Soldier Girls

by Helen Thorpe

  At the same time, he earned so much money that he bought a new house for his family, set his brothers up in business, purchased costly digital cameras for himself, and showered friends with gifts. He had to return to the United States every year to renew his visa, and during one of his visits, Akbar was hanging out with Debbie one day when he announced he was going out for cigarettes. He returned instead with a flat-screen television set, which he insisted on giving to Debbie, despite her vehement protests. Later he gave Debbie and Desma each an iPad, and Michelle an iPod Touch. Then he sent Michelle a pair of fancy sunglasses that had probably cost several hundred dollars. They had white plastic frames and gold-tinted lenses and made her look like a movie star.

  Michelle left her position at AmeriCorps, began working at Colorado Brownfields Foundation, and then got a job at a nonprofit called Veterans Green Jobs, which sought to reduce dependence on oil. Her car died, and Akbar tried to buy her a new one, but she told him she could not accept a vehicle from him—it would not be fair to Billy. They were trying to make things work. Michelle was twenty-eight years old, and half her friends had gotten married. She wanted more than anything else in the world to have children. Billy felt their relationship had some negative aspects, however, and he was not sure they could fix what was wrong.

  After Michelle started working at Veterans Green Jobs, she became close friends with her colleague Garett Reppenhagen, the son of a Vietnam War veteran and the grandson of two World War II veterans, who had worked as a sniper in Iraq. While there, he had started writing an antiwar blog and later had become the first active duty member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. Reppenhagen introduced Michelle to Denver’s progressive veterans community. The Veterans of Foreign Wars had been established in Denver in 1899 by veterans returning from the Spanish-American War, and Michelle started hanging around with some of the other veterans she met at VFW Post 1, the oldest VFW post in existence. Izzy Abbass, a forward-thinking veteran of the Gulf War, was in the middle of transforming the post. He had stopped serving alcohol, had started holding meetings in the Rooster and Moon coffee shop, and was organizing a lot of outdoor activities. He was also trying to make the organization friendly to women.

  For the first time, Michelle found a group of people who shared both her personal history and her political orientation. Michelle stopped hiding her past and talked openly about her deployment. It was a relief. She began to see that it had been somewhat haphazard, who had experienced an easier deployment, and who had experienced a harder one; who had escaped physically untouched, and whose bodies had been changed forever. At one point Michelle went snowshoeing in Rocky Mountain National Park with a group of veterans from Colorado. Michelle and a nurse who was in her sixties were the only two women in the group. They talked about how much the role of women in the military had changed during their lifetimes; when the nurse had enlisted, that job had been the only option available, but by the time Michelle had enlisted, women could become truck drivers or weapons mechanics. Now people in Washington were discussing the possibility of allowing women to serve in combat positions.

  Coincidentally, every individual in the group had chosen to wear their combat boots. Michelle had not been able to find anything better than her well-worn Gore-Tex boots, in terms of waterproofing and warmth; apparently the other vets all felt the same way. They had so much in common and yet they were so different. “I was making jokes about being able to get pedicures at Bagram,” Michelle would say afterward. “Because I did—every time I went to Bagram I would get a pedicure. But I was joking with some of these ex-marines, and I was speaking to someone who was in Fallujah. Jordan, who was with us, he got hit with an RPG, and it almost killed him. He was a marine. So, you know, me saying stuff like that to those guys, it makes my experience seem so trivial. And they look at it that way, too. I mean, they were like, Oh, my God, we were sleeping on cardboard boxes. So then it’s like, why do I have any feelings that are negative about my experience at all? Because it was very easy, compared to that. But these wars are different for everybody, and they’re different every day, in terms of easy, difficult, painful, fun. At any given moment, something could happen to you that will change the rest of your life. That’s the thing about living in a combat zone. You could live through a whole year and escape unscathed, where the worst scar that you have is your smallpox vaccination, but it depends on where you’re standing and in what moment. Everything is so random that you never know.”

