Soldier Girls (3 page)

Partway through sophomore year of high school, Michelle and Veronica had a falling out. Michelle, now fifteen, attached herself fiercely to a boyfriend named Joe Hill, who lived less than a mile away from her maternal grandmother. Joe Hill wore black clothes and smoked Marlboro reds and looked like Sid Vicious. Despite his dangerous looks, Michelle found Joe Hill waiting for her faithfully in his gray Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera in the parking lot at Central High School every single day when the bell rang. She could set her watch by Joe Hill. Together they discovered grunge, then punk rock, blasting the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. To memorialize their union, Michelle and Joe went to a photography studio and took a formal portrait: Joe spiked his black hair skyward and donned a Ramones T-shirt and a necklace of heavy chain links, while Michelle wore a choker made of ball bearings and a T-shirt that said
PORN STAR
. She looked like a lost angel, blown off course. Michelle's father proudly hung it up on the wall of his trailer.

During her high school years, Michelle tried asking her father to wear long sleeves because the sight of his tattoos caused her mortification,
but he just laughed. Eventually Michelle learned to laugh, too, even about his six marriages and the stints in jail, though she considered her family a dark kind of comedy. The one bright thread running through the otherwise gloomy tapestry was the bond she forged with her paternal grandparents, who lived in one home for the entirety of Michelle's childhood, and cherished her all their lives. Michelle spent many magic nights and weekends there, particularly after her mother started working at the factory. In the evenings, she could count on her grandfather to take out his banjo or guitar or violin—he played each of those instruments with equal virtuosity—and fill the house with music. Meanwhile, her strict, Bible-reading grandmother fed Michelle a proper meal and put her to bed at a set hour. Her grandparents provided all the safety she had ever known.

During senior year of high school, Michelle broke up with Joe Hill, although they remained friends. By this point, Michelle and her mother had moved into an apartment building called Maple Manor. The once-grand house, a ramshackle old redbrick mansion with a wraparound porch, had been divided into six apartments. Michelle and her mother shared a one-bedroom on the second floor, which featured fading fleur-de-lis wallpaper. Michelle's mother was still working nights and Michelle secretly dated a cocaine addict for a while but she started having bad panic attacks, which ceased only after she ditched the cokehead. She and Veronica made up and Michelle spent the rest of senior year partying with her best friend.

The following year, Joe Hill introduced Michelle to his friend Noah Jarvis—a fellow guitar player—and Michelle started dating Noah during the fall semester of her first year at the University of Southern Indiana. Noah was a lanky, six-three stoner with olive skin, dreamy brown eyes, brown hair, and a goatee. He played guitar in a local punk rock band named Crank Case. Methamphetamine, or crank, was ubiquitous in southern Indiana, and by this point, half of Michelle's siblings were hooked on it, but it wasn't something she wanted to sample. She and Noah mostly just got high. They hung out with Veronica and Veronica's other best friend, Colleen, who had both gone to Central High and were now both enrolled at the University of Southern Indiana, too. During their first year of college, Veronica and Colleen threw frequent parties
in a raucous apartment they had furnished with old couches and band posters. Noah and Michelle listened to Pink Floyd a lot and talked about how much they hated the status quo. In November 2000, Michelle cast her first vote in a presidential election for Ralph Nader. In the tumultuous weeks that followed, as lawyers for Al Gore and George W. Bush debated hanging chads in Florida, some of Michelle's ardently Democratic friends castigated her for giving her vote to a third-party candidate. Michelle replied that she could see little difference between the two big party candidates. Politically, she tended to cataclysmic scenarios of redemption. In a strange sort of way, four months later, the same kind of thinking impelled Michelle to enlist. The two acts appeared to be at odds—until Noah Jarvis joined her unit, Michelle often wondered if there was one single other Nader fan serving in the entire Indiana National Guard—but in both cases, she had been trying to flee from what scared her most: abject hopelessness. She had voted for Nader because she wanted to upend the political universe, and she had signed up for the Guard because she wanted to upend her life. She wanted to run away from her lousy job and the easy classes and all the meaninglessness she found up and down the Lloyd Expressway. She wanted to escape her father's ruinous life and her mother's sad dysfunction. She wanted to get out of this forgotten place where good jobs evaporated and bad jobs drained the life out of people. She wanted to leave behind the booze and the pot and the meth. She wanted not to end up like her older siblings, with blurry tattoos and raging addictions. That's what she thought she was signing up for when she told Granderson that she would enlist: the opposite of what she knew, a way out.

