by Helen Thorpe
Strangely, right before the elections, the post was blanketed in a thick, impenetrable fog. In her diary, Debbie likened it to something out of a Stephen King novel. The Wrench Daily News advised soldiers to be cautious: “With the elections approaching, be aware of possible threats. Let someone know your whereabouts at all times for the next few days for accountability.” Toppe interviewed various soldiers about the upcoming elections. “I don’t think a lot of people will vote, because they’ll be scared,” Mary Bell told the Wrench Daily News. “Especially women; they feel oppressed. I think there will be isolated incidents, like car bombs.” Other soldiers echoed her comments, predicting a mix of violence and suppressed turnout. Only Debbie’s bunkmate, Gretchen Pane, saw a more optimistic outcome: “The elections are going to be a great beginning for the Afghan people. It’s going to liberate them. It’s a new beginning.”
On Saturday, October 9, 2004, a cold front moved through Kabul, bringing the first taste of winter. Neither the brisk weather nor the predictions of mayhem deterred the Afghan people: three-quarters of the country’s registered voters cast ballots—a massive number, far exceeding estimations. Most of the voters waited patiently in long lines and picked their candidates without incident. Five Afghan National Army soldiers and fifteen election workers were killed, but the majority of polling places operated without disruption. It took more than a week for results to be announced—and even longer for the results to be ratified—but Hamid Karzai had been elected by a margin of 55.4 percent, after earning three times as many votes as any one of his competitors. “The people seemed really excited to vote,” wrote Debbie two days after the elections. “Matula one of the workers for DFAC [the dining facility] showed me his card for voting he was so excited. I hope it’s not in vain + it will help the people.”
Although they played no direct role in securing voting sites, Debbie, Desma, and Michelle nevertheless felt proud for having been part of a military force that had ensured the elections could happen and that women could participate. Women made up two-thirds of the country’s population, yet the question of what rights they should legally possess was a matter of heated contention. During the 1920s, a period of liberalization, women had gained the right to choose their own husbands and were encouraged to seek an education, but during the 1930s, strict Shariah law was reinstated. During the 1960s, another period of modernization, many Afghan women stopped wearing veils and some entered politics, and during the 1970s, the country outlawed child marriage. The 1980s, however, brought chaos. The Soviet Union and the United States struggled to control Afghanistan, and finally abandoned it to warring mujahideen, which led to the rise of the Taliban. In the mid-1990s, the Taliban instated a particularly severe version of Shariah law, requiring men to grow beards and women to veil themselves entirely.
After two months in Afghanistan, Debbie, Desma, and Michelle had begun to appreciate keenly the vast difference between their position in American society and the much more precarious station of the women around them in Afghanistan. Michelle thought it pure chance that she had inherited such largesse; she could easily have been born female into this society instead. Because she moved daily through the streets of Kabul, it was possible for her to imagine some of the privations that fate would have entailed. Not long after the election had taken place, Desma crossed paths with an Afghan family on the post. The medics at Camp Phoenix had provided care to their son, who had been injured by a land mine. The father was pushing his son’s wheelchair, and in the traditional fashion, his wife was following five paces behind. The woman was holding a black headscarf across the lower half of her face. She looked at Desma, a female soldier wearing desert camouflage and carrying an assault rifle, and stopped walking. To Desma’s shock, the woman knelt down before her. “Thank you,” she said in English. “Thank you.”
Unlike Michelle, Desma almost never left Camp Phoenix. She had been spending her days at the motor pool, also known as the shop. Including the mechanics, perhaps one hundred soldiers worked there. About fifty soldiers reported for duty during first shift, forty-five during second shift, and a skeleton crew stayed on through the night in case of something unexpected. “Night shift consisted of playing cards and drinking alcohol,” Desma would say later. Most of the people who worked at the motor pool were men, and they had decorated the walls with pictures of women torn from magazines such as Maxim and Sports Illustrated. Desma worked first shift, along with Mary Bell. They started work at 7:00 a.m. Sometimes Desma finished at 3:00 p.m., sometimes at 5:00 p.m. It depended on how fast everybody else worked. Desma tracked the maintenance on the trucks that belonged to the 113th. The mechanics did top-to-bottom annual service checks on each vehicle, and some of those services took thirty hours to complete. A soldier who drove a vehicle outside the gates of Camp Phoenix did not want that truck to break down. That was the job of the motor pool, to keep the trucks running. The people who worked at the shop got covered in grease and their jobs were not glorious, but nobody could get anything done in Afghanistan without trucks, so they were proud of what they did.
