Soldier Girls

by Helen Thorpe

  Yet they were surrounded by bloodshed. Almost every week, they got word of incidents that had taken place somewhere in Afghanistan involving either American soldiers or Afghan National Army soldiers. On January 3, 2005, for example, an American soldier was killed and three others were wounded near Asadabad, in far eastern Afghanistan, along the country’s fractious border with Pakistan, after their Humvee hit an improvised explosive device, and a gun battle broke out. The wounded soldiers were evacuated by helicopter to Bagram. Forty-eight hours later, the soldiers at Phoenix learned that the individual who had been killed was Sergeant Jeremy Robert Wright, of Shelbyville, Indiana. He was a Hoosier, too; he was one of them. But he was not National Guard—he had been regular army, with the special forces, and he had gone straight to Kunar Province. They were not over in Kunar; they were fixing trucks or AK-47s in the relative calm of Kabul. That same week, Morale, Welfare, and Recreation announced that they were offering swing dance lessons at Camp Phoenix. The following week, MWR opened a new racquetball court and showed The Day After Tomorrow. That was as close as most of her unit was going to get to real action, thought Michelle: watching it on a movie screen.

  Over in Iraq, elections were going to be held at the end of January 2005, and the violence there intensified, echoing what had occurred in Afghanistan the previous fall but on a larger scale. On January 10, an unusually powerful roadside bomb destroyed a heavily armored Bradley Fighting Vehicle in southwestern Baghdad, killing two American soldiers and wounding four others. It was the second incident like that in less than a week; earlier roadside bombs had not been sufficient to blow apart an armored Bradley, but the insurgents had upped the power of their explosives. Bush and his advisers were still hoping that the elections would bring stability and the opportunity to withdraw quickly, but that looked increasingly unlikely.

  At least from Michelle’s vantage point, though, war consisted of being stuck every night on a former Soviet air base where the biggest issue was boredom, wondering if she should take swing dance lessons or classes on personal finance, while knowing that people suffering from dire wounds were being flown to Bagram and that over in Iraq people were dying. By this point, Michelle knew she had it easy. She was not in Kunar; she had never been to Fallujah. The real soldiers (she sometimes thought) were dying in the mountains of Afghanistan and the cities of Iraq, and the biggest challenge she faced was the question of what to do with her time after she watched the last episode of Sex and the City. Even as she had these thoughts, of course, the military was altering its habits, as commanders became more desperate for replacements and less leery of putting women in harm’s way, but it did not occur to Michelle that some future deployment might be different from this one, because she was too busy surviving her current ordeal.

  Bored and restless, Michelle started off the year with several resolutions. “I haven’t had a cigarette in about a week,” she wrote to her father. “It was really hard at first but gets a little easier every day.” And she enrolled in online courses that were being offered by the University of Southern Indiana to get a head start on her new life. “All of my free time goes to studying,” Michelle said in another letter.

  It didn’t seem as though anybody at Phoenix would find themselves in harm’s way, unless maybe they ran afoul of a land mine. Afghanistan was estimated to have ten million of the devices, making it one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. The list of countries riddled with mines (Egypt, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Somalia, Angola, Bosnia-Herzegovina) read like a history lesson in modern conflict. Mines had been used extensively in every war since 1938, and they never went away. They just abided, waiting to go off. According to the World Health Organization, no other country in the world dispensed to the victims of land mines as many prosthetic devices, crutches, and wheelchairs as Afghanistan. The social costs were immense. “Most land mine incidents occur in developing countries or regions where the victims are peasant farmers, herdsmen, nomads, or fleeing refugees,” noted a World Health Organization bulletin. “Because of this, they rely primarily on their physical abilities for their basic subsistence. Many survivors never regain their ability to participate fully in family life or their society.” Without mines, the authors estimated that agricultural production in Afghanistan could have doubled or tripled.

