A decade of women in combat: ‘I had everything they had, plus 120 tampons’

She marched 12 miles with the same rucksack the men carried. She wriggled beneath knee-high barbed wire through the infamous muddy worm pit. The mountaineering phase was as frigid for her as it was for the men in Ranger School that winter.

Army Capt. Emily Lilly — then a single mother of two just a month shy of her 39th birthday — proved that she had the strength, endurance, grit, tenacity and respect from her peers to graduate from the Army’s toughest leadership course two years after it opened to women.