Soldier Girls (2 page)

It had been a grim and frigid spring. On a gray day with the temperature stuck down in the thirties, Michelle and Noah drove over to the armory in Noah's gray Chevy Astro van. They japed their way past the immense howitzer guarding the entrance to the building, pushed through the armory's double glass front doors, and turned right down the wide main hallway. Inside the recruiter's office, a height and weight chart hung on the wall, and posters urged
BE ALL YOU CAN BE.
There were two desks. Behind one sat a middle-age black man in a uniform. He was a sergeant first class and his name was Wilber A. Granderson. Michelle sat down in one of the two chairs facing him, and Noah sat down in the other. Michelle announced that they might enlist, but first they had some questions. Was it really true the Guard could give them a free ride to college?

Granderson had a generous smile. He confirmed that the Guard would pay 100 percent of their college tuition at any institution in the state if they signed up for six years of regular Guard duty, plus two years in the Individual Ready Reserve. While in the reserves they would no longer go to drill, but they could be called upon in an emergency. That was it, he said. An eight-year commitment. In return, he could offer: full college tuition, a housing allowance of $220 per month, and a kicker bonus of an additional $200 for each month they spent in school. Plus, he would throw in a onetime enlistment bonus of $8,000. And the Guard would pay off any existing student loans.

It was a lot of money. Michelle wanted to make sure she understood the whole deal. What if she failed to make it to drill one weekend? She could make the time up, Granderson told her. What if she wanted to study abroad? Not a problem. She could simply add on an extra semester of drill time after she got back. The recruiter turned to Noah. What was on his mind? Noah wanted to know if a misdemeanor charge for possession of marijuana would be an issue. He could still sign up, Granderson replied, but first a specified amount of time had to elapse. While Noah could do the preliminary paperwork along with Michelle, he would have to wait several months before he could actually join the military.

That was the extent of their questions. Granderson told them to return with their birth certificates, and gave them a form to fill out that
required all kinds of information about their backgrounds. That would take a while to pull together, Michelle thought—her family being so convoluted. After they left the armory, Michelle tallied up all the benefits Granderson was offering. Signing up for the National Guard would allow her to pay off her existing debt, realize her dream of transferring to Indiana University, quit her waitressing job, and move onto campus. She could be a real college student, living in a dorm, at a famous university. For that she would gladly surrender one weekend a month. Remembering the buff soldiers displayed in the posters on Granderson's walls, Michelle fantasized that joining the Guard could also help her lose weight—she could go to a great school and get in better shape at the same time.

Michelle and Noah returned to the armory to take a multiple-choice exam called the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. In a room filled with other potential soldiers, they sat down at neighboring desks, Michelle jazzed because she loved triumphing on standardized tests, Noah a wreck because he hated flubbing them. Afterward, Granderson phoned Michelle to discuss her marks. She had been two answers shy of a perfect score, he told her, and he rarely saw such good results. Granderson said she was leadership material, she could become an officer. He explained that joining the National Guard would give her limited options because of her gender. Over the preceding two decades, the percentage of the total army that was female had inched upward from 9.8 percent to 12.5 percent (and would grow to 15.7 percent in the decade to come). However, women were still banned from certain occupations. Specialties judged most likely to see direct combat—such as infantry and field artillery—remained restricted to male soldiers. And the main Guard unit that drilled in Evansville was field artillery. The only positions open to women in Evansville were slots in a small detachment that did support work. Michelle's choices would be limited to driving a truck, fixing a truck, or repairing broken weapons. Granderson saw a more rosy future ahead if Michelle would pledge herself to the military full-time. She was really smart, she could do military intelligence, as long as she joined the regular army, Granderson told her. Michelle enjoyed the flattery, but understood herself to be a nonconformist—
taking orders would not come easily. She stuck with her plan to join the Guard.

