Soldier Girls (20 page)

M
ICHELLE'S GROUP GOT
stranded in Germany for days, sleeping on cots in an enormous tent on the sprawling Rhein-Main Air Base just outside of Frankfurt. It was run jointly by the US Air Force and NATO and served as the primary way station for American soldiers passing through Europe. The chow hall was all blond wood and bright lights, and reminded Michelle of an IKEA cafeteria. Nobody wanted to leave because they served such good food—huge plates of sausages and immense slabs of cake. When their first two flights out of Germany were canceled for mechanical reasons, Michelle began to imagine being granted a reprieve. One night at dinner, she heard that a group that had left after them had already arrived in theater. Was there a reason they could not get where they were going? The following morning the soldiers lined up to depart again, only to be told that a powerful storm had devastated the airport; the roof of their terminal had collapsed. That evening, Michelle saw another double rainbow. It was a sign, she knew it. The soldiers were told they could go out drinking. Michelle, Desma, and Mary found a bar with a sand volleyball court, and whooped it up for hours, trying different German beers. Michelle got wasted, then called Pete to say she thought there had been some kind of mistake, she would be home soon. She stumbled back to her cot in a beery stupor and passed out. She had been asleep for only a few hours when an officer walked in, flipped on the lights, and said, “It's time to go.”

As they boarded the immense green C-17 Globemaster troop transport aircraft, Desma announced that the perfect cocktail for riding in a plane that was going to do a combat landing was one Valium and one Ambien. She handed those two pills to Michelle and to Mary. “One plus one equals you don't feel a thing,” Michelle would say afterward. None of them stirred much when the plane stopped to refuel in Turkey; when they neared Kabul, the C-17 plunged downward in a dive so steep that some of the other soldiers felt as though weights had been placed on their bodies, but neither Michelle nor Desma retained clear memories of the landing. “Sank into that cargo webbing like it was my mother's womb, slept the whole way,” Desma would say later.

Michelle stumbled off the C-17 in a groggy state of disbelief and for one disorienting moment thought maybe they had landed on the sun. When her eyes adjusted to the glare she noticed there was no sign of the army unit that was supposed to greet them. The empty-bellied C-17 took off anyway, leaving them marooned on the tarmac without any ammunition. Somebody wondered out loud if they might get shot before they left the airport. Mary hunkered down by her hand luggage, onto which she had tied a small pink and orange worm that she had nicknamed Gwormy—many of them had brought mascots, as if the toys could keep them safe. Desma slowly absorbed the fact that barbed wire orbited them, and small red triangular signs posted on the barbed wire warned of mines, and beyond those signs a flock of small children had gathered. They were staring at the soldiers. The children wore mismatched clothes, some too big and some too small, nothing that belonged together, as if they had found the items at Goodwill. The soldiers looked like astronauts ready for a moon landing. They had on desert camo pants, desert camo jackets, bulletproof vests, Kevlar helmets, M4 assault rifles. The gear obscured the question of what shape or what gender they might be underneath, and everything matched perfectly. What unearthly prospect did they present? Desma watched a boy run away from them through the field full of land mines, and only after he had gotten quite far did she perceive that he was following a well-worn path.

The regular army arrived and gave the Army National Guard soldiers ten bullets apiece. “Load up,” a sergeant instructed gruffly. “Don't
lock. Leave the chamber empty. Take your weapons off safety.” Neither Michelle nor Desma had ever taken their weapon off safety before, except when they were aiming at a target. He said they should not trust children and they should watch out for cars approaching at high speed and for roadside bombs. A box, a bag of trash, a pile of dirt. He said there could be Taliban out there. Then the army soldiers herded them into the backs of open-air trucks lined with sandbags. Michelle grabbed a seat next to Desma. As they peered out between the planks, they saw rocky, barren terrain ringed on all sides by mountains so tall they looked blue. Kabul itself appeared bleak: bombed-out buildings, bullet holes, junked cars, debris by the side of the road. But the traffic milling around them was fantastic; they saw wildly painted trucks, people wearing robes, barefoot children, donkeys, goats, and women cloaked from head to toe in blue burkas. And then billowing clouds of dust consumed it all.

