Soldier Girls (24 page)

By this point, however, her sense of commitment to Pete had taken on an unreal quality. He was so far away, and Ben Sawyer was so close. September 11 fell on a Saturday. It was yet another brilliant day, just like any other, but the leadership feared violence and the soldiers at Camp Phoenix were ordered to lock and load. They walked around carrying weapons that were ready to be fired, which made them tense. In their newsletter, called the
Wrench Daily News
(they were a battalion of mechanics, mostly), Jaime Toppe ran a special feature with soldiers saying why they thought they had been deployed. One soldier said that they were there “for a good cause,” although he did not name what that was. Another soldier said, “The war on terrorism is a necessity. That's why we're here.” A third said, “We must not lose our focus in extinguishing totalitarianism throughout the world.” Debbie told Toppe: “I hope that we're going to make a difference and that we can accomplish everything we were sent here to do. Everything else is in God's will.”

The day passed without incident, except that the brass brought in some camels for show. Especially aware of her own mortality, Michelle wrote several letters. She adopted her usual cheerful tone with her
father: “I saw my first camel today!” she told him. “He was a scrawny bastard but I don't care. Because now that I've seen a wild camel, I have officially seen it all. . . . Try not to worry, Dad. I really am okay.”

Her letter to Pete was different—reflective, intimate, almost elegiac.

My dear Pete

Talking to you on the phone today made me so emotional. . . . I miss you so much, I swear if it weren't for the pictures sometimes I feel like I made you up in my head. I miss everything about you. I miss lying in your arms, running my fingers through your hair, feeling the tickle of your mustache when you kiss me. I miss talking to you through the shower door, bitching about the bathroom sink, and your pit-stained white T-shirts. I miss brushing my teeth with you. Remember those times you couldn't get me out of bed and you'd just yank the covers off me? Man I used to hate that but I'd give anything to have that tomorrow morning. . . .

I guess I just want you to know that I am always thinking of you. We have so many good memories.

I will always love you.

Michelle

The idea of their relationship still warmed Michelle psychologically, but Pete was no longer a palpable part of her existence. When she wanted tangible warmth, she turned elsewhere. Afghanistan had torn them apart, and the September 11 letter was as close to a farewell as she could muster. She did not write again to Pete that calendar year, although he kept writing to her. At the end of September, when she turned twenty-two, Pete sent Michelle a box of homemade pot brownies. The box arrived several days before her actual birthday, and on Saturday, September 18, 2004, Michelle threw a party in her tent.

“Pete sent me brownies for my birthday,” she told Desma. “And they're special.”

“Woo-hoo!” replied Desma.

For strategic reasons, they decided to share the brownies with all of the women, so there would be a smaller chance that one of the others would turn them in for possession of marijuana. Half the tent declined
to participate, but the rest consumed one brownie apiece. They packed a wallop. Mary, Desma, and Michelle were used to getting stoned, and huddled together giggling, but within an hour Karen Shaw was awash in paranoia. Moving slowly, with her eyelids halfway closed, she came over to consult with Michelle.

“What if I fall asleep and stop breathing?” Karen wanted to know.

“I promise you that I will check on you every twenty minutes to make sure that you're still breathing,” Michelle said. “I will not let you die.”

Karen crashed on her own bed. Michelle, Mary, and Desma stayed up for hours making a list about their relationships entitled “You Know You're Co-Dependent If . . .” and laughing until their sides hurt. That same weekend, Michelle received a card from her father, who had marked her birthday by going to a dive bar named PJs and getting all of the regulars to sign a card. “Tell everyone at PJs I really appreciate all the support,” Michelle wrote back. “It was so nice to get something like that for my birthday, cause I was pretty homesick.” She promised to have a banner printed up and to get everyone in her company to sign it, even as she winced that her father was such a barfly. On Monday, September 20, 2004—her actual birthday—the skies opened, loosing a torrential downpour. Afghanistan was changing, the weather was changing, and Michelle was changing, too. They all were.