  Jordan had gotten hit, and Michelle had not, but she remembered the sound that the RPGs had made when they had fallen around her. She joked about getting pedicures, and she could not compare her experience to that of a marine who had been to Fallujah, but she also knew that she could have hit an old land mine or a new IED. While spending time with other members of Colorado’s progressive veteran community, Michelle heard the term “economic draft” for the first time, which was another moment of epiphany—yes, she thought, that’s what George W. Bush had done. He had used money to draft the same poor people over and over again to fight his fight, and he had left his own class virtually untouched. Most of the veterans she befriended were men, and sometimes they made Billy feel uncomfortable. “I would like to meet one other female veteran who has a successful relationship with a civilian man,” Michelle would say later. “The gender stuff is really wacky. Because it is really important for me to be in the veteran community, which is also 85 percent male. And I had a very masculine job. You know, it gives me a very colorful past, and I think when I first met him he was fascinated by it, but now I feel it’s just some sort of a liability. I don’t know, it’s so hard for me to reconcile being with him and being a veteran. He’s really antimilitary. Anytime he talks about my experience he paints me like a victim. And I don’t think I see myself like that. But he’s really important to me. He’s a really amazing man. Good men are hard to find.”

  Meanwhile, Desma kept speeding. On March 29, 2010, she was pulled over for doing eighty-four in a seventy-mile-per-hour speed zone. She had been trying to make it to Indianapolis for an appointment at the VA. “Case manager spoke with patient by phone,” wrote a staff person at the VA hospital. “Patient . . . is being detained by state police. . . . Case manager could hear the police in the background during phone conversation. Patient asked that message be relayed to Dr. Mottley. Patient did not foresee that she could make the appointment on time.”

  That same month, Desma heard that the military was going to evaluate veterans for PTSD according to different measures. She called the VA hospital and said she wanted her disability rating to be reconsidered. “Veteran would like to appeal her rating,” noted a staff person. “Veteran believes she should be rated for PTSD.” After that phone call, the VA staff added a progress note to Desma’s VA file saying that she had tested positive for PTSD. The note enumerated the symptoms Desma had described in the phone call. Did she have nightmares or difficult thoughts about a traumatic experience? Yes. Was she constantly on guard, or easily startled? Yes. Did she feel numb or detached from others? Yes. From her surroundings? Yes. Along with the earlier diagnosis of TBI, the PTSD diagnosis boosted her overall disability rating to 50 percent. This increased the financial compensation she received for her disabilities to $1,150 a month.

  Desma had been dating Roy Dishner since Christmas, even though they lived 130 miles apart. The trailer where she lived was outside Bedford, while his house was close to Hagerstown, two and a half hours to the north. Roy courted her with old-fashioned industry. They talked on the phone frequently, and about once a month he came to spend the weekend. Roy lived by himself in a large, two-story house, and he had the air of a person who had been lonely for a long time. He was also reliable, punctual, polite, and scrupulously honest; Desma found his trustworthiness comforting. He was careful and precise, a mechanic who always kept track of his tools. Locked in the basement of his house was his extensive gun collection, and he liked to fix old tractors for fun. When he was not wearing his uniform, he often wore
a gray T-shirt that said ARMY, and in his free time he watched movies on the Military Channel about soldiers doing heroic things.

  At first Michelle viewed the relationship with skepticism, but then she learned that Roy believed in saving energy as passionately as she did. After he had returned from his deployment to Iraq, he had decided the best way to avoid future bloodshed would be to transform his home into a model of energy conservation: he had insulated the walls, weather-stripped every door, replaced all the windows, and put in a geothermal heating system. Michelle approved of Desma’s new romance.

