Army special Operation Commands. Its a program that puts women on the battlefield to conduct culturally Sensitive Missions in afghanistan that require contact with women and children. Despite men being officially banned from combat. Hello, good evening. Welcome to book passage in san francisco. I want to thank you for coming out tonight to support independent book writers and independent thinking. I also want to thank i were cspan viewers so know that you are on camera as were taping tonight. As we go to the q a please know we will pass a mic around to capture your questions. We are very honored tonight to welcome a senior fellow as well as a contributor where she reports regularly on issues of National Security and foreign policy. She is also the bestselling author of a remarkable story of remarkable women under after and caliban rule. Shes here to talk about her latest book, ashleys war. Its a book that looks at the unknown history and continuing legacy of a special all women Pilot Program putting women on the battlefield along other women to gain access to afghan women. It brings the story to life and particularly about ashley white in which the book is entitled. This discussing the valor and in courage of these women. Please join me in welcoming her. Its so nice to be here with all of you and of course i love cspan since i was ten years old. This is great. Well keep a pretty informal. All talk about 15 minutes and then we can do the rest of questionandanswer. The story began when i was hosting an event in 2012 at the council on Foreign Relations and i was asking someone about combat story and she said well its just like the First Lieutenant who lost her life on the battlefield in afghanistan in a special operation night mission. I said what . She said yeah there was this lieutenant who was out there and she was on a night raid along Ranger Regiment and special Operation Team and if you look at her obituary it actually said shes a member of the North Carolina national gatt guard. If you keep reading it, it tells you the story of what she was actually doing the night she died. She was part of the special operations team. I said how is that possible . The combat fan is still on and i knew afghanistan from the privilege of writing about it but i had never known that women were out there with special Operation Teams. So three questions immediately popped into my mind. Who are these people . What were they doing out there . Why as a a country did we have no idea that women were out there seeing the kind of combat while the combat band was still officially in place . If you come in and out of afghanistan as i know some of you have, you would know there are a lot of women you would see on airplanes or on patrols but you didnt necessarily know what it was they were doing. You certainly didnt know they were on those kinds of nighttime raids. Those were the questions i started with. I called up a beautiful family bob and debbie white in an ohio and i called them and i said you dont know me, but you can look at everything ive ever written and id really like to calm and talk to you about your daughter. As it turns out no one had really called and said that and it had been 18 months since she had given her life for the united states. I think they had always hoped that someone would call because every family who loses a family in this war, the biggest fear is that your child is forgotten. I went out to see them in the first thing that struck me and this is still what i think about every time he think about this story, was a sign that was in the corner, corner, written on a piece of torn off notebook paper, like some of you carry every day to school and it said you are my motivation in all black letter. Letter. It was not her death that made her so extraordinary and special, it was her life. So that reporting trip led to two years and hundreds and hundreds of hours of interviews in that gas station coffee cups hazelnut or french vanilla, and a lot of Holiday Inn Express night stays all around the country trying to find the answers to those three questions. I spent a lot of time with those senior people in the community and the most Battle Tested men of special operation and of course this Incredible Group of women. At the heart of it this is a story of friendship of friendship, and a story of love only born on the battlefield that no one else will ever understand but the people who serve alongside you. It just so happened that these people were female. So i started meeting with a group of these people trying to figure out what they had done. When i quickly realized is they were not there because of some social experiment. Experiment. They were there because of a security gap with some of the most tested leader leading america threw them through the 14 years of war. There was a security gap on these night raids which is that you could only talk to half the population because it is a conservative traditional country where male soldiers could never speak to women. Admiral olson who was a first navy said we need to get more knowledge out there. We are leaving knowledge behind and theres information we dont know about and people we dont know about. When youre trying to keep the pressure on the insurgency in afghanistan, people are trying to take down the government in afghanistan and you need to know everything. He has this idea about the yang and yang of warfare. He jokingly said a lot of people were waiting for the next commander to come in. But then the head of joint special operation and with a special request for his ranger. He said we need women out here. From those two