When broken trucks came in for repair—maybe the engine had overheated, maybe something was wrong with the four-wheel drive—Desma made sure the mechanics had the right parts. Sometimes she made the hour-long run up to Bagram, jouncing over the potholes, dodging jingle trucks and donkeys, if they did not have the right parts at Camp Phoenix. In addition to tracking the maintenance of vehicles, Desma also ran software programs that tracked any repair work done on weapons, night vision goggles, radios, and other equipment. And she prepared reports about all of the maintenance work being done by the 113th for the battalion’s leaders. Working nearby in the shop, her friend Mary belonged to a crew that dispatched trucks, recording the serial number and mileage of every vehicle that left the post and every vehicle that returned. When a truck broke down, Mary kept track of who went to get the damaged vehicle. Sometimes a team of mechanics drove out to fix a broken vehicle; sometimes they sent a wrecker. Every once in a while, if it was really far away, they sent mechanics out by helicopter.
At the beginning of every workday, Michelle visited the motor pool to let Desma know where the armament team would be working and what they expected to accomplish, and at the end of every day, she returned to say how many broken weapons they had fixed. Desma entered this information into her spreadsheets, documenting the work being done by the armament team. The motor pool was a hub of information and gossip, and working there put Desma in the position of meeting almost every new person who came through Camp Phoenix. Shortly after Michelle began repairing AK-47s, Desma had befriended two blond, good-looking Danish soldiers who had shown up looking for spare parts. They returned bearing a platter of Danish pastries to say thank you. Desma was good company and pretty soon Michael and Kristian were stopping by regularly. One day, Desma introduced the pair to Michelle. She was on her way to the PX to buy the new album by The Cure, and Kristian announced he was a fan of that band, too. The Danish soldiers started driving over frequently to hang out with Michelle and Desma. They worked at the military compound occupied by the International Security Assistance Force (they all called it ISAF), a ten-minute drive away. You weren’t supposed to accept alcohol from the ISAF soldiers, but everybody did. In a letter to her father, Michelle confided that the two Danish soldiers had brought over some beer. “So things are looking up,” she wrote. “I know I won’t get in trouble because they’re supplying all of my chain of command with whiskey.”
One of the Danish soldiers was married, and Desma and Michelle were already having affairs with two other married men, so they kept things with Michael and Kristian fairly innocent. Typically they caught a movie (that month, Morale, Welfare, and Recreation showed Shrek, Shrek 2, Rush Hour 2, Forrest Gump, and The Last Samurai), or went for pizza at Ciano’s. Michelle considered sleeping with Kristian, but she could not fathom the idea of cheating on Pete with Ben and then cheating on Ben with Kristian—so she kept the relationship platonic. Years later, however, she wo
uld say that she wished she had chosen to have her deployment relationship with Kristian instead, but Ben Sawyer had gotten there first. Desma, on the other hand, thought it was fun to make out with her Danish soldier and then sleep with her superior officer. She snuck dates with Michael early in the evening, then met up with Lieutenant Mark Northrup later at night. Desma said the Danish soldiers made the time go by faster; dating European men made the deployment more romantic.
