Soldier Girls (11 page)

The wedding took place on July 20, 1996, in the living room of Dennis's parents' home. Desma wore an off-white dress that fell below her knees and had cost $6 at a local thrift store. Dennis wore blue jeans and a dress shirt with sleeves that were too short. Desma had gotten a meat and cheese tray from the supermarket, and half a dozen two-liter bottles of pop. “It was awful,” she said later, laughing her belly laugh. “Threw it together in less than a week.” According to Desma, on their wedding night, after they had gone to a hotel, Dennis caught her off guard by saying, “It will be over my dead body that you ever leave me.” She described him as having a controlling nature, but said that she only came to see this side of his personality fully after basic training. Dennis Brooks would later dispute much of what Desma said about him, and described Desma as someone who slanted stories about their relationship so that she came out in a better light and he came out in a worse light when that was not exactly how it was in real life.

On August 19, 1996, Desma Brooks left for Fort Jackson, South Carolina. She had never held a gun before, and it was the first time she had traveled outside of the state of Indiana. She had a gritty determination that served her well, however, and she responded positively to the structured environment, even as she also proved injury-prone. Halfway through the training, Desma rolled her right ankle while running. She limped back to the barracks. Her company was slated to rappel down a wooden tower that afternoon—and to get to the tower, they were going to road-march three miles. Desma didn't want to complain of an injury, for fear of being forced to restart basic training from the beginning, because she felt she was already spending too much time away from her son. Desma did the road march, crossed three styles of rope bridges, and then rappeled down the wall while a belayed rope passed under one thigh and over the opposite shoulder. The soldier who went before her was supposed to make sure the rope belayed smoothly, but he gave Desma a jerky descent, culminating in an abrupt drop. She landed hard and buckled. A drill sergeant started hollering at the soldier who had done belay, but Desma interrupted.

“I'm all right, I'm all right,” she said. “I just need help up.”

They marched three miles back. At the barracks, she could not get her boot off. Her battle buddy alerted another drill sergeant.

“What the hell is wrong with you, Private?” he demanded.

“I don't know, Drill Sergeant, I hurt myself.”

“Why didn't you say something?”

“Because I didn't want to be recycled.”

He took out a Gerber and cut the boot off. Desma's foot was black and blue up to her shin. The drill sergeant said she could try doing kitchen duty for a couple of days and see if the injury healed. She missed the gas chamber and hand-to-hand combat, but rejoined her platoon for the rest of basic training. She injured herself a second time, after she got her foot tangled in the straps of a duffel bag while standing on the tailgate of a truck, and fell, landing on her tailbone, which split in half. But she made it through the final exercises without reporting the second injury.

When Desma made an appointment with a medic to have the Norplant contraceptive removed, thinking she might want to have children with her new husband, the doctor had to dig out six plastic cartridges from her newly muscular bicep. She still could not say why she had joined the military, but she was proud of what she had achieved. “Nobody thought I would make it through basic training,” she said afterward. “And just out of spite, I finished it. I hated every minute there, it was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. But at the end, I cried. I had accomplished something. And to somebody out there, it was something meaningful. Maybe not so much to myself, but whatever. You know? I proved them wrong.”

Desma went straight from Fort Jackson, South Carolina, to Fort Lee, Virginia. She had chosen to become an automated logistics specialist, or a 92A (“ninety-two Alpha”), because she thought it would give her job skills that would translate into the civilian world. A logistics specialist ran computer programs that allowed battalions to order vehicle parts, guns, night vision goggles, and other equipment. Men and women enrolled in the classes in roughly equal numbers, and at Fort Lee Desma found herself in an environment in which she drew no special attention for her gender. She trained on large desktop computers, using four-inch floppy disks.

When Desma returned home for Christmas, she was shocked to discover that during her five-month absence, Josh had developed a stutter.
She had intended for Josh to stay with his surrogate father, Keith—the man for whom Desma used to babysit—but instead Josh had been bounced around, staying alternately with Keith, Desma's new husband, and Desma's mother. Dennis was living with his parents, and Desma moved in there, too. They shared his old bedroom in the upstairs part of his parents' house. “Josh didn't want to stay there—he wanted to stay with Grandma,” recalled Desma. “So at night, I would take him down to Grandma's and first thing in the morning I would go get him. He was my sunshine. I would rock him and sing the Barney song and he would go to sleep in my lap.”