men and a bunch of others wet over time really come to believe that they were not getting everything out of the information that they could have and they were leaving a security gap there to go came the idea of what became the idea of a cultural clipart team. It is a incredibly benign name for a groundbreaking concept. You need women to speak to these women. A poster goes out. Female soldiers become part of history and join special operations on the battlefield in afghanistan. Almost all of them you will see in the pages of this book have the same reaction. This is way too good to be true. This is people who had always wanted to test themselves. The only thing they hungered for was to put themselves in the most challenging situation to face the biggest test they could do a mission that mattered and to serve alongside the best of the best. All of a sudden they had their chance even though if it officially they were not permitted in combat. So adm. Olsen comes up with these combat teams and are attached to any team that needs them. It could be rangers or seals or combat forces. That was the idea. In one of the early things that i think people remember is that more than 200 women applied for the program and a hundred to this not very nice hotel in fort bragg. Its not a posh hotel like you send for skins think of posh hotel. So they come to breakfast where they have a walkable maker and theyve never had a moment where theyve been around women who are as hungry and ended ambitious and driven and really committed to doing something that mattered, as they were. They all had a moment where they had been so used to being the only giraffe at the suit that they didnt know there were more people like them. So what follows from that motel experience is what is like 100 hours of hell. That was the test they had to face. The hundred hours of hell was a series of mental tests and physical tests. Climbing. Climbing 30foot walls figuring out puzzles, doing a lot of things within incomplete information. Then doing things by putting 35 or 40 pounds on your back or more and walking or marching for an unknown distance. That could be 2 miles or in this case nine or ten or 11 miles. It was not made for everybody but what each woman had was the same experience. Almost all of them had friends who set i said i would never do this but this looks like it was perfectly made for you. So you have this assembly of women and the instructors had never seen anything like it they have never seen anything like it and they assemble in these tents and immediately start to realize that even though they are competing with one another they all want each other to be great. They want to be great out there because they know everything they do is going to be watched by everybody who comes afterward. Every female who gets a chance to come after will be depending on whether they succeed or not. There was a Pilot Program before them and they were the ones to be selected from all across the army. They army. They are chosen in march or may and they start training in june or july and by august they are deployed onto the battlefield alongside people have served five, six 78 or even ten 11 or 12 combats of deployment. They were really Incredible Team of characters. They are real people but they strike you as characters because i could have never made them up if i tried. In one west point track star who never wore socks and who actually causes a story because her boots smell so badly and her team a cant take it and put them in a trash bag and in the bathtub before she even introduces herself. You have another gal who is maybe 5foot three on a good taste coupe played High School Football all four years. She also wanted to stop and go into the glee club after year one but someone told her she couldnt play football so she decided to continue playing football. You had another girl who looked like heidi and who as a kid love to go shoot stuff. She didnt know stuff. She didnt know women couldnt be in the infantry until much later and she was one of those people who wanted to test herself. She ends up going to bosnia as an intel officer, coming back and deciding to become an actual officer from the enlisted and goes to help the fbi bust drug gangs in pennsylvania. Then there was a girl who run a bronze star for valor and another who was on her fourth deployment and you had First Lieutenant ashley white. She was due to full 5foot 2inch blonde who at her ranger trainer would lady later say looked like a disneyland greeter. This mega time quiet gal who had a smile that would light up the room and would never talk to you about what she had done but was one of those people who would get up be great and always say that she did absolutely nothing remarkable. She remarkable. She really was from everyone you would talk to the best around. I think she was the best of american characters. She would grew up in ohio where you always take the hard right over the easy wrong. Where you always will looked and worked hard than taking the easy route. You always worried about others before you worried about yourself. During lunch they would work out so when they would come back they would take granola so everybody was eating as they sat there sweating through the course. She was one of the people if you forgot your boots or you needed something she was the one you called because she always had a ready and would it ready and would never make you feel foolish for forgetting something. Theres a scene early on, of the 20 most fierce, most fit that had chosen to go to the ranger regimen. They have been continuously deployed since 9 11. These are