Soldier Girls (30 page)

Debbie left for Qatar on Monday, January 10, 2005—the same day they got news of the second roadside bomb destroying an armored Bradley over in Iraq. She turned in her weapon, caught a ride to Bagram, and waited for a plane to take her to the Persian Gulf, feeling badly about leaving Diamond. At 5:30 p.m. she boarded a plane for Qatar, along with a group of commissioned and noncommissioned officers she recognized from Camp Phoenix. Debbie imagined they might all go bar-hopping. She felt excited about the idea until they arrived at Camp As Sayliyah, the US Army base outside of Doha that served as an R&R facility for troops serving in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kuwait. The post strictly regulated access to alcohol, Debbie learned at a briefing; visiting soldiers were given three tickets per day, allowing them at most three drinks in a twenty-four-hour period. And the bars on post only served alcohol between 6:00 p.m. and 11:15 p.m. Qatar was not going to be the free-for-all she had envisioned. “Have to wait for drink tomorrow, too late tonite,” she wrote in her diary. “Plus can't get your drinks until [evening]. How crazy no drinking during the day.”

The following morning, the soldiers she had traveled with went their separate ways, but they joined up for lunch at Chili's. “Food really good,” Debbie noted later. “No alcohol.” After lunch they marveled at the lush, manicured grounds around the post's fancy hotels—they had not seen anything green in months. “Trees, grass, flowers even,” wrote Debbie. “You know ‘stopped to smell the roses'? We stopped to smell the grass.”

In the evening, Debbie met the same soldiers back at Chili's. The enormous post was strange, and the chain restaurant offered the reassurance of being familiar. They hit the bars after dinner. Debbie obsessed about the fact that her colleagues ordered only one alcoholic beverage apiece; the colonel and the NCOs did not seem concerned about using their allotted alcohol ration. Would they offer her their unused tickets? She longed for them to do so. “But no one is offering so I guess I'm stuck with my 3,” she wrote in her diary.

The following day, Debbie bought some earrings for her daughter and coveted but did not buy a pair of pewter goblets. “I miss my Diamond Girl!” she wrote. When she met up with her traveling companions, they
talked her into joining them on a boat ride in the Persian Gulf. From the deck of the craft, the soldiers could see a string of construction cranes hugging the shoreline; the area was booming. The sky clouded over and the temperature dropped and the soldiers shivered as they stood on the ship's deck. They watched a bunch of marines who'd been serving in Iraq cutting loose; of course Debbie befriended them. The marines decided to pile on top of each other to stay warm, and their colonel stacked rugs and mats on top of his men to shield them from the cutting wind. Debbie envied the evident bond between the members of the unit and their leader. Later she wrote: “He is so cool, wish he was over us!”

On their second-to-last day in Qatar, the soldiers from Camp Phoenix paid to go on a safari. Guides drove them all over an astonishing ocean of sand dunes. Debbie raved about the experience:

Oh my what an awesome day. It's the best $21 I've ever spent. We were in Land Cruisers and they had to let the air out so they ride right. It was just like a roller coaster ride my stomach was doing flip-flops I was sure we would roll over but we never did. It's just an awesome feeling to be in a real desert and we were right by the Persian Gulf again we had a cookout with a big tent, chairs, tables, bonfire + beautiful sunset. . . . It's just beautiful like on vacation. They lit Tiki lights + it's just great if only we could stay longer.

But their leave was almost over. Debbie hoped that finally on their last day she might receive some of the unused drink tickets belonging to the other soldiers, but she was disappointed again. “Carpenter still won't give me his tickets oh well it's OK,” she wrote. “I had Carlsberg tonite not bad beer really!” The group decided to return to Chili's again for their last meal. After they finished eating, the others were ready to head back to the barracks, but Debbie still had tickets to use, and the alcohol blanketed her in a comforting fog and helped her find sleep, and it would not be so easily available once she returned to Camp Phoenix. She wrote afterward, “Everyone left + I stayed to finish my beers.”

