Soldier Girls

by Helen Thorpe

  Stoney shared a nearby CHU with the driver of his truck, Dustin Ford, while their truck commander, Jeff Stacey, lived about two shipping containers farther away, in a CHU that he shared with the platoon sergeant. The guys from the lead scout truck were a tight group, ran around as a crowd, and Stoney was the magnet that held them together. Once Desma put Vaseline all over the door handle to Stoney’s CHU—“so, like, when he grabbed it, his hand would slip off, and he’d be gooey.” As it happened, a dust storm blew in, and the Vaseline became a muddy slop. Stoney liked that experience so much that when Desma and Charity left to go and take showers, he rearranged their yard. They returned to find their two mountain bikes, the two blue canvas lawn chairs, the wooden step, the rock, and the butt can all perfectly arranged in their usual configuration, up on their roof. Stoney laughed his ass off at their dumbfounded expressions.

  One night Desma heard scuffling, muffled laughter, and the noise that duct tape makes as it is unrolled. She figured maybe Stoney was duct-taping them inside the CHU. Actually he was duct-taping a can of shaving cream to the outside of the conex, and a string to the doorknob so that when she opened the door she would get covered in shaving cream. Desma opened the door a sliver, saw about eight people, and tried to slam the door closed, but the guys shoved it open and shot white foam everywhere. Stoney dropped by often, and when Desma and Charity were not home, he made sure they knew he had been there. They would come back and find STONEY IS A GOD or HEY BITCHES written across the side of their CHU.

  Talking over the radio from their separate vehicles during missions that could last for twelve, fourteen, even sixteen hours, they dropped into the habit of referring to each other by nicknames they found out there in the Iraqi desert. Charity became Mojo Mama, or just plain Mama. Stoney became Papa. They called Desma Brooksy or Hooker, a term of endearment. Stoney’s truck commander, Jeff Stacey, had buckteeth, and somebody nicknamed him Beaver. He also had a temper, and eventually Desma started calling him Angry Beaver, after a character in a cartoon that her kids liked to watch. The names became who they were—back in Kuwait, they had been Desma and Charity; now they were Mama and Hooker.

  It was always the guys out front, in the lead scout position. If Stoney’s team was working, then Ford was at the wheel, while Angry Beaver was on the radio, commanding that truck, and Stoney was up in the gun turret. His job was to catch any anomaly the other guys did not see, shoot things that he thought had to be shot, and present a visual threat. The second vehicle was the assistant scout truck, known as ass scout for short, or just plain ass. Running ass meant backing Stoney up, spotting any potential bombs he failed to notice, and being ready to fire if there was an ambush. The two scout trucks ran ahead of the rest of the supply convoy, hunting for wires, for boxes, for mounds of trash, for dead animals, for anything that could signify the possibility of death.

  Charity and Desma typically rode in the convoy’s third vehicle, right after the two scout trucks. They were the navigation team. Desma drove while Charity, who was in charge of the vehicle, sat beside her manning the radio, and up in their gun turret was usually a guy they called Peaches. Every once in a while they got Brandon Hall instead—they called him BB or B-Boy. The navigation team followed at a slight distance, but maintained communication with the two scout trucks at all times, even if they could no longer see them. No matter what happened to the scout trucks, it was navigation’s job to lead the civilian trucks following behind to the correct destination, along the route that had been assigned by the convoy commander. Desma had been blessed with an excellent sense of direction and a good memory for physical landmarks, and she excelled at the job of driving the navigation truck. Charity aided her by tracking their progress on the specialized military GPS system, called a Blue Force Tracking device. The Blue Force tracker showed the position of every vehicle in their convoy, as well as any other convoy within a certain range, and through the device they could also send secure text messages to the other trucks or to the home station back at Q-West.

