Women Have Served in Combat Roles for a Decade. The Pentagon is Reopening the Debate

[Tony]

In Army Ranger school, Emelie Vanasse once sat under a poncho in the pouring rain and shivered so hard her entire body cramped up. She strapped on a rucksack that weighed more than 100 pounds and climbed a mountain. Deep in the middle of the woods, she hallucinated a donut shop.

When Capt. Kristen Griest and 1st Lt. Shaye Haver became the first women to make it through Ranger training in 2015, Vanasse had taped their pictures above her desk.

“I’m next,” she told herself then. “It’s gonna be me.”

Less than two years later, she woke up at three a.m., shaved her head—one-quarter inch all around—and drove to Camp Rogers, Georgia, to endure 62 days of crawling through the mud, rappelling down mountainsides, and leading fellow soldiers in training raids and ambushes while hungry and sleep-deprived. She graduated with another woman as the fourth and fifth female Rangers in the Army’s 249-year history.