  The mines were lurking everywhere, and it was impossible to predict when one might be triggered. A group of soldiers from Camp Phoenix were returning from a visit to the ISAF compound when they saw a boy running through a field and suddenly the ground erupted. The soldiers jumped out of their vehicles and ran to tend to the boy, knowing there might be more unexploded ordnance hidden in the field. He lost both of his legs but they saved his life. The boy had not been targeted; the bomb was just a piece of military hardware left over from the other wars that had ravaged Afghanistan. His maiming was an accident.

  But so far the land mines and the roadside bombs had let the soldiers be, and that January the main difficulty that the 113th Support Battalion encountered was precipitation. “The weather has changed it is really rainy + snowy,” wrote Debbie in her diary, “but not like at home the snow doesn’t last and it just floods because we are on cement.” As the weather turned damp and cold, respiratory ailments spread through refugee camps, city neighborhoods, and across Camp Phoenix. Half the battalion fell sick; even Akbar Khan got pneumonia. Ben Sawyer came down with a fever so fierce that when Michelle wrapped herself around him, she was alarmed to feel the amount of heat coming off his burning body. It kept her warm, though. The generators that powered their heaters often quit during the night, leaving them without heat for hours at a time. Michelle, Desma, and Debbie started wearing footies and multiple pairs of long johns under their flannel pajamas when they slept. But they could hardly complain when they were not being asked to fight in Kandahar or in Kunar. How could they whine about the cold when they knew they were not carrying the war’s true burden? And all around them, people lived in far worse conditions. “I’m still seeing the kids along the way to ANA without socks or shoes it just kills me,” wrote Debbie. “I wish I could save them all. People back home can’t imagine.”

  Debbie decided to work through the entire deployment. It felt wrong, she thought, to go on a vacation. She would not be able to relax, knowing that two wars were being waged and that other people were bearing the brunt of the fight. Plus, if she worked straight through the year, she would be able to take a leave when she got home, instead of having to go straight back to work at the beauty salon. Patrick Miller told her that spending an entire year at Camp Phoenix without a break would not be healthy, but she refused to listen. Then Miller engineered matters so that she “won” a free trip to Qatar in a rigged lottery. “Maybe I will get off post after all,” wrote Debbie. “I need a beer I’m sure they don’t have Coors Light but I hope they do.”

  Debbie left for Qatar on Monday, January 10, 2005—the same day they got news of the second roadside bomb destroying an armored Bradley over in Iraq. She turned in her weapon, caught a ride to Bagram, and waited for a plane to take her to the Persian Gulf, feeling badly about leaving Diamond. At 5:30 p.m. she boarded a plane for Qatar, along with a group of commissioned and noncommissioned officers she recognized from Camp Phoenix. Debbie imagined they might all go bar-hopping. She felt excited about the idea until they arrived at Camp As Sayliyah, the US Army base outside of Doha that served as an R&R facility for troops serving in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kuwait. The post strictly regulated access to alcohol, Debbie learned at a briefing; visiting soldiers were given three tickets per day, allowing them at most three drinks in a twenty-four-hour period. And the bars on post only served alcohol between 6:00 p.m. and 11:15 p.m. Qatar was not going to be the free-for-all she had envisioned. “Have to wait for drink tomorrow, too late tonite,” she wrote in her diary. “Plus can’t get your drinks until [evening]. How crazy no drinking during the day.”

  The following morning, the soldiers she had traveled with went their separa
te ways, but they joined up for lunch at Chili’s. “Food really good,” Debbie noted later. “No alcohol.” After lunch they marveled at the lush, manicured grounds around the post’s fancy hotels—they had not seen anything green in months. “Trees, grass, flowers even,” wrote Debbie. “You know ‘stopped to smell the roses’? We stopped to smell the grass.”

  In the evening, Debbie met the same soldiers back at Chili’s. The enormous post was strange, and the chain restaurant offered the reassurance of being familiar. They hit the bars after dinner. Debbie obsessed about the fact that her colleagues ordered only one alcoholic beverage apiece; the colonel and the NCOs did not seem concerned about using their allotted alcohol ration. Would they offer her their unused tickets? She longed for them to do so. “But no one is offering so I guess I’m stuck with my 3,” she wrote in her diary.