The next morning they had to be in formation by 4:00 a.m., then caught a flight back to Bagram. Debbie's thoughts shifted to her pending reunion with Diamond. “Not sure if we have work or not I'm hoping I
get my day off on Monday. But if not I will still go see my Baby!” They got stranded at Bagram Airfield for lack of a convoy to Kabul, but made it back to Camp Phoenix one day later. Debbie got the day off on Monday and used the time to distribute gifts to various local national workers and to visit Diamond. “She's grown so much,” wrote Debbie. “She did fine while I was gone but she missed me. They didn't take her out at all. So I'm picking her up at night + walking her for 2 hours around compound hopefully that will help.”

That week, Debbie did three haircuts and three leg waxes, making up for lost time—her services were in demand, as her clients had missed her while she was gone. It pleased her to be needed. At the same time, Debbie was characteristically delighted when Patrick Miller took the armament team to the range to fire SPG-9s, a recoilless Soviet antitank gun. They had been fixing SPG-9s instead of AK-47s and wanted to be sure they were doing the job right. The only way to know if you had fixed a gun properly was to fire it, Miller said—so they did. Everybody except Michelle Fischer. She announced that she was trying to get through her deployment without firing a weapon and boycotted the exercise. The others were thrilled to fire the unusual weapons. “What a blast,” Debbie wrote in her diary. “It's really quite a boom + really shakes your legs + insides.”

In the chow hall, people were talking about multiple deployments. Earlier that month, Fox News had reported that the army was considering a change in its use of reserve and National Guard soldiers: at the moment, part-time soldiers could not be asked to serve on active duty for more than twenty-four months, meaning that for the entirety of their time as soldiers, they could not be asked to spend more than a total of two years overseas; the proposed change involved rewriting the sentence to say the army could deploy part-time soldiers for no more than twenty-four
consecutive
months. The effect of the one-word change would be to allow the army to deploy part-time soldiers for up to two years at a time on multiple occasions, rather than sending them overseas for a cumulative total of two years. The new policy would allow the army to deploy its part-time soldiers for much longer periods of time and far more frequently. And the 113th Support Battalion was being told to expect a deployment to Iraq at some point in the future.

The policy allowing multiple deployments in a single conflict was
controversial—even during Vietnam, which had lasted for ten years and was at the time the longest war in US history, soldiers were done after one tour of duty, unless they volunteered to return—and nobody in the Guard had foreseen repeated lengthy deployments. By this point, however, American soldiers had been fighting in Afghanistan for more than three years, and in Iraq for close to two. So reliant on the National Guard had the army become that it had already deployed or put on notice of plans to mobilize during the coming year fifteen of the Guard's combat brigades. Not every soldier would be deployed—as chance would have it, Michelle's two former boyfriends, Noah Jarvis and James Cooper, were sitting out the wars at home, because their particular job specialties had not been required—but almost every brigade would be affected. The Guard was no longer serving in an emergency capacity, in other words; it had become an essential part of the country's war machine.

Military leaders were debating whether it was advisable to rely so heavily on the National Guard. Most of the “citizen soldiers” had not foreseen long deployments when they signed up and were not really ready for them. Neither were their families. In a memo to the army chief of staff that was leaked to the
Baltimore Sun
that January, Lieutenant General James R. “Ron” Helmly, the chief of the army reserve, called Bush's policies “dysfunctional” and expressed his “deepening concern” about the readiness of reserve troops. He warned that his branch of the military was being overused and said the reserves were “rapidly degenerating into a ‘broken' force.” He said the Guard could no longer regenerate itself in a viable fashion. Indeed, all of the publicity over multiple deployments had caused recruitment efforts to slide: that January, the National Guard met only 56 percent of its recruiting quota. Noting that recruitment was failing to meet expectations, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld conceded that the US military was “clearly stressed.”

