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Ashley's war, the untold story of a team of women soldiers on the special ops battlefield, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

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historybiography

Ashley's war

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

the untold story of a team of women soldiers on the special ops battlefield

In 2010 the US Army special operations command created cultural support teams, a pilot program to put women on the battlefield alongside Green Berets and Army rangers on sensitive missions in Afghanistan. The idea was that women could access places and people that had remained out of reach, and could build relationships -- woman to woman -- in ways that male soldiers in a conservative, traditional country could not. Though officially banned from combat, female soldiers could be "attached" to different teams, and for the first time, women throughout the Army heard the call to try out for this special ops program. In Ashley's War, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon uses exhaustive firsthand 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 across the Army, and the remarkable hero at its heart: 1st Lt. Ashley White, who would become the first cultural support team member killed in action and the first CST remembered on the Army special operations memorial wall of honour alongside the Army rangers with whom she served

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