In all kinds of ways, Michelle depended on Desma to make their drab lives more colorful. After they had been living in Afghanistan for about a month, Desma had announced that it was depressing to live in a green tent amid an ocean of identical green tents, and therefore she went online and ordered fifty hot pink plastic flamingos, as well as a sign that said KEEP OFF THE GRASS. Desma stuck the sign in a sandbag right outside their tent. Then she arranged the flock of flamingos around the tent’s walls, sticking their wire legs between the sandbags. In that dreary place, the pink birds stood out, a shocking herd of whimsy. Michelle loved those crazy birds. The flamingos declared they would not conform—they were stuck here but they had not surrendered. Other soldiers seemed captivated by the sight, because one by one soldiers borrowed the birds. Desma saw one of them out on the highway, duct-taped to the front of a Humvee. She liked the idea of her flamingo traveling the length of Afghanistan.
When they got bored with filling out dirty versions of Mad Libs, they watched Disney cartoons together on their laptop computers, or swapped DVDs. Michelle watched every single episode in her collection of Sex and the City shows, and then loaned the DVDs out, exchanging them for other movies. Even Nose Hairs borrowed her Sex and the City DVDs. Then Michelle spent hours combing through the hadji movies at the bazaar, looking for entertainment. She found a hadji collection of Johnny Depp movies, as well as a copy of her beloved Return to Oz. The bootleg copies of Hollywood movies were sold at the bazaar for $2 apiece. The word “hadji” bothered Michelle, but everybody used it. Technically speaking, the word meant a person who had made the trip to Mecca—literally, a pilgrim—but Michelle noticed how the American soldiers used the word to separate themselves from Afghans, to keep their distance. Hadji movies meant blurry, cheap, bootleg movies; hadji workers did menial jobs. They had been instructed to use the term “local national workers” instead, but everybody still said hadji. Many of the American soldiers had had little exposure to foreign cultures and viewed the people they called hadjis with fear and contempt.
Debbie was a rare exception. She befriended local nationals just like everyone else, and was regularly chatting with the Afghans who worked at the dining facility. One Afghan man apparently believed they might be falling in love.
“Do you think it will rain?” Debbie asked him one evening.
“Rain?” he said. “Tomorrow!”
“It will rain tomorrow?”
He pointed to his finger. “Yes! Yes!” he said. “Gold ring! Tomorrow!”
“No, no, no!” Debbie laughed, backpedaling.
Camp Phoenix was bustling with activity involving local national workers, as the leadership at the post had ordered a variety of construction projects. Local workers were building a new dining facility, a new post office, a new laundry area, a library, a study room for soldiers who were taking continuing education classes, a television room with theater seating, an Internet café, and a food court with three new restaurants. Local workers were also building structures called B-Huts (short for Barracks Huts) that the soldiers were supposed to move into that winter, as well as more latrines and more showers. The wars were not going to end soon, the construction suggested—the soldiers were going to be here for a while. All of the construction posed an increased security risk, however, and soldiers in the 113th pulled hadji duty more and more frequently as the construction projects mounted. Being assigned to guard Afghan workers was considered an onerous task, but Debbie found it fascinating; she longed to understand more about the country around her, and she spent the time talking animatedly with the workers. “Well I did hadji watch not too bad . . . ,” she wrote in her diary. “They make $6 a day which is a lot for them. They don’t wear socks. Some young boys around ten, eleven. I gave one a pop tart he liked it. Was a cutie I could of adopted him.” One day the local workers she was guarding started a cook fire and made tea and flat bread. The Afghans offered to share their food, and Debbie fell in love with flat bread. The more she talked to the locals, the more her admiration grew. “One of the workers rides his bike one hour just to get here,” she wrote. “No kid at home would do that for $6 a day!”
Debbie had also started visiting Michelle and Desma’s tent regularly to cut hair, wax legs, and wax eyebrows. She told the other women that she would not take money; these services were what she had to offer to make them feel more at home. If they insisted on making some type of payment, they could pick up a scarf for her at the bazaar. Debbie had started off just cutting hair in her own tent, but soon she was getting requests from soldiers across the post; she spent more time doing beauty work inside Michelle and Desma’s tent than any other. The younger women tended to be more concerned about their appearances. And Debbie could tell when a young woman started seeing another soldier, because that’s when she would get a request for a bikini wax. Soon Debbie felt even more at home inside Michelle and Desma’s tent than she did in her own. She spent hours listening to the young women chatter about their romances. Their tent had an intimate, lively atmosphere; it could also be wearying, as the young women indulged in a lot of drama. Debbie no longer wanted to take so many risks, nor suffer such large consequences.
