Soldier Girls (16 page)

Pete told Michelle that he had gotten “that feeling” again when he worried that she might not want to see him anymore. Pete closed the letter by promising never to hurt Michelle again. “I need you . . . ,” he wrote. “I can't let go of the best thing that's ever happened to me.”

Michelle wrote a six-page response on the same steno pad. “Every moment I am with you has become the only time I am allowed to be myself,” she told Pete. “You've swept me away into a dreamland. . . . I know you and I are good for each other.” Michelle worried that she would have to choose between maintaining her friendship with Veronica or having a relationship with Pete. “Then I remember that ideally I'll be going away to school [in Bloomington] next year. So if we are going to separate . . . is all this anguish worth what will end up as a guaranteed broken heart anyway?” But she told Pete that his actions had not compromised her feelings. If anything, she believed they had grown closer because of the difficulties they had experienced.

I'm scared for our future together, simply because I want so badly for there to be one. . . . No matter what happens, you have to understand how much you mean to me. . . . I know you look at this and see all the complications you've brought to me. But there is so much more to us than that. Us.

Pete found a new apartment on the ground floor of an old brick building on the west side of Evansville. Veronica and Colleen lived upstairs, and Michelle confessed her involvement with Pete as soon as Veronica returned. Her friend took the news better than Michelle had expected, and soon Michelle was spending almost every night at Pete's. The apartment had old linoleum floors and Formica countertops and kitchen cabinets that looked like wood but were actually made of metal and clanged when they closed. Pete and Michelle got an old sofa with no legs, and a tiny gray kitten they named Halloween. On the walls they put up a movie poster from
Trainspotting
. They got high and lay on the sofa in each other's arms for hours. If they felt ambitious, they went upstairs to watch
Sex and the City
with Veronica and Colleen.

In the summer of 2003, when Michelle had to report to Camp Atterbury for annual training, she found it excruciating to separate from Pete. Furious about all of the national security measures that had been adopted, Michelle decided to reread George Orwell's classic novel
1984
. She borrowed Pete's copy, wanting to take something of his along with her. Pete could always tell which of his books she had been reading, for he kept his books pristine, whereas his new girlfriend tended to fall asleep on top of them, or to stuff them into her bag. By the creased spines and rumpled covers, Pete could see she had worked her way through his copies of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
and the
Zombie Survival Guide.
At Camp Atterbury, Michelle immersed herself in Orwell's satire about a society that had willingly surrendered all of its liberties to live in a state of never-ending war, then lifted her head and was confronted by identical rectangular cinder-block buildings that repeated themselves endlessly in all directions. The book allowed her to cope with the daily act of putting on her uniform—it was her way of being subversive, of declaring she did not belong.

One day, Michelle crossed paths with a few of the Alpha girls who
were staying in a female barracks nearby. They radiated animosity. Everyone else they knew had just showed up to play pretend war games, while they had been stuck at Atterbury for months, gearing up for the real thing. When her unit set up camp out in the woods, Michelle found the training exercises had gotten more serious, as if the leadership thought they might be next. General Martin Umbarger, who was in charge of the Indiana National Guard, wanted every soldier in the state ready to go to war. As a result, Patrick Miller, the cocky, swaggering ex-marine who had worked in missile repair, now had a new job. He was no longer part of the missile team but had been assigned to investigate whether other soldiers were correctly performing the prescribed war exercises. Miller confided to Michelle that he hated ratting out colleagues, and said he was planning to quit the Guard as a result. Michelle figured he must be confiding in her because he knew she was unorthodox. Miller offered Michelle some dip; sucking the sour tobacco made her nauseated, but Michelle did not want Miller to think her weak. When she finished reading
1984
, she handed it over to his friend Frank Perez, who was still working in missile repair. “Here,” she said. “See what you think of this.” Perez hardly came out of his tent, he became so enraptured by Orwell's story. And as usual, their colleague Ben Sawyer trailed after Michelle everywhere.