  After them snaked the rest of the convoy. On one mission that spring, they were followed by thirty civilian trucks, then two military vehicles, another thirty civilian trucks, one military vehicle, thirty civilian trucks, another military vehicle, the wrecker, and the rear gun. The military vehicles were constant, but the number of civilian trucks varied every time they went out. Sometimes there were as few as ten or twelve civilian trucks in the intervals between the military vehicles, sometimes many more. Sometimes their convoy ran back-to-back with another convoy until they had several hundred vehicles in a row. The wrecker rode at the back so that any truck that might need help would be ahead of it when it broke down or blew up. The wrecker did not have any outside weapons, however, and it needed the protection of the rear gun truck. The job of rear gun was to cover the backside of the convoy. That vehicle was usually a Humvee, with no armor on the bottom, and the soldiers inside it were more vulnerable than those inside more heavily armored vehicles, but it was almost always the lead trucks that got hit.

  The hardest part about Desma’s job, at least in the beginning, was getting used to an unfamiliar vehicle. The scout teams and the navigation team drove armored security vehicles. Only eight feet wide, the ASVs were highly maneuverable, but they weighed fifteen tons and had a heavily protected hull, as well as enormous nubbed tires that came to Desma’s hips. Over time she grew adept at climbing onto the huge tires to reach the small hatches on the upper part of the truck. There were four panes of extra-thick glass across the front and sides of the vehicle, which gave the soldiers a panoramic view of their surroundings. The ASV had been designed specifically to survive IED explosions; its hull was more heavily armored than a Humvee, and the sides of the vehicle angled outward in a V shape, to divert the force of any blast away from its occupants. The armor that covered the outside of the vehicle had been made of ceramic composite, and in case that armor was pierced, the vehicle also had a spall lining—the inside of the truck had been coated in composite material, too, with the hope of slowing any metal particles that might come flying through the hull. The ASV also had more firepower than a Humvee, as each vehicle came equipped with two machine guns and a grenade launcher. Armored security vehicles were expensive—a Humvee cost $140,000, whereas an ASV cost $800,000—but they kept more people alive. Plus the ASV could do seventy miles an hour on the highway, could ford rivers that were up to five feet deep, and the crew compartment was fully air-conditioned.

  Desma had never driven an ASV before. When they first arrived in Iraq, at the end of March 2008, all she did for several weeks was practice driving the unfamiliar vehicle. It still felt new to her even after she and Charity started running missions, in April 2008. Desma told Charity that she was scared of doing something dumb, like mistaking the turn signal for the headlights or rolling the vehicle, but Charity assured her she was a good driver. Charity kept praising her skills, kept telling her she could do it, kept making her think it would be all right. They spent so many hours inside the vehicle that after one month had elapsed, Desma felt as though she knew every inch of the ASV.

  At first they always ran navigation, but after they had been in Iraq for a month or two, Desma and Charity started running assistant scout sometimes. Then it would be Stoney, the Angry Beaver, and Ford in the lead, with Desma, Charity, and Peaches right behind them. Or maybe a different crew would be in the first truck—there were two other teams in their platoon that ran as lead scout, too. “We liked running up front,” Desma would say later. “It was just something to do. We were hanging out with them. We could talk to the guys, you know. I got to drive off the road, check culverts and things.”

  Maybe every third or fourth mission, they would run ass. Otherwise they ran nav. Desma and Charity never took the lead position, which was the most dangerous slot. “Put the boys out front,” Desma would say later. “I don’t know—it always fell that we were the second or third truck in the convoy. I didn’t really want to be out front.” No matter what posit
ion they took in the convoy, inside the vehicle they stuck to the same roles—Charity on the radio, calling the shots, Desma at the wheel, and Peaches with his head poking out of the gun turret—although once Charity served as gunner when they got stuck at the back of the convoy in the rear gun truck. Bush was still saying women were not in combat, but what else would you call being a gunner on a highway in Iraq in the spring of 2008? It was combat as far as Desma was concerned. She never took the role of gunner, but she would have if someone had asked. “Would I have hesitated to pull the trigger? No.”

