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Last updated on Friday, August 21, 2015
(FORT BENNING) - Today, Capt. Kristen Griest and 1st Lt. Shaye Haver will graduate from the Army’s grueling 62-day Ranger program at Fort Benning in Georgia.
Griest and Haver are the first females to ever complete the Ranger course and graduate.
The two women will receive the coveted black and yellow Ranger Tab next to their 94 male counterparts.
Both women are graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and accomplished athletes in their mid-20s. Griest is from Orange, Connecticut, and has served as a military police officer, while Haver, from Copperas Cove, Texas, is an Apache helicopter pilot. The two were among a group of 20 women who attended the first gender-integrated Ranger School that began on April 20.
So what do we know about these two awesome women?
HNL reports, Haver graduated from high school in Texas in 2008, along with classmate and Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III, according to this article in their hometown newspaper. She ran cross country and played soccer while in high school and graduated from West Point in 2012.
"If anyone was going to do something big, it was her," her high school soccer coach Hagen Streckel said, according to The New York Times. "She was faster, stronger, her ability was not to be matched."
In her hometown's paper, Haver called her acceptance to West Point her "calling."
Griest graduated from West Point in 2011, and has also run competitively, according to statistics found by the Washington Post. According to the Facebook page for her unit, the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, she was the distinguished honor graduate in December 2014 in a pre-Ranger School course run by the unit.
In this NYT profile, Griest's high school coaches and teachers describe her as "exceptionally driven."
Women have previously been excluded from the Ranger course because it was believed they lacked the strength and stamina to complete the program, but the graduation of Griest and Haver is a step in the right direction in the recent developments of military integration of women into front-line combat.
As of now, neither woman can serve as an infantry or a tank officer, or try out for the premiere 75th Ranger Regiment, which has its own rigorous application process.
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