It was fun to flirt with the guys from missile, but Michelle longed for Pete. She purchased a writing tablet at the PX and wrote daily letters to him. “Hey sweetheart,” she began. “Day 2, round noon, sitting in the barracks with nothing to do. It's making me miss you even worse than I thought I would. This is horrible, I want to come home, I want you to hold me.” In another letter, Michelle bemoaned being woken up from a vivid dream of being in Pete's arms, only to have to report for guard duty. “I was pissed I had to leave my warm sleeping bag and sweet thoughts to go freeze my ass off outside,” she wrote. Stuck in a foxhole, bored and cold and tired, Michelle began texting Pete during the predawn hours. He sent messages back and forth with her until her shift ended. She wrote later that she had never loved anybody else as much as she loved him. “I'm on radio check, watch, whatever, the easiest damn job I've ever had,” she said. “I just sit and read in a heated trailer. Think of you and decide to pick up my pen. Missing you bad, thinking of all the ways I
want to kiss you.” The more time they spent apart, the more passionate her letters became.

It's day 11, only four days left to go and we'll be together again. . . . I can't believe we've been apart for this long. It seriously feels like two months instead of two weeks. . . . When I lie in my sleeping bag and I'm bored and I can't sleep, I think about making love to you and my imagination is so vivid, and my memory can call out the smallest details of the way you look naked, the way it feels to have you inside of me, our rhythm, everything. And it's like I can't stop torturing myself. I can't stop thinking about you. I miss you. It's almost over, it's almost over, it's almost over.

Michelle moved in with Pete as soon as she got home. They both worked long hours at menial jobs, and their schedules did not align. Michelle got a job making $7.62 an hour at Berry Plastics, where she manufactured disposable cups for fast-food restaurants. Pete worked the evening shift at Staples, and the overnight shift at WGBF, a for-profit FM rock station. They left each other domestic updates and love notes on the steno pad and the writing tablet. Michelle wrote to Pete that she had left clothes in the dryer, then added, “You mean everything to me.” Pete wrote to Michelle that a mechanic had called about her car and signed off, “I worship you.” Michelle thanked him for cleaning the apartment and added, “PS Will you marry me?” And Pete wrote, “Yes!!”

In August 2003, when Michelle reported for drill weekend, she experienced immense relief to see the missing Alpha girls had returned. Their false deployment made Michelle hope that perhaps the war in Iraq might really end without anybody from her battalion being sent there. That same month, NATO took over what was being called “peacekeeping” in Afghanistan, and Michelle let herself imagine that war drawing to a close, too. Perhaps she might be able to realize her dreams after all. Pete and Michelle planned to live apart while she attended college in Bloomington, starting in the fall of 2004, and then they planned to move to Seattle together. They hung a large map of Seattle over their bed so they could get to know their future home.

Michelle's final semester at USI, in the spring of 2004, was grueling:
physics, chemistry, calculus, and Spanish. She wanted to get a degree in environmental science, and she was trying to get two of her science requirements out of the way before she switched schools, because she thought the courses would be easier at the University of Southern Indiana. She spent most of her waking hours poring over her textbooks. Right after she started her spring classes, however, Michelle heard that the battalion she belonged to was going to be deployed sometime in the coming year. Supposedly most of the fighting was over, and the nation-building had begun, yet large numbers of soldiers were still required. At the armory, her supervisor instructed everyone to get into better physical shape, because they were going to be stationed at high altitude. Michelle went home and looked up the elevations of the capital cities of Iraq and Afghanistan: Baghdad sprawled across a vast alluvial plain, at an elevation of only 112 feet, while Kabul rested in an alpine valley at 6,000 feet above sea level. Odds were she was headed for Afghanistan.

Michelle hatched various schemes to get out of the coming deployment. She could break her legs, she could get tattoos on her face, she could get pregnant. She settled on the idea of marrying Veronica. Michelle figured that if she clearly violated the military's policy of “don't ask, don't tell,” she would get kicked out of the Guard. Michelle told Veronica they could get married in Canada, and said she would pay for the entire trip. She had already been saving money for an apartment in Bloomington by working as a waitress at a restaurant called Hacienda, where she made great money in tips. She could afford to spring for gas and a hotel room. They decided the best time to go would be in May 2004, after finals. Supposedly the deployment would not happen until summer. One day that March, however, Michelle was at home when the telephone rang. It was Ezra Schmidt, her immediate supervisor, who had recently been promoted to sergeant. He had been leading the maintenance team ever since Sergeant Joe Haverty had transferred to another company.

