I will try to tell this story without giving too much details. I was a female soldier in Afghanistan and my duties were mostly logistics and medical. I was deployed in an area which was considered high risk.

On the very first day of my arrival, my team attempted to save the lives of two young marines. They were part of a search and recovery unit whose mission was to locate weapons in a village. Their vehicle came under fire and when it returned, the driver was bleeding badly, and the one next to him was dead. Two others in the same vehicle were also shot and badly injured. Only one of the two made it.

It is a culture where a lot of people have guns and not everyone who has guns is your enemy. Such missions were rarely producing the desired result. When teams went out, they would get ambushed and not much was gathered in terms of weapons or intelligence.

Then one day our base was visited by an Afghan father and his twelve year old boy. He attempted to tell us that his wife was in labor and she needed medical help. The area where he lived was roughly the same where the vehicle had been ambushed on my first day. My CO felt that this could be an attempt to lure us into a second ambush. He initially said, "My command puts me responsible for my troops and not for them." But when we looked at both of them, they were visibly very distressed. There was no way a father and his twelve year old son could act so convincingly.

After that, he called me and said "Go to your team and see if you can get volunteers for this." I went to my team, got the names and came back. I told him that these are the volunteers and my name is also in them. He said "Make sure that they (father and son) ride with you."

A few minutes a convoy was heading down the same route. The medical team in it was all women. We drove through narrow alleys and to say that I was not nervous would be a lie. Every time I felt afraid, I would look at the twelve year old and that kid made me believe that nothing would happen.

They took us inside the house where the mother was in labor. Only women were permitted in there and there were four of us. We performed a C-section and delivered a baby girl. The father was so grateful that he would not let us leave without food. Villagers began to bring little things as gifts and souvenirs. We all returned back that evening, loaded with shawls, and rugs.

After that, I would visit to see how the mother and the daughter were doing. No one was shooting at us. Instead I became a celebrity among Afghan women. Every time I would visit, they would come to greet me. Since we were in good terms with the women in there, all female teams were then used to conduct search missions in that same village.

These all-female teams were four times more effective than all-male teams. They visited four times more places than the all male units and did not encounter any resistance. Not a single shot! We went from house to house with our translators, and everyone would open their doors to them. We met so many women and came back with information that was openly given to us.

Today is the day our team delivered that baby girl. It is her birthday and I wonder how she is doing. I just wanted to say how proud I am of what my sisters-in-arms did. They took exactly the same risk as male soldiers, performed four times better but you will never see a Hollywood movie on them. They never blew up anything.