At Camp Phoenix, uniformed guards cleared them through the gate. Their battalion belonged to the 76th Infantry Brigade from Indiana, which was taking over from the National Guard soldiers from Oklahoma, and the turnover had been staggered. For the time being, both sets of soldiers were going to be double-bunked in the same quarters. On their first night, Oklahoma set up a big screen in the middle of the main courtyard and played the movie
Groundhog Day.
Michelle skipped the forced entertainment, but Desma watched Bill Murray wake up over and over again to the exact same reality. It was 5:59, then 6:00.
Put your little hand in mine, there ain't no hill or mountain we can't climb. I got you, babe.
Over and over. Afterward, Oklahoma made sure they got the joke—their days at Phoenix would be so mind-numbingly unchanging as to seem identical. “Yeah, we got it,” Desma told them. “We're not dumb.”

About those hazy, sleep-deprived first days, living double-bunked in a ten-person tent with twenty other women, Michelle kept only smeared, partial memories. There was no privacy, and Michelle found herself observing other women changing their tampons as well as their clothes. Even Debbie Helton, who got to Camp Phoenix about ten days later, squirmed with self-consciousness due to the communal living arrangements. “I've got gas galore these poor people in my tent,” Debbie wrote
in her diary. “It's really bad.” The elevation of 5,869 feet rendered them short of breath, and their bodies required time to adjust to the dry climate, too. Many of the newly arrived soldiers got nosebleeds. The temperature routinely hit one hundred degrees (though later in the year the temperature would drop below freezing), and they had arrived just as the region was staggering through the last phases of a blistering seven-year drought. The wind that constantly scoured the land was literally blowing the ground into the air, and whenever she drew a breath, Michelle felt as though she were inhaling sand. The grit crept into her eyes and ears and undergarments. It stuck to her teeth and it coated her scalp. Her pen no longer rolled smoothly over paper when she wrote letters.

Michelle spent a lot of time smoking cigarettes, mostly with Desma. Oklahoma showed them Camel Rock, a piece of concrete jutting out of the ground that was the designated smoking area, and in the middle of the night when they could not stay inside the stifling tent any longer, they would head over there. They often waited for the dawn together, or just walked around in circles. It was an entirely different night sky than the one Michelle knew; she saw more stars than she had believed existed. Eventually she learned not to point out shooting stars because they flew by so fast that invariably the other person would crane up asking where to look in that immense carpet of light.

Michelle found it hard to sleep because the soldiers had been ordered to take Lariam, a potent antimalarial. The pills were handed out in the chow hall, right next to the silverware. Lariam caused unusually vivid dreams; people also complained of Lariam inducing hallucinations, paranoia, and psychosis. Other soldiers said Lariam caused brain aneurysms, but nobody knew if that was true. Desma announced proudly that Lariam gave her highly realistic sexual dreams, in full color, but Michelle felt as though she had bugs crawling over her skin. Because they had been alerted to watch for insects such as camel spiders, which could grow as long as six inches, Michelle had a hard time ignoring her hallucinations. She grew afraid to thrust her feet down into the bottom of her sleeping bag, then afraid to enter her sleeping bag at all. After a few days, Desma started giving Michelle other pills—muscle relaxants, sleeping pills, antianxiety medication—to help her get some rest. Michelle fell in love with Vicodin, an addictive narcotic that she started taking nightly.
After Desma ran out, the medics provided her with a regular supply. “It wasn't hard to get a prescription,” Michelle said later. “They were handing that stuff out like candy.”

