by Helen Thorpe
“Well, what’s he saying hi for?” grumbled T.J. She liked men who looked like Mr. America, and objected that Jeff’s hair was thinning.
“He’s a really nice guy,” counseled Diane. “You’d like him once you talked to him.”
“Diane, I’m not interested,” said T.J.
One night, Debbie showed up at the Moose alone and saw Jeff drinking at the bar.
“You care if I sit next to you?” she asked.
“Oh, no,” said Jeff. “Go right ahead.”
They talked for two hours, and learned that they both liked guns. Jeff mentioned that he had served in the navy.
“Well, can I ask you a question?” Jeff said.
“Of course,” Debbie said, figuring he wanted tips on how to approach T.J.
“I understand that you’re dating somebody,” Jeff said.
“What? No. Have you ever seen me in here with somebody?”
“Well, no, but Diane says that you have a boyfriend.”
“Really,” said Debbie. “I don’t have a boyfriend—I have an acquaintance. If you say boyfriend, that means commitment. And I don’t have commitments.”
Jeff looked quizzical.
“Why are you asking anyway?” Debbie wanted to know.
“Well,” said Jeff, “I’ve wanted to ask you out for a really long time. I kept trying to tell Diane, I want to meet the other girl. But I really don’t want to ask somebody out that’s already in a situation—I don’t believe in that.”
“Well, let me tell you,” said Debbie. “First, I don’t have a serious boyfriend. Second, I don’t want a serious boyfriend. And third, T.J.’s not interested in you. You don’t have enough hair for her. I’m sorry to say that, but you just don’t.”
“Yeah, I already figured that out,” said Jeff. “I’m not interested in her. I never have been. But if I like somebody, I only like to see them one-on-one. I don’t like to see multiple people at the same time.”
“Well, suit yourself,” said Debbie.
They chatted a little longer and then decided to leave. Right before they departed, however, Jeff had a change of heart. “You know what?” he said. “I think I am going to ask you out. Would you be willing to go?”
“Yeah,” said Debbie. “I’m not making you no promises, but I’ll go with you.”
Debbie never dated another man again. Jeff kept his home spotless. He washed the dishes, made the bed, and scrubbed the shower stall before he left for work. Mr. Clean, she called him. Debbie worried that Jeff would reject her as soon as he saw that she was a bad housekeeper. After her refrigerator had broken, Debbie had taken to living out of a cooler, which she kept full of beer and ice; she had stopped buying food, and just picked up meals when she was out. Jeff asked if she was ever going to invite him over, and she said no, because she was not a Suzy Homemaker. Then Jeff’s landlord sold the home that he had been renting, and Jeff moved in with his mother. One night Debbie and Jeff had sex in the basement with the heating vents wide open. Jeff’s mother announced that Debbie was no longer welcome to spend the night.
“My God, I’m forty years old,” said Jeff. “And my mother’s not letting me have a sleepover!”
“Honey, she’s Pentecostal,” said Debbie.
Jeff spent the following night at Debbie’s house. The next morning, he gave her one of his looks.
“You have no food in the fridge,” he observed.
“Why would I have food in the fridge?” Debbie asked. “It’s just me.”
“I guess you don’t have to have food,” said Jeff.
He moved in that year. He offered to help pay the bills, but Debbie declined, saying she would feel obligated. Debbie remained entirely faithful to Jeff, but she still logged many hours at Shorty’s. Debbie rarely acted drunk, but in the diary that she kept on an intermittent basis, she carefully noted what sort of alcohol she consumed and what effect it had upon her. When Debbie and Jeff took a trip to Belize, after Debbie was named “manager of the year” by the company that ran her salon, Debbie wrote in her diary that they ordered shots of Baileys with their coffee at breakfast. Debbie explained to the waitress that this was their “get up and go” drink. In the afternoon, they drank multiple piña coladas, and afterward, Debbie noted, with obvious regret, “Can’t get a buzz.” There was nothing unusual about her behavior, Debbie felt—everybody she hung around with in the Guard consumed large amounts of alcohol. And she was never late for drill. Debbie was proud of her ability to put away a lot of liquor and still make it to wherever she needed to be. She jokingly called herself a lush, but what she meant by that term was that while she depended on alcohol, she could still function.
