1LT Ashley White- someone you should know.
And you will. Hollywood is making a movie about her and Reese Witherspoon is going to portray her. 1LT White was part of a cultural support team assigned to US special forces in Afghanistan. CSTs are used to interface with the Afghan woman since men searching woman is a big faux paux in that society.
She was killed in a roadside bomb blast in Kandahar province’s Zhari district on Oct. 22, 2011.
White was part of the second group of CST members to deploy to Afghanistan, according to an Associated Press report published shortly after her death. The female soldiers deployed alongside special operations units to assist in areas critical to the mission but sensitive to the population — searching women for weapons, for example, or finding insurgents who were using burqas as disguises.
The Alliance, Ohio, native volunteered for the job, according to her Army Special Operations Command biography. It was her first deployment to Afghanistan. She was 24.