Soldier Girls (29 page)

Desma shopped for Christmas presents online. She got Alexis and Paige each a GoGo My Walkin' Pup, by FurReal Friends, fluffy white toy dogs that could walk and bark. She got Josh a new, tricked-out bike, had it shipped to his dad's house, and made sure his dad put it under the tree. There was no good time to call, given her work schedule, so she just phoned when she could, and wound up waking Josh in the middle of the night. It was two o'clock in the morning on Christmas Eve where he was, and he was only eleven, but Desma told him to get up and look under the tree. “Open up your presents, boy!” Desma said. “I got to go to bed.” Josh was still half asleep and got confused by the box. “There's a bicycle inside,” Desma assured him. “It's in pieces, but your father will help you assemble it.” Once Josh woke up enough to realize that he was talking to his mother and she really had gotten him exactly what he wanted, Desma heard the sound of glee in his voice, and that was all she needed for Christmas.

Desma gave Michelle a clay pipe with a painting of a lizard on it that she had picked up in Cancún. Michelle gave Desma a bottle of Ralph Lauren “Romance” perfume. Ben Sawyer gave Michelle a large blue Yankees T-shirt, because the Yankees were his favorite team, and Pete mailed Michelle the final season of
Sex and the City
, because it was her favorite show. Michelle devoured the entire season in just one week. The DVDs got handed from bed to bed and only after the whole tent had watched the final season (by which point the DVDs were getting passed around the rest of the post) did Michelle and her tentmates finally talk about the surprise phone call from Big to Carrie.

Always outrageous, Desma also ordered vibrators for the entire tent, although the box got lost in the mail and did not arrive until after the
holiday. When it finally came, she handed everyone a vibrator and announced, “You bitches need to chill the fuck out.” The vibrators were small but powerful, with three rotating balls on the business end. Desma called them pocket rockets and promised they would deliver a real kick.

“Why would you buy this for me?” one of the other women asked.

“You need an orgasm worse than anybody I've ever met,” replied Desma.

Michelle and Desma discovered that they could turn the vibrators on and race them down the aisle between the beds. Mary was still struggling to get the batteries inside her machine when Smitty walked into their quarters and announced he was doing a walk-through to see if they had any men in their beds. “Hey, Smitty!” Mary called out. “I need help! Can you open this battery compartment?” She thrust the sex toy at him. Smitty turned red when he realized what it was but got the vibrator working before he left. The vibrators, the flamingos, the vodka, the Article 15—Michelle revered Desma. Without her, spending Christmas at Camp Phoenix would have been simply too grim.

Over in Debbie's tent, many of the women had gone home on leave, and she felt even more grateful for Diamond's company. “Diamond is growing I can't make her stay in the box,” she wrote at the end of December. “She is my sanity saver she's my angel that's helping me through each day.” At the same time, Debbie worried that Diamond would soon be discovered. The more active the dog became, the harder it was to prevent her detection. Debbie was not the only person who was hiding a pet—three other dogs and two cats had secretly been adopted by lonely soldiers—but it was against the rules. Meanwhile, Debbie felt increasingly homesick. “This is my first Xmas [away] from home it seems weird but then many soldiers before me have survived,” she wrote. “I will too.”

A big storm hit Indiana and Jeff wrote an email to say they got about twelve inches of snow. He was dreading the task of shoveling the driveway. “The wind is blowing, going to drift the snow, it is just 1 degree out,” he wrote. “Twenty max today, and I got to get the truck out. Wish you were here we could cuddle up and not go out for 2 days.” Debbie longed to be home to see the drifts out of her very own windows. She wrote in her diary, “Wish I was snowed in with him we would be snuggling.” She did not have time to get depressed, however, as the armament
team worked right through the holiday season. Afterward Debbie wrote, “Well what a week Xmas was okay just not home. We worked hard at the depot. Went through the rest of weapons stayed all day it was really cold.”