By the time she reported to the armory in Bedford, four days after the two hijacked airplanes hit the Twin Towers, Debbie had clocked fourteen years with the National Guard—fourteen years of drill, fourteen years of being overlooked, fourteen years of drinking. When Bravo Company divided in response to the tremendous uncertainty around what the future might hold, her greatest concern was not if they would go to war, but whether she would be included. Maybe she would finally get to participate in a meaningful cause, maybe her life’s path would head in a more fulfilling direction. Debbie hungered to join with a purpose larger than herself. She wanted to see the rest of the world—what lay beyond the blinking fireflies and plentiful cornfields of Indiana.
At drill, Bravo Company’s first sergeant called the clamorous group to order. Chattering ceased and the part-time soldiers gathered into formation, lining up in rows in the battle dress uniforms they put on once a month. The first sergeant kept his remarks short. “We don’t know anything,” he said. “Expect changes in your training in the future.”
3
* * *
Drill
AT ABERDEEN PROVING Ground, jittery soldiers on high alert reported a rash of false alarms. There was a van on the post. Two strangers were spotted lurking behind a building. As ordered, Michelle Fischer rolled underneath military vehicles to look for anything suspicious. She had no idea what to deem suspicious, though—everything down there looked pretty strange. For weeks she had been looking forward to changing back into her Roxy hoodie and her Paris Blues jeans, which she was supposed to be able to do during her fifth week of training, but such privileges were abruptly rescinded—it was easier to spot an intruder if everybody else wore a uniform—and that was when Michelle began to apprehend that she might not get her civilian identity back again. How had she misplaced something so vital? The soldiers in training assumed they might be sent somewhere soon, but they could get no hard information. In this fashion, Michelle came to appreciate the enormousness of the commitment she had made to the military.
Three days after the attacks, Congress passed a bill called the Authorization for Use of Military Force, giving George W. Bush broad powers of response. “The President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations, or persons,” the bill declared. Everybody at Aberdeen seemed to think the bill was a good idea; apparently Michelle was the only person there who did not want to give Bush such leeway. Michelle had been temporarily categorized as “active duty” while in training, and now she heard a rumor that all active duty soldiers were going to remain on active status indefinitely, even if they had only signed up for a part-time role. Michelle got into fierce arguments over whether this was even legally possible. She was stunned to learn that the contract she had signed would allow the military to do pretty much anything if she was put on active duty. She was a GI now—it stood for “government issue”—and could be moved around as if she were a Humvee.
One lone elected official had opposed the Authorization for Use of Military Force. Barbara Lee, a black woman who represen
ted the Ninth Congressional District in the state of California, had cast the only vote against the bill in either house of Congress. It intrigued Michelle to learn that Lee had grown up in a military family. Michelle tracked down a videotape of Lee’s speech on the floor of Congress and decided that she agreed with the reasons Lee gave for her opposition: Lee said the bill granted an authority that was too sweeping, and cautioned against “an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target.” Lee called the bill “a blank check to the president,” pointing out that it allowed him to attack “anyone . . . anywhere, in any country . . . and without time limit.” Michelle marveled at the fortitude it must have taken for Lee to stand up to all her peers, a black woman in a place dominated by white men. Opposing the war was lonely. On September 20, 2001, Bush delivered a historic speech to a joint session of Congress, and the soldiers at Aberdeen crowded into the common room; they applauded when Bush called for a “war on terror.” Michelle could feel in a tangible way how solitary she was in being troubled by that phrase. She lionized Barbara Lee in secret.
One day led into another, and no additional attacks occurred. The officers kept some of the ramped-up security measures (people still had to sign in and out of buildings) but revoked others (Michelle did get to change into her civilian clothes and leave the post on a pass). Alfred Turner returned at the end of September—he surprised Michelle by showing up in time to celebrate her nineteenth birthday, which fell on a cool, drizzly Thursday. Alfred took her away for a romantic weekend in Baltimore, Maryland, an hour’s drive to the south. They stayed in a bed and breakfast, a rambling Victorian with odd, pleasing nooks. Michelle confessed how grim she found the possibility of war. Alfred responded by saying they should get married, they should have children. Michelle seriously entertained the idea of saying yes, but nineteen seemed too young. College. She wanted to go to college.
