Ashley's War by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon Page B

a fellow CST candidate who was crying. The soldier moved slowly, clearly hobbled by pain of some sort, maybe a turned ankle or an aching tendon. It was easy to trip on a rock or fall over some uneven terrain out here in the wilderness. As she passed the woman the hard-edge side of her won out over the compassionate team player. Come on, Amber thought to herself. Really? If you are crying you shouldn’t be here. There are things you should shed tears about—death, severe illness—but a ruck march isn’t one of them. She kept marching.
    I got this, she promised herself. Just don’t get cocky again. And for God’s sake, don’t screw up.
    A few tents away from Amber, Kate rejoiced at having hit the selection group jackpot. Rigby was part of her team and her enthusiasm for the week ahead showed in the first emphatic handshake she offered when introducing herself. Given the ban on contact lenses, Rigby sported dark-framed glasses that gave her the air of an aspiring PhD candidate. Tristan was also in her tent, and as it turned out,Tristan and Kate had been classmates at West Point. They hadn’t been close in school, but since women made up only around 15 percent of their class—about the same percentage as in active-duty military—most of them knew one another by face if not by name. Tristan and Kate became instant friends.
    Rigby, for her part, had not expected to bond with or even like any of the women she roomed with in this selection. She had grown up with a hippie mom and a Navy veteran dad who taught her that nothing in life was either easy or handed to you, a reality that was reinforced by her dad’s job woes, her parents’ eventual divorce, and years of financial precariousness. She had arrived at Assessment and Selection with something of a chip on her shoulder. The West Point women, she thought, were sure to be an uppity bunch; her lower-middle-class upbringing made her mistrust anything that suggested pedigree. But just as she had been forced to question her stereotypes after Kristen bested her back in Arizona, Tristan and Kate made her feel embarrassed about her prejudices. These West Point women weren’t just tough as hell; they were smart and funny. And nice. She wanted to dislike the naturally perky Tristan with her ridiculous physical stamina born of decades of race running and track training, but she simply couldn’t: her good nature and her self-deprecating humor had won her over during their time as roommates back at the Landmark.
    Instructors informed the women about what would be required of them during selection week by using a system of postings on a whiteboard that were updated throughout the day. Instructions were sparse and by design omitted much critical information; it was up to the women to figure it out. This meant that the soldiers had to be ready to leave the (relative) comfort of their tent at any moment, including during their rare rest periods, to find out what was coming next and when. In a selection process designed to keep soldiers off balance at all times, staying abreast of information was critical to success.
    Tristan volunteered to be their tent’s messenger, and neither Kate nor Rigby objected. After all, from that first day she looked like she had been born on her feet. When the ten team members returned to the tent after the opening ruck march, they crashed on their beds, peeled sticky, aching feet out of damp socks, and gingerly nursed their new blisters. Everything hurt—standing and sitting—and the thought of rucking again in a few hours was daunting. But not for Tristan. She was perched on her cot, airing out her infamous smelly boots and breezily chatting with the others as if she had just returned from an afternoon of sunbathing on the beach. Years of running and marching barefoot in her sand-colored Nike military boots had hardened her feet against blisters. Her feet were so calloused and tough it would take far more than twenty miles of marching to faze