The Women of the Army Rangers’ Cultural Support Teams

Lt. Ashley White in marksmanship training during Cultural Support Team training for deployment.Credit U.S.Army photo by SSG. Russell Lee Klika
Two women have now earned the Army’s elite Ranger designation. A third is in the final phase of Ranger School, the humidity-soaked “swamp phase” that ends later this month.

In the wake of this history making, Ranger School is now officially opened to women. And now Navy leaders say they are on track to open their arduous basic underwater demolition/SEAL training course to “anybody who can meet the gender non-specific standards” early next year.

I did. And with each interview I finished, I realized that I had stumbled across a community of women recruited to “become part of history” and to join combat operations back in 2011, first by the United States Special Operations Command and then by the Army Special Operations Command. All while the combat ban remained very much in place. These soldiers and service members (not all were Army) could be there, legally, despite the ban on women in ground combat because they were “attached” to special operations teams, just not “assigned” to them.

Battlefield needs drove the decision to recruit, train and deploy this band of teammates who became friends and, ultimately, family. Special operations leaders believed America would never kill its way to the end of its wars. It needed more knowledge, and the knowledge held by half the population remained out of reach; because of Afghan cultural traditions, women could not and would not speak to male soldiers. All that these women saw, knew and heard remained out of reach. That fact led the head of joint special operations command to request a team of American women soldiers fit and skilled enough to serve alongside his highly trained and tested men.

So the call went out and a team of women from across the Army, Guard and Reserve, and some from the Air Force and Navy, answered after a selection process lovingly termed “100 Hours of Hell.” Twenty or so of these women would accompany Rangers, SEALs, and other special ops teams on “direct action” missions, including nighttime raids aimed at keeping pressure on the blossoming insurgency. They boarded the helicopter in the night’s starry blackness every evening like any other member of the team. And on the objective, they would take fire, find people and things and gather information aimed at accomplishing the night’s mission.

They served their country and they placed themselves in harm’s way each night. And on Oct. 22, 2011, Lieutenant White was killed in action on a combat operation alongside two Rangers, Sgt. First Class Kristoffer Domeij and Pfc. Christopher Horns. Sergeant Domeij was on his 14th deployment; Lieutenant White and Private Horns on their first.

By the time I met them in 2013, Lieutenant White’s teammates had returned from war. They mourned their beloved teammate and they vowed to keep her memory alive. But they also mourned the battlefield camaraderie, the shared experience and the concentrated purpose of serving America on the front lines of its longest war.


Their friendship was a living, breathing thing. I saw that immediately as I sat around a kitchen table in Fayetteville, N.C., and watched six or seven of these teammates snack on Triscuits and cheddar cheese and talk about their time in Afghanistan with their Ranger platoons and other special operations units. They finished one another’s sentences, stepped on one another’s jokes and pushed fast forward on each other’s stories.

They would not talk about themselves, but they praised each other. “I was so proud the night the Rangers gave Isabel the award,” one of them said to me of her partner in southern Afghanistan. “Just to be sitting there and seeing how much respect they had for her because she had made a difference that night.”