Soldier Girls

by Helen Thorpe

  As the temperature dropped, it also started to rain frequently; the seven-year drought had broken. They even got some hail. The Afghan man at the dining hall whom Debbie had befriended congratulated her on changing their weather. “Thank you for bringing the rain,” he told her, as if she had actually brought the rain along in her duffel bag, all the way from verdant Indiana. “Honey, we didn’t have a thing to do with it,” Debbie replied. But he just said, “Thank you, thank you.” And as it began to rain, they began to toughen up.

  One day, the armament team took a break from working on AK-47s and fixed some broken rocket-propelled grenade launchers instead—the very weapons that were most often trained against them. While working on one of the grenade launchers, Michelle came to understand how crude the weapon was: most of the RPGs she saw had no sights at all. It was a crapshoot, in other words, where the explosive device landed. That insight liberated Michelle from the fear of being hit by a grenade, which had dogged her since she had first arrived. There was no way to aim an RPG properly, she now saw; if she was hit, it would be an act of providence. The next time the blaring alarm siren sounded at the post, Michelle shrugged her shoulders at Desma, and they went on doing Mad Libs and eating Tostitos they had found at the PX. They put on their body armor and their helmets—“dressed for getting bombed,” as Michelle liked to say—because otherwise they would get written up, but they did not worry about whether a rocket was going to obliterate their tent. It was too exhausting to keep worrying about that.

  Later, during another air raid, Desma stuck her head outside and saw that nobody was around. “Hey, Michelle, let’s go have a smoke,” she said. They were supposed to hunker down below the sandbags, or else seek shelter in a bunker, but who cared anymore? They were outside smoking when a group of gung ho soldiers from Alpha Company ran by on their way to the bunkers with all of their battle rattle on over their pajamas. Desma gave them a round of applause and kept on smoking.

  Over the course of that fall, Michelle decided to stop allowing Patrick Miller to make her cry, and turned off the tears with stony determination. He continued to berate her, but when his rages no longer had any visible effect, he erupted less frequently. Maybe Miller could also see that he had to change his behavior. Accepting that Michelle would never show up on time, he assigned her the task of picking up their radios from the motor pool. This meant she had an extra half hour before she had to meet the rest of the team. And when Miller did yell, Michelle found ways to insulate herself. She brought her MP3 player to work every day, along with a pair of ear buds. The rest of the team would ask who she was listening to. If she answered Madonna, she was having a good day; if she said Nine Inch Nails, she wasn’t. Often, if Miller was yelling at her, Michelle acted as though she could not hear what he was saying. “You could just tell, you know, that look on the face—she can hear Patrick yelling, but she’s not going to answer him,” Debbie would say later. “We were just dying laughing, because we knew what she was doing. She was just shutting Patrick out.”

  Michelle also learned to use the fact that she was female to throw Miller off. When he had served in the marines, he had had no women reporting to him, and he was still getting used to the idea. One day Miller gave the armament team a pep talk. He told everybody that part of his job was to make sure his soldiers were taken care of, and asked if there was anything they needed. “Birth control,” Michelle said drily. It pleased her to see him blanch. (Much later, after she and Miller had grown close, Miller would reveal to Michelle that he had gone to her tent one day to give her a package from the post office, and had seen her lacy underwear strewn across the floor. He had never imagined that under a uniform—but once he had seen the garments, he could not get them out of his mind.) Michelle sensed that she had the power to make him uncomfortable and liked that it gave her the upper hand.

  At the same time, she made herself useful. She saw that Miller could not function without his car keys and the small dark green field notebook in which he kept detailed notes about their progress. He kept misplacing both items. Michelle made it her business to know at all times the location of his keys and his notebook, and he began to rely upon her to tell him where they were. Also, Michelle and Debbie worked out a methodical system for documenting the stream of AK-47s that were passing through their hands. Miller drummed into his soldiers that they needed to be able to account for every single AK-47, but the AKs were sometimes hard to identify. Michelle and Debbie took over the task of deciphering the frequently eroded serial numbers on the sides of the weapons, and recording the identity of each gun they repaired. If the team got a difficult box, they all concentrated on disassembling and reassembling the broken weapons, and Debbie and Michelle documented the weapons after the repairs had been completed. If they got a box that was easier, however, then Will and Patrick focused on repairing the broken AKs, while Debbie and Michelle wrote down every symbol they could find.

