About a dozen female service members were attached to the SEAL platoon during a six-month deployment to Iraq that began in March of 2019. On the air base, Grace and the other service members who supported Special Operations Task Force-West, the unit responsible for missions inside Anbar Province, Iraq, lived at Camp Fenin while the SEALs stayed at Camp Freiwald, about a 10-minute walk away. The deployment — Grace’s first with the SEALs — was slow, she said. Others who had deployed previously to Iraq told her they had never seen it so quiet. She was asked to identify ISIS targets for the SEALs in an area that had been largely untouched for the past nine months. Grace said the women worked hard to earn the respect of the SEALs. “We’re in there 18 hours a day. We wanted their respect. We were doing good work for these guys,” she said. But Grace said the intelligence staff was under a lot of pressure from the SEALs to do more. “People were itching to get outside the wire at every opportunity,” but not a lot of information was coming in that they could act on, Grace said. Then she said she started receiving text messages from Olson, the platoon chief, late at night that were not work-related. At first, she thought it was because he thought highly of her work. “After I’d been invited over to that side of the camp to have drinks on multiple occasions, I was like this is inappropriate, and that’s kind of when he and I stopped speaking,” Grace said.
'Former sailor details misconduct by SEALs pulled from Iraq', AP News