Debbie's mother had mailed her a box of the old-fashioned peppermint sticks that Debbie always bought every year. They were the fat kind, with a hollow center. When she was little, Debbie's grandmother had taught her how to push the peppermint sticks into an orange and suck out the juice, and when Ellen Ann was little, Debbie had taught her daughter the trick, too. One day, Debbie brought the peppermint sticks and some oranges to the ANA depot, where she taught Michelle, Will, Patrick, and Akbar the same family tradition. They thought she was crazy until they tried it. Later, after they all got back home, that moment when Debbie had taught them to suck orange juice up through a peppermint stick would become one of the highlights of their time in Afghanistan, a little moment of joy they would treasure. The days had grown short and the nights were bitter, and they could not even agree about whether it was right to plug in a string of colored lights, and they had traveled miles and miles from who they used to be, and any hope of resuming their former lives now seemed tenuous, but in the coldest, darkest hours of their deployment, Debbie gave them the taste of peppermint and orange, winter sunshine in their mouths. They used the memory of that occasion to sustain themselves later, after much darker things happened.

W
HAT WAS STRANGE
about living at Camp Phoenix that year, as far as Michelle was concerned, was that you were neither safely at home nor properly at war. You were betwixt and between. Crazy things could happen—sometimes people strung piano wire across the road outside the post, sometimes RPGs whistled nearby—but Michelle could now see just how safe she was inside her tent. By the start of 2005, she had reached the midway point of her deployment, and she dared to hope that the support battalion might fulfill their year at Camp Phoenix without a single person getting hurt. She knew that the infantry soldiers they served alongside took much greater risks and saw much worse things than did the soldiers in her own unit. At the chow hall, they heard stories about the missions those soldiers went on, usually in the dead of night—breaking down the doors of people's homes, or ambushing insurgents holed up in the nearby peaks around Kabul. Most of the real action took place far away, but when they heard of an Al-Qaeda cell in the vicinity, the infantrymen at Phoenix were dispatched to capture or kill alleged members. Women never went on those missions, although anybody who left the post could encounter a land mine or an IED. Back in the United States, the idea of women being exposed to the worst hazards of war continued to be controversial. On January 11, 2005, Bush declared that the modifications being contemplated did not constitute any fundamental shift in position. “There's no change of policy as far as I'm concerned,” Bush told the
Washington Times.
“No women in combat.”

Yet they were surrounded by bloodshed. Almost every week, they got word of incidents that had taken place somewhere in Afghanistan involving either American soldiers or Afghan National Army soldiers. On January 3, 2005, for example, an American soldier was killed and three others were wounded near Asadabad, in far eastern Afghanistan, along the country's fractious border with Pakistan, after their Humvee hit an improvised explosive device, and a gun battle broke out. The wounded soldiers were evacuated by helicopter to Bagram. Forty-eight hours later, the soldiers at Phoenix learned that the individual who had been killed was Sergeant Jeremy Robert Wright, of Shelbyville, Indiana. He was a Hoosier, too; he was one of them. But he was not National Guard—he had been regular army, with the special forces, and he had gone straight to Kunar Province. They were not over in Kunar; they were fixing trucks or AK-47s in the relative calm of Kabul. That same week, Morale, Welfare, and Recreation announced that they were offering swing dance lessons at Camp Phoenix. The following week, MWR opened a new racquetball court and showed
The Day After Tomorrow
. That was as close as most of her unit was going to get to real action, thought Michelle: watching it on a movie screen.

Over in Iraq, elections were going to be held at the end of January 2005, and the violence there intensified, echoing what had occurred in Afghanistan the previous fall but on a larger scale. On January 10, an unusually powerful roadside bomb destroyed a heavily armored Bradley Fighting Vehicle in southwestern Baghdad, killing two American soldiers and wounding four others. It was the second incident like that in less than a week; earlier roadside bombs had not been sufficient to blow apart an armored Bradley, but the insurgents had upped the power of their explosives. Bush and his advisers were still hoping that the elections would bring stability and the opportunity to withdraw quickly, but that looked increasingly unlikely.