  In May 2010, Michelle persuaded Desma and Debbie to meet her in Washington, DC, to support the work of Veterans Green Jobs. A clean energy bill known as the American Power Act had been introduced by Senator John Kerry and Senator Joseph Lieberman. One month earlier, an oil rig had exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, and it was spilling crude oil into the water at the rate of one thousand barrels a day; people in Washington thought the disaster might boost support for the bill. Veterans Green Jobs was arranging conversations between veterans from swing states who believed in clean energy and staffers on Capitol Hill. Michelle asked Desma to recruit other soldiers, too, so Desma called Roy and said, “Hey, you want to go to DC for the weekend?” Roy wanted to know how much that was going to cost. “Apparently it’s all-expenses-paid, you just have to have business attire,” Desma said. She helped Roy buy his first suit, and the guys at the armory taught him how to make a knot in his tie.

  When they met with the young, middle-class staffers who worked for members of Congress, few of whom had volunteered, Desma stole the show. She told the staffers about driving the gun truck, about running ass, about what had happened when the bomb had gone off. It was the first time Michelle had heard her speak in detail about the IED. Desma made all the connections—how the supplies that she had been escorting were going to military bases to feed soldiers who were guarding an oil pipeline.

  Now that Michelle lived in Colorado, it was rare for the three of them to have two days together, and the trip felt like a reunion. Desma had never been to Washington before, and they walked around sightseeing until their feet hurt. They saw the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument and the White House. They were standing on a corner when a motorcade passed by. As the car slowed to make a turn, someone inside started to roll up a window. Before the mirrored glass obscured her view, Desma glanced inside and found herself looking at the familiar face of President Hamid Karzai.

  “Look, there’s Karzai,” she told Roy.

  “Who’s that?” Roy asked.

  “He’s the current president of Afghanistan,” Desma said.

  “Really?” Roy asked skeptically.

  “Yeah,” Desma asserted. “He’s a crook.”

  Karzai had come to speak with President Barack Obama about his plans to withdraw troops. Obama had already begun withdrawing troops from Iraq, and had announced that he intended to start pulling soldiers out of Afghanistan in the middle of the following year. Since they had left that country, Desma had heard a lot about corruption there. It had tarnished the once shiny sense of pride she had taken in being part of a military force that had helped bring about Afghanistan’s first democratic election. A lot had happened since that woman with the black scarf had knelt down before her in the middle of Camp Phoenix and said thank you.

  That evening they went out to a Japanese restaurant. Desma ordered a margarita and they gave her Patrón on ice; everybody else drank too much sake. They sang karaoke: Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” and then “Nobody” by Sylvia. At some point they moved on to a pool hall, where at last call Desma ordered not one but two drinks. It was a mad scramble to catch the early flight home the next morning and at first Roy could not rouse Desma. He went for reinforcements. “Come help me get her dressed,” Roy begged Debbie and Michelle. “What’s everybody doing here?” Desma asked when they finally got her conscious. Debbie and Michelle were fast friends with Roy after that.

  In the summer of 2010, Desma moved in to live with Roy. “Patient reports that since her last appointment she has started to try to ‘let new people in my life,’ ” wrote Delia McGlocklin. At about the same time, the therapist informed Desma that she would be leaving the clinic at the VA. McGlocklin would be able to see Desma for only a few more months. “Started to process with patient the writer’s transition out of clinic,” noted McGlocklin. That fall, Paige and Alexis started over at new schools in Hagerstown, Indiana. Alexis began fifth grade and Paige began sixth grade. The problems Desma had been having with her daughters had not gone away; Alexis seemed perpetually angry and talked back a lot, while Paige grew quiet and started cutting herself. Desma covered Roy’s refrigerator with notes to remind herself of the meetings she had with their teachers, but it was still a struggle to show up. She had never been that way before. Desma had always made certain to be the kind of mother who remembered commitments, because her own mother had not. The girls were disappointed in her and she was disappointed in herself.