Desma turned twenty-one on January 28, 1997. Flush with cash for a change, she decided to buy a car. She had never owned one before. She bought a used Chevy Corsica, gray with a red interior. Her older sister had the same car in the opposite color scheme—red with a gray interior. When she showed up for drill for the first time that February, Desma could see her reflection in the toes of her boots. “Oh, a newbie,” said a noncommissioned officer, looking her over. “That'll wear off quick.” In the months that followed, Desma stopped pressing her uniform but stubbornly continued to shine her boots; she took pride in the fact that she could make a mirrored toe and heel. Her chugging belly laugh and ready smile endeared her to other members of Bravo Company, and she fit easily into the unit. She worked in the section that handled automotive repair and weapons parts. That's what she was
supposed
to do; actually, the National Guard armory in Bedford had few parts. Mostly Desma and her fellow soldiers counted tent poles and camo netting, then played euchre. At annual training, they did the usual required exercises, and played war games in the woods. To burn off their extra ammo, they would hide wearing their MILES gear—it stood for multiple integrated laser engagement system—and shoot blanks at each other. You put the gear on over your uniform, and if you were shot it would beep incessantly, indicating that you were dead, until somebody came and turned it off with a key. Bravo Company and Charlie Company ganged up on Alpha Company; it had become a tradition after the time when Alpha had gotten their trucks tangled up in their own concertina wire. Bravo and Charlie would kill off everyone in Alpha, declare the war over, and then drink a keg of beer. Desma loved the camaraderie.

Of course Desma befriended talkative Debbie Helton. During one annual training, they found themselves stuck in a foxhole together, and Debbie asked, “Want something to drink?” They shared some whiskey. Both women belonged to Bravo, although they worked in different sections and spent time with different friends. When they socialized after their training exercises, Debbie gravitated toward the older crowd, a mostly male group that habitually drank at Shorty's, while Desma ran with a younger crowd that frequented a variety of bars. Of everyone in her company, Desma grew closest to a woman named Stacy Glory—she happened to be the sister of the person who had originally dared Desma to join the Guard, and they lived near each other in Spurgeon. They carpooled to Bedford on drill weekends. Stacy had four children—two boys and two girls—and also was a single mother. She had joined the regular army straight out of high school, and when her term of service ended, she joined the reserves. She had deployed to the Gulf War, shortly after she had given birth to her oldest child. Stacy had found the yearlong separation painful, and later she transferred into the National Guard, because they did not send people overseas for lengthy tours of duty. Stacy had a degree in political science, and she and Desma talked politics in the car; they both listened to National Public Radio, and both followed international news on the BBC. Often they got so caught up in their conversations that they did not notice how late they were until they got to the armory and saw everybody else already standing in formation.

Debbie Helton marveled at Desma's insouciance, the way she and Stacy would casually stroll in late every single drill weekend. It got to be a running joke. The first sergeant would call out, “Brooks!” Invariably there would be no answer. “She's on her way!” soldiers started calling out in response, to rolling laughter. Usually Desma would saunter in before the first sergeant had finished taking the roll, and make a face at the assembled company; this is what you get, she seemed to be saying. “I remember her always being late,” recalled Debbie. “Never on time. Really funny, and always late.” But Debbie approved of Desma's high spirits and the way she never missed a chance to socialize and always put on something revealing. “And then when she wanted to clean up, she'd clean up. Like if we'd all go out at night, a bunch of us, then she'd be nice and
cleavagey,” Debbie said. “She would wear the tops to enhance herself. That's our Desma. Not shy—not a bit shy.”

