Soldier Girls (15 page)

“This is a raging bull message,” Addis told her.

“Bullshit,” Desma replied.

“Desma, don't you hang up on me,” Addis said.

“Raging bull, my ass,” said Desma. “I don't know what you think you're talking about. I ain't goin' nowhere.”

A raging bull message meant there was a deployment coming. Addis told Desma she was supposed to report to Bedford in two weeks. He did not say where they were going but Desma was pretty sure it was
Afghanistan, because several Guard units from Indiana were already in Iraq. She dropped her spring classes (Sociology, Algebra II, American History) before she earned any credits. When she showed up at the armory, George Quintana, a good-looking former marine, asked if she had gotten her burka yet.

“What are you talking about?” Desma said.

“You've got to wear a burka over there,” said Quintana.

“How the hell would I carry a weapon inside of a burka?” Desma asked.

“Out of sight, out of mind, woman!” crowed Quintana.

Everybody loved George Quintana, because he made them take things less seriously. They all called him GQ. Desma tried to adopt his casual attitude, and told Stacy Glory the news of her latest deployment in a blasé tone. Stacy said sharply, “This is not a joke, Desma. You have to get ready for this.” Stacy had been designated to stay back, and was going to serve as a liaison between the home unit and the group that was being sent overseas. Peggy Weiss was staying back, too. Desma wondered who she would hang out with in Afghanistan. Who would she talk with about politics? Who would carouse with her in the middle of the night?

The previous summer, shortly after she had returned home from her false deployment, the people who worked at the armory had informed Desma that all of her gear had vanished. Everything she had put into the conex at Stout Field was gone, never to be seen again. All the soldiers from Bravo Company who had been through the false deployment had lost their gear, too. When she thought about the fact that all her carefully weighed gear had gone missing, it did not seem like an accident to Desma. War meant pandemonium. It meant ghost records and missing trailers and lost gear. It meant having to obey a commander you did not respect, and losing the commander you did. It meant being told you were going to Fort Bragg and winding up at Camp Atterbury; being ordered to Iraq and hearing it might be Djibouti; getting ready to live in your uniform and hearing the president say the mission had already been accomplished. It meant acquiring a tattoo you did not really want, because that's all you could control. War meant thinking you might never see the faces of your children again and then being told to go home. It meant getting jerked around in a cosmic fashion. It meant
reenlisting for six years because you thought you could go to college, then learning you would not finish your associate's degree as planned. And it meant, in Desma's case, once more having to tell her children that she was leaving them for an extended period.

This time she had two weeks to prepare, which allowed her more time to pack their belongings and also prolonged the agony of the impending separation. Paige was about to finish kindergarten, Alexis was still in preschool. Josh was almost through fifth grade and had started playing the trumpet in band. Desma took the two girls back to her cousin's house once more, and she took Josh back to his surrogate father's. She told the children that she loved them and would talk to them soon and drove away. She would be gone by the time Josh started middle school in the fall. Leaving the three children again, one year after the last time she had left them, made Desma a little unhinged. In years past she had believed in making things work; once she had cared enough to stay up for twenty-three hours in a row, making every SINGCARS radio function. But she did not care anymore. Now she had a bad attitude. That's why, in the summer of 2004, after Desma wound up back at Camp Atterbury, “mobing up” again, she decided to see what would happen if she used her new position as a supply clerk to order a few things the company commander had not actually requested. After Desma started acting out, Michelle Fischer decided she really liked that woman named Brooks, who made her laugh out loud when they were stuck in a place where Michelle thought she might never laugh again.

