Forty female Marines volunteered to go to the highly segregated southern Pashtun region to try to connect with the half of the population inaccessible to male Marines

By Gretel C. Kovach, Sign On San Diego

MARJAH, Afghanistan — Sgt. Vanessa Jones and her teammates filed through the countryside with a squad of U.S. infantrymen and Afghan troops. They pushed through tall grass and leaped over canals, spilling into fields of sunflowers and the emerald spikes of marijuana plants rustling above their helmets. Then they waited, tucked into a ridge of dirt, while fellow Marines checked on a bomb dug into the road.

Jones and her partner, Lance Cpl. Yvonne Blanco, were among a group of 40 volunteers who deployed to Afghanistan this spring to serve as Female Engagement Teams, a detachment organized by the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Pendleton.

The new teams were sent to the highly segregated Pashtun south of the country to connect with the female half of the population that is inaccessible to male Marines, to assess their needs, convey information, perform security searches, and whenever possible, win the support of Afghan mothers and daughters.

The Marines knew it would be a tough assignment. Keeping up with the all-male infantry units is perhaps the least of their many obstacles. Jones and Blanco’s first patrol in Marjah, one of the most hostile areas of the Taliban heartland for U.S. and NATO forces, underscored the challenge.

After two hours of walking, the Marines saw many men and boys, but no women. Except for a shrouded passenger on the back of a motorcycle who passed in a blur of billowing fabric.

“It’s a slow process,” said Capt. Emily Naslund, the officer in charge of the teams. “If you keep returning, maybe weeks or months later they might open up.”

The engagement teams grew out of the Lioness program in Iraq, when female soldiers and Marines were used largely in a search capacity to protect the privacy of local women. Now the teams are spread across 16 locations in Helmand Province.

Their experiences and results vary greatly by team, depending on the level of combat in the area, the reception of village leaders or heads of households, and even their U.S. military commanders.

At their best, the female teams have been able to help women start their own businesses sewing and making handicrafts, particularly among widows, and to host clinics flocked with women seeking basic medical care. In those areas, village elders vie among themselves for the work of the female teams and Afghan men sometimes share information with them that they are reluctant to divulge to male Marines, commanders said.

“We soften the conversation,” said Staff Sgt. Nela Gomez.

As the teams’ seven-month tour draws to a close, their replacements are training for the battlefield, and NATO regional commands throughout Afghanistan have instituted similar programs. But the female teams are still finding their footing.

Some infantry commanders were reluctant initially to let female Marines leave base. Several of the teams have bounced from battalion to battalion, starting over each time in the struggle to gain the respect of American infantrymen, then Afghan men who act as gatekeepers to the women, and finally the women themselves.

Jones found a potential opening into the hidden world of Marjah’s women at the bazaar. As she bantered with a group of boys, who told her they most certainly did not want their sisters to attend school, three little girls studied her from afar.

“I am a girl!” Jones yelled, speaking in Pashto. (In her combat gear it wasn’t obvious.) “Are you a girl, too?”

“Yes!” the smallest shouted. Then she looked around to see if anyone heard and jumped to hide behind her brother, smiling sheepishly.

It was a good start, Jones reported back at Combat Outpost Reilly. They had distributed information about schools and other services in the area, and the children might eventually lead them to their mothers.

But Lance Cpl. Jacob Vineyard told the squad he was concerned about balancing engagement with safety: “Talking to the kids, it’s not a good idea in an open field to stand there with that many people for so long. We can only pull so much security for so long.”

The female teams have grappled with pressures from the homefront as well, among those who feel women should not work in areas exposing them to ground combat. When the perennial issue boiled over on Capitol Hill this summer, the female teams were recalled to the rear for a two-week operational pause.

Out in the field, the women Marines are limited by the dearth of female translators who can withstand the rigors of life on remote patrol bases, with Afghan men who insist on speaking for their wives, and doors that remain perennially closed to them.

But the potential payoff for their persistence is great, Naslund said. “In the long run, if they’re supporting us they’re not supporting the Taliban.”

The Golf Company commander, Capt. Daniel Nilsson, had requested a female team for his area. He hopes they will better engage both men and women, opening a dialogue and “a different dimension between the local populace and the Marines that are here.”

Heaven is at the feet of the mother in this part of the world, said Maj. Dallas Shaw, the battalion operations officer. “There is key physical terrain – roads, mountains. But there is also key human terrain. You can stand on key physical terrain all day and still lose. The key in the home is the mother.”

The U.S. counterinsurgency manual, citing influential Australian strategist David Kilcullen, says, “In traditional societies, women are hugely influential in forming the social networks that insurgents use for support.

“Co-opting neutral or friendly women through targeted social and economic programs builds networks of enlightened self-interest that eventually undermine insurgents.”

By that parameter, victory in Afghanistan will be measured in simple things, Jones said: “Simple for us but difficult for them in this place and these times,” like boys and girls going to school, and women free to walk without an escort or own their own shops.

“What we are doing is going to help get there, but sometimes it seems like it’s going to take years to do this, not whenever we’re slated to pull out,” she said. In the end Afghans will be responsible for winning: “We are just showing them the way.”

In another area of northern Marjah, a little boy sitting along a canal recognized the black spectacles and tight blond bun wrapped beneath a Marine’s helmet. “Mariam!” he called, using Cpl. Kathryn Mannion’s Afghan nickname.

After a month in that locale, Mannion and Lance Cpl. Sharhonda Jones have a good rapport with the men of Echo Company. Their commander, Capt. Chuck Anklam, sends the female team out with the infantrymen several times a week.

At the bazaar’s flour mill, Mannion stopped to chat with a group of men and children. “Do you know any women here who can sew?” she asked one gentleman. “In the coming weeks we hope to get some sewing machines and I’d like to give them to people who need them.”

The man she spoke to shook her hand and seemed open to the idea. He agreed to discuss it again when the machines arrived.

A 10-year-old boy named Azadoo asked Mannion for one of the plastic bracelets he knew she kept in her pack. “I will give it to my sister,” he said, trying it on for size. Then the men drove away, the boys perched behind the tractor on sacks of fresh-milled flour, and the Marines walked home.

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