Soldier Girls

by Helen Thorpe

  People back in Indiana seemed inclined to believe that the Taliban could strike down their soldiers; it was hard to grasp how a land mine from a previous war could have caused such a catastrophe. But everyone who had spent the past eight months at Camp Phoenix found it plausible that the ground might have betrayed them. They had seen children missing legs, or hands, or other body parts. They had watched a boy run across a field and nearly die. And they thought of the Taliban as a ragtag sort of enemy. In either case—land mine or IED—Afghanistan had reminded them that it was a dangerous place. But they could not go home yet; they had several months left in the deployment.

  6

  * * *

  Sea World

  MICHELLE NEVER SAW the empty boots, she was not present for the memorial ceremony. By the time the service took place, she and Ben Sawyer were in Kuwait. They had heard about the explosion while they were still at Bagram. Michelle had caught sight of Desma and Mary’s platoon sergeant, looking harried. Why was he wearing his ballistic vest in the middle of the day when there were no sirens blaring? Four guys just died, he told them curtly. There were two theories: the Taliban or the rain.

  Michelle thought about how much rain had fallen, and figured it was likely the deluges could have caused some long-buried land mine to migrate. Still, for weeks afterward, she found herself wondering if the official story was fiction. Truth seemed elusive in a war zone, and both sides had motivation for their theories. Could the US military be using false narratives as well as armor and bullets? She didn’t want to think so, but she had read a lot of left-wing periodicals. Maybe her commanders wanted to blame the weather to make the Taliban seem less powerful. In the years that followed, charts of violent incidents would show that during the months of March, April, May, and June 2005, there was a sudden spike in the use of IEDs across Afghanistan. That year’s fighting season was when the war took a darker turn, in other words. Later—when it would become clear that Afghan insurgents had gotten much better at building bombs that particular spring—it would seem more likely the Taliban might have played a role, but by then the families had already been told the official story about the rain.

  Meanwhile, Michelle and Ben had concocted a false story of their own. Both of them were expecting to return to stressful scenarios in Indiana. While they were still in Afghanistan, Michelle had called her father from Ben’s cell phone and he had let her know that he had been arrested for dealing methamphetamine (although he would later plead guilty to a lesser charge, possession of methamphetamine). He and a friend had been busted for running an illegal meth lab on his property, according to Michelle. He had needed money for bail and Michelle had sent him several hundred dollars. She was dreading her return both because she would have to confront the sordid mess her father had gotten into and because she was planning to tell Pete the truth about the affair.

  And Ben Sawyer told Michelle that he had been watching his bank account be drained from afar, presumably because his wife was spending the money he had been earning. Because he had been amassing combat pay, he kept depositing significant amounts into the account, and he had been spending hardly anything, yet Michelle got the impression that the money kept melting away. Ben told Michelle that his wife had supplied vague answers when he had asked where the money was going, but his friends had shared their suspicion that in his absence Amanda had grown reliant on OxyContin. The military had required that Ben give his wife access to his earnings, to make sure she would be able to support their children while he was gone—it was standard practice—and he had no authority to take that access away from Amanda as long as they remained married, because she and the children were his dependents. By this point, however, his wife seemed to have spent tens of thousands of dollars, and Ben told Michelle that he feared much of the money might have gone to pay for drugs.

  Neither of the two was looking forward to going home—although they both felt compelled to return—so they had lied to their families about the duration of their leave and said they had been given only ten days, when in truth they had been given two weeks. This allowed them to steal five days for themselves, five days when they would answer to nobody, and not wear uniforms, and not have to confront any of the difficulties waiting for them. They took military transport all the way to Louisville, Kentucky, but did not leave the airport. They walked through international customs, went to a different terminal, and caught a commercial flight to Orlando, Florida. They stayed at a fancy resort, ate big meals, drank a lot of booze, went shopping, and lazed on the beach. Michelle looked spectacular in her bikini. Then they went to Sea World. It was free for military personnel, and Michelle, the nature lover, had always wanted to go. Ben was happy to go anywhere with Michelle as long as it meant that he could defer the impending confrontation with his wife. They saw beluga whales and bottlenose dolphins and sea lions and manatees. They saw schools of tropical fish—silver, yellow, orange, green—that whirled in stunning unison. They did not like the crowds, but as long as they were looking at sea creatures they had a sense of being transported to a place where nothing bad would happen. Then Michelle and Ben flew back to Louisville and feigned an arrival straight from Afghanistan.

