"Reflections in Brass" by Ashton Lynn Marie Goodman

In September, 2008, I read an online article about female soldiers in Afghanistan, members of Provincial Reconstruction Teams, or PRTs, living in remote provinces, helping to build roads, bridges, medical clinics and schools for Afghan villagers.

It is a story in itself—how I went from being seized by the idea of going to meet female soldiers acting in a peaceful capacity as humanitarians, to several months of intensive effort, gaining permission from the United States Air Force to be an embedded war journalist—but by January, 2009, I found myself first at Bagram Air Field, interviewing female combat pilots, and then in a military convoy traveling north to a small forward operating base in the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains in Panjshir Province.

At Forward Operating Base (FOB) Lion, I lived with the five military women stationed there, accompanying them on missions to schools and clinics, visiting the shrine of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the hero of Afghanistan and a son of Panjshir Province, and helping with an aid drop for impoverished families organized by these women soldiers. My driver on these missions was twenty-one-year-old Senior Airman Ashton Lynn Marie Goodman, or “Goodman,” as she preferred to be called. Initially intimidated by her tough talk, cussing and military bravado—all of it a veneer, she later admitted, cultivated for survival in a military culture—I came to know her as a mercurial, witty, highly intelligent and courageous young woman. Through online courses, she was studying for her Bachelor’s Degree and planning to become a veterinarian. She longed to travel the world and was an aspiring photographer and writer, extremely modest about what she called her “small stories.”

When I returned home, we kept up a correspondence. When I asked her to send me some of her writing, she did so, but hesitantly, with apologies. In reading Ashton’s stories, I was unsurprised to see how absolutely they reflected her personality—tender, heroic, irreverent, preternaturally wise, rawly honest and funny. She possessed what Albert Camus once described his friend Simon Weil, the philosopher and social activist, as having: “a passion for the truth.”

After she was assigned to the Women’s Affairs Committee, Ashton found new purpose in meeting with village women in weekly shuras or councils, in speaking up for the rights of Afghan women and children. She was learning, she told me, to fight with words, not weapons, and had requested a second tour of duty at FOB Lion. She loved the people of Panjshir and had found meaning in her work with the women. When she published her first article, “Panjshir PRT Medics Improve Medical Sanitation,” in an Air Force online publication, she sent it to her family, her boyfriend and to me.

On May 26th, 2009, days before her twenty-second birthday, Ashton, or “Goodman,” was killed by an improvised explosive device or IED as she was driving her commander to Bagram Air Field.

One of grief’s instincts is to memorialize, to keep the person who has died alive through tribute. In November, 2009, The Collagist published my article profiling the five military women of Panjshir Province’s PRT. In May, 2010, O, The Oprah Winfrey Magazine, printed my feature story about Ashton. In June, 2010, I founded the Ashton Goodman Fund with the Afghan Women’s Writing Project; donations to Ashton’s Fund have helped to build two safe writing houses for women in Kabul and Herat, complete with internet access, laptops, small libraries. In December, I spoke of Ashton’s life, her commitment to Afghan women, to nearly one thousand Air Force officers at the Air Force Institute of Technology. And in May, 2011, nine of Arizona State University’s MFA candidates in Creative Writing took part in the first university staged reading of poetry and prose by Afghan women writers.

But there was one promise I had made to myself that had not yet been kept. Before her death, I had vowed I would mentor Ashton, help her to publish at least one of her fiction pieces. Now Hayden’s Ferry Review, thanks to current editors Laura Ashworth and Kent Corbin, has given me an opportunity to keep that promise. “Reflections in Brass” is an artifact belonging to a young solider now buried near her home in Indiana, a young woman whose dreams of being a veterinarian, writer, photographer, wife and mother, were cut violently short in an unwinnable war. This brief piece, written when Ashton was a nineteen-year-old soldier in Iraq, gives us the merest glimpse of her promise as a writer. The person she was when she wrote it transformed profoundly in the months before her death—she became a spokesperson for Afghan women’s rights, using what she called “the power of words, not weapons,” turning her sword into the ploughshare of a medical clinic, a school, an article, an emergent voice of strength, tenderness and fierce empathy.