After Alfred left for Germany, Michelle struggled to make sense of the news. Bush’s top advisers were split over how to respond to the attacks: One faction supported the idea of going after Al-Qaeda by attacking their strongholds in Afghanistan, but another faction was lobbying for the invasion of Iraq as well. Nobody held Saddam Hussein responsible for the recent attacks, yet the hawkish faction thought the American public would rally around the idea of ridding the country of one of its archenemies. What preoccupied Michelle was the idea of war itself, rather than the question of where it might be waged. On October 7, Bush authorized air strikes in Afghanistan; he said the bombs were falling on the terrorist camps of Al-Qaeda. Great Britain allied itself with the United States and joined in the attacks. Another spate of rumors flooded the base at Aberdeen. One soldier told Michelle that a woman from Pennsylvania who had recently graduated from their job training program had just been deployed, even though she had joined the National Guard. Was it true? Nobody could say.
Strangely, the weather remained glorious. In the mornings and the evenings Michelle’s face pinked in the cold air, but the afternoons stayed bright and temperate, out of step with the tidings. Finally it grew so cold that Michelle realized she needed sweaters, and she asked her mother to put some in the mail. A box arrived, and even before she cut through the tape, Michelle could smell the stale cigarette smoke. Her mother flew through a pack a day, and they had always lived in close quarters. Michelle had never noticed before how her clothes held on to the stench. She had been away from home for six months.
New suitors dogged Michelle. She was young and naive and had never been away from her mother for so long, and she found the attention gratifying. Mark Reed, the chiseled marine drill sergeant who had rushed into her classroom, invited her to watch him play soccer. Thirsting to be singled out, Michelle made certain to attend his practices as well as his games. When he handed her an envelope fat with photographs of himself, which happened to have his cell phone number scrawled on the outside, and told her that she might enjoy looking at the photographs in the bathroom, she did as he bid. Then she called him up, enamored. He was thirty-six, she was nineteen. Only after the drill sergeant seduced her did Michelle finally catch sight of his essential indifference, and then she caught Reed lavishing the same scrutiny upon another young woman. She gathered scraps of gossip about the drill sergeant and deduced that he was a predatory being. The recognition left her soiled, queasy. What scared her most was her own blindness. During the thirteen weeks of training that she spent at Aberdeen Proving Ground, perhaps the most valuable lesson she took away, as painful as it was, was that in the military she needed to watch out for men like Reed. Maybe someday she might want to know how to throw a grenade or how to replace a broken trigger mechanism, but she was certain to work alongside men like Reed. For someone with her level of neediness, such men could pose an even greater danger than any foreign enemy. It was another kind of friendly fire.
During the second half of her time at Aberdeen, Michelle was permitted to leave the post regularly, and young men jockeyed to invite her to parties thrown in rented hotel rooms in the nearby town of White Marsh. Not one but two different marines begged her to accompany them to the Marine Ball that was held at Aberdeen, and she said yes to both. Michelle and her two escorts attended the ball together, Michelle dressed in an iridescent purple gown that she had chanced upon in Baltimore. At one of the debauched hotel parties over in White Marsh, she put on girlish attire, only to wind up in a wrestling match with a male soldier. Later another partygoer gave Michelle a photograph he had taken of her pinning the male soldier in a hold, straddling him in her finery. The guys loved when she did that sort of thing—proved she was one of them and not one of them at the same time.
Michelle would later refer to this period as a “thirteen-week spiral into inappropriate behavior.” It culminated with a spectacular infatuation with James Cooper, a witty, athletic soldier from Cassadaga, New York, a small town near the shores of Lake Erie. She and Cooper were the same age; he was a 44B (“forty-four Bravo”)—a welder. She got to know him one night in the common room, while another soldier was hitting on Michelle relentlessly as the three of them played a game of pool. Michelle found herself drawn to Cooper’s cool, witty sarcasm, and the way he never tried too hard; he had a magnetic self-confidence, a wiry body, and a face with angular features. Before the pool game ended, Michelle was smitten. She worked to seize Cooper’s full attention, which she never quite obtained. She did manage to sleep with him, during one of the hotel parties in White Marsh. Even after they spent the weekend together, however, Cooper remained aloof. Michelle found it seductive.
