Lieutenant Blaisdell-Black, whose Third Platoon of the 164th Military Police Company arrived in Afghanistan only in April, has seen her unit lose an eighth of its strength from two bombs in the first couple of months of their deployment. In addition to Specialist Snyder, three other M.P.’s from the Third Platoon died from the same bomb, along with an American civilian contractor. An earlier bomb, on the sixth day of the Third Platoon’s deployment here, sent one of the other women in the force home with serious injuries, and wounded two men as well.

“There were five of us, sharing the same B-Hut,” Lieutenant Blaisdell-Black said, using the term for barracks here that normally sleep eight soldiers each. “Now there are three.”

Specialist Snyder was a high school track star in Cohocton, N.Y., from a military family; her father had been in the Navy and her sister is, while a brother is in the Army. She enlisted straight after graduation, choosing the military police, because, as one of her platoonmates put it, “We had the best and biggest guns.”

With sleeve tattoos down both arms, Specialist Snyder toyed with the idea of becoming a tattoo model, and also expressed interest in becoming a deception analyst in what is known as the military’s psychological operations. Her physical fitness scores often exceeded the Army’s perfect 300, and she was determined to become a sergeant — an honor awarded to her now posthumously.

At the same time, on deployment she carried a hot pink pocket knife and pink duct tape, and at her unit’s base in Fort Richardson, Alaska, she kept an off-road vehicle, also painted pink. “She definitely had her feminine side,” said Lieutenant Blaisdell-Black. “Even her tattoos were all flowers and girly things.”

The military police is a common job choice for women who want to get into combat, but not the only one. Nowadays combat arms specialties in the infantry and armor units are the only major specialties closed to women — although even there they can go into combat as medics or combat logistics specialists.

The infantry battalion that the M.P.’s Third Platoon was attached to here, First Battalion, 133rd Regiment, has 40 women among its 600-plus soldiers. “To the average soldier who’s out there on a mission, it doesn’t make a difference,” said the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Steven Kremer. “Can that person on my left or right shoot is what matters. I got to tell you the females in my battalion are absolutely amazing.”