The young women wanted so badly to feel more feminine. Because the soldiers were flush with cash and stuck at Camp Phoenix, Internet shopping became an obsession, and in Michelle and Desma’s tent, the hot commodity became fancy underwear. Michelle and Mary started the trend, and then the other women followed suit. Within a short time, Michelle had matching lacy bra and panty sets in black, green, and gold. She hated wearing the male-looking uniform every single day, and liked the idea of Ben Sawyer finding the colorful underwear beneath her camouflage. Then she found a nail salon at Bagram where she could get a pedicure. Anytime Desma had to go get parts, Michelle tagged along and got her toenails painted. It struck even her as frivolous, but that was sort of the point. She wanted to hang on to the sense of being a woman, and that was hard to do as a soldier.
As the weeks passed the weather began to turn, and at night the lows started dropping down into the thirties. Ben Sawyer began staying overnight in Michelle’s tent. All of the women had hung blankets around their sleeping areas, suspended from the top bunks, to create some privacy. For a time, the ten women had stuck to the rule that banned male visitors from spending the night, but at one point Michelle had innocently lifted up the blanket around another soldier’s bed to ask a question, and to her shock had been confronted by the sight of that woman having sex with a male colleague. After that, the goings-on inside of the tent had become more of a free-for-all. Generally, the male visitors tried to tiptoe out of the tent by 4:00 a.m. It was widely understood that several of the battalion’s senior leaders were having affairs with young subordinates, but it was also understood that nobody was supposed to get caught.
The battalion’s soldiers split in their response to witnessing the affairs. Many soldiers were religious and attended a weekly prayer group, and some of the devout soldiers condemned the behavior as immoral and hurtful. Other soldiers shrugged it off as simply a by-product of having been sent to war. The Judge Advocate General’s Corps lawyers who served as legal advisers to the battalion’s command were perplexed about what to do, given that many of the relationships were clearly illegal. In previous wars, soldiers had found physical comfort outside their own barracks, with nurses or with local women. The current trend was a marked departure from past history and signified the first time that interactions between soldiers had become widely sexualized inside the barracks. What did it mean for the overall concept of military di
scipline when soldiers began picking and choosing which part of the Uniform Code of Military Justice they would heed? At one point Desma accidentally knocked over a folder in her company commander’s work area and saw a memo from the JAG lawyers on the subject. Inappropriate relationships will not be tolerated, the memo declared. The commanders should crack down on the illicit affairs, and perpetrators should suffer punishment. Ha! Desma thought. That is not likely to happen, when half of the commanders are guilty themselves!
With a series of cool remarks, Michelle’s tentmate Jaime Toppe communicated that she viewed Michelle’s and Desma’s habit of sleeping with married men as a sacrilege. Her own husband had deployed along with her, however—she was married to Jeremy Toppe, the soldier who had nicknamed Michelle “Poison Butterfly”—and she could sleep with him anytime she wanted. So Michelle shrugged off Jaime’s scorn, concluding that with her own husband present, it was pretty easy for Jaime to resist other temptations. Who was she to judge?
As the days went by, Michelle grew accustomed to wrapping herself around Ben Sawyer’s long body on her small twin mattress. In the dark she could not see his tattoos, and she used his chiseled proximity to tell herself that it was safe to fall asleep. She had no doubt that she still loved Pete, but he had vanished from view, and it was upon Ben that she began to depend for small daily assurances. It was Sawyer’s arms that provided heart-pumped heat in the chilly tent as the nighttime temperatures began to drop, and it was Sawyer’s long legs that reached down into the bottom of her sleeping bag and reduced her fear of the invisible camel spiders that still crawled across her skin.