  During April and May, most of their missions involved driving up to Zakho, one of the northernmost cities in Iraq, on the country’s border with Turkey, and escorting civilian supply trucks from Zakho down to Al Qayyarah. They were protecting one of the army’s main supply routes. The United States–led coalition had established several routes by which to funnel food, water, fuel, weapons, and ammunition into the war theater, including one coming up from Kuwait—but soldiers in other regiments worried about protecting the convoys that were bringing goods up from the south. The 139th Field Artillery was in charge of securing the northernmost supply chain, the one that flowed in the opposite direction, down out of Turkey, from Zakho through Dahuk and Mosul, along a highway that ran roughly parallel to the course of the Tigris River. Their platoon’s missions stopped at Al Qayyarah. The same highway continued south to Baiji and Tikrit, but that wasn’t their run. Drivers belonging to another platoon in the 139th escorted the supply trucks during that leg of their journey, which was the more dangerous stretch of highway. The farther north they were, the less likely they were to chance upon a bomb. Up past Dahuk, they were in Kurdish territory, in a part of Iraq the soldiers called the green zone. Far fewer incidents occurred there.

  And initially they ran only night missions, which also reduced the risk. “Traffic was a lot less at night,” Desma would say later. “The incidents were a lot less at night, under the cover of darkness. It’s not like you can sneak five hundred vehicles through a town at any point. But incidents were a lot less at night.” On a typical mission that April, Desma and Charity started getting ready at four in the afternoon: they loaded ammo into the ASV’s weapons, drove out to the range and tested the guns, drove back, and attended a briefing. The convoy commander described the route they were going to take, told them how fast to go, and listed the military trucks by number. After that they lined up every truck and checked every fuel gauge. Tires with visible damage came off; four or five soldiers hustled over to help change the damaged tires as quickly as possible. They got on the road by 8:00 p.m. As they traveled north, they gradually climbed in elevation, leaving behind the flat plain of the Tigris River valley. The river remained mysteriously always out of sight and Desma never saw that silver ribbon. By the time they reached the mountains, it was ten degrees cooler. On the outskirts of Dahuk, before they began the steepest part of the winding climb into the mountains, they stopped to pee because it was safe to get out of the trucks at that point. Then the soldiers got back in their vehicles and negotiated the steep switchbacks of the final climb. This was Desma’s favorite part of the drive—it was the most scenic and the least boring. It was 3:00 a.m. by the time they reached Zakho.

  They spent the night in a place that everybody called “the hotel,” an office building with a couple dozen cots set up in a wide-open area. Desma grabbed an empty cot and curled up to get a few hours of sleep. The following day they met the supply trucks that had come down out of Turkey, turned around, and escorted the trucks back to Al Qayyarah, dropping in elevation as they moved south. They had daylight all the way to Mosul. It was all right to drive in daylight up in northern Iraq, but after Mosul, it was better to drive in the dark. It took them about ten hours to get from Zakho back to Al Qayyarah; they could have gone faster, but they spent the second half of the trip nosing along at thirty miles per hour, looking for shit that might blow up. The following day, another platoon from the same regiment escorted the convoy from Al Qayyarah down to Tikrit. After Tikrit, soldiers who were stationed at Balad took over the job of getting the goods where they were going. It was mind-numbing to drive for ten or twelve or fourteen hours at a stretch while scouring the shoulders for a stray wire or the wrong sort of trash, but Desma enjoyed leaving the post, and the work made her feel more like a real soldier than anything else she had done in her life.

  Nobody ever said what was inside the trucks. Food, mail, ammo, weapons, fuel—it could be anything required by the military. Often, after they ran a mission, they would suddenly find fresh milk again in the chow hall, or chips on the shelves at the PX. Once, when they were in the middle of a run, the entire convoy took a bumpy detour—a bomb had blown apart a stretch of highway, and the convoy jounced along some decrepit side roads before turning back onto the main road again—and a civilian driver called for the convoy to halt so he could tend to his cargo. The convoy commander said over the radio that he did not want to stop. The driver said he needed to resecure his load now, or they were going to have a problem, because he was carrying Hellfire missiles. “We were like, ‘Holy shit!’ ” Desma said later. “We had no clue there were Hellfires on that truck.”

