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KUNAR PROVINCE, EASTERN AFGHANISTAN — Lt. Lauren Luckey was in the courtyard of the Nari girls school handing out boxes of cookies and coloring books when the radio piece attached to her right earlobe cracked out a warning that no one else could hear.

A suspected member of the Taliban was standing in the crowd rapidly amassing in front of the school’s metal gate, and her six-man security squad wanted her to hurry up.

Inside the courtyard, the principal was not satisfied.

“This little stuff will not do so much,” he said, pointing at the heavy green bag of donated supplies Luckey was lugging toward his office with her left hand.  Her right hand steadied her rifle, which was swinging against her body armor.

Luckey put the bag down.  Her trip to the school had been postponed for nearly a month while her battalion waged a bloody campaign to construct two security outposts nearby.  Every resource on hand had been devoted to the fight, which killed nearly 150 insurgents, and for weeks no soldiers had been available to provide her security escort.  She wanted to get the most out of the visit.

“We are concerned about the well,” the principal said.  In the center of the courtyard there was a well, dug by a previous unit before Luckey arrived in Afghanistan.   It had been broken for years, he said, and the girls were wasting valuable learning time taking trips to the river to collect water in metal buckets.  Bacteria in the river were making his students sick.  “So many Americans came and took the complaint that we have no water, but no one came back to take care of it.  The girls need water.”

Her radio cracked again.  There were now four Taliban in the crowd.  Luckey had five minutes, her men estimated, before the situation got dangerous.

The principal continued, “And the roof.  It’s leaking.”

Moving quickly, without betraying any emotion, Luckey assured the principal she would look into the cost of fixing the roof and well.  She then shook his hand, ducked into a classroom of bewildered schoolgirls, waved a quick goodbye, and slipped out the front gate.

The visit was frustrating but routine for Luckey, who is the only member of the 2nd Battalion, 27th Infantry regiment’s so-called “female engagement team,” in Kunar province.  Kunar — a wild, mountainous region that shares a porous border with Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal areas — is a haven for weapons smugglers and foreign fighters.  The population is so isolated that when 2-27 arrived from Schofield Barracks in Hawaii local villagers mistook them for Russian soldiers. With just two months left in their deployment, 2-27 is trying to solidify the fragile gains it has made in the region.  Luckey’s struggle to visit the Nari school underscores how delicate those gains are, despite 10 years of war.

Luckey, a 23-year old former goalie for the University of Massachusetts women’s soccer team, had no training in Afghan history or language when her superiors told her that she would be running the battalion’s female team, just a month and a half before they left Oahu for Kunar.  She was a chemical officer, trained to analyze nuclear and biological threats.

“I gave myself a crash course on female engagement,” she explained, sitting in her office at forward operating base Bostick, 2-27’s headquarters in Kunar. “I read everything I could on the internet and talked to everyone, but I didn’t really know how it would work before I got here.”

No one did.  Before Luckey, 2-27 had no official female program in place.  Since 2004, the unit has been on a grueling deployment cycle to Iraq, with little down time between combat tours.

The concept of so-called “female engagement teams” is not new.  It began in 2006, when the Marines developed a program that taught female Marines to search Iraqi women at security checkpoints.  In conservative Muslim cultures it is considered offensive for a woman to be touched or seen by a man outside of her immediate family.  During the 2009 surge into the extremely conservative south of Afghanistan, where such an offense can cause a feud ending in death, Marine officers decided to take the Iraqi program one step further.

“Waging a counterinsurgency war is an exercise in politics — violent politics,” said former Marine Captain Matt Pottinger, who helped create the first female team in Afghanistan.  “You’re trying to win friends and allies, but we’ll settle for some degree of support, or even neutrality within a local population.”

In 2009, Pottinger pulled female volunteers to patrol with him from squads of mechanics and desk clerks. Information on Afghan culture was scarce, and he dug through dated encyclopedias and books like the 1962 James Michener novel, “Caravans,” to glean whatever insights he could.

The Marine Corps has since streamlined the program.  On their last deployment to southern Afghanistan from North Carolina in 2011, the Marines had nearly 50 dedicated female engagement team members — each with three months of specialized language and culture lessons, as well as additional combat training.

Before they left, each woman was assigned to a two-person team.  In Afghanistan, the teams were attached to male combat platoons in the field for 45 days at a time; they had money and supplies available to try to launch humanitarian projects for Afghan women in the field.  A designated staff of female officers monitored the teams from Camp Leatherneck, their headquarters in southern Afghanistan. 