Over the next several weeks, Michelle filled out various documents, including a form in which she swore that she had never been fired from a job nor ever been court-martialed. Noah promised to enlist as soon as he could. Michelle felt less alone after she dropped by the armory one day to learn how to march and bumped into Angela Peterson—Angela's younger brother had been in Michelle's class at Central High, and when they had been underage Angela used to buy them beer. Angela was a pretty girl with a heart-shaped face and a pixie haircut. She had signed up that spring, too.

Granderson told Michelle to report back at the end of the month, ready to take a trip to the closest military entrance processing station, down in Louisville, Kentucky, an hour and a half south of Evansville. When Granderson put her into a military vehicle bound for Kentucky, she found Angela Peterson already inside. The two of them shared a hotel room in Louisville, where they spent a lot of time doing push-ups. Every female recruit had to be able to do three regular push-ups, no knees touching the floor. When she had first shown up at the armory, Michelle could not do any, but she hated being bad at something, so she and Angela practiced every night.

At the military entrance processing facility, medical staff took Michelle's blood, asked her to pee into a cup, prodded her lymph nodes, and administered tests of her vision, hearing, and depth perception. She did her push-ups, as well as the requisite number of sit-ups, and then she performed a duck-walk in her underwear, so that the doctors could check for flat feet. On March 26, 2001, after she had passed all of the entrance requirements, a drill sergeant put a document in front of her. This was her formal contract, and after she signed her name, her commitment to the military would become binding. They told her to read the document out loud. “I, Michelle Fischer, do solemnly swear or affirm that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the state of Indiana against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the president of the United States and the governor of Indiana
and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to law and regulations,” Michelle recited. “So help me God.” That's pretty much all the document said. Michelle trusted that it meant what Granderson had suggested—twelve weekends a year, plus two weeks of annual training. She signed.

Michelle had a particularly close relationship with her mother, and when she thought about basic training, which she was slated to start in June 2001, she thought about it as their first separation. Yet Michelle had also been parenting herself for a long time. Her mother, Irene, battled crippling anxiety, the legacy of a childhood trauma. One day, when Irene was nine years old, her parents had been burning trash in the yard, and Irene had picked up a stick and begun playing with the fire. Her dress had ignited. She spent almost an entire year in the hospital, and the extensive burns left white ripples fanning across her back and arms. Irene grew into a fearful woman.

Michelle's father possessed the opposite sort of temperament. His given name was Wilfred, though he always went by Fred. He was a bluff, colorful ne'er-do-well whose storied life included many hard-to-believe moments, such as the time he shot his own stepson or the time he volunteered to grapple a declawed grizzly bear inside a wrestling arena. “My dad's the guy who sticks his hand up, and he's like, ‘I'll wrestle it,' ” said Michelle. “You know?” Before Irene had married Fred, she had been married to one of his cousins, and they had two children, Michelle's half siblings Tammy and Donovan. Meanwhile, Michelle's father had been married a total of six times to four different women: Twice he had married one woman, twice he had married Michelle's mom, and then he also married two other women one time apiece. It was by one of the other wives that Michelle's three other half siblings, Daniel, Ray, and Cindy, were conceived. After Michelle's parents had divorced for the second time, they had lived together for a third stint before they split for good. This last iteration of their relationship—the only one that Michelle can really remember—had ended one night while Michelle was in first grade, after her father had gotten drunk and belligerent, and her mother had called the police. Michelle had been sent to her aunt's house, and what she remembered most vividly about that evening was the brusque
police officer who came to her aunt's door and asked if she could draw a picture of where her father kept his guns.

Michelle was the youngest child, and the only one her parents had had together. Like her half brother Ray, Michelle strongly resembled her father in physical appearance—she inherited his button nose and his laughing brown eyes—while the other children looked more like their mothers. All of them were heirs to a family history in which many men had served in the military: Michelle's paternal grandfather had driven tanks across France in World War II, and Michelle's father, one of her uncles, and her mother's first husband had all served during Vietnam. Only Michelle's uncle and stepfather actually saw combat, however; her father had spent those years locked up in various military prisons for repeatedly going AWOL, according to Michelle.