At least from Michelle's vantage point, though, war consisted of being stuck every night on a former Soviet air base where the biggest issue was boredom, wondering if she should take swing dance lessons or classes on personal finance, while knowing that people suffering from dire wounds were being flown to Bagram and that over in Iraq people were dying. By this point, Michelle knew she had it easy. She was not in
Kunar; she had never been to Fallujah. The real soldiers (she sometimes thought) were dying in the mountains of Afghanistan and the cities of Iraq, and the biggest challenge she faced was the question of what to do with her time after she watched the last episode of
Sex and the City.
Even as she had these thoughts, of course, the military was altering its habits, as commanders became more desperate for replacements and less leery of putting women in harm's way, but it did not occur to Michelle that some future deployment might be different from this one, because she was too busy surviving her current ordeal.

Bored and restless, Michelle started off the year with several resolutions. “I haven't had a cigarette in about a week,” she wrote to her father. “It was really hard at first but gets a little easier every day.” And she enrolled in online courses that were being offered by the University of Southern Indiana to get a head start on her new life. “All of my free time goes to studying,” Michelle said in another letter.

It didn't seem as though anybody at Phoenix would find themselves in harm's way, unless maybe they ran afoul of a land mine. Afghanistan was estimated to have ten million of the devices, making it one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. The list of countries riddled with mines (Egypt, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Somalia, Angola, Bosnia-Herzegovina) read like a history lesson in modern conflict. Mines had been used extensively in every war since 1938, and they never went away. They just abided, waiting to go off. According to the World Health Organization, no other country in the world dispensed to the victims of land mines as many prosthetic devices, crutches, and wheelchairs as Afghanistan. The social costs were immense. “Most land mine incidents occur in developing countries or regions where the victims are peasant farmers, herdsmen, nomads, or fleeing refugees,” noted a World Health Organization bulletin. “Because of this, they rely primarily on their physical abilities for their basic subsistence. Many survivors never regain their ability to participate fully in family life or their society.” Without mines, the authors estimated that agricultural production in Afghanistan could have doubled or tripled.

The mines were lurking everywhere, and it was impossible to predict when one might be triggered. A group of soldiers from Camp Phoenix were returning from a visit to the ISAF compound when they saw a boy
running through a field and suddenly the ground erupted. The soldiers jumped out of their vehicles and ran to tend to the boy, knowing there might be more unexploded ordnance hidden in the field. He lost both of his legs but they saved his life. The boy had not been targeted; the bomb was just a piece of military hardware left over from the other wars that had ravaged Afghanistan. His maiming was an accident.

But so far the land mines and the roadside bombs had let the soldiers be, and that January the main difficulty that the 113th Support Battalion encountered was precipitation. “The weather has changed it is really rainy + snowy,” wrote Debbie in her diary, “but not like at home the snow doesn't last and it just floods because we are on cement.” As the weather turned damp and cold, respiratory ailments spread through refugee camps, city neighborhoods, and across Camp Phoenix. Half the battalion fell sick; even Akbar Khan got pneumonia. Ben Sawyer came down with a fever so fierce that when Michelle wrapped herself around him, she was alarmed to feel the amount of heat coming off his burning body. It kept her warm, though. The generators that powered their heaters often quit during the night, leaving them without heat for hours at a time. Michelle, Desma, and Debbie started wearing footies and multiple pairs of long johns under their flannel pajamas when they slept. But they could hardly complain when they were not being asked to fight in Kandahar or in Kunar. How could they whine about the cold when they knew they were not carrying the war's true burden? And all around them, people lived in far worse conditions. “I'm still seeing the kids along the way to ANA without socks or shoes it just kills me,” wrote Debbie. “I wish I could save them all. People back home can't imagine.”

Debbie decided to work through the entire deployment. It felt wrong, she thought, to go on a vacation. She would not be able to relax, knowing that two wars were being waged and that other people were bearing the brunt of the fight. Plus, if she worked straight through the year, she would be able to take a leave when she got home, instead of having to go straight back to work at the beauty salon. Patrick Miller told her that spending an entire year at Camp Phoenix without a break would not be healthy, but she refused to listen. Then Miller engineered matters so that she “won” a free trip to Qatar in a rigged lottery. “Maybe I will get
off post after all,” wrote Debbie. “I need a beer I'm sure they don't have Coors Light but I hope they do.”