Soldier Girls (13 page)

With the salary she was earning as a waitress and the extra salary she got from the Guard, Desma was making a total of about $9,000 a year (supplemented by the tips she got at the truck stop); she had the wherewithal to feed, clothe, and house herself and her three children, but not much else. Desma saw a newspaper advertisement for a part-time job that paid $8 an hour working as an aide at the Owensboro branch of the Kentucky United Methodist Homes for Children and Youth. It served children who had histories of abuse, neglect, abandonment, or trauma. She applied. Owensboro, Kentucky, was a twenty-minute drive, over on the other side of the Ohio River. Desma started working at the group home two or three days a week, filling in as a substitute. It felt like a calling. Desma learned that she had a knack for getting along with the troubled kids who washed up there flotsam-like. She was tough enough
to stand up to them, yet there was no case so hard that she did not feel for the child. She knew they were all paying the price for somebody else's dysfunction. After about a year, the organization hired her part-time. The pay she earned at the youth home boosted her total income to about $17,000.

Throughout the fall of 2002, as they drove to Bedford for drill each month, Desma and Stacy listened to news reports about Hans Blix and the team of UN inspectors who were attempting to determine whether Iraq possessed so-called weapons of mass destruction. Desma had no doubt that Hussein possessed chemical weapons—she had heard convincing news stories about his purchases of chemical and biological agents—but she had no idea whether there was any real crisis, or whether the Bush team was trying to manufacture a sense of outrage so that Bush could finish the task his father had failed to complete. She thought Hussein probably needed to be removed from power, but wanted to be sure it was done for the right reasons.

Desma watched the hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in which Senator Joe Biden tried to slow the Bush people down. She felt swayed by the argument that it was not a good idea to invade Iraq while there were still soldiers in Afghanistan—fighting two wars at the same time struck her as risky. Did they really have enough soldiers to finish both jobs? Around the country, National Guard units were starting to go overseas for the first time in decades. On drill weekends, her unit began doing exercises with live ammunition. They had never before practiced with live ammo—it was expensive. They were also getting lectures on the Geneva Convention, and what was legally permissible in a war zone. And they had just been told they could earn $1,000 for every new recruit they brought to the armory, and an additional $1,000 if the recruit made it through basic training. All the changes—the live ammo, the lectures, the lure of $2,000 per recruit—she knew what they meant. The regular army was being asked to cover too much ground.

That Christmas, Desma bought her son a Mongoose mountain bike from Walmart. He had outgrown his old bicycle and he rode the new one constantly. Paige and Alexis, now five and three, respectively, had started going to Head Start. At home, they watched a lot of PBS and Disney, especially
Lilo & Stitch
. On Sunday, March 16, 2003, Josh turned
ten, and Desma got him a twelve-foot trampoline. Josh rode his Mongoose mountain bike off the roof of the shed onto the trampoline; he said he was being Evel Knievel. Desma took the bike away and turned on
Meet the Press
. Vice President Dick Cheney was speaking about Iraq; the United States had amassed a hundred thousand troops in Kuwait. “I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will in fact be greeted as liberators,” Cheney said on
Meet the Press
. “I think it will go relatively quickly. Weeks, rather than months.”

Desma stared at the guy. Was he serious? They still had troops in Afghanistan. Did he really think they would be out of Iraq in weeks?

“If your analysis is not correct, and we're not treated as liberators, but as conquerors,” asked Tim Russert, “and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle with significant American casualties?”

“Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators,” Cheney answered. “I've talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several months myself, had them to the White House. The president and I have met with them, various groups and individuals, people who have devoted their lives from outside to trying to change things inside Iraq. The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but that they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.”

“Bullshit!” Desma said out loud.

Was Cheney an idiot or was he just lying? Desma hated it when people didn't call things straight. She shrugged off her anger and left the house to pick up the cake she had ordered for Josh's party that afternoon. He had gotten so big—he didn't care about
Toy Story
anymore; now it was motorcycles, motorcycles, motorcycles. Eight fourth-graders came over that afternoon to bounce on the new trampoline and eat motorcycle cake.

Four days later, the United States began intensive bombing of Iraq. The idea was that a display of overwhelming force could destroy an enemy's will to fight; the United States planned to bomb Iraq into submission, in hopes this would render the country easy to invade. Desma was
struck by the fact that while “shock and awe” was taking place thousands of miles away, everything seemed completely normal at home—
Lilo & Stitch
and the thrill of the bouncy trampoline. Special forces moved into the oil fields around Basra, while the main part of the invading army started advancing up through southern Iraq.

One factor that the Bush team had not anticipated, however, was the immense difference in the quality of intelligence they were getting out of Iraq, compared with the intelligence they had gotten out of Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, the CIA had a long history of involvement, deep ties, and numerous trustworthy sources; the reports that the CIA had been delivering about that country had proven highly accurate. In Iraq, however, the CIA's work would turn out to be wildly off base. According to
Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq,
by Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, the agency told the US military to expect easy surrenders, warm welcomes, and possible parades. Instead soldiers and marines found themselves confronting not only Iraqi military but also armed civilians dressed in black who were fighting back ferociously. All over Iraq, US forces ran into unexpectedly stiff resistance, and at the same time they also encountered a series of thorny logistical problems.

