In November, a former Special Forces team leader with whom I had served in Afghanistan sent me an article announcing another milestone for women in the military. For the first time, a female soldier had passed Special Forces Assessment and Selection, a grueling preliminary step to becoming a Green Beret. “Awesome news,” he wrote. While I agreed, my own experience had left me feeling skeptical. The article quoted prior remarks from then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who had said “the jury is out” on integrating women into infantry roles and that the Pentagon was trying to “give it every opportunity to succeed if it can.” As a woman who had worked in Afghanistan alongside two teams of Green Berets — one open-minded and mission-oriented, the other prone to sexism and insularity — my success had been dependent on whether I was supported and respected by my male colleagues. This servicewoman’s advancement would likely rely on the same thing.

I began working with the first team of Green Berets in 2012 on Combat Outpost Herrera in Paktia Province, a remote base in eastern Afghanistan occupied primarily by a company from the Fourth Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division out of Alaska. The Green Berets’ mission was to reduce the influence of the Taliban by improving local development, security and governance. They worked well with the district governor, the police chief and other officials. But the team was made up entirely of men, and they could not interact with the women in their area, leaving them unable to interact with half the population. Knowing this, they requested a Cultural Support Team, a small all-female unit trained to engage Afghan women and children.

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I led the Cultural Support Team, which consisted of myself; Leigh Murchison, an Army master sergeant; and a female interpreter. Winnowed from a group of 280 female soldiers and officers who had volunteered, Leigh and I were two of the 28 who had passed a series of “physical, mental and intellectual evaluations,” completed training at Fort Bragg, N.C., and had been selected to work with Special Forces. As an intel analyst and a logistics officer, Leigh and I studied Afghan and Islamic culture before deploying, and we refined the military skills needed for an assignment alongside elite troops, including weapons use, trauma care, radio communications, intelligence gathering and driving the vehicles used by Special Forces teams in Afghanistan’s harsh terrain. The Army, following the counterinsurgency doctrine of the time, expected us to help all-male combat units identify causes of instability, in part by meeting with influential villagers and officials, and also by meeting with local women who were not accessible to these male units.