  The following day, Debbie bought some earrings for her daughter and coveted but did not buy a pair of pewter goblets. “I miss my Diamond Girl!” she wrote. When she met up with her traveling companions, they talked her into joining them on a boat ride in the Persian Gulf. From the deck of the craft, the soldiers could see a string of construction cranes hugging the shoreline; the area was booming. The sky clouded over and the temperature dropped and the soldiers shivered as they stood on the ship’s deck. They watched a bunch of marines who’d been serving in Iraq cutting loose; of course Debbie befriended them. The marines decided to pile on top of each other to stay warm, and their colonel stacked rugs and mats on top of his men to shield them from the cutting wind. Debbie envied the evident bond between the members of the unit and their leader. Later she wrote: “He is so cool, wish he was over us!”

  On their second-to-last day in Qatar, the soldiers from Camp Phoenix paid to go on a safari. Guides drove them all over an astonishing ocean of sand dunes. Debbie raved about the experience:

  Oh my what an awesome day. It’s the best $21 I’ve ever spent. We were in Land Cruisers and they had to let the air out so they ride right. It was just like a roller coaster ride my stomach was doing flip-flops I was sure we would roll over but we never did. It’s just an awesome feeling to be in a real desert and we were right by the Persian Gulf again we had a cookout with a big tent, chairs, tables, bonfire + beautiful sunset. . . . It’s just beautiful like on vacation. They lit Tiki lights + it’s just great if only we could stay longer.

  But their leave was almost over. Debbie hoped that finally on their last day she might receive some of the unused drink tickets belonging to the other soldiers, but she was disappointed again. “Carpenter still won’t give me his tickets oh well it’s OK,” she wrote. “I had Carlsberg tonite not bad beer really!” The group decided to return to Chili’s again for their last meal. After they finished eating, the others were ready to head back to the barracks, but Debbie still had tickets to use, and the alcohol blanketed her in a comforting fog and helped her find sleep, and it would not be so easily available once she returned to Camp Phoenix. She wrote afterward, “Everyone left + I stayed to finish my beers.”

  The next morning they had to be in formation by 4:00 a.m., then caught a flight back to Bagram. Debbie’s thoughts shifted to her pending reunion with Diamond. “Not sure if we have work or not I’m hoping I get my day off on Monday. But if not I will still go see my Baby!” They got stranded at Bagram Airfield for lack of a convoy to Kabul, but made it back to Camp Phoenix one day later. Debbie got the day off on Monday and used the time to distribute gifts to various local national workers and to visit Diamond. “She’s grown so much,” wrote Debbie. “She did fine while I was gone but she missed me. They didn’t take her out at all. So I’m picking her up at night + walking her for 2 hours around compound hopefully that will help.”

  That week, Debbie did three haircuts and three leg waxes, making up for lost time—her services were in demand, as her clients had missed her while she was gone. It pleased her to be needed. At the same time, Debbie was characteristically delighted when Patrick Miller took the armament team to the range to fire SPG-9s, a recoilless Soviet antitank gun. They had been fixing SPG-9s instead of AK-47s and wanted to be sure they were doing the job right. The only way to know if you had fixed a gun properly was to fire it, Miller said—so they did. Everybody except Michelle Fischer. She announced that she was trying to get through her deployment without firing a weapon and boycotted the exercise. The others were thrilled to fire the unusual weapons. “What a blast,” Debbie wrote in her diary. “It’s really quite a boom + really shakes your legs + insides.”

  In the chow hall, people were talking about multiple deployments. Earlier that month, Fox News had reported that the army was considering a change in its use of reserve and National Guard soldiers: at the moment, part-time soldiers could not be asked to serve on active duty for more than twenty-four months, meaning that for the entirety of their time as soldiers, they could not be asked to spend more than a total of two years overseas; the proposed change involved rewriting the sentence to say the army could deploy part-time soldiers for no more than twenty-four consecutive months. The effect of the one-word change would be to allow the army to deploy part-time soldiers for up to two years at a time on multiple occasions, rather than sending them overseas for a cumulative total of two years. The new policy would allow the army to deploy its part-time soldiers for much longer periods of time and far more frequently. And the 113th Support Battalion was being told to expect a deployment to Iraq at some point in the future.