Their new home had originally been constructed as a Soviet air base, and they found it a spare, utilitarian environment. After the Soviets had withdrawn, a local tractor trailer company had used the area as a junkyard; one year before the soldiers from Indiana arrived, NATO had leased the property and turned it back into a military installation. Now a sea of dark green tents spread across two and a half square miles of concrete, interrupted by islands of tan prefabricated buildings. Everything else was made of plywood. “If you think plywood is one-dimensional, then you haven't been to Camp Phoenix,” wrote Diana Penner, a reporter for the
Indianapolis Star
who visited during their deployment. “There is nothing, it appears, that plywood can't be used to create. There are desks and bookcases, phone cubicles and computer stations, chests of drawers and armoires, chapel pulpits and a smoking gazebo, signs and entire dwellings.” So much plywood meant strict fire codes and weekly inspections. “A base fire station is now under construction,” added Penner. “It also is made of plywood.”

Eight hundred soldiers from seven different countries were stationed at Phoenix. They spoke a babel of languages and wore camouflage of different patterns but all belonged to the Combined Joint Task Force Phoenix III, an international military organization formed to train and mentor Afghan National Army soldiers.

Ever since the United States and its allies had failed to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, they had been searching for him in the mountains of Afghanistan, primarily along the country's border with Pakistan. Between Afghanistan and Pakistan rose the formidable peaks of the Hindu Kush mountain range, some reaching more than 25,000 feet high, most shrouded in perpetual snow. The terrain was so harsh that the mountain range had gotten its name—literally, Hindu Kush means “killer of Hindus”—from bloody journeys of the past in which large numbers of captive Hindus had died while crossing over in the hands of slave traders.

The American soldiers had not found bin Laden anywhere, but they had gotten entangled in a series of difficult conflicts with various of his
supporters. It was hard to tell how the war was going, exactly—it just kept dragging on, one firefight after another waged across remote and inhospitable mountain valleys. Meanwhile, the Bush administration had become preoccupied with the question of how to secure the rest of Afghanistan and make it a less friendly place for bin Laden's supporters, such as the Taliban. To that end, it was now working with their NATO allies to build up the Afghan National Army.

Every nationality in the coalition had their own particular specialty. The French soldiers removed land mines, wearing special footwear that everybody called “egg boots,” while the Romanians knew the most about Soviet weapons. Their foreign colleagues had notably different habits; Debbie got a kick out of watching the French soldiers do their PT exercises, because the French soldiers were wearing the smallest nylon shorts she had ever seen on a man. “Not a sloppy French guy,” Debbie said approvingly afterward. The classes for Afghan soldiers were held at a variety of locations around Kabul, and usually they were led by American instructors. The 113th Support Battalion maintained the vehicles that American soldiers used when they traveled to the training locations, and also repaired or replaced any broken weapons, night vision goggles, and other equipment. All told, the NATO coalition was training and deploying almost ten thousand Afghan National Army soldiers per year. The governing idea was that someday Afghanistan would have a stable democracy and a military capable of warding off threats to stability posed by groups like Al-Qaeda or the Taliban and they could all go home.

Michelle and Desma explored the post together. They found Morale, Welfare, and Recreation, known to everyone as MWR, where soldiers congregated to watch TV or play pool, Ping-Pong, foosball, and video games. There was free water and free microwave popcorn. The post also featured a small library and a Green Beans coffee shop. They found the phones, the Internet computers, and the gym. A large outdoor bazaar took place every other week on Fridays. Michelle saw jewelry set out in red boxes lined with white fabric, cashmere throws, marble tea sets, and ornately patterned wool rugs in rich browns, reds, ochers, and deep midnight blues. She bought a hand-embroidered silk tapestry and a postcard of a man wearing a turban. “I guess I spoke too soon; I left Germany about two hours after I called you,” she wrote to Pete. “I am okay,
things aren't too bad here. A little boring. The altitude kind of sucks. But the mountains are breathtaking. I have seen so much already that I will never forget. Please try not to worry, I don't think Camp Phoenix is very dangerous. I love you I really do. Write soon.”

She received a letter the following day that Pete had put in the mail two weeks earlier. “I got your letter today,” she wrote back. “It made me cry. I feel how far away I am now. In time and in distance. I miss you so much. I feel like when I get home everyone will have a new and different life without me in it. . . . I hope we can just pick up where we left off. I am so sad right now.” Before she sealed her letter, Michelle thought of all she had forgotten to pack, and added a hasty postscript:

My wish list:

nasal spray