  Michelle told nobody about the five stolen days in Florida, not even Veronica, who met her at the airport. While they drove to Evansville—past gray fields stubbled with last year’s corn, as a gray sky hugged the gray landscape—Michelle did tell Veronica everything else. She described how Ben had shadowed her, and how other men had called her by name even though she did not know who they were, how she had slept with Ben by accident, and how it just kept happening. Michelle described how cold it had been and how warm Ben had kept her. As Veronica sped along the highway, Michelle speculated about whether the new relationship might continue after the deployment. Veronica just listened. She did not show surprise or criticism. For that, Michelle was grateful. She felt unburdened for the first time in months.

  Veronica drove her straight to Pete’s apartment. He still lived in the same place, the one they had shared. Michelle was not naturally a deceitful person—she was needy, but not untruthful—and hated herself for hiding the affair for such a long time. Now that she was seeing Pete face-to-face, she could think of nothing else except telling him about Ben Sawyer, but it was late by the time she arrived and when she walked into the apartment she found Pete and Halloween asleep in bed. So she just climbed into bed with them and fell asleep, too. She was home, she thought, as she drifted off. In the morning, she told Pete everything. He shied away from the subject of her infidelity, as if it disturbed him too much to discuss, and just said in a tone of wondering dismay that she had changed in so many ways he felt as though he hardly recognized her. Where was the Michelle he knew? Even her body was different—she had grown so muscular. Michelle bristled. She was proud of her body, she told Pete defensively. She had worked hard to look like this. You’ve become vain, Pete said. And you don’t even smell the same.

  They got into an epic fight. Michelle stormed out the back door and sat down on the chipped concrete steps. She hunched over to make the tightness in her middle go away, but it was a stubborn kind of tension. After a while, Pete came out and sat down beside her.

  “I’ll forgive you,” he said. “I’ll forget all about this, if you’ll just stay with me.”

  “I can’t,” Michelle told him. “I love him.”

  She spent the rest of the week at her mother’s place.

  Irene had moved again while Michelle was gone and was now living in the middle of nowhere, without a telephone. Her half sister Tammy and her two kids were living there, too. Michelle had no way to call and let them know when she was going to arrive, so she just showed up. Her mother was reading in the bedroom, Tammy was occupied in the kitchen, and her nephew Cody was playing by himself, wearing only a diaper. “Hi, Michelle,” Cody said brightly when she walked into the trailer, as if she had been gone for only a few hours. Tammy gave Michelle a tight hug and whispered to be quiet so they could surprise thei
r mother. Irene melted at the sight of Michelle.

  Later Colleen and some other friends took Michelle to a male strip club and made sure that she got spanked onstage. It somehow seemed appropriate at the time—how else did you celebrate having stayed alive? She did not know what she actually needed, so she went along for the ride.

  At various points during the week Michelle returned to the apartment where Pete was living, because she needed some of her belongings, or because Colleen and Veronica lived upstairs and she just happened to be in the building. Pete had taken the entire week off work, expecting to be able to spend it with Michelle, and instead she had dropped that bombshell on him. Each time she returned to see how he was doing, she found him sitting on the sofa in his boxers, in a catatonic state. She did not want to be responsible for putting a human being in that position so she told herself that Pete had conflated her abandonment of him with his mother’s decision to leave him for an entire year when he was just a child. And who knows, maybe there was some truth in that explanation, or maybe she was just using it to make herself feel better about an awful, awful thing.

  Strangely, the person she found it easiest to be around was her father. He took her to PJs and got her drunk and then they spent a day drinking together in his party trailer with relatives on his side of the family. Her father had parked a second trailer beside the trailer in which he lived, and they used it for any kind of celebration. For once there was no conflict, and it was easy. Her father and her uncle and her other half sister Cindy all seemed to look at her differently—with a rosy glow of appreciation. It had never been like that with her father before. He had always taken her for granted, but somehow she had become special.

