The Only Woman on the Sand

The noise of two giant Army helicopters taking off is deafening. The silence, after you and 25 of your closest colleagues have jumped off the back and they’ve taken off, leaving you alone and stranded just outside an Afghan village, is sobering. As the dust from the rotorwash settles, I look around, squinting against the harsh glare of the desert sun. I can make out the village hundreds of meters in front of us, and I can see the narrow path that we will have to cross to get from the open desert into the center of town. We assume our patrol position and begin to march, knowing there shouldn’t be much danger here today, but never taking anything for granted. Every one of us can think of friends lost on other missions just like this, missions where nobody was supposed to die.

We steadily move forward. Out in the open country of Afghanistan it takes us nearly four times as long to cover ground as it would back home, because we never know what part of the road could be rigged with bombs, or what rocks might be perfect hiding places for snipers. This is what fighting terrorists is like. This is asymmetrical warfare. I wonder if, once I get back home, I’ll ever look at a pile of trash along the side of the road, and not feel my heart tighten with fear, wondering if this will be my last day on earth. Up front, our Lieutenant puts his arm up in the air, a closed fist the signal that we should all stop dead in our tracks and not move another muscle. We’ve barely been on the ground for twenty seconds, that kicked up dust still has not yet settled deep into our lungs, but already he can tell that something is wrong. Over the radio, I hear the warning: “The path to the village is caved in, we’re gonna be canalized on this road. Everybody be on their guard.” Fear tenses in my heart, but I also know that the guys with the right machines, the ones that help us sniff out bombs in various secret and highly guarded ways, are up front and on the alert.

But something else is bothering me too, and I’m trying hard to put my finger on it. As the only female Soldier in the group, I have been more than encouraged to speak up and speak out, but I have to have more to go on than just my ‘woman’s intuition’. and that’s right when it hits me, the realization that maybe only I can make. Where are all the children? I wonder, as the sinking feeling that this is not normal hits me. Usually they are swarming out of their village, racing towards the helicopters as fast as their little feet can carry them. We’ve had situations where the pilots had to do another go-round, the landing zone they were targeting covered with children dressed in rags, waving heartily at the birds overhead. I know why I notice it too — vanity; girliness; whatever-you-want to call it. As we’ve started to do more and more missions with a few of us first women included on actual combat patrols, I’ve had the opportunity to leave the base where I usually sit at a desk, supervising intelligence operations. When I’m out there, I love to see the children, and they love to see me. I’m flattered and honored when I see the eyes of little Afghan girls lighting up when a girl soldier comes marching by. I imagine they’ve never even dreamed of such a thing. I wonder if it might inspire one of them to do bigger and better things someday.

But today, I don’t see anyone little. Where are the six-year-old girls toting young baby siblings on their hips? Where are the boys with slingshots made from sticks, and the goats they run around with? Where are the children with the bright red-purple hair that you’d swear is dyed but is actually a phenomena almost exclusively in the deserts of Afghanistan, some DNA left-over of Ghangis Khan. The back of my mind is scrambling to connect the dots. I know the answer here, why can’t I think of it. and then I do, then, suddenly, like a flash of light, or a bomb, it comes to me. “Stop”, I cry out with a bravery that I didn’t know I had. I’m not the leader here, and while anyone can make a danger call on a patrol, I know that I’ll never live it down if I’m wrong. “There are no children”, I yell even louder, when everyone turns to look my way. I stare at the raised eyebrow on the Lieutenant. We’re the same rank, but he’s the mission commander, while I’m just here to talk to the women.

I watch realization quickly dawn on him, and both his eyes widen. “Everyone hit the ground”, he yells louder than he’s ever done in our training drills. That’s the first moment I know that I wasn’t wrong. The danger is there, a bomb on our path. Over the next five minutes our team will verify it with fancy equipment engineered by some of the brightest minds in the world, but the absolute lack of children is the only confirmation that we need. The Afghan villagers may be ambivalent about American soldiers. They might waver back on forth between supporting us or helping clothe and feed the terrorists who try to take our lives, but they love their children as much as any other parents. For months now, as an intelligence officer deployed to Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan, I’ve briefed this to teams of soldiers going out beyond the wire. We call them indicators, signs of danger. No children is a sign of death. and as I look around me at all the Ranger tabbed men lying in the dirt, their eyes glued to the sights of their black and tan assault rifles, I realize that the lack of children is an indicator that any woman might notice significantly faster than even the best-trained man.

