Women's secret war: the inside story of how the US military sent female soldiers on covert combat missions to Afghanistan

US marines with a female engagement team in southern Helmand province, Afghanistan, in May 2012. Cpl. Meghan Gonzales/DVIDS

A US Army handbook from 2011 opens one of its chapters with a line from Rudyard Kipling’s poem The Young British Soldier. Written in 1890 upon Kipling’s return to England from India, an experienced imperial soldier gives advice to the incoming cohort:

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains …