[Richard]

From today's Stars and Stripes - WaPo weighs in on the CSTs...

Richard

In a new elite Army unit, women serve alongside Special Forces, but first they must make the cut
WaPo, 27 Oct 2011
Part 1 of 2

The medics helped Sgt. Janiece Marquez into a chair and started to treat her sprained ankle. Marquez, 25, had tripped over a rock on one of the dark paths in the camp. She had just run two miles during the physical fitness test and marched at least six miles carrying a 35-pound rucksack that evening. Now she could barely walk.

One of the medics looked at her ankle.

“Are you going to be able to ruck tomorrow?”

“Absolutely,” Marquez said.

“What if I tell you the next day you’re going to go about 25 miles? Are you ready for that? Do you think you can physically do it?”

What Marquez knew for certain was that she wasn’t going to quit. And that refusal to give up was what the evaluators, all special operations soldiers, were looking for in the 55 selectees here at Camp Mackall, a former World War II training base near Fort Bragg tucked into the pine forests of central North Carolina. They were being considered for elite, all-female teams trained to build relationships with Afghan women.

The evaluators wanted the Army’s best female soldiers. The toughest — mentally and physically — and the sharpest intellectually. The next 100 hours would not only test the soldiers’ ability to run and march, but also how well they thought on their feet and adapted to the unknown.

With a throbbing ankle and many more back-breaking marches with heavy rucksacks and lung-burning runs ahead of her, Marquez got up and limped across camp.

* * *

While Department of Defense and military department policies still restrict women from serving in combat units, the soldiers selected from this group will serve alongside the Army’s most elite units on the battlefield. The Army has never selected women to do a mission because of their sex, until now.

It is recruiting female soldiers to work closely with Special Forces teams and Ranger units during raids. Because women and children are often held in a separate room while soldiers search the compound, these teams go into villages in Afghanistan to build rapport with women, as it is culturally inappropriate for male soldiers to talk with them.

“We’ve been missing out on half of the population in Afghanistan because of cultural taboos,” said candidate Meghan Curran, a West Point graduate and first lieutenant in the artillery.

Female Marines began meeting with women in southern Afghanistan two years ago. Then in spring 2010, retired Navy Adm. Eric Olson, the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, issued an order to create these Cultural Support Teams.

The teams are trained to have a deeper understanding of Afghan culture and to connect with women in the villages to gather information on enemy activities. The teams aim to create a dialogue between U.S. forces and Afghan women, which can help in medical clinics or building governance.

The teams have been deployed to Afghanistan for more than a year. While Army officials have praised the program, it is unclear how they are measuring its success except for anecdotal stories and requests for more CSTs by commanders in Afghanistan.

So far, 156 out of 233 candidates have been selected.

Until Maj. Patrick McCarthy became the architect of CST selection, no one in the Army had created an assessment course for women. McCarthy was a unit commander during the so-called surge in Iraq in 2007 and 2008.

The selection process borrows from his experience in Iraq and from some of the same problem-solving and physical tests used to weed out Special Forces candidates. Selection tests a soldier’s ability to maintain composure, apply logic, communicate clearly and solve problems in demanding environments. It’s as much a mental test as it is a physical one.

“The unique perspective of females in military operations, particularly unconventional situations, is an untapped and underappreciated capability within the Army,” McCarthy said. “These teams are important — not only for the Army, but for the success of military operations as a whole.”

That is why McCarthy makes getting on a team difficult. In fact, he calls selection “100 hours of Hell.”

* * *

Sunday morning, the first day of assessments, the candidates got off the bus and quickly changed into shorts and running shoes. The 55 women, a mix of officers and enlisted soldiers and one Air Force major, grunted their way through two minutes of push-ups, sit-ups and a two-mile run. Each rep was measured with by-the-book standards. Six candidates got cut right away.

Next, candidates were separated into five teams. They wore digital camouflage uniforms with tape on their arms and legs showing their roster number, so it was impossible to tell who was an officer and who was enlisted. That afternoon, the team members got a first assignment but also spent time getting to know one another and forming a bond that they hoped would help them through.

