At 5 feet 3 inches and 110 pounds, Cronkhite carries at least 110 pounds in gear. Her body armor and ammo weigh about 50 pounds. As a medic, she carries a rucksack packed with 70 pounds of supplies.
“I have to carry enough to sustain four to six people in case of casualties,” she says.
Cronkhite also is a member and veteran of a new program, the Female Engagement Team and the Female Search and Seizure Team.
The FET/FSST is inspired by the Marine Corps’ Lioness program, a team of female soldiers trained to search Muslim and Iraqi women. The Army took the program and expanded and adapted it to meet its needs.
“Our ideal mission is to inform and influence,” says Maj. Maria Rodriguez, 37, from the Bronx, N.Y. Rodriguez is the brigade provost marshal and brigade Female Engagement Team officer in charge.
“We also do searches,” she said.
The women accompany the male soldiers on missions with the intention of meeting with the Afghan women and learning about their concerns. On a mission, the male soldiers ask a male head of the household, a malek, if he would allow the FET soldiers to speak with the women of the house.
“Sometimes we get told ‘yes.’ Sometimes we get told ‘no,’” Rodriguez says.
If they’re accepted, they often offer lotions, shampoo, diapers and feminine hygiene products.
“We’ll sit there for two hours and have tea and have girl talk. And that builds relationships,” Rodriguez says. “It is a slow, slow process.”
Seven women form the FET team attached to the 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division. Cronkhite, 32, from Skipperville, Ala., and Spc. Melicia James, 25, from Jamaica, N.Y., have been with the team since its initial training at Fort Wainwright in late 2010. Pfc. Jamie Sterna, 21, from Mequion, Wis., and Pvt. Liliana Nunez, 20, from Brownsville, Texas, are recent additions.
“Nunez and Sterna, they’re fresh-eyed,” says Cronkhite, who guides their training.
Sgt. 1st Class Miriam Lopez, 45, from Salina, Puerto Rico, joined the team at the start of 2012. Another, “Mary,” who cannot be identified for security reasons, serves as the team’s female linguist. Capt. Stephanie Boatman, 30, from Augusta, Ga., completes the team.
Each of the women has an assigned job, separate from her FET duties. Cronkhite and Nunez are medics. James is a mechanic. Lopez is a cook. Sterna is an ammo specialist, truck driver and mail clerk. Boatman is a signal officer.
In early January, Cronkhite, Sterna and Lopez prepare for a mounted patrol with 4th Platoon, Bravo Company, based at strongpoint Sperwan Ghar in Kandahar Province. They join two interpreters, eight Afghan National Army personnel and 23 American soldiers for the three-mile drive to the village of Big Reggai.
They arrive at a dusty, walled compound. Before starting on foot, the soldiers are advised to stay to the left of the red spray-painted lines; the area to the left indicates it’s been swept for mines. The women are told to hang back. As they wait, a muffled boom-boom catches the soldiers’ attention.
“You can tell by how the blast sounds,” Cronkhite says, describing how she can judge distance. “You can feel it in your feet or you feel it in your stomach.”
When they enter the compound, a Sufi mystic the soldiers call “the Pope” is sitting with a gathering of men. Many are awaiting a blessing.
Boom-boom. Boom-boom. A couple more shudders, apparently not close enough to deter the patrol.
“If you guys want, you can move up a little bit, do your thing,” a soldier tells the FET women.
The male head of the household escorts the women to the compound. A sergeant arranges security for the women and gets them a radio. The man will not allow the male interpreter inside with the women. The interpreter stands outside the door. They play a sort of telephone game as the questions are passed from the FET soldiers to the man to the interpreter back to the man then back to the women.
Eight women — four of them cradling infants — quickly gather around the soldiers.
“What we’re doing now is to start to get to know them. We’re asking all these questions so we can help them,” Cronkhite says, asking the interpreter to explain their intentions to the male head of household.
“Is everybody OK with us being here?” Cronkhite says. They don’t mind, the interpreter relays. “That’s awesome.”
