Ashley's War by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon Page A

People are getting hit all the time now. Do you have any idea what you’d be getting yourself into? You don’t need to deploy now—I just got back. Let’s think about this for a while, find you a good medical deployment you can do another time, once we’ve had our wedding and honeymoon and some actual time together.” Ashley had studied sports medicine in college—often with Jason serving as her test patient—and trained as a medic at Fort Sam Houston during her ROTC years. Jason saw no reason why she couldn’t deploy as a medical officer—and one who stayed on base.
    It was Ashley’s turn to sit quietly and listen. She heard him out, but it was clear she was unmoved by his entreaties.
    “I promise,” he continued, “I’ll help you find another tour. Why do you want to go looking for trouble?”
    “I want to do this, Jason, I think this program is important and I want to go for it. I am not going to train all of these years and then not serve when my country is at war.” As she pressed her argument to the one person who had always encouraged her to speak her mind, Ashley’s eyes were now watering. “What if I wait for another deployment and then the war is over? I can get this out of the way and do something I’ll be really proud of when I’m a grandma and rocking on our porch.
    “Besides,” she added, moving next to her big husky dog, Gunner, on the couch where she and Jason snuggled and watched movies on weekends, “who knows if I’ll even make the team? We don’t have to decide anything yet.”
    She motioned for Jason to join her, but he sat silently in his recliner, trying to put himself in her place. He knew his wife was tough and talented. If she wanted something she would get it. He wasn’t worried she wouldn’t be selected; what worried him was he was certain she would .
    He saw in her eyes that same look of determination, that total indifference to everything around her that had been so evident in Ranger Challenge. If she really thought this was something she had to try for, how could he do otherwise, when he loved her so much and she had done exactly the same thing for him a year earlier?
    “All right, Ash, if you want to go for this, let’s do it,” he finally said. It was long past midnight, and he was exhausted, both physically and emotionally. “But you better dig in. You’re going to have a tough fight at selection. You don’t quit. If you call me and say you need me to come pick you up because you didn’t make the cut, it had better be because you broke a bone and couldn’t walk yourself out of there. You want this? We’re going at it full throttle. No half steps.”
    This is what Ashley was thinking about at the Landmark Inn as she grabbed a yogurt and set off to find a seat with the other girls. She had promised then to give it her all, and she was ready.
    No half steps, Ashley thought. Time to dig in.
    She sat down and began introducing herself to her tablemates.
    A nne Jeremy was one of the first people Ashley met that morning. Tall, fit, and blond, she looked more like a television anchor than a soldier, but her temperament was serious, no-nonsense. She had proven herself on the battlefield at just twenty-three after Taliban rocket fire blew up and sliced through a caravan of vehicles in the supply convoy she was leading. She never felt she deserved the awards she received for her bravery and thought only of her soldiers killed in the battle, but her commanders felt otherwise after seeing her composure in leading her convoy through more than twenty-four hours of intermittent heavy arms fire and hours of prolonged enemy contact. Back at her base she went on to become her combat engineer company’s first female executive officer, or XO. Officially the role was off-limits to women, because the Army had coded the job for men only in its personnel system. But the colonel she served under in Afghanistan thought she was one of his most promising officers, so he simply left