  The serial numbers typically began with a triangle or a square or a horseshoe, and such a sign would be followed by several letters and a series of numbers. Together the symbols indicated the country in which the gun had been made and the order in which it had been manufactured. At first Michelle copied down letters from foreign alphabets without understanding their significance; later she learned how to translate Russian, Chinese, Dari, and Farsi letters into the alphabet she knew. If they could not find a serial number on the barrel, they would look for a serial number on the butt stock or the trigger mechanism—although it was not considered as reliable, since these parts of the weapon could be replaced. Over time they grew fluent in the language of AK-47s. They came to know which countries had made more reliable versions, and which made versions that were more likely to be broken. The Chinese models were the worst, and they discarded large numbers of them. Other AKs held up astonishingly well over time. Some of the guns had been manufactured in the 1950s. “Those weapons last forever,” Michelle would say later.

  Typically, the sights would be missing, and the weapons mechanics would replace them. They also checked the function of the firing pin, making sure it would strike the bullet. They cleaned the gas tube and made sure it was not clogged. If the trigger did not feel right, they would replace the entire trigger mechanism. The safety—it often wasn’t working. They used a punch to take it out, and put in another one. Frequently the springs were bad, and they replaced them; many times, Michelle had old springs pop out and hit her in the face. She accidentally got her fingers caught in various parts of the gun, too. But they were not terribly hard to fix. “That’s the beauty of an AK-47,” Michelle would say later. “It’s a really simple machine.” After all that, they would do a functions test, and oil the gun until it looked new. “We just got better as the year went on. You just get practice, and then you can do it in your sleep. Breathe, eat, and sleep AKs.”

  Did the various languages on the AK-47s map the shedding of blood around the globe? Michelle told herself not to think so much. Otherwise she would drive herself crazy wondering what role she might be playing in the globalization of war. Patrick Miller did not appear to let his mind wander in this fashion. He ordered the team to stack repaired AK-47s in groups of ten, and at the end of the day he counted how many stacks they had completed, and wrote down the total with satisfaction. He drove the team hard. So swiftly did they repair the weapons, a supervisor expressed doubt that Miller’s team was actually accomplishing as much work as Miller claimed. Some brass came to the depot to conduct an audit, but Miller was able to account for every single assault rifle they had repaired, and proved the armament team was actually as fast as the prodigious numbers indicated. A major paused to inspect the documentation work that had been done by Michelle and Debbie. It was incredible, he said. He wished his guys were as good.

  Michelle exercised furiously after work. She could not always restrain herself in the dining hall—it was hard to resist ordering an omelet in the morning, and she had become addicted to butterscotch pudding—yet she spent so many hours in
the gym that she lost twenty-two pounds. She was proud of her flat tummy and her six-pack. By October she could do an hour on the StairMaster at level twenty. One afternoon, a guy they called Smitty walked up while she was working out. Michael Smith was a mechanic from Evansville who worked in a Toyota plant. He was smart, tall, and good-looking, and had a high-wattage smile; he was happily married, but all the girls loved him anyway.

  “Have you ever seen An American Werewolf in Paris?” he asked Michelle.

  “No,” she told him.

  “There’s this scene where the werewolf murders a young woman,” said Smitty. “And she is upset about getting killed because it took her four years on a StairMaster to get that body. When I look at you, that’s what I think of. You look awesome!”

  Michelle had been avoiding alcohol, but she made an exception that fall when Kristian and Michael smuggled over a bottle of vodka from the ISAF compound. Desma stashed the vodka in a secret hiding place, between the dark green canvas outer wall and the white canvas inner wall of their tent. Then Michelle decided to drink a little vodka with Ben Sawyer, and after they finished she put the bottle into Desma’s footlocker, hidden under a stack of towels. Desma was supposed to stow it away in the more secure hiding spot after the rest of the women left the tent the following morning, but forgot.

