Soldier Girls (19 page)

“We need something for morale,” Desma told Mary. “It's just not enough to have family day—I want a horse.”

Livestock was class ten, technically out of her domain, but she could probably purchase the horse, if the supervisors in Building Three signed
off on the 2062. Desma ordered a Clydesdale. She also ordered a bridle, saddle, and blanket. Unfortunately, a scrupulous supervisor spotted the unusual request and sent the 2062 back, along with a note asking for a letter of justification. Desma wrote up a beautiful memorandum; all it needed was the company commander's signature. She stapled the 2062 behind the memo and slipped them both into the middle of a stack of counseling statements for Mueller to sign. He whipped through the counseling statements, signed the letter of justification, and then paused to read the memo. Desma heard him bellow from half a block away.

“Goddamn it!” yelled Mueller.
“Addis!”

Desma's boss, Gregory Addis, looked shaken when he came to find Desma.

“You need to get over there,” Addis told her.

Desma put on a big smile as she stood at attention.

“Why in the hell did you order a horse?” Mueller demanded.

“Morale and welfare, sir!” said Desma.

“What the hell are you going to do with a damn horse?”

“I'm going to
ride
it, sir! Didn't you notice that there's also a requisition for the saddle, the bridle—all its tack?”

“Get out of my office,” Mueller told her. “Don't go back to supply. I don't know what I'm going to do with you, but you can't work there anymore.”

Great, Desma figured; no more 2062s. They did not get the Clydesdale, nor the kegs, but they did get the hamburger meat and the hot dogs. The story of Desma trying to order the horse made the rounds and just the idea of the Clydesdale had a galvanizing effect. Michelle Fischer, for example, loved hearing that Brooks had tried to order a horse, and decided afterward that being friends with Desma Brooks was how she would survive Afghanistan. At the end of July, right before they had to board the airplane, they snuck off-post together. It was Desma who coined the idea to go to the Classy Chassy, a strip club with an Indy 500 race car theme, over on the south side of Indianapolis. Their departure was looming and they were desperate for distraction. Desma rounded up people she thought needed to be shown a good time and herded them into her Vista Cruiser, a vast station wagon with paneled siding and a floaty ride. It was the middle of the week and they had no
permission to leave post. What the hell, Desma figured, the advance party had already left, and pretty soon they were all going to be in a war zone. It seemed like a good idea to go AWOL now, while they were still surrounded by the forgiving cornfields of Indiana, which lit up every evening with galaxies of fireflies. One last hurrah before they left all this behind. She said that she would be the designated driver.

Mary Bell sat beside Desma in the passenger seat, dressed in a pink tube top and a white tennis skirt. Behind them, on the wagon's middle bench seat, were Michelle Fischer and her perpetual shadow, muscular, tattooed Ben Sawyer. Michelle claimed they were just friends but it looked like more than that to Desma. On the rear-facing backseat sat Suzy Allen and Don Southard. A devout Christian, Suzy had been leading a relatively wholesome life on post, despite the debauchery going on around her, but Desma had grabbed her anyway, figuring she had to be freaked out, too. Sawyer had persuaded Southard to join them on the way to her car; he was a good-looking married man who was fond of boxing.

“We're going to sneak off to the Classy Chassy,” Sawyer had told him. “Want to come?”

“Hell, yeah!” Southard had said.

The Classy Chassy was hopping. Drag cars hung from the ceiling, lit up by red neon, while black lights sucked the color out of everything in the room except the white parts of the strippers' costumes. One stripper was dressed up as a cowgirl, another as Captain America. They saw other soldiers in the audience, but they were the only women. The DJ fanned the crowd into a frenzy when he played “Whip It,” and then Michelle requested Def Leppard's “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” The chairs had wheels, and Desma and Michelle and Mary rolled from their table over to the area by the stage. The strippers lavished attention on them, delighted to be entertaining women. Desma stuck to her promise and ordered only Diet Cokes, but she harassed the bartender into making stiff drinks for her friends. “Listen, we didn't drive all the way down here to drink juice and water,” Desma told him. “If I wanted them to drink juice and water I could've kept them at home.”