  During the time that Desma spent in Iraq, the total number of IEDs placed along the highways began to decline, compared with the year before (the most violent year of the entire war). In 2007, the number of IEDs found each month had peaked in June at 2,588. Since Desma had arrived, however, the number of IEDs kept dropping: soldiers found 1,161 IEDs across Iraq in April 2008, 901 in May 2008, and 602 in June. Most of those were discovered south of Desma’s run. Nobody in the 139th had hit as many IEDs as Mancil Smith, another soldier in their regiment who often ran in the lead scout truck. During an earlier deployment, he had been involved in five different explosions, and he hit several more IEDs that year. The bombs had given Mancil a lazy eye. Desma had seen photographs of him that were taken before the war, and his eyes had looked different.

  They had it easier. The only time Desma really screwed up during two months of runs to Zakho was the night when she and Charity misread a sign and let the scout trucks ahead of them make a wrong turn. They wound up driving down the main thoroughfare of Dahuk, past all kinds of storefronts. They got their gun turret hung up on some power lines and had to stop. An Iraqi man with a well-trimmed beard who was wearing a plaid shirt and khakis came over with a broom to get them disentangled. In broken English he urged them to leave. “No go here!” he exclaimed. “No military!” He gave the confused navigation team excellent directions, and they got out of there as quickly as possible.

  They loved Zakho. A city of two hundred thousand on the banks of the Little Khabur, a tributary of the Tigris, Zakho had been a trading center for centuries. It was known for its rice, oil, lentils, and fruit. Stoney wanted to walk across the Delal Bridge, a local landmark made of ancient stones, possibly of Roman construction. If they made it across, they would be in Turkey, and Stoney wanted to steal a big Turkish flag that they could see from their side of the river, but the customs guys would not let them onto the bridge. They often ate dinner in one of Zakho’s restaurants. “They would bring two soups, a salad, beans, all these vegetables,” Desma later recalled. “And then the meat. Lamb, beef. They had this purple—I don’t know what it was—some sort of pickling they put on onions and other vegetables. And you’d eat that with the naan, the flat bread. Really amazing food.” Eating inside the restaurants also brought Desma into contact with local traditions. “Us, as women, we had to stay in the front of the restaurant, by the window, which was a little unnerving. But they didn’t want us near the prayer areas. In every restaurant, you’ll find an alcove facing the east. Strictly for prayer. Women don’t belong in those areas. It was not so much that I was one, a sinner; two, an American; and three, an infidel. You know, it’s just, women don’t belong in those areas.”

  Desma and Charity spotted more potential problems than the guys. Stoney liked that the two women were more cautious. “They
were very diligent,” he remembered. “It definitely helped to have them rotate up front. We were used to seeing lots of stuff and we would just drive by. Having a fresh set of eyes was better.” Sometimes, though, he teased them about their wariness. During one particularly long mission, when they were on their way back down from the Turkish border, and had gotten as far as Mosul, and it was maybe a few hours after midnight, Desma and Charity called a halt to the convoy because they had spotted something suspicious. “Did you guys see that?” one of the women asked over the radio. “That could be a wire.” Stoney took a look; he thought the object that lay across the road was a water pipe. It was hard to tell in the dark, though, and he figured it was better to be safe. They called EOD and sat around waiting for the explosives guys to arrive—an extra two hours. In the end, the object turned out to be a water pipe. Stoney did not let Mama and Hooker forget. “Did you guys see that?” he chortled over the radio at random intervals. “That could be a wire!” It became one of his favorite refrains, a chorus to their convoys.

  One day they were driving south from Zakho with some supply trucks, and had just left the green zone. Stoney, Ford, and Angry Beaver were out front as lead scout. Desma and Charity were two trucks behind, running navigation. They had already descended out of the steep part of the mountains and were surrounded by beautiful, flowing hills. Desma watched Stoney’s truck disappear behind one hill, and then a few minutes later, she saw a big cloud of dust. They felt the vibration first, and then they heard the explosion. Desma could not move or reason. Were the guys dead? And then, over the radio, she heard the sound of Stoney’s voice, alive and pissed off: “Missed me, motherfucker!” The back part of his truck was speckled with shrapnel, but everybody inside was fine. It was Ford who found the second bomb waiting nearby. They had to sit there while a team from Explosive Ordnance Disposal drove out to meet them, and the second bomb made a huge white flash when it was detonated. The rest of that trip was quiet, none of the usual chatter.