Soldier Girls (27 page)

Akbar proved reliable, courteous, and highly intelligent, however—a vast improvement over the interpreters they had used previously—and from that day forward, he became their regular translator. After a little while, the armament team found him some cast-off BDUs (the dark green camouflage that none of them used anymore), which he wore with
a white kaffiyeh jauntily draped around his neck. Akbar turned out to be fiercely proud of his culture but also relatively open-minded. He asked them all sorts of questions about America; they in turn asked all about Afghanistan. Akbar explained that he had grown up in a wealthy Afghan family that had fled during the rise of the Taliban; he had attended secondary school and college in Pakistan, where he had majored in sociology. After school, he had chosen to return to his country of origin, because Afghans were looked down upon in Pakistan. Rambo had recommended him as an interpreter, as they were relatives. Akbar spoke six languages fluently: Pashtu, Dari, Farsi, Punjabi, Urdu, and English. At the same time, he seemed naive about other aspects of life. Patrick Miller liked to discuss things such as women's anatomy in front of Akbar just to see him blush. Debbie, on the other hand, treated Akbar like the son she never had. “We have an interpreter with us now he's really nice his name is Akbar he's a hard worker . . . ,” she wrote shortly after he joined the team. “Akbar is the oldest of his family + his parents are both sick so he's here living with his uncle and sending money back home to help his family.”

Debbie asked Akbar Khan to explain everything she had been wondering about. Why did they never see any girls above the age of twelve or thirteen? They were kept inside, he explained. Above a certain age, it was no longer viewed as acceptable to play outside with boys, and they needed to learn the art of keeping a home. How young were the girls when they got married? Debbie wanted to know. More than half of the girls were married by age eighteen, Akbar told them. Some of the Afghan workers who moved inventory around the warehouse stopped by to talk. With Akbar translating for them, the Afghan workers plied Michelle and Debbie with questions. “Are you married?” one of them asked. “Do you have children? How old are you?” The Afghan workers seemed astonished to learn that Michelle was twenty-two years old and single. Debbie found it hard to explain her relationship with Jeff, so she lied and said they were married. “Then why did your husband let you come here?” one of the workers asked. Debbie laughed and said he hadn't been given a choice in the matter. Debbie enjoyed the conversation but it left Michelle feeling like a spectacle. “I would be like, I'm not a mother. I have no children. I have no husband. I'm a hussy little
American. Like, I know that all the twenty-two-year-olds in your culture have five kids, but I don't. In their own polite Afghan way, they were asking: What the hell are you doing here? And I was like, I don't know! I didn't ask for this! And I'm not allowed to leave.”

Akbar Khan tutored them in Afghan history. A monarchy had held the country stable for four decades, but since the 1970s Afghanistan had endured constant conflict. After the Soviet Union withdrew, leaving the country to be fought over by various warlords, one million Afghans had died and another three million had fled to other countries. Now that the United States had arrived, and was trying to stamp out the Taliban, hundreds of thousands of refugees were returning, in the hope that their once-thriving society could be reconstructed, but there was still not much of a local economy. Ninety percent of the government's budget came from international aid, and the warlords were running a lucrative opium trade, but otherwise most people lacked paying jobs. That was why Akbar Khan had chosen to support many members of his own family by working for the American military.

Akbar offered a door onto Afghanistan, a window onto Kabul. He was the first devout Muslim any of them had ever known. They watched him unroll a prayer mat every afternoon and make his prostrations. He was very pure, Michelle decided; all the virtue that she felt she had lost, she now ascribed to Akbar. They discovered that they were almost exactly the same age. Michelle concluded it was her job to protect this innocent young man from being corrupted by his contact with Americans. She chastised Patrick Miller for cursing around Akbar; she objected when Jason Kellogg joined them temporarily and teased Akbar for being a virgin; she got upset with Akbar when he drank Mountain Dew. Ramadan began on October 15 that year, and Akbar fasted for a month. Michelle brought Star-Kist tuna for lunch one day and worried that the strong smell must surely be increasing Akbar's hunger. Akbar viewed the intense young woman with bemusement. He had never met anyone like Michelle Fischer. “Are you a Christian?” he asked. Michelle said, “No.” She tried to explain that religion played no role in her life, but this idea was impossible for Akbar to grasp. “You're a Christian,” he told Michelle. “You come from a Christian country. Maybe you don't go to church, but the basis of all of your thinking is Christian.” She tried but failed to
repudiate this conclusion, and that was when she began to grasp just how central religion was to Akbar. He could not imagine a person without that basic orientation.