Right before Michelle left for basic training, her half sister Tammy threw her a going-away party. Tamara, known as Tammy, held the party in her front yard. Noah showed up in a pair of blue jeans and a short-sleeved button-down shirt worn over a long-sleeved T-shirt. He slouched down low in a lawn chair, holding a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Michelle's friends Veronica and Colleen dropped by on their way to another party. Most of her complicated family came, including her father, who drove up from Sebree, Kentucky, with his latest wife, a woman named Kathy. To celebrate Michelle's decision to enlist, Fred Fischer had gotten a new tattoo on his other forearm—a naked soldier
girl. He showed it off proudly. She wore only boots and a helmet, but she carried a big gun. Michelle got falling-down drunk on Mike's Hard Lemonade and threw up in front of her church-loving grandmother. For years afterward, shame seared her at the thought of her grandmother watching her get so sloppy.

Michelle shipped off to basic training on June 4, 2001. Her mother drove her to the armory, and Noah came along to say good-bye. Michelle's mother broke down in tears, triggering Michelle to follow suit, and even Noah misted up. Then Michelle clambered into the van that would take her to the airport, where she boarded an airplane for the first time in her life and flew to South Carolina. She had dressed in her most beloved clothes: a faded pair of Paris Blues jeans, an orange Roxy surf hoodie, and a light pink athletic T-shirt that had once belonged to Noah. As soon as she arrived at Fort Jackson, however, she was told to put her civilian clothes away.

VICTORY STARTS HERE
, the post's motto trumpeted. Fort Jackson was the army's busiest point of entry, where half the country's soldiers got their introductory training. It was hot and startlingly humid. Drill sergeants started yelling at the new recruits as soon as they got off the bus—Michelle had to drop and do push-ups right there in the parking lot—and quickly she became just another soldier in green, brown, and tan camo. She was issued four sets of battle dress uniforms, or BDUs, as well as a field jacket, and gray and black army workout clothes. She had to give up wearing her contact lenses—during basic, soldiers with bad eyesight were given identical brown plastic glasses. The glasses were so ugly that everyone called them birth control glasses, or BCGs, the idea being that nobody would have sex with you if you were wearing a pair.

Michelle had to wear her long hair pulled back into a bun or a braid; she was not allowed to tie it back in a ponytail. She was not allowed to use lacy scrunchies, fancy bows, barrettes with butterflies or sparkles or fake gems; she was not allowed to wear jewelry unless it was of a religious nature; she was not allowed to wear brightly colored eye shadow or visible lipstick. There was no time to put on makeup anyway. Suddenly there were acronyms for everything, and Michelle looked exactly like everyone else. In her BDUs and her BCGs, Michelle felt as though she had surrendered her entire identity. She found herself bitterly
homesick and pined for home in the letters that she faithfully wrote to each of her parents. Michelle's mother lost every letter that her daughter sent, but Michelle's wayward father hung on to each one. He numbered the letters and kept them inside a red, three-ringed binder, along with the Valentine's Day cards she had drawn for him when she was a little girl. “I love you and making you proud is really important to me,” Michelle wrote on June 17, 2001. Then she wished him a happy Father's Day.

At the point when Michelle mailed that letter, she was in the middle of the first three weeks of basic, known as the red phase, when the drill sergeants were introducing the idea of total control. The recruits had to make their beds perfectly, with sharp corners and no wrinkles. They had to keep their personal areas immaculate. They had to wake up in pairs in the middle of the night for CQ duty, which basically meant standing guard. The fundamental idea was to get new soldiers into the habit of following orders, no questions asked. There was an ice cream machine in the chow hall, but Michelle was not allowed to go near it. She was not allowed to talk during a meal. At one point, Michelle's mother mailed her photographs of the party at Tammy's house, and Michelle wrote to her father, “Mom sent me some pictures of my going away party, so I have a picture of me, you & Kathy together. But I'm not allowed to hang it up because you & I have beer in our hands! I'm not allowed to hang up pictures w/alcohol in them. So that eliminates just about every picture from that day. But I showed them to my friends and they all say we look so much alike it looks like I was ‘picked out of your ass'! Go figure.”