But despite all of this, female Marines on the ground say the program yielded few measurable gains.

Marine Sgt. Meredith Burns, 27, last year deployed to Helmand province, where the security situation was stable enough that Afghan women walked to her post on foot and asked for her by name.  Burns said she had plenty of money and equipment to build chicken farms for widows and poor women in the area, but most of it went unused.

“They don’t want us to come to their house,” she said.  “They think people are watching them and will hurt them if they see them working with the Marines.”

In Kunar province, Luckey has no dedicated funds, supplies, or teammates to accompany her on patrols.   

Her missions are shadowed by the threat of violence.  The last time she visited a local midwife clinic the Taliban said they would behead any woman in attendance.  To date, there is no report that this has happened, but there is reason to believe they are serious; around the same time, two brothers who worked as security guards at Bostick were stopped at an impromptu Taliban checkpoint nearby.  One brother was released; the other was kidnapped and beheaded a few days later.

Even Luckey’s own living quarters are unsafe. Mortar attacks from the tall, rocky mountains surrounding Bostick are a fact of life.  A few weeks after the Nari school visit, one landed just outside Luckey’s bedroom while she was sleeping and gravely wounded a soldier walking by.

In this environment, Army regulations dictate that Luckey always travel in the company of at least four gun trucks and 16 gunmen when she goes into Afghan villages, but 2-27 rarely has a soldier or truck to spare.

The night before she visited the Nari girls school, Luckey worked her contacts in the unit to see which squads were available to escort her to the village.  The best she could come up with was a platoon trained to remove roadside bombs — while other soldiers protect their position.

One of her friends in the unit — a salty former Marine with multiple deployments in both Iraq and Afghanistan — agreed to fill in as an extra gunman on the patrol.  He shook his head as he and five soldiers from the bomb squad escorted Luckey and two female volunteers on foot, across the Kunar river and out of the sightline of the four gun trucks perched on its banks.

“I don’t like this,” he muttered, jerking his head toward the baby-faced soldiers.   It was raining and misty. “These guys haven’t fired their rifles since Hawaii, at least.”

There are only a handful of women deployed among the roughly 800 American soldiers living at Bostick, and with the exception of Luckey, they are all serving in support positions. Whenever Luckey goes on a patrol, she must ask their superiors for permission to bring them along.

That day she had approval to bring two female soldiers to Nari—a mechanic and a medic.  The battalion went on high alert as Luckey and the women prepared to leave Bostick’s heavily guarded perimeter.

“If Luckey went out the wire and she got into a firefight we’d level Kunar,” said Captain Ron Hopkins, 27, the unit’s fire support officer.  “I have no doubt in my mind.  She has 800 brothers — she’s got an infantry battalion,” he said.

But that afternoon as she and her small entourage made their way through the Nari village, where groups of young men and boys gathered along the road to watch the Americans, Luckey explained that she wasn’t worried. 

“If they start shooting, we’ll just take a house,” she said, gesturing at a hut built into the rocky mountainside. Fog poured off the surrounding peaks and seeped into the open holes in its mud walls.

She had high hopes for the afternoon.  In the past week she had worked around the clock researching the costs of creating a program to help the area’s widows start their own sewing businesses.  The local police chief had promised to bring the widows to meet Luckey at the girls school, were she would also hand out donated supplies to the students.

The widow’s program was only in the ideas phase, but it had taken weeks of politicking to get the local governor on board.  He had been away at a family wedding, and finally came to Bostick to meet Luckey for a face-to-face meeting.  Over plates of diced lamb and rice, he agreed that helping the Nari widows was a good idea.

“I want to give them a sustainable job,” she explained, sitting on the floor next to the governor — he was barefoot; she wore her combat boots.  “One that they can keep going for years after the Americans aren’t here anymore.”

She wanted to try to set up a soccer team at the Nari girls school—“wouldn’t that be cool?!”—but didn’t tell the governor.  She also couldn’t tell him that she planned to visit Nari in just two days — the chance that the information could be leaked was too risky.

Once she canceled a visit to the home of the Bostick laundryman, whose wife had arranged a feast for her and dozens of local women, after discovering that her translator — a U.S. citizen—had told the laundryman that they would be coming the next afternoon.

“But ma’am, we have to go,” protested the translator.  “They’ve already slaughtered the goats.”