some of the most tested special Operation Teams and they had never had to take females out with them on a mission. They figured if they are going to do this for the first time, time, they would have to bring women who could keep up who were fit and who could take off their helmets in the heat of battle and show that they were female. Which is why heidi got the character in the book because she would always wear braids. It was immediately apparent under all the armor and the weapon and a pistol and night vision goggles that she was, in fact, female. So on these missions, what would happen is they would all go and helicopter in the dead of night, go to the compound and these raiders would look for the person they were looking for and then women and children, in the middle of all this combat would be assured away by these women away from Everything Else that was going on and the women would talk to them. Lo and behold they would have expenses where sometimes they would say the guy you are looking for is two houses over. That really made things a lot easier for the men alongside these women. They find a woman sitting on and ak47. One time a woman was sitting on a suicide bed and it wasnt they were part of the insurgency but they were being asked to do things. These women who had just been plucked from their other job were out there in the heat of battle, in the dead of night, alongside men who had done the equivalent of three or four years of war and they were proving themselves. What they found was, of course it was hard to be the only female with men who had never worked with females, females, but they were open minded because all they wanted to do was accomplish their mission and get home. It was those girls who get out there, there, pay their rent and show their value and that was all they asked for. One of the ranger trainers, and they had about eight days with them at this point, and he had this moment at the very beginning and this is in Chapter Seven where he gets out and says hey, you gotta go train girls. Oh what kind of assignment is that . And at the end of his eight days with them he doesnt wanna use language thats in the book around children but read the book because theres a lot of colorful language where he just has these moments about how serious they are and they want to be here. And he said if they want to be here then im going to teach them everything i know. What he found was they had heart and they had grit and when he asked them to climb rope up and down with their body armor on its hard for a lot of them. Then them. Then comes ashley white goes up and down three times usually only her arms. Then apologizes because he had taught them to do it using their arms and legs. He said what you do here if you do out there you will be fine because you care and you want to be there. Those guys understand that all they want to do is get the job done. So all this goes on and they start prove themselves they are all starting to get there and then Tragedy Strikes in that First Lieutenant ashley white is on a mission just like every other night with her interpreter who is from Orange County chapter 11s altars and she is one of those people who thought she was going to do a humanitarian russian leaves Orange County to go interpret and realizes 36 hours after she got there that she is going to be translating for bosnian detainees 12 hours on in 12 hours off in afghanistan. She gets asked if she wants to be part of the all girl team that new cultural support kind of thing, and do you want to go out and do these kind of missions. She had no training for that. Within two weeks of saying yes, she finds herself the same thing, on helicopters, running on missions, and not very good year that came from the korean war as it looked and she is trying to be the voice and the eyes and the ears with whom shes working. One time she said you really need to keep up. She said girl, i was in Orange County at the mall two years ago wearing my steve maddens. Im maddens. Im doing the best i can out here. She has this very human and relatable moment and i think the other women, and i think what stands out the most to read it was when nadia, the interpreter is first waiting for ashley and her teammates to come in they are in the ladies room and she doesnt know what theyre going to be like. They come out and one gal is putting on her eyebrows and another is doing her eyeliner before the combat mission. She said oh my gosh, you wear makeup im so glad. Her teammate said well yeah obviously thats not what we do on a a regular basis but i like to feel like myself when i go to work. Im really bummed if i look kinda sick because i dont my eyebrows done. They have this moment where they realize its okay you can be feminine, and feminine and fears and fit and do your job well. I think that makes them even more to find one another. So nadia is not even cleared to go out on this mission because she had sprained her wrist a couple weeks back and she was not officially clear by the dr. To go back on mission but because its ashley and ashley who asked her, she said yes because she told me if it was a situation where i was on crutches, i wouldnt of said yes because so many people used us where they just wanted to get their money out of us as translators but ashley and those ladies cared. They always cared. They always treated us like we were people first and we were getting our jobs done. So ashley called her to go out on a mission and every scene everything seemed fine until it wasnt. Within a short period of time a daisy chain iud set off and it went off. Ashley white was injured very seriously