*

That was just one mission, on one average day, in 365 days at war. But that mission stands out to me more than most of the others. That mission demonstrates why diversity matters, why, after 250 years of existence, the US Army finally realized that having women on the team could be more crucial to mission success than any of us had ever suspected. After two and a half centuries we finally realized an important truth: when both men and women are trying to kill you, it makes a whole lot of sense to have both men and women trying to keep you alive.

In 2011, I just so happened to be in the right place at the right time in history to have the honor of volunteering as part of the first group of women to conduct deliberate ground combat operations — integrated right in with traditionally all-male units. Women had been in combat before, in every conflict in American history, in fact, but this was the first time we were sending women out on purpose as combatants, not just as ‘support’. It was a big deal, but even we didn’t realize how big.

We showed up to our first unit, literally expecting all the men to be angry that they had to take girls into combat with them, but they were so happy to have us there. Don’t get me wrong, they made us work hard. I’ll never forget the gruff voice of the platoon sergeant as he barked: “So, you think you wanna be in the infantry, huh?” which was the only warning that started an epic day of proving ourselves, physically, in all of our heavy gear, until we were bruised and bleeding. But we were also smiling oh so big! I proved my street cred because I could run faster in all of my 50lbs of gear than the lieutenant in charge could run in just his workout clothes, generating immense amounts of teasing for that lieutenant and an immediate acceptance of my presence on the team. Once we had proved that we could be part of the team any initial objections there might have been to our presence quickly vanished. These men had had their hands tied for so long because of the rules of engagement in the conservative Muslim culture of Afghanistan, the rules that said that male soldiers could never touch women — not to search them, not when they thought they might be a threat, never — that they were just happy to have expanded capabilities by having women on the team.

Our commander, Lieutenant John Runkle, sat down next to me during a break in a long mission, “Daniella, I want to get to know you, to learn about what makes you different. I think having women here is so important, so different, and I want to know how best to use you.” So, we got to know each other, just two lieutenants chatting in the sand telling our life stories. I told him about how I’d grown up in Brazil, studying abroad in Germany during college, and how excited I was about the opportunities that the Army might finally start providing to women if we were to integrate our force fully, finally.

John, wise as ever, put things into a different perspective for me, “I’ve always thought that having soldiers with different points of view on my team was an important thing — so you ladies might just be the most important soldiers here. Promise me one thing, okay? We’ll take care of you out there, we’ll do our best to make sure that you don’t come to any harm. You just speak up anytime you notice anything. I mean it, Daniella, anything. Other commanders might be pissed that we have girls on the team now, but I see you ladies as our secret weapons. The rest of us have been doing this for so long, we all speak the same language, we all notice the same things. You girls have fresh eyes, fresh brains and new perspectives. I want you here because you’re different, not because you’re the same. Don’t be afraid, okay? For all of our sakes.”

and so, I took him at his word. I asked a lot of questions; I made a lot of mistakes and sometimes it was really embarrassing. and then one day John was gone, just like that, the way it happens in war. Then we were at his funeral, mourning him and many others on our team. Months later, laying in a ditch near an Afghan village, in the prone position behind my rifle, waiting for the confirmation of the bomb that I’d suspected lay in the road ahead, I wondered if I could have made a difference on that fateful day too — if having someone with a completely opposite perspective on the team could have kept them with us that day, could have saved some lives, the way it probably had done today.

The US Army has a long history of struggling with the idea of women in combat — and the official answer, all the way until 2013, had always been “no”. There was no way, people said, that women could be as good as the men. We weren’t strong enough, fast enough, tough enough, disposable enough. What would the American people do if mothers started dying in war, politicians said, with seeming disregard for the fact that fathers die in war all the time. At the end of the day, no argument for 2.5 centuries could prove that women were good enough to be men.

The war in Afghanistan put that argument aside. Because we weren’t at war with Afghanistan, we were fighting a proxy war, a war against terrorists that were using that country as a cover. We needed the local villagers on our side. We needed to win the hearts and minds of these Muslim people, and to do so, we needed to respect their customs and their culture. and in their culture, men don’t touch women outside of their immediate families. So, our Soldiers couldn’t search houses, set up roadblocks, do almost any operations where they were interacting with a mixed group of people, without the help of women. Operations forced integration.