T
UMULT BLOSSOMED EVERYWHERE
during the week leading up to the elections. The Taliban posted “night letters” (signs put up in the dark) across southern Afghanistan promising retribution against anybody who voted. Afghan authorities intercepted sixty guerrillas as they attempted to enter the country with the aim of mounting attacks at voting centers. The United Nations predicted fraud, intimidation, and violence; Human Rights Watch accused warlords of threatening women. President Hamid Karzai's running mate held an election rally in northern Afghanistan and his convoy was hit by explosives; two people were killed, although he escaped unharmed. Rockets hit various parts of Kabul, among other cities, while down in Kandahar, a dog trained to sniff for bombs uncovered a fuel truck filled with ten thousand gallons of gasoline that had been jerry-rigged to blow. The soldiers at Camp Phoenix expected rockets to fall but were spared. “On Thurs night we had some bombings in Policharky [sic] + Bagram + Kabul,” wrote Debbie in her diary. “We weren't hit thank God.”

Strangely, right before the elections, the post was blanketed in a thick, impenetrable fog. In her diary, Debbie likened it to something out of a Stephen King novel. The
Wrench Daily News
advised soldiers to be cautious: “With the elections approaching, be aware of possible threats. Let someone know your whereabouts at all times for the next few days for accountability.” Toppe interviewed various soldiers about the upcoming elections. “I don't think a lot of people will vote, because they'll be
scared,” Mary Bell told the
Wrench Daily News.
“Especially women; they feel oppressed. I think there will be isolated incidents, like car bombs.” Other soldiers echoed her comments, predicting a mix of violence and suppressed turnout. Only Debbie's bunkmate, Gretchen Pane, saw a more optimistic outcome: “The elections are going to be a great beginning for the Afghan people. It's going to liberate them. It's a new beginning.”

On Saturday, October 9, 2004, a cold front moved through Kabul, bringing the first taste of winter. Neither the brisk weather nor the predictions of mayhem deterred the Afghan people: three-quarters of the country's registered voters cast ballots—a massive number, far exceeding estimations. Most of the voters waited patiently in long lines and picked their candidates without incident. Five Afghan National Army soldiers and fifteen election workers were killed, but the majority of polling places operated without disruption. It took more than a week for results to be announced—and even longer for the results to be ratified—but Hamid Karzai had been elected by a margin of 55.4 percent, after earning three times as many votes as any one of his competitors. “The people seemed really excited to vote,” wrote Debbie two days after the elections. “Matula one of the workers for DFAC [the dining facility] showed me his card for voting he was so excited. I hope it's not in vain + it will help the people.”

Although they played no direct role in securing voting sites, Debbie, Desma, and Michelle nevertheless felt proud for having been part of a military force that had ensured the elections could happen and that women could participate. Women made up two-thirds of the country's population, yet the question of what rights they should legally possess was a matter of heated contention. During the 1920s, a period of liberalization, women had gained the right to choose their own husbands and were encouraged to seek an education, but during the 1930s, strict Shariah law was reinstated. During the 1960s, another period of modernization, many Afghan women stopped wearing veils and some entered politics, and during the 1970s, the country outlawed child marriage. The 1980s, however, brought chaos. The Soviet Union and the United States struggled to control Afghanistan, and finally abandoned it to warring mujahideen, which led to the rise of the Taliban. In the mid-1990s, the
Taliban instated a particularly severe version of Shariah law, requiring men to grow beards and women to veil themselves entirely.

After two months in Afghanistan, Debbie, Desma, and Michelle had begun to appreciate keenly the vast difference between their position in American society and the much more precarious station of the women around them in Afghanistan. Michelle thought it pure chance that she had inherited such largesse; she could easily have been born female into this society instead. Because she moved daily through the streets of Kabul, it was possible for her to imagine some of the privations that fate would have entailed. Not long after the election had taken place, Desma crossed paths with an Afghan family on the post. The medics at Camp Phoenix had provided care to their son, who had been injured by a land mine. The father was pushing his son's wheelchair, and in the traditional fashion, his wife was following five paces behind. The woman was holding a black headscarf across the lower half of her face. She looked at Desma, a female soldier wearing desert camouflage and carrying an assault rifle, and stopped walking. To Desma's shock, the woman knelt down before her. “Thank you,” she said in English. “Thank you.”