In a town called Nasiriyah, a convoy of the 507th Maintenance Company from Fort Bliss took a wrong turn and drove straight into the city instead of going around it. Located near an important crossing over the Euphrates, Nasiriyah was the site of bitter fighting. Soldiers in the 507th were not supposed to see combat—they were just a maintenance outfit—but they had mistakenly driven right into the fray. Among the soldiers who had gone missing were several women. One of them, Jessica Lynch, a nineteen-year-old supply clerk from West Virginia, had just joined the army to pay for a college education. Also missing in action were Lori Piestewa, the driver of the Humvee that had taken the wrong turn—she was the mother of two children—and an army cook named Shoshana Johnson. On March 27, 2003, seven days after the start of the Iraq War, while Lynch was still missing in action and Johnson was being held captive (Piestewa had died), Desma reported to the Bedford armory. It was a Thursday, and she didn't usually go to the armory during the middle of the week, but she had missed a drill weekend and had to make up the
time. She was supposed to arrive at 7:30 a.m., but actually arrived closer to 8:00 a.m.

“I know, I'm late,” she announced to Sergeant First Class Andrew Hendrikson.

“You need to come in and have a seat,” Hendrikson said.

“I've never sat down for an ass-chewing in my life,” said Desma. “Why start now?”

Her drinking buddy Peggy Weiss stood nearby in the hallway. Desma looked over and saw to her surprise that Peggy's face was beet red. Was Peggy crying?

“Desma,” Hendrikson said, his voice stony, “you need to go home, you need to pack all your stuff, all your military gear. And you need to be back here on Monday morning, zero-seven-three-oh. You're being mobilized with Alpha Company. You're going to Iraq.”

Unable to absorb what Hendrikson was saying, Desma focused on a single detail.

“Alpha Company?” she objected. “Who the fuck thought
that
was a good idea? They die, every year, at AT! I can't go to war with those people!”

Hendrikson said nothing.

“I'm not going,” Desma announced.

Then she got her official orders, a piece of paper that said she would serve a “period of active duty not to exceed three hundred and sixty five days,” and realized she did not have much of a choice in the matter. She could fail to show up, in which case she would most likely go to jail, or she could plead hardship, saying she wasn't able to find care for her children. But nobody did that. It was not a socially acceptable option. “I'm a single mom, I [could] claim hardship, I can't go,” Desma would say later. “There's no dignity in that. Might as well just say, ‘Hey, I'm a dirtbag.' ” So Desma obeyed her orders, because she could not bear to lose the esteem of her fellow soldiers. She knew what it had cost Josh when she had gone away to basic training; she would never forget returning to his stutter. But every parent in Alpha Company had been asked to leave their children, and she was not going to desert her teammates.

She went home and told her children that she was being sent to Iraq for a year. The girls asked if she was going to die. “I'm not going to die,” Desma said. “I stay on the post and work on computers. I just have to go
away for a while.” She had been given three days to figure out where her children would live. Josh wanted to stay with his surrogate father, her ex-boyfriend Keith. Keith had married and moved half an hour north to Gentryville, Indiana, but he still spent time with Josh on a regular basis, and agreed to keep Josh for the year. Desma figured the girls would feel most at home with her cousin Lesley, who lived nearby in Petersburg. Desma wrote a will, named her cousin and her sister as the executrices, and took out a $400,000 life insurance policy. On Sunday, Desma drove the two girls to her cousin's house, told them not to worry, said listen to Lesley, and that she would call often. Then she drove Josh to his father's. The girls had been hysterical; Josh was silent. She did not say good-bye; she just said, “I'll talk to you soon.”

Desma reported to Bedford as instructed on March 31, 2003, along with another dozen members of Bravo Company who were also being deployed with Alpha Company. The soldiers from Bravo picked up their weapons from the arsenal at Bedford and boarded a bus bound for Stout Army Air Field in Indianapolis, where they were going to meet up with their colleagues from Alpha Company. A young woman Desma did not know sat down behind her, looking glazed. Desma spent April 1 in a chaotic crowd of soldiers who were busy debating the merits of the second war; administration officials were now backpedaling, and Bush had observed that a campaign in a country the size of California could be longer and more difficult than predicted. The headline in
USA Today
read,
OFFICIALS WHO FORECAST A BRIEF CONFLICT NOW SAY IT'LL BE NEITHER QUICK NOR EASY.
Desma started calling the whole predicament (being at Stout Field, all the media hullabaloo) the worst April Fool's joke ever. At the same time, Desma's paycheck from the National Guard increased more than twentyfold: she had been earning $128 per month for drilling with her unit, but now her pay jumped to $3,000 per month. She was suddenly making $36,000 a year as a soldier—double what she had previously been earning from all three of her jobs put together.

Stout Field served as the headquarters of the Indiana National Guard. They were only going to be there for perhaps a week. Before they went to Iraq, they would train for several months at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina. The army called this period of time being in “premob”; later Desma would refer to it as “three months of hell.” At Stout Field, Desma and the
other soldiers picked up additional gear they would take with them to Iraq—ballistic vests, gas masks, and night vision goggles, among other things. They had to complete a combat driving course in which instructors urged them to drive like they stole it, and showed them how to force other vehicles off the road. And they spent hours in the freight yard, counting tents and tent poles, matching trucks by identification number to those listed on their inventories, packing motor oil and spare parts, weighing everything, and loading it all into large metal shipping containers known as conexes. There were no pay phones at Stout Field, so Desma bought the cheapest cell phone she could find, a flip phone from Verizon. “Please don't cry,” she told the girls. “I'll be home as quick as I can.” She told Josh, who never said much, “I'll see you when I get a pass.”

One evening, Desma walked into the dining hall and glanced around. She did not know as many people in Alpha. Off to one side, Desma spotted a group of happy families having some sort of celebration; the soldiers belonged to a different unit, and apparently their command had given them permission to invite their spouses and children to join them for a meal. Desma sat down in a foul mood. She spotted the young woman who had not spoken on the bus, holding a tray with a blank stare on her face. “Hey,” Desma said, and pulled out a chair. The young woman sat down but did not eat. She just froze, still holding the tray with both hands.

“What's your name?” Desma asked.