Welcome to Lioness Origin Story, a special mini-series podcast presented by the Veterans Breakfast Club. Each week co-hosts Shannon Morgan, Army Lioness Vet, and Daria Sommers, Filmmaker/Writer, present, along with special guests, true stories of women who participated in Team Lioness. The goal is to provide an historical counter to Taylor Sheridan’s fictional Special Ops: Lioness. As the hosts and their guests trace the evolution of Lioness Teams into Female Engagement Teams and Cultural Support Teams, the series will reveal how these new roles led to the dissolution of the Combat Exclusion Policy and the eventual opening up of military roles to women. In 2008 filmmaker and writer Daria Sommers and Meg McLagan released LIONESS, a documentary that revealed the history of a group of women support soldiers who went to Iraq in 2003 as mechanics, clerks and engineers but ended up serving as the original Lioness soldiers. One of those Lioness soldiers was Shannon Morgan. An Army mechanic from Mena, Arkansas who served in Ramadi from 2003-2004. During the 2004 Battle for Ramadi, she was one of a group of Army Lioness soldiers attached to the 2/4 Marines during house to house searches. That put her at the center of some of the fiercest street fighting of the war. But, because the combat exclusion policy, when Shannon returned home, she had to fight to get the full extent of her service recognized and receive the benefits she was entitled to as a combat veteran. Lioness A feature-length documentary by Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers Trailer - https://bit.ly/44GR6fV Available for streaming on Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video Presented by the Veterans Breakfast Club - www.veteransbreakfastclub.org