In certain ways, however, Akbar Khan proved more worldly than his American friends. When the soldiers talked about the war with the Afghan translator, he did not speak of democracy or the rights of women or the satisfaction of liberating fellow Afghans from the yoke of the Taliban. He said, Don't you know that in our mountains we have one of the world's largest deposits of lithium? Cell phone batteries, that's what the war was about, Akbar believed. It was hard for the soldiers to trace the war's arc—hard to see the whole forest when they were so aware of each tree, each individual bomb blast. There were rumors of Taliban gains down in Kandahar and Helmand Provinces, but they had no way to gauge the scope of the opposition to the American presence. Over in Iraq, though, it seemed clear that things had taken a bad turn.

After Hussein had been removed from power, an intense struggle for control of Iraq had erupted between opposing Shi‘a and Sunni factions, causing ever-increasing levels of sectarian violence. The Iraqi population had also turned against the US soldiers who had brought about this power vacuum and were waging a full-blown insurgency. Improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, were the weapon of choice. Meanwhile, US forces had been alienating the Iraqi population by sweeping through homes and rounding up all men of military age. “In the late summer of 2003 senior US commanders tried to counter the insurgency with indiscriminate cordon and sweep operations that involved detaining thousands of Iraqis,” wrote Thomas E. Ricks in his highly regarded book
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.
“This involved ‘grabbing whole villages, because combat soldiers [were] unable to figure out who was of value and who was not,' according to a subsequent investigation of the fourth infantry division's operations by the Army inspector general's office.” Tens of thousands of Iraqis had been detained, and the US military did not have enough interrogators to process them in a timely fashion. The indiscriminate sweeps, which came about as a misguided attempt to rectify the lack of solid intelligence, only caused deepening animosity between the country's population and its invaders. Iraq had slipped into an ungovernable turmoil. US military commanders
were trying to turn the situation around by implementing counter-insurgency tactics, but the ideas were foreign to many rank-and-file soldiers, as they involved restraining the use of force, and the new tactics were not yet proving effective. Instead soldiers were getting blown up in their trucks more and more often when they went out on patrol.

That fall, seventeen soldiers in Iraq refused to go on a fuel run in vehicles that they deemed unsafe and inadequately armored. The soldiers were detained for their insubordination—news of which raced around other military bases. The army tried to dismiss the incident as an isolated problem, but the idea that US soldiers were being sent to war without adequate equipment took hold in public opinion. It was an election year in the United States, too, and by November of 2004 this question of whether soldiers were adequately equipped had become part of the ongoing debate between incumbent George W. Bush and his Democratic opponent, John Kerry. Likely voters were evenly split; it looked like it was going to be a close race. The two candidates argued heatedly over the wars, but in particular over Iraq; Bush's people had promised that the war would be short, but instead it kept on going.

That month, a military source leaked an internal document written by a top US Army official questioning the army's preparedness, citing concerns over a shortage of spare parts, adequate protective gear, and weaponry. At the same time, soldiers were filing lawsuits objecting to the fact that they were being kept in the military past the point when they had fulfilled the terms of their military contracts. Earlier that year, the military had instituted the “stop-loss policy,” which allowed the armed services to keep soldiers past the point when their contracts expired if their unit was deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. John Kerry took issue with the stop-loss policy, calling it a “backdoor draft.” These debates were closely followed by the soldiers stationed at Camp Phoenix. Michelle mailed off her absentee ballot, casting another vote for Ralph Nader, while neither Desma nor Debbie voted. Most of the other soldiers they knew voted for George W. Bush.