as well as two men. As she passes the two rangers who are killed, there is him moment through crisis in addition to the huge in that moment of crisis all crisis all the women say are they going to shut us down . Is america finally going to realize that there were women out there on the night raid . Is the fact that a female died going to explode in the headlines in america wont be able to take it and we will all be sent back home. The truth is america barely noticed. The special Operation Community did notice. They immediately descend upon ashleys ohio town and her parents had actually not really known what she was doing because they tried to protect them. For the first time they learned about what it was she was doing. They hear the word new and groundbreaking and historic and historical operation. The head of special operations comes to her funeral and said women are warriors and have set a new standard on what it means to be a woman in the army and you will not be said forgotten. Please this is written for a man but it speaks to the fallen female soldier and remember that your ranger brothers will be out there in your honor every night. So all of this is happening but nobody back in afghanistan knows in fact one of the historians comes and says do you want to keep going. They said that to kristin with the west pointer with the shoes. Do you want to come ashleys replacement in kandahar. Do you want to keep going because nothing would dishonor her memory more than stopping this mission. I cant promise you i wont die any more than the rest of us but this is what we signed up to do. We do. We didnt sign up to give our lives but we did sign up to serve. This is a conversation thats going on in all of the women keep going out. It is true that not a single one of them thinks that any job will ever measure up to what they did that year alongside special operations. They love the job they loved the mission they considered a a privilege to be doing the work they were doing because they were at the heart of a mission that mattered serving with the best of the best which is all they had ever asked for. In fact, one of the gals, another member of this team who had this unique distinction of being both a sorority sister, and rtc cadet and a women study major she has this moment where she says i hate being a girl because everything noble noble is out of reach. All the sudden things they always dreamed of doing came true. They had a great leader. There was another gal who was a track star that seems to be a common theme and when they ought asked her to be the officer in charge, she said absolutely. She was one of those people who exercised full person leadership. She never saw people is just working for her. One day a girl wanted a different kind of breakfast and it was there the next week. Another one wanted a guy to keep come calm and have coffee with her. And shes like im here to work and not have coffee with you. She still has no idea to this day what happened. This team was found by the leadership they shared in the love of mission that transcended the fact that they were in all different parts of afghanistan usually on the ground. Theres this one final story, i want to tell you which is at the very end which was the start of the process at the end of the first set of interviews with mr. And mrs. White. I asked them, what would it mean for you if a little girl said she wanted to be like ashley . Mrs. White who is a teachers aide and a School Bus Driver and has a catering business on the side looked at me and said it would mean everything because a huge part of ashleys legacy is those women she left behind and those women will always be part of our family. Its if her legacy is helping america to know them then maybe ashley will have left us more than we thought at the beginning. She told me a story at the very end at ashleys funeral warrior a woman comes up to her with her daughter she does still doesnt know to this day who she was and she said mrs. White, i brought my daughter here today because i wanted her to know what a hero was and i wanted her to know that heroes could be women too. I think that is the legacy that these teams leave us. We could talk about policy and all these women were recognized by special Operation Command when the ban was actually lifted in january 2013. In june 2, 0131 of the special operation leaders said those young girls i was so impressed with their fitness and the truth is i think they may have laid the foundation. All of these conversations are still going on. By january 2016 we will know whether women will be able to become field rangers in their own right. Weve had a lot of conversations about what women could and should do and very few acknowledgments of what theyve actually done. This done. This is a team story, a story of friendship, a story of character in action and a story of the power of purpose. I hope youll enjoy the book. Thank you so much. [applause]. Heres a question are there teams like this being sent out in places that arent official war zones right now . I think now . I think theres lots of things you dont know about that are happening all the time. These teams are winding down with the war in afghanistan. There are of course always things that are happening but officially these teams are winding down with the end of the war in afghanistan. Theres a moment in the epilogue that you will see where they come back and have a year to really change their life and they have these friends that the going to love forever and the truth is the first thing that struck me in a room with these women is that they are each others