M
ICHELLE HAD JUST
fallen in love. In the fall of 2002, she had moved back in with her mother again, and started taking classes at the University of Southern Indiana once more, but the following year she applied to the University of Indiana in Bloomington and received the heady news that she had been accepted. She was nearly living her dream. When the bombs started raining on Baghdad, in the spring of 2003, Michelle flinched to see that they were the wrong hue; the explosions appeared green on her mother's small television set, because they had been recorded through night vision technology. It disturbed Michelle that the media were reporting everything through a military filter and not showing her the true color of things. She started reading
Adbusters
, which satisfied her in a way the mainstream news did not. Then all of the Alpha girls vanished: every female soldier whom Michelle had known from middle school or high school—Angela Peterson included—they were all 88Ms (“eighty-eight Mikes”), all truck drivers, all gone. Two years earlier, when she had visited the recruitment office to sign up, that had been the alternate job specialty that Michelle had written down: truck driver. If she had not gotten her first choice, to become a weapons mechanic, then she would have been placed in Alpha Company, too, and she would have been headed for Iraq. She felt that call-up pass her by like a wind on her cheek, it brushed so close.

Reading
Adbusters
and watching
Democracy Now!
, Michelle had a million doubts about the war in Iraq. Yet nobody else around her seemed
to question what was taking place. Some of her peers even thought Iraq had something to do with 9/11, and told Michelle she was crazy when she said that was not the case. Political figures such as Rumsfeld and Cheney had begun using the terms “war on terror” and “weapons of mass destruction,” and then suddenly the Alpha girls were gone, and almost nobody in Evansville objected to their absence. It was as if the spectral language had justified what was going to unfold. Because the other students felt at no risk of being drafted, the remote conflicts did not touch them personally. They did not see the void that the missing Alpha girls left behind. It was war without the debate that had always accompanied war; war when only the poor had to serve. Without the Alpha girls, Michelle found the armory's big bay more cavernous, more echoing. The guys who belonged to the 163rd still showed up, but most of her detachment was at Atterbury, getting ready to go to war. Michelle's relief at missing the deployment was matched by the guilt she carried because people she had known for years had not been so lucky. It felt random, the question of who among them got sent off to a combat zone, even though there wasn't anything random about the roster; the generals with responsibility for Iraq had asked for truck drivers, and Michelle was a weapons mechanic. It all came down to what you had studied back when you were in training. None of them had known, during those fat and innocent years, that the job specialties they had chosen would carry such life-altering ramifications.

After Bush declared the war in Iraq to be a fait accompli—even as so many women she knew personally were preparing to deploy there—Michelle watched other people shrug off the idea of the wars, as if one or both were really over. Everybody seemed tired of the twin conflicts, and happy to put them out of mind. At USI, the students partied as if it were peacetime. Veronica and Colleen, who were on the verge of completing their sophomore year (by this point they were a full year ahead of Michelle in their schoolwork because of the time she'd lost in basic training and in Fort Wayne), had become the party queens of their peer group. On weekends, students flocked to the gatherings they hosted at their apartment. As much as she opposed the wars, Michelle could not help identifying with the Alpha girls, so it was impossible for her to participate in the collective amnesia. Was she paranoid or simply unusually
perceptive in her habit of spying spider-webbed connections between the far-off wars and the humdrum? One day she turned a corner at Walmart and saw boxes of shotgun shells stacked into a pyramid, right beside an aisle full of toys. “Like it was candy or something,” Michelle objected. She started photographing the display. A manager threw her out of the store, and then she started boycotting Walmart. It was all interlaced as far as she was concerned: Bush, the weapons industry, the collective amnesia, the vanished Alpha girls.

After she had returned from Fort Wayne, Michelle had lurched through a series of ill-advised flings and then withdrawn from romantic interactions entirely. During the spring of 2003, Michelle had dated nobody during what friends jokingly called her “semester of celibacy.” By May, however, as she was slogging through textbooks to prepare for her final exams, Michelle had begun spending time with a friend of Veronica's named Pete Peterson. Pete had gauged ears and nipple rings and smoked pot. He was tall, with sandy hair, light blue eyes, and a gentle merriness. A music fan, he worked at WSWI, known as “the Edge,” the college's award-winning radio station. Pete and Michelle quickly discovered their shared passion for music, even though Michelle was now listening to more melodic groups such as the Dave Matthews Band, while Pete liked heavier stuff—Queens of the Stone Age, Disturbed, Godsmack. Pete continued to split an apartment with an ex-girlfriend named Sharon, and had also begun sleeping with Veronica, yet he found himself intrigued by Michelle, a small, curvaceous figure with flowing blond hair in bell-bottom blue jeans who surprisingly put on a uniform to drill with the National Guard. “It was like, ‘
You
go to the National Guard every other weekend?' ” he would say later. “It was like, ‘What?' ”

