by Helen Thorpe
Questions like these thronged her. She understood why the United States wanted to prevent terrorist strikes, and she knew that Al-Qaeda had established training camps in Afghanistan, yet she could not always fathom how the work they had been doing at Camp Phoenix was related to all that. And she had never understood why it had been necessary to invade Iraq, when the blame for 9/11 lay squarely with a small group of men who came primarily from Saudi Arabia. And how exactly had the two wars mushroomed into their present, bloated forms? Was she the only one who wondered why the military had strayed so far from its original goal of finding Osama bin Laden? When would it all end? There was always the thought that she might be sent on another deployment. The longer the wars continued, the more likely this seemed. Meanwhile, the part of her intelligence that constantly analyzed things was waking up again and sometimes she felt filled with horror, wondering about the meaning of her deployment. What had it signified, that she had spent a year fixing broken AK-47s? Often she had a hard time staying in the present. She was standing in Target, she reminded herself; she was supposed to buy toilet paper. It was just hard to make up her mind.
“Stay here,” Pete said. “I’ll be right back.”
He vanished, leaving her alone.
Panic. Her peripheral vision blackened, her sense of hearing dropped, her heart thudded in her chest. Primeval questions blared across her mind: Am I safe here? Is this a good place? She could not have justified why in rational terms, but it seemed to her that there was something fantastically amiss—something malignant, even—with a store that sold twenty-five different brands of toilet paper. How could this level of material abundance be morally acceptable, given the poverty on the other side of the globe? And now that the flesh of reality had been peeled back and she could look underneath the surface of things, she could see that she was utterly, utterly abandoned and surrounded by a yawning, nameless danger. Michelle began crying uncontrollably, heaving sobs, terrible sounds. By the time Pete found her, she could barely function. “I’m having a panic attack,” she managed to say. “Get me out of here.”
They left without buying anything. Afterward Michelle thought the timing of the panic attack had been curious. She had survived the sound of nighttime rockets whistling around her at Bagram, only to be felled by a trip to Target? Why had that pushed her over the edge? Maybe some part of her recognized that on home soil it was permissible to go to pieces, or maybe coming home was simply much harder than she had anticipated, or maybe the transition from Evansville to Bloomington had been the last straw. Michelle unpacked her clothes and put the marble tea sets that she had bought at the bazaar in Afghanistan on the bookshelves. This was simply going to take some time, she told herself.
* * *
Desma Brooks had not wanted to meet her children in the crowded, noisy armory because she thought she might fall apart. Instead she had waited until after the five days of demobilization to call her cousin Lesley. She arranged to meet Lesley and the children at a McDonald’s near Lesley’s house. Lesley brought all the children, including her own, to the restaurant. Desma walked over and sat down at their table and for one split second she marveled at how much Lesley’s son had grown. Then he said, “Hey, Mom.” It was Josh. He had been round and pudgy when she had left, but now he was all angles. “Where?” one of the girls said in response. “Where’s Mom?” Desma had not recognized Josh; the girls had not recognized their mother. It had been a long time.
Desma told the children that she needed some time to unpack, and then two days later she drove to her cousin’s house and her ex-boyfriend’s house, collected her three children, and tried to pick up where she had left off. She was a mom; she should cook dinner. At Camp Phoenix the staff had cooked her meals, done her laundry, cleaned the bathrooms, mopped the kitchen floor. Her life had been highly regimented; she had been told where to be and what to do. Go to the motor pool, track vehicle maintenance, eat dinner, play cards, sleep; go to the motor pool, track vehicle maintenance, eat dinner, sleep. Each day mind-numbingly similar to the previous one. Now there were three children running around in a state of overexcitement and a grown man waiting to be fed and nobody to tell her what was on the menu. Desma opened the refrigerator and saw that it contained only condiments. Okay, there’s no food in the house, Desma said to herself. I’ve got to go to the grocery store. She drove over to the Buy-Low, and it was just aisles and aisles of stuff. “And I’m like, I don’t know what I need,” she said later. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to cook. I don’t know how this all works. It was like, What do they eat? What do they like? I haven’t been here in over a year.”
Tunnel vision, racing heart. She abandoned her shopping cart in the aisle and went outside and called Stacy Glory. Stacy talked to Desma the entire time as she drove the fifteen miles to the Buy-Low, and then she accompanied Desma as she walked back into the store. After that, for a period of several months, Stacy went with Desma whenever she ran errands, made sure she was never by herself. “She would go grocery shopping with me so I didn’t freak out when I didn’t know what to get,” Desma would say later. “I tried to come home and pick up my life, and I was like, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” Stacy told her it was normal to be bewildered; she just needed time to adjust. That was reassuring, because otherwise Desma found her difficulties inexplicable. Nothing dire had happened to her in Afghanistan, so why did she stand in the cereal aisle for an eternity, staring at a box of Honeycomb, asking herself how it could be true that when she had left, the box had cost less than $3 and now the same box cost almost $4? Sometimes she got lost in her own head, puzzling over her place in the universe. “I came back and I realized how small I was in the whole scope of things,” Desma said later. “I was sitting at the picnic table in my backyard and I look up and there’s a plane flying overhead and it’s full of people and I don’t mean jack shit to anybody. It was a huge problem when I first got home.”
