Soldier Girls (22 page)

“You'll never make a soldier out of that girl,” he observed.

“Yes I will!” vowed Miller.

Quintana stuck out his hand and offered to bet that Miller would fail. At the end of the deployment, GQ maintained, Fischer would remain as unsuited to military life as she had been at the beginning. They put money on the question. It helped, naming the power struggle: Miller wanted to remake Michelle over in his own likeness, while she was determined to remain unchanged. No way would she let Sergeant Miller turn her into an automaton. Day after day, she kept showing up late, and Miller kept exploding. He got even more loud and vulgar, as if he could browbeat Michelle into submission. It was hard for the others to watch Miller bully the girl, but she remained implacable. Debbie wondered at Michelle's backbone. Did she herself care too much about making other people happy? That did not seem to be a problem for Michelle.

In a couple of weeks, the armament team finished framing the room, putting up the walls, hanging the door, and laying down the floor. After the secure weapons room was done, Miller took the team on an eye-opening trip to a nearby military base called Pol-i-charkhi. The base was infamous because it was home to a prison where supposedly many atrocities had been committed. It was also one of the locations where NATO had been training Afghan National Army soldiers.

The drive took only twenty minutes but seemed longer because of the state of the road. There were no traffic lights, no stop signs, and no posted street names (the signs had been taken down during the first Soviet occupation), and many streets were rutted with potholes so enormous that traffic lurched from one side of the road to the other to avoid the spine-jolting chasms. If the right side of the road was especially bad, everybody veered to the left, then used their horns to force one another out of the way. The armament team bumped into other cars as they jostled for a spot in the weaving confluence. The soldiers were fascinated by the surrounding traffic. Michelle was charmed by the sight of tiny three-wheeled taxis with cartoon-like stickers on their windshields. They saw a stooped man in a brown robe herding some woolly-looking goats. They saw men riding camels with brightly colored bridles, and other men riding Suzukis. Will Hargreaves kept pointing out the jingle trucks, transport vehicles elaborately painted scarlet, turquoise, yellow, and flaming orange. Some of the jingle trucks had ropes of beads strewn over their windshields, others featured swaying pom-poms, or regal crowns. Noisy metallic fringes below swayed with their movement, making a constant jingling sound; the noise was supposed to ward off evil spirits. Michelle supposed the drivers needed good luck, for their vehicles were piled with stacks of goods so alarmingly high that she kept expecting things to fall off.

Looking out of the dusty windows of her own vehicle, she apprehended that Afghanistan was a country of grinding poverty. They saw a child with only one leg, and others with no shoes. The children were terribly skinny. Afghanistan ranked as one of the poorest nations on earth, and the average life expectancy was forty-four years—lower than that of any neighboring country. Women died in childbirth at sixty times the rate in industrialized nations. Against the backdrop of lofty mountain
peaks, they saw people living in mud homes without running water and children who seemed inadequately dressed. Yet the children kept flashing the soldiers the thumbs-up sign, thrusting themselves forward with vivid enthusiasm. “It's worse than Belize as far as Third World,” Debbie would write in her diary that evening. “This is real poverty. . . . I hope our time here can only really help the future of these kids.”

Inside the gates of Pol-i-charkhi, the armament team beheld a sea of old Soviet tanks, now serving as military vehicles for the Afghan National Army. Afghan soldiers took them to a warehouse and showed them boxes of derelict AK-47s. The guns were rusting, dirty, missing sights. Over the preceding months, Afghanistan's warlords had surrendered more than thirty thousand weapons to the United Nations, and the guns were being stored in conexes like the one they now stood before. Their first sergeant, Dean Kimball, had accompanied the armament team. He said their job would be to ensure future peace by cleaning and fixing the old guns so that the Afghan government could hand them out to the Afghan National Army. They could save the Afghan government tens of thousands of dollars by repurposing the old weapons, Kimball said. They would identify which AK-47s might be salvageable, clean the weapons, fix those that could be repaired, and use the others for parts. It was important work, because they were helping to build a democracy. The transfer of weapons from the warlords to the Afghan army had a fancy name: NATO brass were calling it Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration, or DDR. Michelle could never remember exactly what DDR stood for, so she just called it
Dance, Dance, Revolution
, after one of her favorite video games.