She knew it would amount to a personal insult to the laundryman’s family, but Luckey would not budge. If information of her travel plans spread accidentally to one of his assistants or beyond, insurgents could have almost 24 hours — more than enough time — to plan an attack on her convoy, or the Afghan women visiting her.

On the morning she left for Nari, Luckey called the local police chief and told him she was on her way to the village.  Her patrol would make the obligatory first stop at the governor’s sprawling compound, and then go on to the school.  Could he have the widows assembled there?

The police chief promised he would. 

An hour later, Luckey, a female medic, and a female mechanic gathered near the Bostick helicopter pad, where the soldiers from the bomb squad were readying the four gun trucks that would escort them to the governor’s compound. 

The group of 20-odd soldiers circled around Luckey and her truck commander, who discussed evacuation plans in case they were ambushed or struck a roadside bomb en route. 

“All right, does anyone have any questions about this mission?” Luckey asked, as they wrapped it up.

No one answered.

Moments later the massive, armored trucks rolled toward the Bostick main gate in a single-file line.  They were stalled for a long time at the test fire pit; before leaving the gunner always tests the vehicle’s missile system — today the gunner couldn’t get the weapons to shoot.

Luckey was having difficulty with her radio.  No one at the command center inside of Bostick could hear her. 

“Just relay your messages through me, ma’am,” offered the truck commander from his seat in the front, as Luckey struggled with her settings.

At the governor’s compound the governor, police chief and Nari school principal and vice-principal — all men — greeted Luckey and her small team with short, welcoming speeches.  Afterward Luckey began discussing her plans for the widows.

“We never talked about widows,” said the governor.  There were no widows waiting at the school, he continued.

“Anyway, the widows are not so important,” said the police chief.  “What you need to do is focus on the young children, the future generation of Afghanistan.”

A flash of annoyance flickered across Luckey’s face. “OK, well, I have some things to give out, and I’d like to visit the girls at the school,” she said evenly.

For the next few hours she drank cups of chai and ate plates of rice and chicken as the Afghan men discussed among themselves if she should even go to the girls school.

“You’ll scare the students,” the principal argued.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” complained the police chief.   “I cannot guarantee it is safe.  You should drive into the village in our police trucks,” he said.

“I appreciate that, but we have certain rules to follow,” replied Luckey.  “We cannot ride in your trucks.”

There was a long pause.

“Well if you don’t mind about safety and security that much, you can walk from here,” said the police chief.

She laughed. “Safety and security is my number one priority,” she said.

Finally they agreed that the police chief and his men would drive in their trucks alongside Luckey and her team, who would walk the mile between the governor’s compound and the Nari school.  Her four gun trucks were too heavy for the wooden bridge they had to cross; they would stay parked on the banks of the river, fully manned.

By the time she reached the metal gate of the school building, Luckey had been in Nari for the better part of a day and still not spoken to a single Afghan woman.

Her security team waited in front of the gate while Luckey and her two female volunteers went inside; it would be offensive for the male soldiers to enter the school and see the girls uncovered. 

Inside, the principal escorted Luckey to a classroom where she removed her helmet and pushed her wrap-around anti-ballistic sunglasses to the crown of her head.  The students pulled their headscarves tightly around their mouths and stared.

“These are for you,” she said, holding up packages of colored markers.

Silence.

After a few more awkward attempts to speak to the girls, she left the markers on one of the wooden desks and walked on to another classroom.  The scene repeated itself several times, but Luckey said she thought she was making a positive impact.

“I think by seeing me, they see that there is more to life then just, ‘hey I’m going to get married and have all of these babies and have to walk to the river five times a day and cook and clean,” she said later.

There was a rare bright moment when Luckey stepped inside of a classroom where a female teacher was instructing the students in English.  A young girl stepped up and shyly read the word “orange” from the board.

“Wow,” Luckey said to herself from her perch on top of a desk in the corner of the room.  “That’s amazing.” She was beaming.

Just about 30 minutes after arriving at the school her squad radioed the five-minute warning.

She wanted to stay, but she thought of the six soldiers standing guard outside the metal gate.  If any of the Taliban outside tried to launch an attack, they would be the first ones to get hit, she said.  “You feel responsible for your guys,” she explained.

That evening she sat at a table in a conference room at Bostick and ate snacks that had arrived in a care package from her grandmother.

She was frustrated, she said, but felt that visiting the girls at school had made the day worthwhile.

“Have I put the girls at risk?  I’ll find out tomorrow,” she said, looking around the room.  “That’s what I have to live with.  Am I really helping them or am I hurting them?”