Cronkhite directs the conversation. She asks about the children, their ages, any illnesses. One woman is nine months pregnant. Cronkhite asks if there’s someone who delivers babies in the village. A 70-year-old woman with hennaed hands responds that she is their midwife.
Cronkhite asks to hold one of the babies. The infant girl begins to cry as Cronkhite shushes her. She asks if they can take photographs of the babies — and the women agree to be photographed, too, which is unexpected and delights the FET women.
Over the radio, the women are told to wrap it up. The whole mission takes two hours. Forty minutes after they return to base, the soldiers gather for a debrief. The men run through security issues. The FET members offer their assessment.
“They were very receptive to us being there,” Lopez says. “We felt very comfortable.”
The FET women are not assigned to the infantry. The FET soldiers are attached to the 1-5 “Bobcats.” It’s an important distinction in the Army.
“Technically, I don’t have any females assigned to this unit,” says Command Sgt. Maj. Ernest Bowen of the 1-5.
And though they are not officially assigned to the infantry, they are in combat.
“When you put boots on the ground on patrol — female, male, working dog, you’re as susceptible as anybody to contact with the enemy or stepping on a mine,” Bowen says. “They’re doing a great job out there with the guys. The FET has been value added. They go to interact and touch part of the population that male soldiers can’t.”
In Dand district, the 1-5 FET helped local women create water filtration systems using layers of sand in barrels with simple spigots. The FET soldiers also taught midwifery, well-baby, well-woman and basic hygiene classes. As a military police officer, Rodriguez is particularly proud of the small, new women’s unit in the Afghan Uniform Police in Qalat in Zabul District, where the women went from “wearing burkhas to wearing uniforms.”
Now the FET soldiers attached to the 1-5 are working in Panjawa’i District, hoping to create similar opportunities for Afghan women.
“I joined FET because I thought it was a great opportunity to reach out to Afghan women and children,” Sterna says. “It makes me feel like I’m doing something good, huge in life.”
“All of us were secretly hoping to get it,” Cronkhite says. “Not a lot of females get to go out on the line and do the things we get to do.”
In the morning, Sterna is among the first of the team to rise for the next mission. Before Cronkhite rolls out of bed and puts a dip of chewing tobacco in her mouth, Sterna has already showered and put on make-up.
“I put on make-up every day no matter what,” she says. “It makes me feel like I’m still a woman.” Her breakfast consists of the five P’s: two cinnamon Pop-Tarts, two cans of Pit Bull and a powered-sugar donut, followed by a Newport menthol cigarette.
The women will accompany 3rd Platoon Bravo Company on a clearing operation in Sekecha, a town the soldiers nicknamed “Sketchy.”
“If you come out with Bravo Company, you’re guaranteed to get in a firefight,” a soldier says.
Before the patrol begins, the soldiers give Sterna grief. She’s wearing her insulating poly-pro garments under her uniform and the guys repeatedly tell her she should remove it. They think she’ll overheat on patrol. A blonde with the broad shoulders and straight back of an athlete, Sterna holds her ground.
“I grew up with an older brother always picking on me and beating me up, so it doesn’t bother me much when the other guys here pick on me,” she says later. “I’m used to it. I just try to pick on them back.”
As a medic and veteran of many patrols, Cronkhite is put at the front of the first group, near the soldier on point with the Valon metal detector. Still in training, Sterna marches near the back of the second group. The terrain is challenging. The land around Sperwan Ghar is a maze of vineyards. The vines lean against tall mud supports and the soldiers must repeatedly climb over the 6-foot walls.
They reach a compound with only an older woman and several children living in it. Once the ANA and American soldiers have cleared the structure, Cronkhite and Sterna approach the woman with a translator. They remove their helmets and set aside their rifles. They sit on the dirt floor and face the woman. Cronkhite talks and Sterna takes notes.
“We are poor people. We have nothing to eat,” the woman says. “We make money by our farm.”
The soldiers discover two rooms half-filled with processed marijuana (their unconfirmed estimate: 5,000 pounds).
“What does she think about the women being here?” Cronkhite says.
“Yes, we’re happy the women are here.”
Not for long. The soldiers return and tell Cronkhite to tell the woman they’re going to burn her crop. It’s illegal to raise marijuana in Afghanistan.