In her book, Joan of Arc, writer Mary Gordon describes the fifteenth century French warrior saint this way:

“... She has a young girl’s heedlessness, sureness, readiness for utter self-surrender. She loves life; she is afraid of dying. This cocky, pure, maddening, unwise girl forgot herself in a cause greater than herself. She was talky and self-contradictory; she died in silence. But even in death, she refuses singleness.”

Pure, maddening, cocky, sure. Surrendering to a cause greater than herself. Loving life, refusing singleness.

Oh, Ashton.

January 17/ Sept 2008

It was raining brass, brass from an automatic machine gun, raining down through the turret. It pinged harmlessly off my body armor, the ammunition that kills already downrange and embedded in the burnt up shell of a tank. It was dark outside. The current gunner stood up in the turret, his hands gripping the butt stock of the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon. His face was pressed against the thermal sight and struggled to make out the blobs of whites, greens, and blacks that were supposed to be our targets. The gunner’s feet moved relentlessly next to mine as he attempted to find the best stance and send only the most accurate rounds downrange.

Our training mission on this dark night was to engage and destroy “enemy tanks” in accordance with the regulations we’d been taught to abide by. The words “Enemy tank at 600 meters, at 12 o’clock” was followed by “Identified, engaged” and flowed freely from the gunner’s mouth without much thought. When had killing and destruction become so commonplace for us and was this normal? Was I supposed to feel something when the time came to shoot this weapon at a real person? But there wasn’t much time to think about this really. “Down gunner!” the cadre in charge of our Humvee yelled. He let us know that it was time to switch places. It was someone else’s turn to man the gun. My turn.

Even with all my bulky body armor on, my small size allowed me to move easily into the turret of the tank. The previous gunner didn’t have it so easy, the other soldiers in the vehicle had pulled and wrestled with his weight and size in order to fit him into the turret. He fell back into my previous seat and let out a loud sigh and I wondered if the same thoughts about killing were running through his head as well: Is this normal? Will I feel something when the time comes to actually shoot a person?

I surveyed my surroundings from my new place in the tank. Blackness was everywhere and broken only by a tracer round streaking through the night or from an occasional grenade flash nearby. “More ammo!” I yelled, my voice scratchy. I was practicing my killing skills. Early in my military career I’d gotten used to the fact that I would spend a ridiculous amount of time practicing killing on various ranges. There were dozens of weapons to qualify

for. This particular range was designed to allow gunners time on the turret of a Humvee, time to become familiar with the feel of weapons firing in their hands. It’s a powerful feeling to have a weapon at your command. It’s liberating and suffocating.

I loaded my weapon with a belt of ammo and closed the feed tray. The butt stock was smooth under my gloved hand. I felt for the best grip and hand placement around the gun. The range was surprisingly quiet. Gunners ceased fire. I placed my weapon onto the trigger and identified my target. I imagined the tanks in the distance to be the enemy; people who wanted me dead. I never felt rage like some soldiers did when they thought about the enemy. I didn’t feel much of anything about the enemy really. Was this a sign of cold- heartedness, or, a coping mechanism? I’m not sure it mattered either way.

The cadre jumped on top of the hood and inspected the weapon to make sure I’d loaded it correctly. I waited for the magic words, my finger on the trigger. “Enemy tank in the open, 400 meters, 12 o’clock. Identified. Engaged.” Pulling back in one smooth motion against the trigger weld, bullets exploded from the barrel into the night. The only indicator that I had actually hit my target was the cascade of brilliant sparks that illuminated the berms on the lane. Five to seven round bursts were the standard for the M249 SAW and to count this number in my head I chanted the words, “Die, motherfucker, die. Die, motherfucker, die.”

Finally, I ran out of ammo. The barrel of the weapon glowed a faint orange, and raindrops made slight sizzling noises as they fell onto the hot metal. The cadre barked for me to clear the weapon of bullets, but it was already done. I exited the turret and the next soldier made his way up to repeat the same drill. I sat in the seat he’d just vacated in my body armor and listened to the music of the battlefield. A grenade’s flash lit up the dark sky like lightening. It was just enough light to see the silhouette of an abandoned tank off in the distance. Raindrops beat against my armor and made small clinking noises against the metal. I thought about the first time I shot a weapon in Basic Training. My M16 was old and beat up, but got the job done. At first, I was afraid of the rifle’s weight and of what the weapon could do. But it wasn’t long until I realized that a weapon is servant to its handler. A weapon will only do what it is told to do.