  The policy allowing multiple deployments in a single conflict was controversial—even during Vietnam, which had lasted for ten years and was at the time the longest war in US history, soldiers were done after one tour of duty, unless they volunteered to return—and nobody in the Guard had foreseen repeated lengthy deployments. By this point, however, American soldiers had been fighting in Afghanistan for more than three years, and in Iraq for close to two. So reliant on the National Guard had the army become that it had already deployed or put on notice of plans to mobilize during the coming year fifteen of the Guard’s combat brigades. Not every soldier would be deployed—as chance would have it, Michelle’s two former boyfriends, Noah Jarvis and James Cooper, were sitting out the wars at home, because their particular job specialties had not been required—but almost every brigade would be affected. The Guard was no longer serving in an emergency capacity, in other words; it had become an essential part of the country’s war machine.

  Military leaders were debating whether it was advisable to rely so heavily on the National Guard. Most of the “citizen soldiers” had not foreseen long deployments when they signed up and were not really ready for them. Neither were their families. In a memo to the army chief of staff that was leaked to the Baltimore Sun that January, Lieutenant General James R. “Ron” Helmly, the chief of the army reserve, called Bush’s policies “dysfunctional” and expressed his “deepening concern” about the readiness of reserve troops. He warned that his branch of the military was being overused and said the reserves were “rapidly degenerating into a ‘broken’ force.” He said the Guard could no longer regenerate itself in a viable fashion. Indeed, all of the publicity over multiple deployments had caused recruitment efforts to slide: that January, the National Guard met only 56 percent of its recruiting quota. Noting that recruitment was failing to meet expectations, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld conceded that the US military was “clearly stressed.”

  Embroiled in two wars that kept thundering forward, however, Pentagon leaders believed there was no other way but multiple deployments to keep troop levels sufficiently high—at least not while maintaining the idea that the United States was using an “all-volunteer” force. In the weeks that followed, the army did adopt the one-word change in policy, although the decision proved so unpopular that Pentagon officials almost simultaneously vowed not to use their new authority. “No individual will have more than twenty-four months cumulative on active duty, Guard or reserve,” General Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would tel
l the Senate Armed Services Committee. “Right now we’re able to stipulate that anyone who has already been called to active duty will not be recalled.” But the soldiers at Camp Phoenix suspected that this vow would prove untrue.

  As they debated the issue of multiple deployments, a series of blizzards pummeled the region. It snowed on both January 20 and January 21, which happened to be the first two days of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. Also called the Greater Eid, or the Feast of the Sacrifice, Eid al-Adha was a different holiday than the Lesser Eid, which had marked the end of Ramadan. During the four-day holiday, Muslims honored the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son, before God let him sacrifice a lamb instead. Camp Phoenix announced that most of the soldiers on the post did not have to work. They all enjoyed the holiday atmosphere in their own ways. Debbie slept late and hung out at supply, drinking. Desma drove to a nearby orphanage in Kabul to deliver clothes and shoes, on a day when the sun was shining, and everything glittered. Michelle studied for her online courses and had a snowball fight with Ben.

  President Bush delivered his second inaugural address on Thursday, January 20, 2005—also the day that snow began falling in Kabul, and the day that Muslims began celebrating Eid al-Adha—to an audience that included soldiers who had been wounded in Iraq and were being treated at a nearby military hospital. Bush thanked the men and women who were serving in the armed forces. He talked about freedom and liberty. “Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave,” Bush said. “Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation’s security, and the calling of our time. So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Maybe the elections in Iraq would make everything there all right, he seemed to be saying. Shortly afterward, the Bush administration requested another $80 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.