One night her sense of being insignificant grew so acute that she called a suicide hotline. The woman she spoke to struck Desma as useless, and the phone call was more annoying than helpful. The interaction served a purpose, though—it made her want to speak to somebody who would not talk in platitudes. So she called Mary Bell, who came over and stayed with her until she regained a sense of worth. Desma felt like a freak, but she could say this to Stacy, or Mary, or Michelle. And Stacy kept telling her, Des, this is just what happens. You’ll get used to going to the grocery store again. It’s overwhelming at first, but you’ll get used to it again. Everybody feels this way when they get back. But it was impossible to explain to civilians.
“You are different,” Jimmy said. “What happened to you?”
“I dunno, there ain’t nothing wrong with me,” Desma told him.
Suddenly it was time for the kids to return to school. Alexis was starting kindergarten that year, and Paige was starting second grade, while Josh was going to enter the seventh grade, in a different middle school than the one he had attended while she was gone. She bought them new shoes and new clothes and new backpacks and then she looked at her bank account and realized that if she did not go back to work soon the money would run out. She had been paying $600 to her cousin and $300 to Josh’s father every month the whole time she was gone, and had ordered gifts and necessities on the Internet for the children as well, so she didn’t have nearly as much money saved as her childless friends. Desma still felt dazed by basic domestic routines and not yet competent at civilian life, but she returned to work anyway.
While she was gone, the truck stop had turned into a strip joint, so she didn’t go back there. Instead she returned to her part-time job at the Kentucky United Methodist Homes for Children and Youth, and tried selling life insurance on the side. She gave up the life insurance gig after she figured out that the clients were even more broke than she was. Then Kentucky United got a big grant and promoted Desma to full-time and boosted her hourly pay to $10. Trying to work forty hours a week, run errands, clean the house,
and feed the kids, Desma could not manage. “I had a back porch area—it was enclosed, and I had my washer and dryer out there,” Desma said later. “They had so much laundry, and I had a full-time job. I could not keep up with it. Then it was mounding in these baskets and I didn’t know how to take care of it.” It baffled Desma to watch herself fail to cope. She had not been shot; she had not seen anybody get blown up. She had spent her days at the motor pool. Why could she not do the laundry? But there was so much of it, and she hadn’t done any for a year. Among Jimmy, the three children, and herself, the household produced an extraordinary number of tasks. In those early days, it just felt like too much. Everything felt like too much.
Desma slept with Mark Northrup once or twice more, and then the relationship fizzled. The end came after he broke the rules, and called her from his home phone—although they had agreed they would only communicate on drill weekends. Northrup’s wife must have grown suspicious, because one Saturday afternoon Desma started getting phone calls from Northrup while she was sitting in a movie theater with nine teenagers from the group home. She was working that day, and the teens had earned the privilege of an outing. Perplexed to see that Northrup was calling when it was not a drill weekend, Desma let several calls go to voice mail, and then she received a text message saying, You really need to call back. When Desma called back, Northrup put her on speakerphone. He said he was sitting with his wife.
“Oh, okay,” said Desma. “What’s going on?”
Northrup announced that he had told his wife about all the flirtation and the connotations, and said it had to stop. Desma played along, for the sake of his marital harmony, although she could not believe what he was doing—denying the affair, pinning the whole thing on her, taking zero responsibility.
“That’s cool with me,” Desma told Northrup. “I didn’t mean to cause any harm. It was all in fun. I know you’re married. I didn’t figure I could take you home.”
“Well, it has to stop,” Northrup said again.
“Fine,” Desma said.
She never slept with him again. “I was beyond done,” Desma would say later. “He could kiss my ever-loving ass—you know, put me on speakerphone with the wife. Own up to your own shit, and let’s not blame it on me.”
* * *
When Debbie Helton had arrived home, Ellen Ann had been waiting for her in the crowd at the National Guard armory, and she had brought her baby along. Both of Debbie’s parents had been there, too. Debbie wound up on the front page of the Indianapolis Star after a reporter had learned that she was meeting her granddaughter for the first time. Jaylen had reached for the name badge on Debbie’s uniform as the Indy Star reporter questioned Debbie about her age; because the military needed additional recruits for the war effort, the Pentagon had just asked Congress to raise the age cutoff for new enlistees to forty-two. Debbie suggested people should think hard before they enlisted but told the Indy Star that she had not allowed her age to stand in the way of her dream to become a soldier. “I was determined enough that I wasn’t going to fail,” she told the Star’s Rebecca Neal. “If you’re determined, if you want to do something, put your mind to it and you can.”
