Inside the tall brick and glass walls of the Bowery Hotel in New York on Thursday, hundreds of women in dress uniforms and evening gowns gathered in a solemn ceremony to mark the events that had sent them to war.
Some were still on active duty or in the reserves. Others had long retired. All had signed up for the toughest jobs in the military, including service in combat with the nation’s most elite counterterror teams.
The women belong to a nonprofit organization called ALLTRU — a play on the word altruism — founded five years ago by two female veterans as the only fraternal organization for women in special operations. Now numbering roughly 375, its membership has expanded to those in other military occupational specialties, law enforcement and the intelligence community.
Holding the gala on the eve of Sept. 11 was a way of acknowledging the terrorist attacks that had led so many of the women to join the military. The event also coincided with the 10-year anniversary of the Pentagon dropping the last remaining restrictions on women serving in combat.
That decision is now under review by the Defense Department’s top policy official, part of a series of recent moves by the Pentagon that have questioned women’s roles in the military. The percentage of high-ranking officer nominations going to women is currently at its lowest level in over two decades, according to a recent New York Times analysis. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly fired or removed senior women officers from promotion lists.
That context went unspoken. The gala avoided politics or any discussion of Trump administration policies, styling the night not as a defiant statement but as a celebration.
ALLTRU is a contrast to the many benevolent organizations dedicated to supporting special operations troops and their families, by prioritizing the women who served in combat alongside them.
“Popular culture portrays special operations usually as Navy SEALs kicking in doors, and very rarely do they include all the other actors that make those spectacular missions possible, which, yes, include women,” said Shelane Etchison, a former Army major. “ALLTRU is a place for us to be able to still feel in community with one another, with people who have our shared experiences when a lot of the world doesn’t understand.”
The group has grown its mission to provide support to women serving in the special operations forces of other nations, funding internet access for girls in countries where their schools have been driven underground by totalitarian governments.
When she was commissioned in 2008, Ms. Etchison chose to become a military police officer because the Pentagon’s prohibition on women in combat made it impossible for her to choose a combat arms field like the infantry. But in early 2011, she heard the Army was holding tryouts for women to join combat units in Afghanistan, and soon found herself at Fort Bragg standing in formation with about 300 other young women.
“I remember just being very excited and thinking to myself, ‘Oh this is what the brotherhood feels like,’” Ms. Etchison said. “Here I am with a bunch of women who are here to get after it in the name of defending the United States.”
Ms. Etchison and the other female soldiers tried out for what came to be known as the Cultural Support Teams — secretive groups of highly trained women who supported Army Rangers, Green Berets and SEALs on combat missions in Afghanistan. Their jobs were to collect vital intelligence from local women, given that cultural norms in the country meant that male soldiers could not engage with them.
That first group of 300 women competed for a handful of spots on those teams. Many of the women at the gala deployed to combat as the sole female soldier in a group of special operations troops for months at a time. The experience could feel isolating.
“A lot of the women here tonight are the ones that raised their hands, showed up to Fort Bragg, home of Army Special Operations, and were put through a very rigorous assessment and selection processes,” she said.
One friend Ms. Etchison made at Fort Bragg was Ashley White, who was later killed in action at age 24 on a Ranger mission. Ms. Etchison, who was in a different part of Afghanistan at the time, feared that when her friend’s death became public, it would reveal the existence of the Cultural Support Teams and lead to them being shut down.
But the teams kept going. And so did the wars.
For a group of women who had grown accustomed to life in otherwise all-male units, Thursday offered the chance to respectfully turn the tables. Early in the gala, a dozen women in dress uniforms of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps stood at attention, one in front of the other, for a solemn ceremony called Old Glory. They passed a folded American flag down the line and saluted slowly as another member of the group spoke of the flag’s role in combat since the nation’s founding.
Once the ceremonies concluded, the women (and some men) traded in their uniforms and combat medals for ball gowns and black ties.
For many of the women, silky backless dresses revealed the elaborate tattoos and toned muscles common among their former male counterparts, along with the direct and unflinching gaze of combat veterans.
Among them were not only former members of the Cultural Support Teams, but also Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal officers, members of Naval Special Warfare and Army Special Operations Command, fighter and helicopters pilots from all branches of the armed forces, and members of the 75th Ranger Regiment. Also present were a number of Afghan women who had served as soldiers alongside some of the Americans, and were evacuated to the United States by ALLTRU five years ago as the Taliban retook the country.
While serving, their femininity was often mistaken for weakness. But for them, it was part of their power, they said. It was a strategic advantage, just as women have quietly used their identities and perceived limitations to serve the United States in secret intelligence missions as far back as the Office of Strategic Services in World War II.
On Friday morning, after the women at the gala danced to a live band until past midnight, into Sept. 11, they gathered again to memorialize the date that had drawn so many of them together.
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