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
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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
With stories and insights from USMC Colonel Maria ‘MJ’ Pallotta and retired USMC Colonel Maria Marte, this episode reveals how the same conditions that led to the creation of the Army’s Team Lioness in 2003 affected the USMC in Afghanistan in 2004. Colonel Marte describes how she and her female Marine ‘searchers’ attached to combat units on missions that took them outside the wire for three to four weeks at a time. Like the Army’s Lioness soldiers, their mission was to defuse tensions with women and children and gather intel. Their duties as ‘searchers’ occurred before the Marine Corps formalized their Lioness program in 2005. Colonel Pallotta explains how these ‘boots on the ground’ decisions, while technically a violation of the Combat Exclusion Policy, depended on whether a commander went with the spirit or the letter of the law.
Turning to Paramount's Special Ops Lioness, everyone agrees that, after the most recent episode, ‘The Choice of Failure,’ the show is a Hollywood fantasy that has nothing to do with reality. But, unfortunately, by calling it Lioness, the show muddies the actual history of women who served nobly under that appellation and its iterations.
CORRECTION: Don't Ask, Don't Tell was repealed in 2011.
The Lioness Origin Story Podcast
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
