Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, Ashley’s War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield, Sydney, HarperCollins, 2015.

Judging by the slightly misleading title, one might think the book is about a team of ferocious female fighters who, gun in hand, fought side by side with the U.S Rangers. It is not. It is about a very small group of military women who provided those units with something known as “cultural support” by questioning and searching Afghan women in an attempt to avoid offending “cultural sensibilities” in that country. To no avail, of course, in so far as the war was hopelessly lost long before the women arrived on the scene in 2011.

The story follows the careers of a few of these women, in some cases from the moment they came into the world. Many were born to military families. Ohers came from the kind of small towns so prevalent in the US where nothing ever happens and people have no future, only a present. Others still came from families that did not have the money to allow them to study, which explains their decision to go for ROTC and join the army. Asked why they volunteered for CST (Cultural Support Team) training, most answered that they wanted to “prove themselves” to themselves. And to advance their careers, of course. Even if, as happened in quite a few cases, doing so meant leaving their little children for months and months on end.

As the author admits, “the training program for the female enablers did not come anywhere close to the formal preparation of Special Forces or Ranger Regiment men” with whom they were supposed to work. Good: or presumably the outcome would have been lots of female cripples hobbling about on crutches and drawing pensions. And why, one female trainee asks, don’t male soldiers want to carry female ones or be carried by them during training? Because they worry about being falsely accused of “sexual harassment,” that’s why. To the point that some commanders in Afghanistan have tried to ban all non-duty communication between male and female soldiers. Or at least monitor it as closely as they could.

Having received lots and lots of PT and acquired a smattering of Afghan culture, the women found themselves in that Godforsaken country. And what did they actually do? Here is what. “A week or so in, one CST discovered an AK-47 buried in the ground just beneath a woman she was searching… Out one night with her Ranger platoon, Cassie was called up to the front of formation to help calm a young girl whose father was known to be part of a group planning attacks on Afghans and Americans.” The girl, however, told Cassie to go to hell and spat obscenities at her. Enter Nadia, an Afghan-American interpreter or “terp,”, as they are known. Nadia was not a CST and had not received the relevant training. Yet her linguistic skills made her more useful than all the other women combined. Even so, trying “to build bridges between the Afghan women and the American soldiers who led the missions… she found few takers.” Scant wonder, I should say.

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At one point the Rangers engaged some Afghans in a firefight. Meanwhile Ashley White, the CST after whom the book is named, “was standing in the open air of the main compound’s courtyard questioning the women and children.” In fact the real heroines of this particular episode were not Ashley and her interpreter. They were the Afghan women. Torn out of their beds in the middle of the night and trying to protect their children, they surprised Ashley by taking the ransacking of their houses and the nearby gun battle with “relative composure.” It is they, not Ashley, who should have been awarded the Combat Action Badge.

I read the book from cover to cover. Easy, because so much of Ashley’s War consists of filler. It bristles with totally irrelevant stories about Japanese Americans in World War II, the history of dogs in the army, the history of a military hospital in Kandahar… The one thing it does not offer is serious analysis, either of CST or of anything else, from which anything can be learnt. It is not even a war novel (some war novels are very good indeed, presenting reality better than reality itself can). It is a fourth-rate sob story masquerading as reportage. Which, given that all names except that of Ashley and her immediate relatives have been changed, it may or may not be.

Much of the remaining material consists of rather infantile descriptions of the heroines’ background and their emotions. For example: “Rigby… 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.” “Her eyes felt like glass that was being sandblasted.” “North Carolina has the brightest stars I’ve ever seen, Tristan thought.” “Six months into the job, Nadia realized that the shallow, label-conscious Afghan-American girl she once was had disappeared, and in her place was a steely professional.” While on the final, hardest of all, road march, Ashley “heard the flapping wings of birds flying above against the steady, in and out pattern of her own breath and the tap-tap-tap of her own heart.” Actually that is not at all what a human heart sounds like during strenuous exercise (as a former Marathon runner, I should know). One purple passage follows another. Or would have, had the author known how to write them properly.

A pity Freud did not have a chance to read the book. He would have found in it an almost inexhaustible treasure trove of penis envy from which to draw examples for his own works. We meet “ironman women” (why not simply “ironwomen”?) Women routinely address other women by calling them “guys.” “It [a grueling road march] will be a suckfest, Kate promised.” “Why wasn’t I born a boy, [Cassie] often thought to herself, so I can do what I really want to do?” Repeatedly, trainees who are not doing well enough are told, by their fellow trainees, to “man up.” Tracey, a lieutenant, “considered making herself more ‘masculine’ and harder-edged for the sake of fitting in.” The women “were undeniably proud to have a chance to wear the uniform worn by the Army’s hardest fighters.” Anything but do the one thing men cannot do as well as, or better than, women. Namely, have children and raise them as they deserve to be.

Towards the end of the book Ashley dies of injuries received when an improvised explosive device (IED) goes off near her. That finally entitles her to the greatest accolade of all: namely, to be called, after a 1910 speech by Theodore Roosevelt, “The Man [my emphasis] in the Arena.” Had I been a military woman, and had anyone written about me the way Ms. Lemmon does, I would have died much earlier.

Of shame.