#Army ranger snake eaters trial

I need you to find out where the bad guys are, as quick as you can.вЂќ But we are not at war to pass out blankets and hugs. You have to de-escalate whatever situation you are drawn into, and engage with the women and children. As the lead instructor of the eventual CST training course would put it: вЂњYou are CSTs and you have a very particular job to do on the battlefield. They had to be fit enough to endure the physical punishment of fast-roping and ruck marches, but once on-scene, their primary job was to talk, not shoot their weapons. Their solution was to create a unit of female soldiers that could embed with the Rangers and SEALs doing the raids. In an effort to respect local culture and tradition surrounding women, male American soldiers were being hoodwinked. The wives, mothers and sisters of the Taliban knew where the guns were hidden and who was fighting with which tribe, but no one was asking them. In the late 2000s, as the war in Afghanistan dragged on, Admiral Eric Olson, General Stanley McChrystal, and Admiral William McRaven, all three special operations officers, had the same insight at about the same time: when their teams raided insurgent compounds, they were only able to collect intelligence from half of the population. What do women do better than men? Or, to put it another way, in the context of male-dominated Afghan society, what are female American soldiers uniquely qualified to do? But Lemmon moves the story forward by asking a more relevant question.

#Army ranger snake eaters trial

When Defense Secretary Leon PanettaвЂ™s announced in 2013 that women would be allowed in direct combat roles, it was the official acknowledgement of decades of precedent.ДЄs the Army currently conducts a trial run of putting women through Ranger School, and as the Marine Corps tests integrated units at Twentynine Palms, most news and pundit chatter centers on whether women are as good as men.

But their work was also truly groundbreaking, and in her fast-paced narrative, Lemmon gives us an inside view of one of the most prominent women-in-combat programs that the Pentagon has ever attempted. So the CulturalВ Support Teams (CSTs) of 2010 - the first all-female units assigned to special operations forces in Afghanistan and the subject of the new book AshleyвЂ™s War by Gayle Lemmon - were standing on the shoulders of giants. Her widower Max is also an Army EOD tech, and she died in his arms. That number includes two of my fellow Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) techs: Senior Airman Liz Loncki was killed by a booby-trapped car bomb in 2007, Staff Sergeant Kim Voelz died disarming an IED in Baghdad in 2003. Thousands of women have served in direct combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, as helicopter pilots, military police, artillery officers, interpreters, and K9 dog handlers, and nearly 200 of them have died, most from combat-related injuries, from RPG explosions to mortar fire to aircraft crashes.