Jeff had not met Debbie in the big crowd. “He was going to meet me later because he felt like that was the time I should be meeting with my mom, my dad, and my daughter, and for the first time meeting my granddaughter,” Debbie would say later. “And he felt that he would rather wait until I got settled and then he would come and get me. And then we would do our own thing.” Jeff picked up Debbie and Will after they received their two-day passes—Will had no plans and had been at loose ends—and drove them around Indianapolis. They meandered up and down the city’s streets, looking for a decent place to stay. Jeff said he wanted to find the right sort of hotel, although Debbie said they could spend the night in a tent and she would not care. They wound up at a Holiday Inn. What Debbie did not say was that she was finding the reunion to be more fraught than she had anticipated. “It had been over a year,” she would say later. “You’re a little apprehensive, because you haven’t been with this guy for a year, and is he going to think you’re just as attractive as you were then, or are you going to think he is? Are you going to feel different? Are you going to feel attracted to him when you see him? Are you going to feel sexual? Or not? Oh, yeah, totally overwhelming. And then what if you sit there and you have a conversation and you don’t like the person anymore? You change, you change, and even though you talk and you say the same things on the phone, and you write emails, when you meet in person, you’re like, Oh, my God, he might not like me anymore.”
They checked in at the front desk.
“I’m going to go to my room and get settled,” said Will. “I know you two have a lot of catching up to do.”
Jeff said drily, “Well, I doubt that’s going to happen right away.”
In the hotel room, Debbie and Jeff sat on the bed and talked about nothing, just talked about the flight, and about the day, and about her granddaughter. Debbie decided maybe nothing had changed after all—“it had changed but it hadn’t changed.” Jeff asked what she wanted to do. “Honey, you probably want to get out of them clothes,” he said. “You’ve been in them for twenty-four hours. Would you like to take a hot bath?”
“Yeah, but I want you to come with me,” Debbie said.
“Well, I don’t have to, if you want to take a bath by yourself, I understand.”
“No, I think I want you in there.”
They lazed around in the tub for an hour, then called Will.
“Are you ready to go eat dinner?” Debbie asked.
“Yeah, I’m starved,” Will said.
They found a steak place nearby. Will came back to their room, had a few beers, but did not stay long. “Aw, I’m beat, guys,” he said. “I’m going to bed.” By the following day, Debbie was not worrying about whether she and Jeff would stay together, because he kept making everything easy. It was all about her. What did she want to eat? Where did she want to go? He made no demands. It meant a lot to Debbie that Jeff had let Will join them. So many men would have gotten upset at the request to bring another man along. But Will had been her closest friend during the deployment, and Debbie had not wanted to leave him alone. Maybe Jeff could also see that Debbie needed Will; it would have been jarring for her otherwise, to leave the rest of her unit behind, and spend two nights with a man she had not seen in a year.
Shortly after they returned to Bloomington Debbie walked into a Kroger grocery store, realized immediately that she could not handle the experience, and turned around and left. She did not stay long enough to become panicked, and few people knew that Debbie struggled to get used to being home again. But she did, because she missed Afghanistan terribly. The life she had returned to struck her as meaningless by comparison. “When I got back, I felt pretty worthless,” she would say later. “Like, What am I doing? I’m just back working at a hair salon, and that’s nothing. Well, yeah, my clients like it, but where’s my life going?”
She slept poorly and some days it was hard to get out of bed. The question of what clothes to put on perplexed her; she had liked just knowing to put on a uniform. Debbie had always remembered everything about her clients—their names, the names of their spouses, the names of their children, even their pets—but at this point she found herself frequently going blank when she was greeting a client. She covered up her memory lapses by calling her clients “honey” and “dear” and hoped they did not notice. Her colleagues saw that she had trouble stocking the inventory, however, as she failed to order critical products when they ran low. Before the deployment, Debbie had been able to glance at the shelves and know instantly which products needed to be ordered, but now the shelves read like a foreign language; she could not remember which shades of hair dye were the most popular and needed to be stocked in greater quantities. When she did the payroll she found she could no longer perform basic math, and she had to count on her fingers to determine that 8 plus 7 equaled 15
. Debbie was frightened to see how many facts that had once moored her had unaccountably slipped away.
At home she had crying jags. It was unlike her, and it startled Jeff. He noticed how much better she seemed after speaking with Will, however, and urged her to call Will more often. And it was true, speaking to Will always helped. Debbie needed that particular connection—she needed to talk to someone who had been with her in Afghanistan, preferably another member of the armament team. Will or Michelle, their voices produced the right chemistry. They were the ones who could lift her out of a black mood or restore her sense of having value. “I’m just having a really bad day and I just need to talk to you for a little bit,” Debbie would say. The first time Michelle got one of those phone calls, she was caught off guard—it was so unlike Debbie. And Debbie hated not being herself, hated being needy. She criticized herself for losing perspective, for lacking self-control, for letting in the blackness. She thought she was supposed to be strong, like her father. She did not want to be like her mother, who had suffered nervous breakdowns. She did not want to be weak. But Debbie had to admit out loud that she was struggling to find any relief. Soon Michelle and Will got used to Debbie’s calls, because she frequently needed to talk.