  Michelle saw Ben Sawyer again back at the airport in Louisville. He said his wife was down to ninety pounds, and his kids had wandered into and out of the house essentially uncared for while she lay sprawled across the sofa. The house had smelled bad, and there had been dirty clothes mounded in the bathtub. They got stuck in Kuwait for several days, and arrived back at Bagram almost three weeks after they had left, in the middle of April. Fighting season was in full swing and they spent the night in Bagram’s transient housing area, lying side by side on cots in a cavernous, domed tent, filled with an ocean of cots occupied by innumerable other soldiers, all wearing Kevlar helmets and ballistic vests, listening to RPGs explode around them. Michelle listened to the big booms, crying as quietly as she knew how. She was afraid for her life, and she had forgotten what that felt like—it was as though she had never before been to a war zone. During those nights when she had done Mad Libs with Desma, she had grown numb to the idea that an RPG might snuff her out, but the women who shared her tent were not with her, and Michelle felt alone in the sea of strangers. She had never been through an RPG attack without Desma before.

  Only after they returned to Camp Phoenix did Michelle finally realize the enormity of what she had missed: the four deaths had fundamentally altered the atmosphere at the post. There was a shared sadness in the air and she was out of place, out of step with everyone else. While they had been grieving, she had been at Sea World; in retrospect, the vacation that she and Ben had stolen seemed selfish, wrong. Michelle felt like a stranger in her own tent.

  While Michelle had been gone, Debbie had been forced to confront her own mortality. Shortly after Michelle and Ben had left, Debbie had gotten a cold, which had turned into a sinus infection. She had gone to see a medic, who did a routine examination and discovered that Debbie’s blood pressure had jumped to 155/99. The last time the medics had taken a reading, her blood pressure had been 110/80, in the normal range. She had a mild case of hypertension. The medics conferred among themselves and decided to monitor Debbie’s blood pressure daily. “I’ve never had any problems so I’m supposed to go back the next 3 days around the same time,” Debbie wrote in her diary. “Didn’t go anywhere just laid around don’t really feel like too much.” In the days that followed, however, Debbie’s blood pressure went up, not down. She scrawled with frustration: “Went to get it checked around 3:30 it was higher today 158/102 what’s up he said if it’s still high tomorrow medicine I guess my 50s are not going to be nice to me.”

  Debbie spent hours crocheting, hoping the soothing activity would lower her blood pressure. It was almost time for the baby’s birth. “I talked to mom EA is one and half cent dilated but could stay that way for a while,” Debbie wrote. “She’s two weeks away.” She finished Jaylen’s blanket. “It doesn’t look too bad now to mail it off.” She was hoping the blood pressure issue would resolve of its own accord but when she saw the medics again she learned otherwise. “Didn’t have as much headache so I thought maybe it would be better but it was worse I don’t get it. It was 158/110 today.” The medics started Debbie on blood pressure medication. Afterward, Debbie cheered herself up by going down to Morale, Welfare, and Recreation with Gretchen and some other friends. They ordered a pizza at Ciano’s and then went to the new Dairy Queen that had just opened up on the post. It was comforting to linger over a beverage that reminded her of home. “Orange Julius was great haven’t had one since they left the mall,” Debbie wrote.

  The group gossiped about the fact that two women in the battalion had learned they were pregnant. Living in such close quarters, they had few secrets, and many people knew that a married woman from Charlie Company had conceived a child with her husband while she was home on leave, and an unmarried woman from Bravo Company had conceived a child with someone else on post. Ten days later, the young woman from Bravo Company left for Germany, supposedly to seek treatment for bowel trouble. “Heard [name deleted] was sent to Bagram for bowel trouble but not!” When the young woman returned, looking wan and strained, she turned to Debbie for consolation; it was always Debbie, she mothered them all. The young woman confessed that she had found reentry into the gossipy world of Camp Phoenix excruciating. Debbie confided something she rarely discussed: she had once gotten an abortion herself, more than twenty years earlier.

  She got back today she feels strange like everyone is judging her I told her it was her business anyway no one else’s. Her dad went to Germany to be with her for a while it was a wise decision she just doesn’t know it yet! It was hard for me + I still have hard feelings every once in a while but it was the right one!