The keg parties and the euchre games and the late nights at bars made the experience of belonging to the National Guard a lot more fun than Desma had anticipated. In a few years, she realized that she had grown closer to her fellow soldiers than she had been to friends in school. During one annual training, Desma went out drinking with Peggy Weiss, the administrative NCO of Bravo Company 113—basically she made sure that jobs in the unit were filled and that Bravo Company soldiers got their paychecks. They returned to Camp Atterbury at about two in the morning, and by then Peggy had gotten loud and boisterous. They ran into Captain Hoskins in the orderly room. Despite the late hour, he was wearing a crisply pressed uniform, but he was accompanied by a disheveled lieutenant who was covered from head to toe in mud and grass. Peggy turned to Hoskins.

“Sir, are you lazy?” she barked. “Or are you just too stupid to get down in the mud?”

Hoskins just shook his head and walked away.

“I'm going to bed,” announced Peggy. “People are pissy.”

Desma lived for those moments.

And she had come to depend on the extra paycheck. Desma and Dennis had purchased a stick-built house with yellow siding for $42,000. It had three bedrooms, one bath, a full basement, and a screened-in porch. They had signed up for a variable rate mortgage, however, and over time the interest rate climbed from 6.8 percent up to 23 percent. In the process, their monthly payments tripled, from $325 to almost $900. As the financial stress mounted, Desma's husband began to have problems controlling his anger, according to Desma. Once he shoved her backward into a glass door that broke, and a shard of glass punctured one of her lungs, Desma said. She also remembered that Dennis could only hold on to a given job for a few months at a time. He quit one job while Desma was pregnant. Desma developed preeclampsia, and the baby had to be induced; after their daughter Paige was born early, the hospital sent a bill for $6,000. To help pay off the debt, Desma returned to work at Jasper Desk. When her husband lost his next job, she had to make their monthly house payments by herself for a while, according to Desma.

Dennis remembered everything differently. He said that Desma was the cause of their financial problems, as she kept spending more money than he was earning. She bounced one check after another, according to Dennis—and according to court documents Desma was charged with several counts of check fraud (for amounts ranging from $28 to $38). He was never out of work for more than a few days at a time, Dennis said, and even when he lost one factory job, he still worked part-time as an emergency medical technician in an ambulance. Dennis also recounted an alternate version of the story about the fight where Desma wound up with glass in her back: he did give her a “little shove” that sent her into a glass door, which did break, Dennis conceded, but that's not when the glass went into her back; according to him, the glass went into her back about ten minutes later, when she stepped backward and accidentally bumped into the already broken shards of glass.

Figuring that they had better not have any more children, Desma got another Norplant device; it suppressed her heavy periods, just as the previous device had done, which she considered a blessing. Several months later, however, she began to puzzle over the fact that she could no longer button her favorite jeans. A doctor discovered that she had somehow conceived another child, despite using the birth control device. At this point, her husband was working again, but according to Desma, Dennis lost the job before she gave birth, and once again Desma delivered a child without health insurance. Their daughter Alexis was born in 1999—Desma opted for a tubal ligation after the birth, to avoid getting pregnant again—and they got another hospital bill, this time for $9,000.

A few weeks after giving birth, Desma found a factory job in Huntingburg, Indiana. She caught baseboards as a router spat them out and stacked them on a skid, and she made $7.50 an hour. Her relationship with her husband continued to fray. Desma felt that Dennis was failing to support their family and in her estimation his temper got worse. At one point, Desma said, he shoved a rifle so far into her mouth that he chipped one of her back teeth. Dennis vehemently denied that this ever happened. Desma's drill weekends turned into a form of escape—a way to get away from the perpetual financial worry and the perpetual conflict. The Guard offered camaraderie, a supplemental income, and an alternative arena in which to prove her competence.

Desma could be brittle, especially around her superiors, but they could see that she was a wizard with gadgets. In the spring of 2000, the battalion was issued a shipment of used SINGCARS radios that had been passed along by active duty army troops. SINGCARS stood for Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System, and the new radios employed voice encryption and frequency hopping systems to defy an enemy's ability to listen in—although the frequency hopping system sometimes meant that even friendly soldiers heard only garble. Desma took a class at Atterbury and learned the radios had digital clocks that needed to be synched within three seconds, and painstakingly retimed every radio in Bravo Company so that the soldiers could actually hear one another talk. She spent drill weekend after drill weekend teaching everyone else how to use the radios without accidentally changing the timing.