Over the course of the night, Michelle consumed a total of nine vodka Collinses. They got so rowdy that the manager told them they
were going to have to leave unless they settled down. They rolled back to their table and were quiet for a while but then a particularly attractive stripper came over and made purring sounds in their ears. She put her head down between Suzy's legs, and vaulted upward into a headstand so that her tiny white underpants, which glowed under the club's black lights, were nearly touching Suzy's face. “Oh, my goodness!” exclaimed Suzy. The stripper's underpants had tiny red cherries on them.

“I need to get in the car,” Mary announced.

Desma told the others that she was going to take Mary outside. They walked around the parking lot until Mary felt better and then Desma got her into the Vista Cruiser and rolled her window down and told her not to puke in the car. A lonely Mexican tried to chat with Mary, so Desma rolled up her window. He came around to Desma's side.

“Does she want to fuck?” he inquired.

“Do you see her? She is knocked-out drunk.”

“What about you?”

“Get the hell away from me,” Desma told him.

The others finally emerged, and the Mexican vanished. Desma got them onto 465, the highway that looped around Indianapolis.

“I don't feel good,” Mary said.

“You need to tell me before you're going to vomit so that I can pull over,” Desma instructed.

“Okay,” Mary said.

But the car had that floaty ride. Desma looked into the rearview mirror for a moment and saw that Ben Sawyer had put his arm all the way around Michelle and was holding his hand over her mouth to keep her quiet, while she was shaking with laughter. Behind them, Desma saw two feet, up by the roof of the car. Were those Suzy's feet? Then she heard Mary make a little sound like a meow.

“Did you just puke in my car?” Desma cried.

“No—in my tube top,” Mary reported.

“I know you got napkins,” said Ben Sawyer. “You're a mom.”

They could not clean Mary up sufficiently with the car moving floatily along at sixty miles an hour, so Desma pulled off onto the shoulder of the highway. Mary stumbled out of the car, pulled off her tube top, and flung it into the darkness. Desma and Michelle were mopping her pukestained
breasts when another vehicle pulled up behind them. It was the company commander and the XO. Mueller and his second in command just sat in their van, taking it all in. “Oh, Mary, your boobies!” cried Michelle. She stepped behind Mary and cupped her friend's naked breasts in her hands. They stood like that looking at the two leaders of their unit as Don Southard and Suzy Allen pulled on their clothes and stumbled out of the car. Alcohol-induced stupidity, Suzy Allen would say later, but she wasn't sober yet, and she was looking at her commander.

Desma stepped forward and observed tartly that she believed the company's two leaders were AWOL. “You're not supposed to leave the post,” she announced. “So what exactly are you doing out on this highway?”

Mueller sighed. He asked if she was sober enough to drive and told them to go back to Camp Atterbury.

Desma bumped into Mueller the next morning.

“How's everybody feeling?” Mueller asked drily.

“We're feeling just fine,” Desma told him. “Where did you go?”

“We went to the Red Door. Where did you go?”

“We went to the Classy Chassy.”

“That's why everybody was puking in your car.”

“Oh, not everybody was puking,” Desma said.

Michelle Fischer was twenty-one years old, and she hadn't gambled on any of this. She hadn't gambled on 9/11, hadn't gambled on Camp Atterbury, hadn't gambled on Afghanistan. She was as scared as she had ever been. Every night, she drank herself into a stupor, trying to subdue the bone-gnawing anxiety. Mostly she drank Hypnotic, a pale blue mixture of prepackaged vodka, cognac, and fruit juice. She called it “ghetto fabulous.” But she put on a brave front when she communicated with her parents, because she did not want to make them worry. At the beginning of May, she wrote her father a short letter in a chipper tone. She told him:

I am trying to make the most of my time here. Right now I'm trying to organize a recycling program for my company. We drink so much beer in cans, so I'm trying to convince my first sergeant
to let me recycle them. I'm having a hard time, but I'm stubborn. (Thanks to you and Mom!) I drink almost every day here. There's not much else to do. I just let myself drink whenever I want to because I know I can't drink at all in Afghanistan so I don't have to worry about coming home with a drinking problem. . . .

I'm not afraid of this experience anymore and I'm not mad about it. All I can do is keep myself positive. . . .