Basic training proved to be an astonishing fitness program, and Michelle shrank in size as fat turned to muscle. The army had different standards for soldiers depending on gender and age. Before she could graduate, Michelle had to be able to perform thirteen push-ups and forty-seven sit-ups, and she had to be able to run two miles in at least nineteen minutes and forty-two seconds. (By comparison, a young man her age had to do thirty-five push-ups, forty-seven sit-ups, and two miles in sixteen minutes and thirty-six seconds.) As the days went by she kept shaving time off her clocked runs. “I just finished my physical strength test,” she wrote in her next letter to her father. “I missed my run time by thirty-five seconds . . . I am so mad at myself! I could have
sucked it up and pushed myself a little harder. But I passed my push-ups and sit-ups.”

She learned how to read a topographical map, use a compass, administer basic first aid, rappel, and four different ways to choke a person into unconsciousness. She learned how to do the low crawl and the high crawl. One night, while she was hustling across a field of sand on her knees and elbows, under a snarled maze of barbed wire, with fake bullets flying overhead, she realized she had outdistanced the rest of her peers. For a moment she flipped over and lay on her back, looking up through the barbed wire at the orange tracer rounds glowing across the black sky. She found the sight unexpectedly beautiful. Afterward, she discovered that so much sand had gotten down into the sleeves of her BDUs that her elbows were rubbed raw and bleeding.

The temperature climbed into the nineties, and the humidity hit 100 percent. They put on their uniforms and all their gear, and donned rucksacks that weighed thirty pounds, and marched for miles through swampy, furnace-like afternoons. “Beat the heat cause their ain't no heat like the Carolina heat 'cause the Carolina heat is hot! Hooah!” the soldiers had to chant before they were allowed to take a drink of water. Michelle was astonished at how profusely she sweat. Her dog tags left green stains on her breasts, and constantly snarled in her bra. Each of them had been assigned a “battle buddy,” and they were told to look out for each other. Michelle was paired with a Haitian immigrant who almost never spoke. Instead Michelle grew close to other members of her platoon. She formed strong ties with three young women, Carson, Shea, and Lawlor, as well as two young men, Davidson and McDonough. It was always last names; that was how they knew each other. McDonough grew infatuated with Michelle, but Michelle remained faithful to Noah. To Michelle's surprise, the platoon chose her to represent them in a formal ceremony. “I was so flattered I almost cried,” she wrote to her father. “Everyone in my platoon means a lot to me. We're still rough around the edges, but we're starting to act as a team.”

On the first day of the white phase of basic training, drill sergeants herded Michelle and other trainees into a gas chamber. After they put on their masks, they were doused with tear gas. Then the drill sergeants ordered them to take off their masks, breathe in the tear gas, spell their
names, and say their Social Security numbers. After the deliberate exposure, Michelle walked around outside in a big circle flapping her arms, with her eyes and nose streaming. They spent the next three weeks focusing on their M16 assault rifles. Until she entered the white phase of basic training, also known as the gunfighter phase, Michelle had only fired a weapon once. Back in elementary school, in an attempt to seek a greater closeness with her father, she had begged for permission to fire his shotgun. He had taken her outside of her grandparents' home, rested the gun on top of a cooler, and stood behind her to help catch the recoil. Now Michelle slept with her gun, did push-ups with it lying across her hands so that her lips kissed it when she bent toward the ground, used it as a weight during PT, and carefully took it apart and cleaned it and put it back together every night. She also spent hours and hours firing it. Unexpectedly, Michelle fell in love with shooting. Her experience of time became suspended, and half a day would slip by unnoticed.

Targets popped up, then disappeared, and she had only a few seconds to hit each one. They all carried instructions for how to unjam their rifles on pieces of paper tucked into the band of their helmets, and when the omnipresent sand fouled Michelle's rifle, one of the other soldiers would read the instructions to her out loud, so that she could get her rifle working again. Gradually, she grew familiar with the factors that affected her accuracy: whether she pulled or squeezed the trigger, how loosely or firmly she held her weapon, if her body was relaxed or tense. She decided that shooting was all about breath, for her shots varied wildly until she began relaxing her body and squeezing the trigger gently at the very bottom of her exhale. Then she qualified as a marksman.