Daily Show: http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/ycezko/gayle-tzemach-lemmon

Morning Edition: http://www.npr.org/2015/04/28/402561101/ashleys-war-details-vital-work-of-female-soldiers-in-afghanistan

PEOPLE: http://www.people.com/article/reese-witherspoon-buys-rights-army-girls-special-ops-afghanistan

Slate excerpt: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/05/gayle_tzemach_lemmon_s_ashley_s_war_excerpt_inside_an_elite_unit_of_women.html 

Further Background: In 2010, the U.S. Army Special Operations Command launched a pilot program to put women on the battlefield alongside Green Berets, Army Rangers, and Navy SEALs on sensitive nighttime missions in Afghanistan. The idea was that women could access places and people that had remained out of reach, and could build relationships—woman to woman—in ways that male soldiers in a conservative, traditional country could not.  Though they remained officially banned from combat, female soldiers could be “attached” to different teams, and for the first time, women throughout the Army, National Guard and Reserves heard the call to try out for this special ops program that would show them the kind of combat seen by less than five percent of the entire U.S. military. Each had her own story, her own reason for wanting to, as the recruiting poster advertised, “be part of history,” serving alongside America’s finest fighters.  

In Ashley’s War, Gayle tells the story of Cultural Support Team (CST-2), a unit of women hand-picked from the Army, and the remarkable hero at its heart: 1st Lt. Ashley White, who would become the first CST member killed in action and honored on the Army Special Operations Memorial Wall of Honor alongside the men of Ranger Regiment with whom she died on mission. She would also become the first female to be remembered on the National Infantry Museum’s Memorial Walk, though women still today cannot officially serve in the infantry. But that’s changing.

In 2013 Defense Secretary Leon Panetta lifted the ban on women in ground combat.  A few months later when the question arose as to whether women would be allowed to become Rangers and SEALs in their own right, the example of the women featured in “Ashley’s War” – the women who served on the Cultural Support Teams  — was cited as an instructive lesson. “Quite frankly, I was encouraged by just the physical performance of some of the young girls that aspire to go into the cultural support teams,” Maj. Gen. Bennet Sacolick of special operations command said in a June 2013 Pentagon press conference about the opening of combat roles to women. “They very well may provide a foundation for ultimate integration.”