AS SOON AS the sun came up that morning, people began arriving at the FET’s checkpoint. All vehicles entering the area near the polling station were searched. Women and children were removed from the vehicles and directed over to Stacey’s team, where they could be searched for weapons or explosives behind a privacy barrier.

After Stacey and her team had been on their feet and engaged in this incredibly physically and mentally tough and tense environment for more than ten hours, a dingy and rusted vehicle drove up. An Afghan woman and man got out. When directed over to Stacey and her team, the man grabbed the woman by the elbow and with one arm around her waist, began to push her in Stacey’s direction. She was covered from head to toe in a blue burka. All the other women up until that moment had come over to the FET’s location without being accompanied by any men.

Stacey could tell immediately that something was “not right.” The woman was fidgeting, dragging her feet, and had to be forcibly moved forward by her male companion. Stacey recalls her heart beating so hard that she felt like it was lifting and lowering the entire vest of body armor she was wearing. As a sign of cultural respect, she and her teammates wore headscarves under their Kevlar helmets to hide their necks and hair. Stacey was so scared, she felt like the head scarf was strangling her. Her tongue felt like a giant wad of dry cotton stuck to the roof of her mouth. She thought this was it. This was their enemy, making good on their earlier threat.

As the officer in charge, she had difficult decisions to make and only seconds to make them. The mission and the safety of every single one of her FET teammates—sisters, daughters, wives, and mothers— depended on those decisions that Stacey would have to make in the next few seconds.

Immediately, Stacey shouted at the woman and demanded that she stop and lift her burka. The man just kept shoving her forward. Despite the Female Engagement Team’s weapons now pointed at her, the woman (and her male companion) continued toward them.

Should she give her FET teammates the order to fire?! If given now, they would be at a distance where any blast from an explosive device being worn by the woman might injure them but not kill them or anyone else at the polling station. But that order would have to be given right now!

Stacey and her FET teammates fell back on their training and the habits developed during their thousands of hours of hard work, of doing One More™. It helped provide her with the intuition to order her teammates not to shoot, to hold their fire. Instead, she decided on a different course of action. She instructed one of her FET teammates, Corporal Jennifer Hoff, to immediately approach the woman and her male companion and conduct the search. The entire rest of the team would provide security for her. In order for Corporal Hoff to do her job though, she would be dangerously close to the woman. She would undoubtedly die if the woman blew herself up. Stacey’s teammate had received and understood the same earlier reports threatening the FET team. Would Corporal Hoff execute Stacey’s order?

Should Stacey do the search herself? The FET had seen Stacey conduct searches before, so they, and Corporal Hoff, knew that she could. What would happen in the time it took Stacey to run up to the woman’s position? What was best for her team? Stacey and her FET teammates were located at multiple polling locations. If there was violence to follow, Stacey was responsible for getting her entire team to safety. Based on the threatening report they had been given, the violent events in the time leading up to the elections, and the unusual behavior of this Afghan woman, they had enough information for fear to present itself. Stacey still felt that they did not have enough information to pull a trigger.

Consistent behavior during thousands of hours of hard work, of One Mores•, had helped develop an incredible level of trust throughout the entire Female Engagement Team—trust that each member of the team would do their job when called upon. She told her teammate to move forward and conduct the search. Without hesitation, Corporal Hoff moved forward. Under all the layers of this Afghan woman’s clothing, in the over 100-degree heat, she wasn’t strapped with an explosive device as they had thought. She was holding her limp and near-lifeless infant in her arms. Stacey’s heart cried in sympathy for that Afghani woman and her young son.

She was struck with a wave of emotions thinking about her decision not to fire, an action that she and her team were dangerously close to doing, and what the devastating consequences would have been had they done so. Stacey wasn’t to become a mother for another eight years, but she inherently knew that the most innocent and precious thing in this world was being cradled in the arms of that woman.

If Stacey and her teammates had let fear take over, and not followed the rules of engagement, they would have killed an innocent Afghan woman, possibly her infant son, and completely derailed the Afghan national elections. If they had kept a fearful distance from the woman, failed to search her, and allowed her to pass through the checkpoint while possibly carrying an explosive device, they could have hurt or killed their teammates on the other side of the checkpoint and numerous innocent civilians.

Stacey and her team had been up all night long and had already performed hundreds of searches. The heat was brutal. Complacency was an ever-present threat. Physically, mentally, and emotionally, it was a huge contradiction for Stacey to point her weapon at another woman. More crippling was the moral battle she fought inside herself about asking her teammate, Corporal Hoff, to move forward and conduct a search that could severely injure or most probably kill her. The decision-making and subsequent execution of those decisions that day was physical, mental, and emotional hard work.

Stacey and her team were able to do that hard work because of the commitment to hard work, to One More™ that they had made well before that adversity struck. They always hoped for the best, but did One More™ expecting the worst.

In preparation, Stacey knew that if they didn’t hold each other accountable to doing One More• (one more search scenario, one more casualty evacuation drill, one more weapons systems check, one more brutally intense workout), then there might be at least one day during their deployment that the enemy would hold them accountable for not doing so. Stacey and her FET teammates ensured that this would not occur, and because of it, rather than take a life on the morning of August 20, 2009, they saved one—that of a nine-month-old baby boy.