They drove back to Camp Phoenix in a convoy. A vehicle behind them broke down, and protocol required that their truck stop, too. They were still three miles away from Camp Phoenix, stranded and vulnerable. Some children approached, calling out, “Thank you! Good! Thank you! Hello, America!” Will and another soldier were ordered to pull security, which meant putting a bullet into the chamber and getting ready to fire. “The kids mostly want to come close but [we] have to lock + load + shoot if necessary,” Debbie wrote in her diary that evening. The Taliban had been known to use children as suicide bombers. Afghanistan encompassed such harsh contrasts that it was hard to embrace it all; in
a single day, they had recoiled at the sight of bombed-out buildings, rejoiced in the natural glory of the lofty mountains, suffered at the sight of such poor children, and then been told that it might be necessary to shoot them. Later that night, Debbie woke up to the feeling of her bunk being shaken. She thought Gretchen was trying to wake her up, but Gretchen protested that Debbie should stop shaking the bunk. It was their first earthquake. Afterward Debbie wrote, “I'm really missing my Maxxi a lot I need a dog hug badly.”

Nobody on the armament team had worked on AK-47s before. The idea of learning how struck Patrick Miller as appealing, given that soldiers at Camp Phoenix were not breaking their own weapons often enough to keep his crew busy. In the days that followed, Debbie expressed enthusiasm for the new mission, and so did Will. Michelle felt torn: on the one hand, the AKs struck her as sinister, but on the other hand, she liked the prospect of traveling outside of the claustrophobic, regimented world of Camp Phoenix. Afghanistan was the first foreign country she had ever visited, and the brief glimpse of its strangeness that she had gotten made her want to know more.

T
HAT FALL,
Afghans were attempting to elect a president by a democratic vote for the first time in their country's history. Originally the presidential election had been scheduled to take place in July 2004, but it had been twice postponed, and was now supposed to happen in October 2004. At the end of August, the soldiers living at Phoenix had been told to brace for unrest. “The elections are soon and they do anticipate trouble,” Debbie wrote in her diary. In a letter to her father, Michelle shared that the atmosphere in Afghanistan had gotten “a little heated.” Violence lurked all around. Soldiers found two unexploded bombs nearby. One had been placed inside Pol-i-charkhi, and the other had been discovered close to the gate of Camp Phoenix. After that, two Afghan National Army soldiers were shot, one in the neck and one in the foot; medics from Debbie's tent went out in the middle of the night to tend their wounds. And a Humvee got hung up on some piano wire that had been strung across the road outside of Camp Phoenix, at a height set to decapitate a soldier. That particular Humvee had a .50-caliber machine gun installed in its turret, however, making it impossible for the gunner to stand up. “Luckily the 50 mount was on or someone would have lost their head,” wrote Debbie. “The warlords are active as it gets closer to elections.”

From time to time, loud sirens blared across Camp Phoenix, signaling the descent of a rocket-propelled grenade. The soldiers in Debbie's tent handled the first such incident with aplomb; Debbie scrambled into
her body armor and then chatted amiably with Gretchen as they waited for the all clear. “There was an explosion at the front gate no injuries,” Debbie wrote afterward. “Still very scary. We have to stay inside the tent below sandbag level with all on till they give all clear.”

The soldiers in Michelle's tent were younger, however, and the clanging sirens set them on edge. Desma distracted everyone by announcing that she wanted their help filling out a particularly dirty version of Mad Libs. By the time the all clear sounded, some of the young women had slipped into hysteria anyway. “I don't know what I'm doing here!” one of them cried. Somebody else said, “I want to go home.”

They spilled out of the tent, a mess. Desma had changed out of her blue flannel pajamas with white stars on them, back into her desert camo, and could see that she needed to take charge. Mary Bell was nineteen years old and she looked like she was about to bawl.

“All right, ladies, gather up,” Desma announced. “Step into a circle. We're going to do the Hokey-Pokey.”