I love you Daddy!

But in a letter to Pete, written on the very same day, she struck a different tone.

This sucks. I really miss my old life, this army shit is for the birds. . . . There is
no one
here like me, not even close. I have a few close friends but even they don't have much in common with me. Oh well—at least I won't have to worry about anyone wanting to borrow my
Adbusters
. . . .

Kiss Halloween for me. I miss him. When I get home he'll be a cat. Not a kitten.

Michelle's old hip injury flared up after one of their runs, and she asked the medics to look, hoping the stress fracture from basic training had reemerged. They sent her down to Louisville, Kentucky, where the doctors pronounced her fine. Then Michelle was out of excuses. She made a calculated decision not to renew her Indiana driver's license when it expired, however, because driving a truck in a war zone was probably the most dangerous job that the military was assigning to women. And she stubbornly kept wearing her rainbow hemp anklet.

In other respects, however, it was simply easier to conform. The PX carried certain basics, but otherwise everybody went to Walmart. Buses took the soldiers over to Walmart and brought them back to the post. It was the only place the buses would go. So Michelle ended her boycott and resumed shopping at Walmart. The military was vast, and it did not tolerate idiosyncracy. It was exhausting to fight all of the time to maintain her identity. At least she would be rich when she got back, Michelle figured. In the middle of May she got her first active duty paycheck: she
was now earning $994.68 every two weeks. Once she got to Afghanistan, she would earn hazard pay, too. And while she was there, she would pay no federal income tax. Her income would skyrocket—and all her meals would be provided, her laundry would be done, and movies would be shown at night for free.

Michelle lost Pete's ring one day in the pool, and she slept with Ben Sawyer shortly afterward. She still loved Pete, but Sawyer was there and Pete was not. She had been shit-faced on Hypnotic when it happened—drunk, lonely, and scared. Most other people would have found her behavior understandable, but she could not forgive herself. She did not tell Pete what had happened because she wanted so badly for it not to have taken place. But when she wrote to him next her words were imbued with an unmistakable tone of regret.

I love you so much, and I really miss you. I'm sorry that this experience is changing me. I know that you can tell the difference already. . . . I miss my colorful life so much. Some days I am okay, but only if I am really busy. I can't think too much. But when I do it's always of you, or Halloween. And the little things I miss like
Sex and the City
. Just dumb shit you take for granted every day of your life. Let's take this year to dream, because when I get home I'll have enough money and we can do whatever we want.

The following month, Michelle went with Ben Sawyer to Fort Benjamin Harrison, over in Lawrence, Indiana, to become certified as a combat lifesaver. “It was the most nerve-racking thing, I never, ever thought I could stick a needle in somebody's vein,” Michelle wrote in a letter to her father. “But I did it perfectly. I am so squeamish around blood, but now that I've done it once I feel like I could do it a million times.” By then she had gotten falling-down drunk once more, and had sex with Sawyer again. She had not intended to repeat her mistake, but she had no self-control when she was plastered.

Michelle wrote one final letter to Pete before she left the country. She found a card with a drawing of a green olive. Inside, the card said, “Olive you!” It was an inside joke. At the radio station on campus, when Pete
had been behind the glass, unable to hear anything Michelle was saying to him, she used to pantomime kisses and hold up notes that said “olive juice.” She knew he would get the joke. Inside she wrote:

Dear Pete,

You are the love of my life and I am forever grateful for your love. I know that I could not make it through this experience without your support. You are my
only
support, you're my family, my partner, my love, and my best friend. Thank you so much for everything you do for me.
I'll always love you.
Keep your chin up. Think of Europe, Bloomington, Seattle, and all of the dreams that we share. I'll be home soon.

Love always,

Michelle

She went AWOL and snuck out to the Classy Chassy with Desma right after she mailed the letter. Even the nine drinks she ordered could not obliterate her sense of guilt at having cheated on Pete, nor the terrible fear that was fueling her need for physical reassurance. They left for Afghanistan the following day. Michelle, Desma, and Desma's friend Mary boarded an airplane that left the United States on July 20, 2004. The next time Michelle saw Debbie Helton was in Kabul.