family. They step on each others sentences and ruin each others joke and they are each others career counselors and baby shower hosts. Theyre the people hosts. There the people they taxed at 2 00 a. M. And the people they call at 2 00 a. M. Exam. That will never change no matter what happens. Quite honestly as a country weve never had a chance to see that. There havent been many of these allfemale teams created to answer a battlefield need. This is also a love story. Ashleys husband was her kent state rotc sweetheart. He had just finished his own deployment to afghanistan and he really did not initially want her to go on this mission. She tells him what she wants to do and he said no way. I dont think way. I dont think you know what youre getting into. That is serious combat that youre talking about. Thats why people asked them to do the jobs they do. She said thats what i want to do. I want to be with the best people that are out there. You said yourself to the best guys out there. He acknowledges that and he has a a moment where eventually he calls his dad and says what do i do because he never wanted to keep her from the from being the best she could be. In fact her mother said he was the one that made her smile. You would never see her smile on photos before him but you would always see her smile with him. He called his dad and his dad said you guys have never held her back because he never wanted her to regret the what if. What if she hadnt tested herself. Because she was this wild mix of Martha Stewart and g. I. Jane. She was somebody who loved making dinner for husband and then loved putting 40 pounds of weight and going to march for 10 miles going to the gym and doing 25 or 30 pullups from a dead hang, climbing 15foot rope three times over in addition to lunges and a number of other things. He never wanted her to feel like he had been the one to hold her back when he had been such a part of helping her become who she was. When these women went on these missions and they talk to the local women, did the women first think they were men and were they surprised when they realized they were women . Im assuming because they were women they were able to build a level of trust more quickly . They were shocked. There was this moment where you take off your helmet and under all of that is a female. They put on a headscarf or they dont even have a conversation. During this war it was a moment of connection where they would talk to one another and in fact women would keep them away from foreign men and Everything Else happening and have conversations and i think thats why these teams were able to be effective. Its not that every night was successful but that they were much more likely to communicate and have a moment of conversation or exchange of information with a woman then you were with a guy with all thats here looking like martians that had landed in peoples living room. Because these women were sort of doing the very thing that the local women couldnt do where they also what are you doing here . There here . There were a lot of questions. What you mean you are in the military and do you have a husband, do you have children . So yes they would definitely ask lots of questions. Even as questions. Even as in a reporter in afghanistan, you get lots of stairs because you are this gender and you can talk to afghan women and you can also talk to men. You have this sort of third gender where you dont fit into either one of them but it does let you move among worlds. Is it a reporting failure military secrecy why didnt we know . We think the truth is we have not been fully paying attention to what that does on behalf of the united states. Its been states. Its been a very long war and people have very busy lives and all of that plays out in reporters who are tired, people who are tired servicemembers who now get used to people having no engagement with the war that theyve just come back from fighting and i really wanted this book to be a reminder of the people and what we ask of them in america today. Day in day out in this case night in, and night out and to remind us what we are requiring of people who served this country who have now been on so many appointments at their families are almost use to it. I think ashley that throws in a whole a whole new wrench not just for the military but for society. How many are used to seeing a man in uniform whose wife has been serving alongside special operations. Not many. I think their story is a part of living history that really does make us rethink so many of the things we care about and the things we dont care about. Its funny because early on i told someone i was working on a story that had to do with special operation and female stories. And they said oh was it about rape or ptsd . That was another thing that was kind of shocking because you realize theyre very important narratives but they leave out valor. They they do not fully take in everything that women have been doing on the battlefield. Are there any other questions thank you all so much for being here. [applause]. Every weekend booktv offers programming focused on nonfiction authors and books. Keep watching for more here on cspan2, and watch any of our past programs online at booktv. Org. Heres a look at some books that are being published this week. In taking a stand, senator and 2016 president ial candidate rand paul offers his plan for the country which promotes school choice, reform of mandatory minimum sentencing and a change in u. S. Foreign policy. Wall street executive jason trenert gives his defense of the Investment Banking industry in my side of the