Ashley's War The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

eBook - 2015

The New York Times–bestselling account of an elite team of female soldiers is "compelling. . . . In battle as in life, these women refuse to quit" (Christian Science Monitor).In 2010, the Army created Cultural Support Teams, a secret pilot program to insert women alongside Special Operations soldiers battling in Afghanistan. Their presence had a calming effect on enemy households, but more importantly, the CSTs were able to search adult women for weapons and gather crucial intelligence. They could build relationships—woman to woman—in ways that male soldiers in an Islamic country never could.In Ashley's War, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon uses on-the-ground reporting and a finely tuned understanding of the complexities of war to ...tell the story of CST-2, a unit of women hand-picked from the Army to serve in this highly specialized role. The pioneers of CST-2 proved for the first time that women might be physically and mentally tough enough to become... more