Unlike Michelle, Desma almost never left Camp Phoenix. She had been spending her days at the motor pool, also known as the shop. Including the mechanics, perhaps one hundred soldiers worked there. About fifty soldiers reported for duty during first shift, forty-five during second shift, and a skeleton crew stayed on through the night in case of something unexpected. “Night shift consisted of playing cards and drinking alcohol,” Desma would say later. Most of the people who worked at the motor pool were men, and they had decorated the walls with pictures of women torn from magazines such as
Maxim
and
Sports Illustrated
. Desma worked first shift, along with Mary Bell. They started work at 7:00 a.m. Sometimes Desma finished at 3:00 p.m., sometimes at 5:00 p.m. It depended on how fast everybody else worked. Desma tracked the maintenance on the trucks that belonged to the 113th. The mechanics did top-to-bottom annual service checks on each vehicle, and some of those services took thirty hours to complete. A soldier who drove a vehicle outside the gates of Camp Phoenix did not want that truck to break down. That was the job of the motor pool, to keep the trucks running. The people who worked at the shop got covered in
grease and their jobs were not glorious, but nobody could get anything done in Afghanistan without trucks, so they were proud of what they did.

When broken trucks came in for repair—maybe the engine had overheated, maybe something was wrong with the four-wheel drive—Desma made sure the mechanics had the right parts. Sometimes she made the hour-long run up to Bagram, jouncing over the potholes, dodging jingle trucks and donkeys, if they did not have the right parts at Camp Phoenix. In addition to tracking the maintenance of vehicles, Desma also ran software programs that tracked any repair work done on weapons, night vision goggles, radios, and other equipment. And she prepared reports about all of the maintenance work being done by the 113th for the battalion's leaders. Working nearby in the shop, her friend Mary belonged to a crew that dispatched trucks, recording the serial number and mileage of every vehicle that left the post and every vehicle that returned. When a truck broke down, Mary kept track of who went to get the damaged vehicle. Sometimes a team of mechanics drove out to fix a broken vehicle; sometimes they sent a wrecker. Every once in a while, if it was really far away, they sent mechanics out by helicopter.

At the beginning of every workday, Michelle visited the motor pool to let Desma know where the armament team would be working and what they expected to accomplish, and at the end of every day, she returned to say how many broken weapons they had fixed. Desma entered this information into her spreadsheets, documenting the work being done by the armament team. The motor pool was a hub of information and gossip, and working there put Desma in the position of meeting almost every new person who came through Camp Phoenix. Shortly after Michelle began repairing AK-47s, Desma had befriended two blond, good-looking Danish soldiers who had shown up looking for spare parts. They returned bearing a platter of Danish pastries to say thank you. Desma was good company and pretty soon Michael and Kristian were stopping by regularly. One day, Desma introduced the pair to Michelle. She was on her way to the PX to buy the new album by The Cure, and Kristian announced he was a fan of that band, too. The Danish soldiers started driving over frequently to hang out with Michelle and Desma.
They worked at the military compound occupied by the International Security Assistance Force (they all called it ISAF), a ten-minute drive away. You weren't supposed to accept alcohol from the ISAF soldiers, but everybody did. In a letter to her father, Michelle confided that the two Danish soldiers had brought over some beer. “So things are looking up,” she wrote. “I know I won't get in trouble because they're supplying all of my chain of command with whiskey.”

One of the Danish soldiers was married, and Desma and Michelle were already having affairs with two other married men, so they kept things with Michael and Kristian fairly innocent. Typically they caught a movie (that month, Morale, Welfare, and Recreation showed
Shrek, Shrek 2, Rush Hour 2, Forrest Gump,
and
The Last Samurai
), or went for pizza at Ciano's. Michelle considered sleeping with Kristian, but she could not fathom the idea of cheating on Pete with Ben and then cheating on Ben with Kristian—so she kept the relationship platonic. Years later, however, she would say that she wished she had chosen to have her deployment relationship with Kristian instead, but Ben Sawyer had gotten there first. Desma, on the other hand, thought it was fun to make out with her Danish soldier and then sleep with her superior officer. She snuck dates with Michael early in the evening, then met up with Lieutenant Mark Northrup later at night. Desma said the Danish soldiers made the time go by faster; dating European men made the deployment more romantic.