, throwing out a softball question just to break the ice, “what’s the thing that sticks out in your mind the most?”
“The FET,” Carlin said. “Out there it was women helping women.”
A short statement that speaks to tremendous power. Both Afghan and American women were fighting multiple wars—ones that were entangled in rights to work, to be recognized as combat fighters, to be protected from abuse, to strengthen families, to protect young boys from becoming terrorists. Accomplishing those things hinged on catching and defeating insurgents—and Afghan and American women were helping each other do that in ways no one had expected.
As I listened to Carlin talk about the significant work the FET had done, I realized this book had the potential to convey to the public what I already knew: women are vital when it comes to intelligence collection in the Middle East. My work in Kuwait proved it thirteen years earlier, and the multiple roles women played in fighting insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan were proving it again.
Her words inspired me to hunt for the stories of other women who have served on FETs throughout Afghanistan.
In this book I tell the story of Jamila Abbas, one of many Afghan women who benefitted from the work of the FET. Jamila spent most of her young married years running—first with her husband to escape the Mujahedeen and the Taliban and then away from her husband’s killers. I also tell the story of FET leaders like Army Captain Johanna Smoke, who helped women register to vote in Afghanistan; Army Major Maria Rodriguez, who headed American military police operations and fought to find and train Afghan Female Police (AFP) officers to take over when American forces moved out; and Sergeant Sheena Adams, a Marine helicopter mechanic from California who faced a Kevlar ceiling that hindered her ability to get promoted after she returned from battle.
The FET program was powerful. Their gender alone was, in many cases, the biggest asset the US military had. For them, dedication to and belief in the mission went well beyond the teams’ practical beginnings.
These are the stories of everyday women who exhibited extraordinary amounts of courage in the face of danger. Even as they fought, military policies denied their combat existence.
They were on the frontlines of war. Their stories are important.