  Roy had no children of his own, and he met Desma’s when they were half grown. They were not small, not adorable—he had missed all that. They were surly preteens going through what they would almost certainly look back on as a difficult period in their lives. Roy tried to muster the requisite patience but in some ways he was rigid. He fretted if Desma hung pictures in places where he would not have hung them; he asked Desma not to wash his clothes because he liked to fold his laundry in a certain fashion. The children were messy and they did not obey orders. He had to tell himself they were not part of a squad that was under his command. Put your dishes in the dishwasher, he said more gently. Don’t speak to your mother like that. He was trying but there was friction.

  Roy lived to the northeast of Camp Atterbury. Desma’s commute to work was virtually the same as before, but the drive down to southern Indiana was more than twice as long. Her ex-husband started meeting her halfway so she didn’t have to do all the driving. Nevertheless, that November Desma was pulled over for speeding yet again. This time the police officer said she was a “habitual offender” and threw her into the county jail for the weekend. Desma shrugged off the episode. When asked later if she had been driving too fast, she would reply, “That’s what he said. I coulda gone faster.” Michelle felt as though she were watching a statistic play out. “You know how veterans come home with dramatically increased risk behaviors?” she would ask. “Well, Desma was speeding to the point where they arrest you. She never had that behavior before.”

  Roy saw that Desma was spending $1,200 a month to fill the tank of the red Pacifica. In December 2010 he cosigned on a loan so that she could buy a blue Prius. Desma lined up a series of five stickers on the rear bumper of the new car, her own little joke about the last decade. The bumper stickers said AFGHANISTAN, SNAFU, WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT, BOHICA, IRAQ. (Translated into civilian, that was, “Afghanistan, Situation Normal All Fucked Up, What the Fuck, Bend Over Here It Comes Again, Iraq.”) Desma kept driving long distances, but she did slow down. She also discovered books on tape, and listened to The Help and Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, which made the hours on the road less boring.

  Even as Desma was pulling her personal life together, she fell out of favor at work. The people who had served with Desma in Iraq had known why she was angry, and had not judged her when her weapon had been taken away. As long as she worked alongside soldiers who had also deployed with the 139th, Desma had been understood. Her first NCO evaluations had been glowing. “Extraordinary initiative,” a supervisor in the 139th had written back in May 2009, just a few months after Desma had become an NCO. “Dedicated hardworking individual who shows her responsibility. . . . Exacting approach to work ethic; pays attention to detail. . . . Possesses the leadership skills necessary to lead any company on the battlefield.”

  At the end of that year, however, Desma had been forced to transfer out of the 139th because it was a field artillery regiment and technically not open to female soldiers. She coul
d be transferred into that regiment during a deployment when the soldiers in it were acting in a supportive role, such as providing convoy security, but she could not belong to it at home. After leaving the 139th, Desma had transferred into a unit she had never belonged to before that was part of the 638th Support Battalion. Her next evaluation, written in January 2010, had remained positive. A supervisor had written, “Constantly sought ways to learn, grow, and improve. . . . Projected confidence and authority. . . . Always a team player.” But one year later there was a stark shift in how Desma was described. “Struggles with following up with tasks,” wrote another supervisor from the 638th in February 2011. “Lacks desire to improve overall physical fitness. . . . Needs to realize importance of tact when questioning orders.”

  Desma received the critical assessment shortly after getting crosswise with her company commander. Desma had wanted to attend a Warrior Leader Course—the first leadership course that noncommissioned officers were supposed to fulfill to qualify for promotions. She enrolled in a class that was being taught in Utah. But her supervisor told her that she could not go because of her profile, which stated that she could not carry a weapon, and canceled her flight. Desma asked that the company commander write a memo stating that she was the victim of a combat injury, so that she would be deemed eligible to attend the class. “All he had to do was write a one-page memorandum saying that my profile was the result of a combat injury and that I was fully capable of going to school,” Desma would say later. “He would not do it.” According to Desma, the commander expressed doubt about Desma’s claim to have been injured. Injudiciously, Desma lashed out with fury in her voice, telling the commander that he had no idea what soldiers went through.