And they did.
You put your right foot in, you put your right foot out; you put your right foot in and you shake it all about,
they sang.
You do the Hokey-Pokey, and you turn yourself around, and that's what it's all about!
Other soldiers stared as if they were kooky, but they did not care. Something about the way the words were ingrained and they did not have to think and the song had nothing to do with rocket-propelled grenades restored their equilibrium. They shook their right foot and their left foot and turned themselves around, and they got to the other side of the experience. Desma had put it behind them.

They found Afghanistan hard to explain to the people they had left at home. There was a nine-and-a-half-hour time difference, which made it challenging to find a good time to call, and if you said anything about bombs or booby traps to relatives, they got spooked. Desma called her children as often as possible, but made certain never to call on the same day of the week, never at the same time of day. It was easier on the family that way—they would not worry if they did not hear from her at the appointed hour. She hated the days when she called and caught the girls when they were tired, because then they would just cry. It made her feel as though she were making things worse by telephoning. She said nothing about sirens going off in the night. Instead she repeated the same
refrain, over and over again. “I'll be home before you know it,” Desma said. “I'll be home before you know it.” It was like a lullaby. After a while she started saying, “You know when I'll be home.” And Alexis or Paige would answer, “Before I know it.” “That's right,” Desma told them. “I'll call you again soon.”

She got an email from her cousin Lesley, who felt she was not doing a good job. The girls were mad at her all the time, Lesley wrote. Apparently Paige had announced she was running away. Desma told her cousin that if the girls thought she was being too strict, then she must be doing something right. She coordinated trips for them to visit their father, to visit their grandparents. She called Lesley and said, “Josh wants to see Paige and Alexis, so he's coming to your house this weekend.” It was long-distance parenting—trying to find a quiet corner on the post, at an hour when it made sense, arranging everything by cell phone.

Hearing about major change at home unsettled the soldiers. Debbie was having trouble sleeping, which she mentioned to her grown daughter, Ellen Ann. Debbie was a night owl, but her tentmate Gretchen started getting ready for work at four in the morning, and Debbie often woke up to the sound of Gretchen rustling into her uniform, then could not fall back asleep. Ellen Ann sent her mother a care package with two movies, a pillow, and brand-new sheets. Combined with a Tylenol PM, the new bedding did the trick. “Tried my new sheets,” Debbie wrote. “They are really soft. Feels so good. Wake up young again.”

When she called Ellen Ann to thank her, Debbie learned that her daughter was pregnant. “Well it's great I'm finally a ‘grandma' what a wonderful feeling my baby is having a baby,” wrote Debbie in her diary. Ellen Ann's due date was in early May, however, and Debbie was not going to return to Indiana until the following August—she was going to miss the birth of her first grandchild.

At first Debbie and Jeff communicated exclusively by phone, but then Jeff figured out how to send and receive email, which delighted Debbie. “My honee emailed he loves me,” she wrote in her diary. “Makes my night.” At the same time, she worried about Jeff's well-being. Friends said Jeff had let his membership at the Moose lapse, and that it was hard to persuade him to leave the house. Debbie urged Jeff not to hole up, and later he let her know that he had planned a weekend trip to go deer
hunting. “My honee is going camping I'm glad he needs to get out more,” Debbie wrote.

All of the soldiers in the 113th were struggling to cope with the radical changes in their lives. Shortly after they arrived, two of the battalion's soldiers had gotten in serious trouble for “huffing”—inhaling mind-altering vapors out of an aerosol can—and had their guns taken away. Then another soldier was caught with hashish, which he confessed he had acquired by trading with a local Afghan who worked on the post. Debbie had quietly begun drinking every day, if she could acquire alcohol—not too much, just one or two cocktails. She supposed there were worse habits. When the two guys were caught “huffing,” Debbie observed in her diary that one of the soldiers was in complete denial about his addiction and hoped he would get help after he was sent to a rehabilitation program at Bagram Airfield, the largest US military base in Afghanistan, an hour's drive north of Camp Phoenix. She did not see her reliance on alcohol in the same light. She viewed it more as a sleep aid. “I'm awake off and on all night,” she wrote in her diary. “I hate my sleep pattern. . . . What a few beers or a stiff drink would cure.” Sometimes, however, she remembered to drink but forgot to eat. “Came back had the place to myself so I fixed a cocktail pretty good,” she wrote one Sunday. “Watched a movie. Skipped breakfast and lunch.”