After he had left the military, Michelle's father had held a steady job for about a decade at a company called Swanson Electric. They manufactured motors. She remembered going to visit him once and being awed as she watched him lower an immense engine into a vat of varnish. After ninety years in operation, however, that company had closed abruptly, and Fred Fischer never again found such steady work. Meanwhile, Irene had worked as a bookkeeper for twenty-five years at an industrial recycling company called General Waste, but lost that job when General Waste also closed. Irene had started doing factory work instead, and in the process her earnings greatly diminished. Michelle attended four different elementary schools and three different middle schools, as they moved almost every year. They became visibly poor, and onetime friends shunned Michelle because she did not own the right sort of clothes. After Irene began working in a factory where she made rubber seals for car doors, she and her daughter moved into a particularly rundown trailer.

Irene was working the first shift, which meant that by the time Michelle woke up, her mother had already left. One day, while Michelle was in the middle of taking a shower, the water quit working, and she was stuck in the shower with no water and unrinsed shampoo in her hair. Michelle was eleven years old. She didn't know how to fix the water, or whom to call, so she just stayed home from school. At times, Michelle
and her mother relied upon food banks—beef stew out of a can, dried mashed potatoes. Michelle's favorite movie was
Return to Oz
. Darker than the original, the movie depicts Dorothy unable to sleep, while the farm is about to fall into foreclosure. Dorothy is in trouble, and none of the adults around her can help—she is on her own. No matter how many times Michelle and her mother changed residences, Michelle rented that movie over and over again, and she found the act of repeatedly watching Dorothy endure her harrowing plights and come out all right in the end to be soothing.

Michelle harbored complicated feelings toward her father. She knew her precarious economic situation stemmed from his inability to provide support to her mother. She glowed when he bestowed his oft-wandering attention, but disliked the way he grew unpredictable after five or six drinks. She also became embarrassed by his garishness. One night, when she was invited to an awards ceremony at one of her middle schools, she felt excited about the prospect of bringing both of her parents to the dinner, as she rarely got to be with the two of them at the same time. Then her dad showed up at their trailer wearing short sleeves, and Michelle could clearly see the tattoo on his forearm, an image of a naked Indian squaw with particularly generous breasts. White trash, that's what the other students would think. Michelle announced that she felt sick, and they skipped the awards ceremony.

Beginning when Michelle was about fourteen, she and her mother started sharing various homes with a series of relatives. First they lived with one of Michelle's half sisters, and later they moved in with Michelle's half brother Donovan. Michelle had looked forward to sharing a home with Donovan—they had been close when she was small, back before he had joined the navy. While they were living with Donovan, however, Michelle's mother began working the night shift, and after Irene went to work, Michelle often watched Donovan do meth with a friend. The house Donovan had rented was an old, rambling place, and Michelle grew afraid of being alone there, since it creaked so much and had so many inscrutable corners. At the beginning of her sophomore year of high school, Michelle spent all of her school clothes money on a black Lab puppy that she named Potato. She threw tantrums when Donovan
did meth around the dog, because she thought the stinky fumes would harm Potato.

After she got to Central High, Michelle announced that she was done with being the new girl—her mother could move again (and did), but Michelle would stay at Central. For the first time in her life, Michelle formed enduring friendships. In her freshman year, she hewed to a girl named Veronica. Like Michelle, Veronica had grown up poor, yet was smart and ambitious. Veronica was also wickedly funny, and Michelle admired her boldness. She thought it was cool when Veronica introduced her to pot. During her sophomore year of high school, Michelle and her mother began sharing a home with Michelle's maternal grandmother. In that house, Michelle was not allowed to use the microwave, not allowed to use the back door, not allowed to use the telephone. If she wanted to use the bathroom, she had to ask permission. And her grandmother made Michelle take Potato to the pound. Michelle figured that her grandmother, a strict Catholic, must have hated Michelle's father because he had divorced her mother not once but twice, and therefore hated Michelle, who so closely resembled him.