Embroiled in two wars that kept thundering forward, however, Pentagon leaders believed there was no other way but multiple deployments to keep troop levels sufficiently high—at least not while maintaining the idea that the United States was using an “all-volunteer” force. In the weeks that followed, the army did adopt the one-word change in policy, although the decision proved so unpopular that Pentagon officials almost simultaneously vowed not to use their new authority. “No individual
will have more than twenty-four months cumulative on active duty, Guard or reserve,” General Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would tell the Senate Armed Services Committee. “Right now we're able to stipulate that anyone who has already been called to active duty will not be recalled.” But the soldiers at Camp Phoenix suspected that this vow would prove untrue.

As they debated the issue of multiple deployments, a series of blizzards pummeled the region. It snowed on both January 20 and January 21, which happened to be the first two days of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. Also called the Greater Eid, or the Feast of the Sacrifice, Eid al-Adha was a different holiday than the Lesser Eid, which had marked the end of Ramadan. During the four-day holiday, Muslims honored the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son, before God let him sacrifice a lamb instead. Camp Phoenix announced that most of the soldiers on the post did not have to work. They all enjoyed the holiday atmosphere in their own ways. Debbie slept late and hung out at supply, drinking. Desma drove to a nearby orphanage in Kabul to deliver clothes and shoes, on a day when the sun was shining, and everything glittered. Michelle studied for her online courses and had a snowball fight with Ben.

President Bush delivered his second inaugural address on Thursday, January 20, 2005—also the day that snow began falling in Kabul, and the day that Muslims began celebrating Eid al-Adha—to an audience that included soldiers who had been wounded in Iraq and were being treated at a nearby military hospital. Bush thanked the men and women who were serving in the armed forces. He talked about freedom and liberty. “Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave,” Bush said. “Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time. So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Maybe the elections in Iraq would make everything there all right, he seemed to be saying. Shortly afterward, the Bush administration requested another $80 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Then it snowed more. In Kabul, it snowed lightly on January 24 and much more heavily on January 25 and January 26, when a blizzard dropped two feet of snow on the post. Workers were sent out all night long to get the weighty snow off the tents, to make sure they did not collapse. Desma, a light sleeper, woke up over and over again to the sound of squeegees scraping across the frozen canvas; Michelle, a heavy sleeper, never stirred. Then it plunged down to thirteen degrees one night, and the following night down to a cruel eleven. Local national workers took away the sandbags around the outside of the tent because they were soon to move into a B-Hut, which was how they learned that the sandbags had provided insulation. It was so painfully cold that they found it impossible to sleep, no matter how many items of clothing they wore. Any water left standing on the post's concrete landscape turned to ice, and much of the ice was hidden under snow. Desma was walking a group of local nationals over to the dining facility when her legs went out from under her. She fell hard and broke her right arm. The medics X-rayed it on a dental machine and then set the bone. Meanwhile, everybody felt unsettled at the news that an Afghan soldier down in Helmand Province had turned on his colleagues and opened fire, killing five fellow Afghans and wounding six others; the rampage was attributed to mental illness. Nobody wanted to believe that it might mark the start of a trend. They were arming Afghan soldiers and they had to trust that the Afghans would remain their allies.

Desma celebrated her twenty-ninth birthday on January 28, 2005. She did not let her broken arm prevent her from throwing a party; she got away with staging a birthday party during work hours by calling it a “maintenance appreciation celebration.” Jaime Toppe advertised the party in the
Wrench Daily News
: “Refreshments, games, music, and more!” Desma's friends decorated the shop with pretty pink streamers—actually, the ubiquitous pink crepe Chinese toilet paper found in every bathroom on the post. They played a hilarious game of Twister, with Desma manning the spinner. They couldn't serve any booze because Desma's boss was there, but there was something delightful about the low-key manner in which most of the soldiers whom Desma liked dropped by the party; she found it hard to say why, but the toilet paper streamers and the game of Twister and having a party at the shop somehow amounted to one of the best birthdays she ever had.