  A few days earlier, their tentmate Caroline Hill had received a care package. Michelle happened to be in the tent when Caroline had opened the box and pulled out a bottle of Southern Comfort. Later a female Alpha Company soldier got so inebriated that she needed an emergency IV for rehydration. When questioned about how she had acquired the alcohol, the Alpha soldier confessed that she had gotten it from a Bravo girl, but refused to say which one. It seemed obvious to Michelle that Caroline Hill must have shared her bottle of Southern Comfort with the female soldier in Alpha Company, because the two women were close friends, but Hill denied doing so. “She told me that she got rid of this stuff by passing it along to the infantrymen even though her best friend had just gotten caught wasted,” Michelle would say later. “It was kind of obvious that she was blatantly lying.”

  Several days later, Michelle went to the gym, took a shower, and returned to her tent. Then in marched Captain Nicholas Mueller, three first sergeants, and a female major named Foley. They announced they were doing a surprise inspection. Oh, shit, thought Michelle; the vodka. They found the half-empty bottle in Desma’s footlocker right away. Desma was outside, smoking a cigarette. When she walked in, Major Foley made a show of searching her footlocker and acted as though she had just discovered the vodka.

  “What do we have here?” Major Foley asked.

  “That would be my Article Fifteen,” Desma responded without missing a beat.

  Article 15 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice allows a commanding officer to discipline a soldier for a minor infraction without a court-martial. Punishment could range from reprimand to loss of pay, extra duties, or reduction of rank. Desma would have to wait to learn her fate—all she knew was that she was in trouble. Within hours, Michelle and Desma learned that the inspection had additional consequences: Debbie Helton had also been caught with alcohol. News that Debbie and Desma were both in trouble because of a soldier from Alpha Company raced through Bravo ranks. Because the soldiers believed the wrong people were being punished, and because they did not like the idea that their personal belongings could be searched, the incident caused an uproar. Jaime Toppe ran a special news story in the Wrench Daily News. A total of six tents had been searched, she reported; Captain Mueller maintained that a routine health and welfare inspection had been planned even before the case of intoxication, and said the tents had been chosen at random. Mueller said he wanted the surprise raid to demonstrate that the leadership was serious about the ban on alcohol. “People need to be responsible,” Mueller told the Wrench. “It could jeopardize the lives of others. We’re in a combat situation and alcohol is not authorized.”

  Desma frequently acted in ways that her superiors considered inappropriate, and she was already in the process of earning a collection of counseling statements (written reprimands that constituted an official slap on the wrist) for being late, for being insubordinate, for having a bad attitude, and for failing to show up for remedial physical training as instructed. Desma pinned her counseling statements on the wall at the shop where she worked, right over her desk. As soon as she got the Article 15, she made it the centerpiece of her display. Debbie, on the other hand, felt angry and ashamed. “Way to go get busted,” she wrote disgustedly in her diary. “If they would give us a three beer ration I would be happy but no. 76 sucks.”

  Bravo Company rebelled at the idea of Debbie Helton getting slapped with an Article 15. All the first sergeants had found were a few small airline bottles of liqueur with the seals unbroken, hidden inside a coffee can. Nobody thought that Debbie’s stash had caused the soldier from Alpha Company to get sick. Even Dean Kimball, the first sergeant of Bravo Company, seemed to view the outcome as problematic. When Kimball crossed paths with the Alpha girl who had gotten drunk, other soldiers heard him yell, in a taunting tone, “Want a beer?” Other Bravo soldiers hassled the woman from Alpha Company, too—because of her, two of their own soldiers were getting punished. Debbie fretted about the pending judgment. “No word yet on our fate,” she wrote miserably one day after the incident. Two days later she wrote, “Still no word I’m a little nervous.”

