Devil brigade trains up its first female engagement team

By Sgt. Michael J. MacLeod
1st BCT, 82nd Abn. Div. PAO

December 15, 2011

	Photo by Sgt. Michael J. MacLeod/1st BCT, 82nd Abn. Div. PAO Paratroopers with the 82nd Airborne Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team don headscarves during training on how to engage Afghan females to learn their needs, Nov. 11, at Fort Bragg. Brigade combat teams deploying to Afghanistan are required to train and employ female engagement teams.

Some volunteered and some were “voluntold,” but all of the female paratroopers assigned to the Army’s newest female engagement team, or FET, were excited and a little nervous about a possible deployment to Afghanistan.

Pfc. Olivia Guzman-Tejeda, a support Soldier with the 82nd Airborne Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, wanted to be a military policewoman when she joined the Army, but because she was only 17, she was ineligible.

“This is the closest I can get,” she said, noting that her odds of being on the front lines of the military effort in Afghanistan are now greatly increased as a FET member.

Brigade combat teams deploying to Afghanistan are required to train and employ FETs, according to Maj. Russell Bagley, 1st BCT, 82nd Abn. Div. civil affairs officer. With a likely deployment just months away, Bagley and his noncommissioned officer in charge, Sgt. 1st Class Calen Bullard, were charged with building the ‘Devil’ Brigade’s first FETs.

FETs are designed to gather information to address social, economic and welfare needs of indigenous communities by tapping into its female component, allowing the brigade combat team as a whole to better assist with the security needs of the communities, in partnership with Afghan security forces, according to Bullard.

FETs have been employed in Afghanistan as early as 2007, but because the brigade’s last few deployments were to Iraq, it is their first experience with the concept.

With that imperative, the brigade’s civil affairs team recently trained 34 female paratroopers, to be divided among the unit’s infantry battalions and companies.

“How can you know what people need if you are disregarding 50 percent of the population?”
asked Bullard to his class of trainees. A transfer from the special operations community’s 95th Civil Affairs Brigade, Bullard has deployed five times, including tours to Iraq and the Philippines.

“The FET allows us to know what the Afghan women need to make their lives better through their own eyes,” he explained.

Cultural and religious mores in Afghanistan do not allow females to converse with males to whom they are not related, and females who violate the taboo may be severely punished or even put to death.

Trainees learned that engagement does not mean collecting military intelligence on the “bad guys.” Rather, by building bonds with Afghan women, FETs gain access to real-time domestic and social needs of communities.

The training included two weeks of classroom lectures, augmented by civilian language and cultural experts.

“The first week we learned Pashtu — how to say hello, how are you, and how to answer back,” said Guzman, who found rolling the R’s in Pashtu words particularly easy because she also speaks Spanish.

Informal meetings with guest speakers rounded out the training with lessons learned in the field — always teach fellow male Soldiers to respect you at all times so they show you respect “outside the wire” when Afghans are watching. Also, test your interpreter before you leave the wire because they are an extension of you. Remember to use the traditional female headscarf depending on the situation and know that it may conflict with how Afghans see you as an empowered female (not male or female but rather as a third gender.) Develop critical thinking skills now because you will need them to discern what Afghan women need today (and not a year ago.) Finally, teach your commanders how you are operationally relevant to them.

According to one team member of an initial FET attached to the 82nd Abn. Div.’s 4th BCT in 2007, by engaging Afghan women in Khost province, the team was responsible for a 60 percent drop in (combat) operations. Those are numbers that will get any commander’s attention, she said.

“It’s not about proving that you are as good as the guys,” said the former FET member, now a college professor at a Florida university. “If you do, you’re missing the point. We have strengths in areas where men don’t. It’s not about getting women in combat. Toughness in Iraq backfired on us.”

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