What we learned that day on the sand was that the US Military for over 2.5 centuries had been placing importance on everyone being the same. But we learned that day that maybe it’s even more important for everyone to be different. It turned out, we didn’t need the women to be men, we needed to be women. It quickly became obvious that it was important for everyone to have a seat at the table or a pair of boots on the sand, and for everyone to be empowered to speak up about what they see from their own unique perspectives, from their different life experiences. That’s how we get 360 degrees of safety. That’s how we increase the likelihood of mission success and profitability. That’s the business case for diversity.

Today, in less than a decade in the US Army, the combat ban on woman has been repealed and all combat jobs have been opened to women. The first amazing women graduated from Ranger school, one of our most elite, and viciously guarded, all male-courses. Women have become infantry officers, filled many different roles in combat, and when they sacrifice their lives they finally, finally, get laid to rest with the same honors and dignity that the men do. There have been so many incredible firsts, including our first 4-star female general ever to take command of an infantry division — and the whole country cheered! That’s how fast breaking barriers can change a culture, even in a country whose military is as ‘famous and respected’ and unchanging, as the United States’.

Diversity is a fancy word right now, but it’s a complicated subject and culture change is hard, always. But the lesson that I learned from my friend, Lieutenant John Runkle stands, that diversity is not about social justice, its business benefit does not come from a notion of ‘equality’ — it’s about covering holes, seeing further, and being better together than you could be alone. It’s about profit, success and safety — bottom line.

One of the first things you learn about intelligence collection is to live and die by this matrix here:

It contains 4 sections: The known knowns, the unknown knowns, the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. Figuring out your known knowns is as simple as making lists: brainstorming with your team and writing things down. The unknown unknowns refers more to group knowledge or experience — something that you or your organization already have access to, it just has to be discovered or rediscovered. You usually find this when you are listing the knowns and unknowns or doing the research to answer questions.

The known unknowns is where intelligence collection really starts: when we know the most pressing questions, we can set about answering them. Which is easier to answer: “How to take control of an Afghan village?” or “What effects the rain from last night will have on the composition of the only road the team will have to take to get to village x?” Obviously, it’s the specific one.

The unknown unknowns is what we refer to as the dark quadrant in intelligence — you can’t actively answer questions that you don’t know you have. For example, no leader of any country had an answer for how to keep their economy afloat when the entire world went into isolation, because there was no scenario where that was possible. One of the best way to address unknown unknowns is to get as many different perspectives and eyes on your plan as possible — other people almost always have a slightly different point of view than you do.

Nobody can possibly know everything they don’t know. The only way to protect yourself — your lives, your mission goals, your combat team and your country — is to surround yourself with others who are completely different from you, and then give them a voice, the way that my leader gave to me.

In 1869 John Stuart Mill, a philosopher who developed all of his ideas with his wife, by the way, wrote, “What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing — the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.”

What he meant was, we don’t know what women are capable of, not yet. Not physically, not mentally. Not in war, not in business, not at all. For all of history, we women have been controlled and dictated to. Cultural norms have determined what we are capable of. For the first time in history, all the barriers are starting to come down, whether it’s the #metoo movement where women are speaking publicly about assault, women running for the highest political offices in tons of countries all over the world, or women taking up arms right alongside male soldiers. The only way we are going to truly know what we are capable of is when we pull down every last barrier and release our potential.

Daniella Mestyanek Young is an American author and TEDx Speaker. Daniella has been breaking through barriers and challenging authority figures since her earliest childhood memories growing up in the horrifying Children of God Cult and on through her service and deployment to war twice. Daniella served as part of the first group of women who integrated into deliberate combat arms missions back in 2011 and has since spent the majority of her time leading in veteran service organizations to try and help folks heal and find their own definition of success after their service.

Daniella is married to the world’s best special operations helicopter pilot (retired) and speaks primarily in Brazilian Portuguese with her daughter, who sasses her back in three languages. Daniella is currently at work on her memoir, Uncultured. She can be found speaking speaking truth to power, irritating vetbros and stamping out the kyriarchy on Twitter @daniellamyoung.