  Encircled by younger women, on the verge of becoming a grandmother, and feeling powerless as she watched her blood pressure rise, Debbie faced the unavoidable truth that she was aging. So were her parents; that month, her father turned seventy-nine. She called him on his birthday; they had always been close. She wrote wistfully in her diary that at least she would be home the following year, when he turned eighty. Becoming older herself confounded Debbie. She still found herself attracted to men who were half her age. (“Some people were visiting from Kabul University boy was there a cutie I’ve been here too long he looked a lot like Keanu Reeves . . . he was gorgeous.”) Yet her body was betraying her in a fashion as elemental as the way her blood ran through her veins. She wondered about the possible reasons for her hypertension: Was it age? Could it be the altitude? The stress of the deployment?

  Her blood pressure varied but stubbornly remained higher than normal, despite the medication. During her daily visits to the medical area, Debbie grew attached to one doctor in particular, a tall, blue-eyed, sandy-haired medic who had an attentive bedside manner. During one of their consultations, the doctor noticed Debbie’s tall and slender build and asked about her diet. Was she eating enough food? Debbie said she was. Drinking excessive amounts of alcohol can raise blood pressure to unhealthy levels, but when the doctor asked, “You haven’t been drinking while you’re here, have you?” Debbie said, “No, sir.” The doctor changed her medication. The following day, Debbie felt worse, not better. “Well I go back today to check the BP I think it’s still up I have a constant headache + I felt like I was in a fog last night + this morning,” she wrote. Indeed, her blood pressure had climbed even higher, to 162/99. Several days later, however,
her blood pressure dropped to 138/100. The medics continued to monitor her closely, but they were encouraged—the new medication seemed to be working.

  Shortly after starting the second medication, Debbie went down to supply for an impromptu party after being tipped off that other soldiers had made a run to Supreme Foods. The store was part of a chain founded by a former army food service worker; it sold liquor as well as groceries, and had outlets near American bases in the Balkans, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Soldiers from Camp Phoenix had discovered a branch in Kabul. The armament team had begun radioing in false departure times from the ANA depot or the KMTC so they could stop there to stock up on liquor. “The boys got to make a Supreme Run for the First Sergeant,” Debbie wrote in her diary. “Me + Terry went down around 3:00 started having fun early too early skipped dinner don’t remember coming home. Got sick felt like shit most all the day not like my normal hangovers.” The following day she went back and allowed herself only one alcoholic beverage, but soon she was drinking at her usual rate. She shrugged off her brush with ill health. “Okay my BP 130/78 so I think that’s fine,” she wrote. “I think it was a fluke with the sinus + throat thing. I’ll finish this med + then have it checked + see about going off of it in case I don’t need it!”

  When Michelle Fischer returned that week, Debbie greeted the young woman with her usual stream of chatty affirmation, wanting to know how everything had gone, buoying Michelle up by saying she had done the right thing, telling Pete in person. Debbie mentioned dealing with some issues related to blood pressure but quickly changed the subject. Only in the pages of her diary did Debbie reveal worry, fear, anxiety, or dependence; otherwise she concealed her vulnerabilities. Debbie had missed Michelle while she was gone. She enjoyed the girl’s liveliness, her daily dramas, and her compelling way of putting it all into words, entertaining everyone in the process. Although Debbie thought it was her job to take care of Michelle, who struck her as too young to be in Afghanistan, oddly she found herself less anxious when she heard the girl’s bell-like laugh peal out again as they fixed another batch of AK-47s. Patrick Miller had gone home on leave to visit his wife and baby, who was now six months old, and had left Will Hargreaves in charge of the armament team. Will was not a hard-driving taskmaster, and Debbie and Michelle enjoyed his more relaxed style. The air grew mild, and wildflowers carpeted the hills around them. “The weather has been beautiful I’m getting spoiled working outside every day!” Debbie wrote. She picked some of the wildflowers and stuck them into the pages of her diary. Meanwhile Michelle and Desma bought some hash and got stoned in the tent, hiding under their bedclothes, blowing the smoke into dryer sheets in an attempt to hide the smell. They thought they were very clever, but Caroline Hill came in and said, “You know I can smell that, right?”