For Shelane Etchison, time was running out.
She was trying to get on the ballot as an independent candidate for Congress, something nobody had ever done in North Carolina. She’d spent a lot of money with a Florida company that promised to get the 7,460 petition signatures needed by March 5. With the deadline looming, she was still far short. So she asked her friends for help.
“The flare went up–so out we came,” Dominique Reyes, a fellow Army veteran, told The Assembly. “It was like, OK, boots on the ground. Here we go.”
Friends came from around the Sandhills region and from as far away as Utah. Many were fellow veterans or active-duty soldiers from nearby Fort Liberty. Most were women. This time, their mission took them not to remote villages in Afghanistan but to laundromats, wine bars, and restaurants in the 9th District in the central part of the state. By March, their “band of sisters” had the required signatures–and then some.
“Thank God a lot of my friends are from the military,” Etchison told one interviewer. “We can put together a pretty mean operation when we need to.”
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