Free Ashley's War by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

. . .
    Tristan had been an elite runner—an all-state standout in high school—and had her choice of colleges offering her full athletic scholarships. But while touring college campuses she felt wooed by the siren call of West Point, with its rugged beauty and history nearly as old as America itself. She was drawn to both the physical and mental challenges that West Point offered, and went on to become one of the U.S. Military Academy’s top track stars. But she was hardly a typical warrior-in-waiting. Each time a West Point graduate was killed in action the school made an announcement over the public address system, and the entire community observed a moment of silence in the mess hall over breakfast. By 2008 the booming announcements became so frequent that Tristan felt haunted by the pointlessness of it all. What did any of the athletic achievement or the years of study matter when they were all going to go off anddie? How could these people just keep passing the eggs when one of their own would never return home? War had sounded a lot more glamorous before those who were killed were people she knew, fellow students who had sat at that very same breakfast table only a year earlier.
    “It just seems like no one is even affected by it anymore,” Tristan told her track coach one afternoon. “Everyone just goes about their business.” Her coach tried to explain to her that that was the reality—and the risk—of being an officer in wartime. “You have to come to peace with that,” she advised.
    As time went on, Tristan did come to terms with her trepidation, and by the end of her studies she was ready to deploy. The desire only grew as she watched more and more of her classmates heading to Iraq and Afghanistan. What use was she here at home? At West Point she had chosen field artillery as her specialty because at that time, seven years into the Afghanistan war, she had heard the artillery branch was opening a lot of jobs to women and it meant she would get to shoot big weapons and be in the fight. She specialized in the Multiple Launch Rocket System, an armored rocket launcher that could hit critical targets at distances both short and far. When an infantry unit was in trouble the MLRS was one of the weapons they called in for precise—and lethal—backup. But Tristan soon was disappointed to learn that the most exciting jobs—the ones that would put her in combat next to the infantrymen who called in the artillery during critical battles—remained male-only.
    By the time Tristan showed up to her first assignment out of West Point, she was already determined to find a way out of artillery. But her brigade commander had read her file along with all the other new officers and noted her mix of West Point experience and athletic fitness. Shortly after she arrived at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, he sent word that he wanted to formally interview her. “I want you to be a platoon leader,” he told her. It was a job that officially only men could hold, but Tristan, like Anne Jeremy, was clearly worth betting on.“I read your file and I think you’re the best person for the job,” the commander said. He made it clear he didn’t care if it was “coded” male-only. Army policy or not, he offered it to her.
    At first the noncommissioned officers and enlisted men Tristan led, most of them veterans of at least one war deployment, unleashed a pile of grief on her. They had never had a female platoon leader and had no intention of changing their ways for one now. Their behavior spanned from rude and crude to just plain silly, and they went out of their way to make sure Tristan overheard their colorful stories of sexual exploits and conquests. Tristan shrugged it all off and kept her focus on her work. She had heard a lot worse at West Point and had learned how to ignore it. A few weeks into her new role, after they realized she wasn’t the stereotypical, shrinking female who would take offense from their rough talk, the men moved