“That’s the only way we have to make money,” the woman says. “If you want to destroy it, you must give us money.”
This turn of events puts Sterna and Cronkhite in a tough position. They came to discuss the woman’s concerns and needs. Now they’re telling her the soldiers will burn her cash crop.
“This is the first time we hear this is illegal,” the woman says. “If you destroy this, I won’t have food for my kids. Just forgive us this time. We won’t grow it again.”
“Tell them to stick to wheat and grapes,” Staff Sgt. Matt Huck says.
The American soldiers spend the next three and a half hours shoveling the marijuana into bags, which the ANA soldiers drag outside and dump into two piles for burning.
The Americans want to use the woman’s straw as a fire-starter. Again the woman protests. “This is for heating the house and making bread.”
The soldiers take some of the straw. The woman goes inside a room and does not return.
The Americans give the ANA soldiers the materials to set the blaze. As they burn the marijuana, they may also be burning the bridges that Sterna and Cronkhite intended to build.
Each woman has different rituals that surround departure for and return from a mission. A self-described troublemaker, Nunez listens to country music to relax. She often plays “If You’re Going Through Hell” by Rodney Atkins. At night, she and Sterna might join some of the male soldiers around a bonfire on the edge of their home base, Shoja. They’ll smoke cigarettes, laugh, call each other out and drink the non-alcoholic beer the soldiers call “near beer.”
James starts her day and missions with prayer.
“I wake up, listen to gospel, read my Bible and pray,” James says. “On Mondays, I fast. I only read the New Testament when I’m in the field cuz I can’t carry that big Bible. I believe in God and I pray to God and I can see him pulling me through.”
James is a single mother of two young boys, Dario, 10, and AJ, 6. She loves the Army and the FET and the chances both have given her.
“I still could do good for myself, my kids and my country.”
As a mother, James understands the challenges of the Afghan women she meets. She recalls an encounter on a recent mission near Khenjakak.
“I empathize with that older lady cuz her husband died and she’s struggling to make ends meet. That really touched me,” James says. “We’re there to help and at that particular moment, I couldn’t help. I am pushing to go back to that area. Out of the kindness even of their heart, they have no land to grow their food, they couldn’t provide for their family, they still gave us tea and bread. That shows their generosity and kindness.”
James has her after-mission rituals, too.
“Actually, I go to the shower first, then I go to the MWR (Morale Welfare Recreation center). I talk to my kids and my sister.”
Cronkhite calls her husband, Robert, who is a retired Army first sergeant.
“I called him after I got blown up,” Cronkhite says. She was returning from leave Oct. 21, 2011 when the Stryker vehicle she was traveling in hit an IED.
“It destroyed the mine roller. There were eight in that Stryker. James was in the gunner’s hatch,” Cronkhite says. “I got knocked out. I remember hearing it. It wasn’t loud. All that moon dust. We were all strapped down. It was a big boom and I’m a little girl.”
On Dec. 30, 2011, Battalion Commander Lt. Col. Brian Payne pinned a Purple Heart on Cronkhite. She is the only FET soldier to receive a Purple Heart and is one of only two women in the 1/25 Brigade to receive it. She also earned the Combat Medic Award for rendering medical aid while under fire.
She has mixed emotions about the Purple Heart.
“There’s guys who aren’t coming back who get that. I don’t know if I’m worthy of that. It kind of gets to me in the head when people congratulate me for it.”
She notes that both awards mean that someone got hurt. And she’s seen a lot of hurt.
She’s been a medic at the scene of multiple mass casualties.
The aftermath of one IED explosion sticks with her.
“It was rather graphic. Get the clothes off. Rinse off some of the stuff,” Cronkhite says. “We were all a little shell-shocked.”
Some soldiers survived, one with a double-amputation of his legs; one soldier died.
And she carries that weight with her, too.
Cheryl Hatch was a recent Snedden chair in the University of Alaska Fairbanks journalism department. She and photographer JR Ancheta, a UAF student, were embedded with a Fort Wainwright Stryker brigade unit in Afghanistan.
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