Ashley's War by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon Page A

teammate who had dropped right in front of her.
    A half hour later it was Rigby’s turn to “die.” She had already carried several of her more petite teammates to safety and joked to herself that the real test would come when they had to carry her, for while she was hardly big, she was taller and thicker than most of the other women in their tent. Finally the instructor came by and “killed” her.
    By that time the temperature had climbed well above eighty degrees and the soldiers had sweated through every inch of their camouflage uniforms. Rigby’s blisters bled freely and she was soaked through with perspiration from top to bottom. It was almost a relief to lie quietly on the dirt lane, playing dead and gazing at the gray sky, waiting to get picked up by her teammates. And then she looked down and saw that her pants were soaked in blood from her waist to her knees. She felt a jolt of panic wondering if all their combat role-playing had started to play tricks on her mind. And then she burst out in laughter. She had been out there in the field for well over twelve hours and had somehow missed the fact that her period had started hours before.
    Kate looked over, saw her “dead” buddy laughing, then followed Rigby’s eyes to the source of the moment’s absurdity. “Oh shit,” she said, “this one’s going to be interesting!” She was already hatching a strategy for how the team would carry her safely home.
    But Rigby darted off in another direction, and behind the spare cover of a spindly North Carolina tree she dealt with her feminine hygiene.
    “I just gotta take care of my business,” she shouted back. “Be there in an instant . . .” Kate looked on, trying unsuccessfully to suppress her own laughter.
    “The bears are going to have a field day!” Kate shouted to her teammates.
    Along with a woman’s inability to carry a comrade off the field, another reason soldiers frequently gave for keeping women out of the infantry was that their periods would attract bears out in the wild. Among Army women there was a long tradition of joking about the ridiculousness of this idea, as if a bear would find a menstrual cycle any more attractive than they did.
    The male cadre was standing twenty feet from the women and watched without saying a word. His own training had taught him to be stoic at all times and to betray no spontaneous expression. This guy is good, the soldiers thought, but of course he had never dealt with an all-female selection before and this body stuff was entirely new terrain. His eyes grew large, full of what Kate later called “shock and awe,” but he stood there and simply watched as the women arranged themselves like nothing at all had happened, then got on with the task at hand.
    “Okay, let’s go,” Rigby called out a minute later. Another teammate hoisted her up with help from Kate and another soldier and heaved Rigby’s torso behind her shoulders and on top of her rucksack. The fake-dead Rigby hung limp, as the team humped its way back to the staging area.
    “One hundred hours of hell” had lived up to the promise of its name.
    A shley’s preparation for the hours of hell had started six years earlier when she was a freshman at Kent State and became addicted to rucking. On school breaks she would pack rocks into her backpack and head out of her family’s house in Marlboro for her own “unknown distance” road marches.
    “What are you doing, Ashley?” Bob would ask. “Why would you make it heavier?”
    “I’m training, Dad, trying to get stronger,” she would call back to him as she walked out the door and began to set a pace for herself on the two-lane highway that ran alongside their ranch home.
    Now her years of preparation were paying off. The scale that weighed everyone’s gear before the first ruck started, tipped well above the minimum requirement when Ashley’s pack was placed on it. No way she would get penalized because the instructors found her pack was too