“It has always shocked me how close a group of soldiers can become in such a short amount of time,” said 2nd Lt. Alex Horton, a Team 2 member. Horton, 23, from Hermosa Beach, Calif., grew up with a hippie mom and a Navy father. She joined the Army after completing her degree in criminal justice at Western Michigan University. She sees the Army as a short-term job.

“After I get out, I’ll join the Peace Corps,” she said. “I want to have both aspects and have that to look back on. A soldier and a hippie.”

She selected the intelligence branch in the hope it would give her a future with the FBI or CIA. With only a few months in the Army, she was already restless. That’s why she was at Camp Mackall.

“I realized that sitting at a computer is not my thing,” she said. “I really didn’t feel like a soldier being an intel officer.”

Team 2 was made up of six officers, including Horton, and four sergeants. Marquez, from Bosque Farms, N.M., wanted to be in the infantry when she walked into the recruiter’s office in 2005. The recruiter pointed out that women can’t join the infantry, so she became a linguist and interrogator.

Marquez was deployed to Khost, Afghanistan, in 2008 for 15 months. That tour should have been her chance to use her interrogation skills, but she felt stifled and bored working with the 101st Airborne Division. “I like very intelligent, driven people,” she said. “And I can’t say that about the people I was working with out there, and because of it, my deployment was kind of tough.”

The times she did get to use her skills or build rapport with the Afghans, though, made her believe she had the skills to carry off the CST mission.

* * *

None of the candidates was allowed to wear a watch. Instead, they relied upon a large, white dry-erase board near their tents to tell them where to be and what to do. The directions were sparse — “Pack a rucksack with 35 pounds” — and designed to make the candidates prepare for the unknown.

Racing to the board a few hours after the physical fitness test, Meghan Curran saw that the next event was a road march: a brisk jog. There were no orders on distance. Just directions to bring a pack and enough water to stay hydrated.

She and her teammates marched silently, crossing over the sandy hills. Many leaned forward under the weight of their packs. Few women could keep up with Curran. The 24-year-old from Chelmsford, Mass., excels at runs and ruck marches.

“Physical parts are easy. I know that is one of my strengths,” Curran said. But she admits to not being the smartest student, especially compared with her classmates at West Point, from which she graduated in 2009. Curran used to listen to her father talk about his stint in the Marines, and she wanted to serve, too.

All of Team 2 completed the march. None had as much trouble as 42-year-old Air Force Maj. Sarah Cleveland, on Team 3, who marched until her legs stopped working. Cramping up so badly she couldn’t walk, she fell onto the dirt road.

“I can’t quit!” she screamed between moans of agony. Her legs kicked out as if she was fighting off an attacker.

“Don’t worry about that right now,” said McCarthy, in a rare crack in his gruff demeanor.

“My legs are really bad,” Cleveland said.

Medics swarmed around her and applied cold compresses on her legs and arms. One medic slid a needle into her left arm and started an IV fluid bag. Clearing the seats out of a Ford cargo van, they hustled Cleveland into the back and drove her to a nearby clinic. The next morning, she joined her team.

Two other candidates fell out during the march, making eight washouts before the end of the first day.

* * *

On Day 2, Team 2 walked gingerly across the gravel on the parade field trying to keep pressure off the blisters on their feet.

“I am like an old car that can’t go any faster,” 1st Lt. Amy Steffanetta said. “I’m stuck in second gear.”

Steffanetta, 24, was the only other candidate who went to West Point. When she was in middle school, her U.S. history teacher kept talking about all the Civil War generals who went to the military academy. Steffanetta concluded that people who do big things in the world went there. She graduated in 2009 as a military police officer.

“If you really make a difference and are the most trained and qualified, you have to make the sacrifice and go the hard route,” she said.

The day’s obstacle course was a mix of physical tests, such as climbing over a wall, and problem-solving exercises, such as disarming a make-believe bomb blindfolded. Between each obstacle, the team hiked a few miles with their heavy packs and mock rifles.

(cont'd)