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Female engagement teams train for Afghan future

  • Published
  • By Spc. Amanda M. Hils
  • 319th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment
JOINT BASE MCGUIRE-DIX-LAKEHURST, N.J. --  Unlike typical military engagement teams, where traditionally male Soldiers meet with key leaders in villages and towns near their areas of operation, two Soldiers from the 324th Psychological Operations Company Tactical, Detachment 11, are at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst training in a new capacity.

Everyone involved in this pre-deployment scenario, Soldiers and role players alike, are female.

PSYOP specialists Staff Sgt. Kailah M. Karl and Spc. Nataly L. Clapp, are the only females in their detachment and have been tasked to become part of a Female Engagement Team. This team is designed specifically to address the importance of proper interaction and relationship building with female Afghans during deployments.

"The FET is a relatively new idea, and as far as we can tell right now, they're not really using the typical Psychological Operations element with FETs, which makes us excited about getting out there," said Karl.

In line with females participating in operations, the Afghan National Army has been adding females to its ranks across many military occupational specialties since September 2010.

"Our whole job is affecting change, and it's what we do," Clapp added. "It's really nice we're not ignoring half the population."

Since starting in January, there have been four PSYOP detachments receivinged the FET training, said Sgt. Jayson L. Ferrell, a trainer with A Company, 1st Battalion, 1st Training Brigade, United States Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command stationed here.

"It was a tool which wasn't being utilized across the board, and it's something that just came about in Afghanistan, so we implemented it in our training," he said.

Ferrell outlined the major training objectives to include building rapport and initial relationships with key persons in the area where Soldiers are assigned. There is also an emphasis on consequence management, where the FET will learn how to deal with a situation that has gone awry, how to quell it and re-establish rapport.

Clapp and Karl were placed in scenarios where they met with a small group of women within a town to begin building a relationship with them. During meetings with the women, they found out what kind of problems the town was having and how their detachment could help. They also discussed previous interactions between the town and American servicemembers.

The primary scenario dealt with engaging major female leaders via an interpreter during an initial meeting. The second scenario drew from the first but added in a degree of difficulty when Clapp and Karl were given just fifteen minutes to explain to the women Soldiers would be conducting a search of their homes at the end of the fifteen minutes. Melding both scenarios together, the last required the FET to reestablish rapport and trust after the search in a tense meeting with the insulted Afghan women.

"It meets my expectations and in a lot of ways exceeded them," Clapp said about the training.

Clapp and Karl have an opportunity to be one of only a handful of trained FETs overseas when they leave for eastern Afghanistan in a couple of weeks.

"We may not be able to affect a heck of a lot right now," Karl said, "but those women raise little women and they raise boys, and the cities are coming up and becoming more urban, more westernized. So with a full-blown Western female they are talking to females that are coming up, there could be a lot of change. It may not be this generation, but it'll definitely be the next and after that."