“You've been activated,” Schmidt told her. “It's Afghanistan.”

He said he was going, too. They had about a month before they went on active duty status. Michelle could hear the effort it took for Schmidt to maintain his composure. When she asked who else was going, Michelle learned that the other members of their five-person maintenance support
team—her former boyfriend Noah Jarvis, her ally Amber Macdonald, and a friend of Noah's who had joined the group—were staying back. They were all truck mechanics. Only she and Schmidt, the two weapons mechanics on the team, had been selected for this deployment. At least, Michelle thought, she did not have to watch Noah go to war.

Michelle had been alone when the call came. She went upstairs and told Veronica and Colleen the news. By the time Pete came home from work, Michelle was sloppy drunk. She accosted him in the kitchen and loosed a river of words, brokenhearted because she was going to miss out on her twenties. Pete let her talk and talk. The whole matter of her impending absence became much more real for him when Michelle brought home a copy of her orders, and he saw the font that the military used, which he knew so well from his childhood. “You are ordered to active duty as a member of your Reserve Component Unit for the period indicated unless sooner released or unless extended,” the orders said. “Period of active duty: Not to exceed 545 days. Purpose: 1A MOB #96-3, OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM (OEF).” So much for the idea that she would only be a soldier one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer. Five hundred and forty-five days, that was eighteen months; unofficially, she was told the deployment should last no more than a year.

Michelle shut down. Inside she was full of a strange, airy nothingness where her feelings might have resided. It was Pete who felt a storm of emotions for them both, and the more he responded, the less inclined Michelle was to feel at all. They talked about eloping but there was no time. Michelle disassembled her life. She quit her job at Hacienda and went to the registrar's office to withdraw from her classes. She earned no credits; all her hours of studying had been for nothing. Pete said he would move to Bloomington with her, after she got home from Afghanistan, so they didn't have to spend so much time apart.

Michelle had saved up $1,300 for an apartment in Bloomington. Instead she ordered kegs of Killian's Irish Red and threw a party, took friends out to dinner, bought her mother a new bed. She also took out a large life insurance policy and wrote a will leaving everything to her mother. Irene was too consumed by anxiety to comfort her daughter, and instead Michelle had to keep telling her mother that she would be
all right. Pete's mother took the news in stride. She bought Michelle's red Cougar with the V6 engine, so that Michelle wouldn't have to worry about making her monthly car payments. By the end of April, Michelle's money was gone.

Michelle was told to report for duty on May 1, 2004. She spent her last evening walking back and forth from the bedroom to the kitchen, where she had laid out her two duffel bags. Pete, Veronica, Colleen, and some old friends of Pete's who dropped by at the wrong time sat on the sofa without legs. Nobody spoke to Michelle, who clearly wanted to be left alone. The next morning, Pete drove her to the armory. Later that day, he was supposed to take a final exam; he had asked if the exam could be rescheduled, but the professor had said no. The questions were going to be about international relations—how did the United States get along with this country or that country? In all his life, it was the only exam that Pete would ever fail.

Inside Pete's blue pickup, Michelle put a pillow over his lap and laid her head down. He pulled up at the armory.

“We're here,” said Pete.

Michelle lifted up her head and checked the time.

“We're early,” she said. “Just keep driving.”

Pete headed east on the Lloyd Expressway. A while ago, he had given Michelle a ring he had been wearing, a silver circle with a pressed pattern; it fit her index finger. He liked the idea that she was going to take his keepsake to Afghanistan. She had bought him a copper ring in its place but he had lost it already, and she teased him about that. They returned to the armory, stood around in the parking lot. Most of the other soldiers were male, and most of the people saying good-bye were female. Michelle hugged Pete. “It's just a year,” he told her. “It'll be over soon, it's just a year.” She lined up in formation and marched over to the bus that would take her to Camp Atterbury. Perhaps she still could have married Veronica, but in the end Michelle had qualms about the scheme. Why was she so special, she had asked herself, that she should skip a deployment when everybody else who had gotten that phone call was going?