Another big argument concerned the length of tours of duty. In the past, the army had typically sent soldiers overseas for six months at a time; it had upped its tours to twelve months after being asked to wage two wars simultaneously. Due to the length of its deployments, the army
was now encountering difficulties with recruitment. The fewer new soldiers the military managed to recruit, the more often existing soldiers got shipped overseas. In response to the dismal recruitment numbers, the National Guard announced that cash bonuses for soldiers willing to reenlist for another six years were going to triple, from $5,000 to $15,000. Cash bonuses for new enlistees would jump from $6,000 to $10,000. That fall, the army's top officials began negotiating with the Pentagon to create more flexible rules about women in combat. The army asked for permission to place mixed-gender companies inside a battalion alongside companies of single-gender soldiers. Previously, the military had not allowed mixed-gender companies and single-gender companies to belong to the same battalion or regiment. The army argued that it was simply recognizing that male and female soldiers were facing similar threats from rockets, mortars, roadside bombs, and ambushes, regardless of job specialty. Women were seeing combat already, even if they weren't supposed to.

By November 2004, all the soldiers in the 113th had been on active duty status for six months and away from home for three months. They could feel the presence of the holiday season looming, and nobody was looking forward to spending Thanksgiving and Christmas at Camp Phoenix. “I've been really homesick lately,” Michelle wrote to her father. “More than usual. But time is going by alright I guess. . . . I'm still living in a tent but we should be moving into a little building called a beehut in a few weeks. It'll be nice to have walls that don't flap in the wind. The girls that I live with have become like family to me; we are doing a secret Santa thing for Christmas. I'm dreading the holidays, everyone is going to be sad about not being home with their families. But we will get by. Just remember, they can't keep me here forever!”

Michelle asked to take a leave but was told she would have to wait—other soldiers had already applied. Desma Brooks and Mary Bell were planning a secret vacation to Italy. They said nothing about the trip to their families back in Indiana; Desma desperately wanted a break from the crowded post, but she could not stand the idea of going home and then enduring another painful parting from her children. Desma did not want to take her leave so early, but it was the only time when she could get permission to go away with Mary. They flew to Kuwait successfully,
but could not board their flight to Italy because neither Desma nor Mary owned a passport. Their military identification cards were considered insufficient to enter Italy. It seemed like a total catastrophe, but then Desma figured out they could fly from Kuwait to the United States and from the United States to Mexico using only their military IDs, and they successfully boarded a flight to Atlanta, where they connected with a flight to Cancún. “Heaven,” Desma would say later. “White powdery sand, turquoise blue water, tart margaritas. Heaven.”

Their hotel turned out to be low-end and located at the less desirable end of the strip, which suited Desma fine; the fancier places seemed intimidating. They upgraded to the “all inclusive” option; Desma was good at math, and she saw that the bracelets would prove to be a bargain. “I had never heard the term ‘all inclusive' before that,” she would say afterward. “I'd never been on a vacation before. I paid the extra $600 because it seemed to make more sense.” They went snorkeling one day and the next day they went parasailing. They took a double-decker party boat over to Isla Mujeres, where they had too many bright-colored cocktails. Desma wound up riding a mechanical bull, barefoot in a little black party dress, and then on the way back she got sick over the side of the heaving party boat. They fended off a couple of French men by claiming to be lesbians. Toward the end of the trip, they shopped for souvenirs at the Flamingo Plaza, where they saw baby sea turtles the size of silver dollars. When they drove back through the gates of Camp Phoenix, and were confronted once more by the dreary starkness of the dusty post, Desma felt as though all of the joy had been leached out of the world. It was hard to be back, but she had no regrets about her decision. She knew that other people would think a mother should have gone home to see her children, but those people had never been to Camp Phoenix. A lot of soldiers snuck away on side trips without seeing their families. “It was hard enough to leave them the first time,” Desma would say later. “And you do need a break. You need to take leave. Goddamn, I couldn't imagine going home and leaving them again, having to do that to myself all over again.”