  At the same time, Debbie had other concerns, for she had learned in phone calls to her family that the condition of her childhood friend Jim was worsening. The following week, both Debbie and Desma had to appear before Captain Mueller, who told them they would be docked seven days’ pay and get fourteen days of extra duties. Debbie savored a sense of relief that at least the sentencing was over. But when she went to check her email, she learned that her childhood friend had died. She had not gotten to see Jim after learning that he was sick, and the news made her distraught. “I feel so bad I should be doing something and I can’t,” she wrote in her diary. “I’m helpless over here!”

  For the next two weeks, Debbie and Desma performed extra duties. They cleaned the shop where Desma worked, they swept the parking lot, they did extra time on local national watch. After a while, their supervisors eased up, and Debbie spent extra hours writing down the serial numbers of AK-47s, while Desma pulled extra guard duty, which actually meant she sat around playing euchre with Northrup and Mueller. Later, a soldier who worked in payroll quietly informed them that they would not actually lose any pay. Debbie spent some of her income on a surprise for her boyfriend Jeff. She renewed his membership at the Moose Lodge, paying his dues. Jeff sent an email in which he said it was a good thing Debbie was in Afghanistan or else he would have given her an ass-whooping. Debbie interpreted this to mean he was pleased. Then Ellen Ann mailed her a copy of the ultrasound that she had just gotten. “Well I’m having a Baby Girl,” wrote Debbie. “As long as she is healthy it’s okay. . . . I told EA the next one will be a boy. . . . I have to not shut Jeff out when I get back because I know I will want to be with the baby.”

  They could feel winter coming. They had been living at Camp Phoenix for three months, and they were not the same anymore: They were more capable, more cynical, less like civilians and more like regular army soldiers. They were a lot less scared, and a little more careless. At the same time, the war going on around them was changing, too. As the temperatures sank lower, their leaders said, the soldiers should expect a lull in the violence—generally, not much fighting happened in Afghanistan during the winter months—but they should not get complacent because spring was known as fighting season.

  4

  * * *

  Translation

  ONE DAY Patrick Miller went into the building where the armament team stopped to pick up its translators and came out with a young man named Akbar Khan. They had worked with various translators before, but none of them had been like this: Akbar Khan stood more than six feet tall, wore his black hair
cropped short, and his face clean-shaven. He was movie-star handsome, with a square jaw, high cheekbones, chiseled lips, and an aquiline nose. He had been working at Camp Phoenix for only five or six days when Miller strode furiously into the room where interpreters waited to be assigned work. “He was a short, little, hyper person, and the first thing he did, he cursed,” Akbar would recall later. “And then he asked for a person to assist him as a linguist.”

  Several other interpreters were waiting for a job, but Miller was so gruff and unvarnished that none of them replied. Akbar had already been told that he was going to Kandahar, a province in southern Afghanistan that was becoming known as a place where the Taliban appeared to be making inroads, but he had heard that Kandahar was a hellhole and that he should avoid going there at all costs. He felt weird that this person was standing there, all geared up to go, and getting no response from the other translators. He figured he should at least talk to the man. As soon as Akbar stood up, Miller said, “Okay! You! Get your ass in the Humvee!”

  Because of the barbed comments Miller frequently made about black people, brown people, and hadjis, Michelle considered her boss a racist. Akbar Khan decided instantly that he liked Miller, however; Akbar thought that the team leader behaved in an entirely natural way, which he found reassuring. In Miller’s brusque manner, there was nothing false. So Akbar got into the Humvee. Later, the other soldiers in the vehicle would say that getting to know Akbar was the single greatest thing that would happen to them in Afghanistan—he was what gave meaning to their deployment—but on his first day, Akbar made no significant impression. Akbar was not timid, but it was the first time he had ever been inside a military vehicle, the first time he had ever interacted at length with armed soldiers, and the first time he had been told to put on a seat belt. People in Afghanistan did not use seat belts, as a rule, and Akbar struggled to secure the unfamiliar strap around himself. “I had all kinds of feelings,” he would say later. “The feeling of maybe if we get attacked en route, what should be my reaction? Especially when it comes to my own people, what is my place out there? Should I be hiding behind a tire, or protecting those that I’m working with? The question of who is the friend and who is the enemy—it’s a very hard situation for us, especially when we have to decide which side to choose.”