Soon Cooper could prevail upon her to do most anything he wanted, and they executed a series of crazy pranks. They bought the sound track to the movie Top Gun, which was full of sappy songs they both hated, slipped the sound track into the stereo at the gym, then doubled over as the tough-looking soldiers wilted upon hearing “Take My Breath Away.” Cooper was always pulling pranks—they had overlapped at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, as it turned out, and he confessed that he had been the guy who had thrown a water bottle in the air during the rock concert. Cooper persuaded Michelle and another female soldier to climb up the fire escape to the male-only part of the barracks to meet him and a friend for a double siege. The two couples stole inside two unoccupied rooms, with a lookout posted nearby, the surreptitious intimacy twice as exciting thanks to the fear that a drill sergeant might discover them in a state of undress. “You’re adorable,” Cooper told Michelle, then retreated into his self-sufficient solitude.
Even as he remained elusive, Cooper kept Michelle’s anxieties at bay. She was a creature of thought, but he was a person of action—he did not ruminate the way she did. He made her laugh, made her lighten. It helped, even though they did not join up well philosophically. Cooper hewed to black-and-white beliefs, and he was gung ho about the possibility of war. When Congress passed the Patriot Act, greatly expanding the power of the federal government to gather intelligence, oversee financial transactions, and detain individuals suspected of terrorism, Michelle
found the very name of the act frightening, yet she said nothing about her dismay to Cooper because she feared he would turn away. It chilled Michelle to watch her country surrender its liberties so easily, but nobody else she knew of at Aberdeen seemed worried.
In the classroom, Michelle continued to excel. She proved handy with mechanical tasks, and the art of repairing weapons came easily. Toward the end of her stay at Aberdeen, after eleven weeks of studying the same weapons, the marines broke off to study their own sniper rifle, while the army and the Army National Guard soldiers worked on howitzers. The big gun was massive—the breech weighed more than Michelle—although everybody considered them obsolete. Michelle wasn’t sure exactly what kind of war Bush had in mind, but she doubted the soldiers were going to be using howitzers. “I mean, what kind of a situation would I be in where I would have to fix a broken howitzer?” she would ask. She did not believe that the members of Al-Qaeda were going to dig trenches and line up to be shelled.
And then she was finished. James Cooper had gone already; he had finished his welding courses before her and gone home to New York. When Michelle graduated from Aberdeen toward the end of November, nobody came to celebrate. Michelle packed up her things shortly before Thanksgiving. At the Baltimore airport, she ran into the newly heightened security measures involving airline travel for the first time. At the ticket counter, an airline staff person told Michelle she could not board the airplane while wearing her uniform. If there was a terrorist incident, said the woman, Michelle’s uniform was likely to make her a target. She was told to go to the bathroom and change her clothes. The country was awash in fear, Michelle realized. She had stepped outside of the civilian world for just half a year, but in that time it had been transformed.
Back in Evansville, Michelle found six people living in the one-bedroom apartment that she had been sharing with her mother. Her aunt had moved in after losing her job; her brother had moved in after finding a job at a nearby McDonald’s and stayed even after he got fired; her sister had moved in, along with her two children, after her husband had abandoned them. Nobody living in the apartment was working except for her mother. Michelle had given her mother access to her bank account while she was gone, and her mother had plundered it to pay for rent and groceries. Donovan had commandeered the Tank, and after somebody smashed one of the windows he had neglected to repair the glass. It had rained, and the car stank of mildew. Donovan had also run up a bill of more than $1,000 on her cell phone. Michelle had earned thousands of dollars in active duty pay during her six months away, and all of that money was gone. Once Michelle might have slumped into this, but she had been through basic training—she knew how to choke somebody until they passed out, she knew how to fire an M16. “I don’t have to take this shit anymore,” she told her family. Then she packed up her things and left.