One evening, during another party at Veronica and Colleen's apartment, Pete asked Michelle why she had joined the military.

“For school,” she said.

“We just invaded Iraq,” he observed.

“Yeah, I screwed up,” she told him. “That whole September eleventh thing happened after I had already enlisted.”

Pete was sympathetic. His mother, his father, and his stepfather had all served in the navy, and Pete had grown up on or near various naval bases in Hawaii, California, Connecticut, England, and Puerto Rico.
After his mother remarried, she and Pete's stepfather had a daughter, Stephanie. Pete's mother left her two children behind with Pete's stepfather for one year when she was assigned to work on an oiler that was refueling ships in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, and she left the family again when she was stationed for several months at a naval base in Bahrain. That summer, Veronica went on an extended trip to Europe. Pete swore to Michelle that his relationship with Sharon had ended, even though their lease had not, and declared he was not interested in Veronica. He liked Michelle. Michelle let Pete take her to Burdette Park, a vast complex of lakes, tennis courts, waterslides, and playgrounds. Later she would write in a letter to Pete: “I remember the way it felt to kiss you at Burdette, for the first time, surrounded by crazy ducks. I felt like I had waited an eternity for that moment.”

Michelle and Pete began meeting on the sly—at his house if his ex-girlfriend was not there, or at Michelle's house if her mother was working. They wanted to keep their romance a secret until they could tell Veronica. One night, however, Pete's ex-girlfriend Sharon walked into the apartment when she was supposed to be visiting her parents. Pete threw a blanket over Michelle, but his ex figured out who was underneath. She grabbed a knife and ran outside and slashed the tires on Michelle's red Cougar. After this, Pete wrote Michelle a lengthy apology—for sleeping with her friend Veronica, for getting her embroiled in the ongoing saga with Sharon—in a steno notepad. Certain he had ruined the chance to have a serious relationship with Michelle, he described his desperate state of mind. “[There is a] black feeling in my chest,” wrote Pete. “Sick.” Then Pete recounted a painful moment in his childhood that had occurred during his first lengthy separation from his mother. His words made clear, despite the passage of time, how much had been left unresolved for the child whose mother was serving in the military:

Let me paint this picture. . . . My mom is my world and it hurt to see her go. She left around the springtime of my sixth grade year and would be gone for one year. We coped. My dad cooked and cleaned and I watched Stephanie. This is the way life moved on. . . .

This story takes place around Christmas time. It was after school and my dad was not home so I had the chore of watching Stephanie. The day was overcast and we had nothing but the tree lights on. . . . The phone rings. . . . It's [my friend] Charlie doing a very bad crank call. I know it's him and laugh and hang up. I make my way to the living room and the phone rings again and again the same. . . .

Time goes by and the phone rings I run to the phone Stephanie trails closely behind. I answer “Ricco's Pizza” there was nothing. Stephanie laughs and I put down the phone. . . . [T]he phone rings again. I run and answer the same “Ricco's ha ha Pizza” I can't contain my laughter.

A small, distant voice says “Pete?” It's my mom standing on the street in Greece on a pay phone with traffic whizzing past her. . . . She tries to talk “Pete?” She was crying now, half the world away, on a busy street, not seeing us in months, using time and money to call us. . . . She was crying the strongest woman I know is crying because of me. I don't know how to handle that I really don't to this day I don't know. . . . My dad took this the wrong way, he had no idea how I suffered and how I suffer to this day. I got beat.