Soldier Girls (31 page)

They moved that weekend. Desma, Michelle, and the eight other women they lived with carried their belongings out of the drafty canvas tent and into the brand-new plywood B-Hut that would serve as their home for the rest of their time in Afghanistan. Tent by tent, Bravo Company had been moving for weeks; as fast as the huts could be constructed, soldiers were filling them up. When construction workers tore down their emptied tent, Desma and Michelle were disgusted to see black mold covering the bottom-side of the floor, and scum oozing over the concrete underneath. The B-Hut was entirely clean; the wooden walls and ceiling embraced the warm air of the heaters more thoroughly than the canvas walls of their tents. They moved just in time. That night, the temperature plunged to a new bone-chilling low of one degree, the coldest day of the entire year they would spend in Kabul. That same weekend, Jaime Toppe started running a daily joke about life at Camp Phoenix in the
Wrench Daily News
under the headline “How to Prepare for an Afghanistan Deployment” (similar things were being emailed from soldier to soldier). Her first suggestion: “Sleep on a cot in the garage. . . . Replace the garage door with a curtain. . . . Six hours after you go to sleep, have your significant other open the curtain, shine a flashlight in your eyes, and mumble, ‘Sorry, wrong cot.' ”

The jokes immediately became Desma's favorite thing to read in the
Wrench
. She read them out loud to Mary and Michelle: “Stop using your bathroom and use a neighbor's. Choose a neighbor that's at least a quarter mile away.” And “Leave the lawn mower running in your living room twenty-four hours a day for proper noise level.” That's exactly what it had been like, living in a tent that was too close to a generator. After five months of that a plywood hut struck them as luxurious.

Meanwhile, Debbie was still shivering in her tent—she would not move into a B-Hut for several more weeks. And right after Desma's birthday party, Debbie heard that a dog that hung around the front gate had been taken to Bagram for routine vaccination shots and had supposedly “gone crazy.” This sparked talk of rabies. “So now they can get rid of all the animals,” wrote Debbie disgustedly. “They were saying Diamond came from that litter [the same one as the dog at the gate] but she didn't.” Company commanders rounded up every pet the soldiers were concealing. They kept the dogs at the motor pool, where Desma
and Mary could keep an eye on the animals while Debbie was at work. It broke Debbie's heart to see Diamond locked up but she visited as often as she could. “I let her in the office to play + took her out to potty,” wrote Debbie. “I came back next morning so she could get out to potty + eat. She was so scared + confused as to why she had to be in the cage.”

The soldiers were told that the animals would be held in quarantine, probably at Bagram Airfield. If they proved not to develop rabies, supposedly they would be returned. “I suspect they are lying,” wrote Debbie grimly. “They are not coming back.” Later that week, Mary Bell told her that Diamond had been moved, and she did not know where. Debbie learned that all of the dogs were now being held in the welding shop and were about to go to Bagram. She got to see Diamond once more.

I found out where she was + went to see her + asked if they had let her out to potty or eat they said they were not allowed to let them out. . . . So sad they were so frightened. Dia was so restless I knew she had to pee + poop. She finally did so I cleaned it up + her blanket was wet either her water or pee. I dried her blanket. I couldn't take her out so I sat a chair in front of the gate + got half in + petted her + rubbed her to try + give her some comfort. I brought her back steak for dinner. . . .

When her blanket dried I put it back in and she started to wind down a little. I brought some of her fav toys she played with them she finally was tired so she laid close to me and I just petted her till she fell asleep. . . .

That was the last time I had with my Baby girl. I miss her a lot.

Debbie never found out exactly what happened to Diamond; she simply never saw the dog again. The soldiers assumed their pets had been euthanized. “Needless killings,” Debbie fumed in her diary. A dog named Cherry had escaped the roundup and was still at Camp Phoenix. Cherry had been there when they arrived and would be there when they left—that dog had achieved the status of an unofficial mascot. If they could spare Cherry, why not Diamond? Debbie could not speak of anything else in her diary for several weeks, while around her colleagues and friends she lapsed into an uncharacteristic silence and did
not speak at all. She was furious with the brigade's leaders. “As usual if you're having fun it will be taken away,” she wrote in her diary. “76th sucks.” Soon Debbie resumed her habit of taking long walks in the evenings with Will, and going down to see Gary. “Will came up with some Southern Comfort so we trekked to Supply + had a nice cocktail for the evening!”

As the cold snap intensified, conditions in the unheated warehouse where the armament team worked became almost unbearable. On many days, the ink in Michelle Fischer's pen froze, making it impossible for her to write down the serial numbers of the AK-47s until she warmed the ink back into liquid form. Patrick Miller let them burn old butt stocks in an oil barrel, and they warmed their hands over the fire. They wore four layers of clothes: thin black nylon long underwear known as ninja suits; then the uniform itself; over that, they wore bear suits, as they called the heavy black fleece overalls and matching black fleece jackets; the final layer was a lined Gor-Tex overcoat. Debbie also made certain to wear earmuffs every day, but several hours in the penetrating cold still left her numb. Eventually Miller decided it was inhumane to keep the group inside the frozen warehouse for an entire day, and announced that he was implementing an unauthorized winter schedule: they would work until they had fixed one hundred weapons, or until 2:00 p.m. in the afternoon, whichever came first, and then return to the post and lie low. Motivated by the desire to get warm, they hustled and finished one hundred weapons by midday. “Go hide,” Miller urged back at the post. “Fischer, don't go to the gym before four o'clock. Don't change your clothes. Just go back to the barracks.”

And then it really began to snow. Early in February, the sky clouded over and stayed gray for two weeks, while a series of storms dumped another several feet of snow on Kabul, paralyzing the city. Kabul had not experienced so harsh a winter for half a century, said the oldest residents of the city. Many Afghans welcomed the precipitation as likely to assuage the devastating impact of the drought, but the harsh weather also caused a rash of injuries and fatalities. Doctors reported seeing 30 percent more leg and arm fractures than usual that month, and saw a sharp rise in cases of serious respiratory diseases, particularly among children. “We have to have two children to a bed,” Mohammed Hamid Nazim, a
doctor in a pediatric hospital, told the Environment News Service. “The number of patients is simply too great.”

All of the highways leading into and out of Kabul shut down—the city did not own enough plows to clear the roads, and the machines they had were malfunctioning due to the freezing weather—and officials found eighteen people dead in their vehicles after they were stranded for an extended time on the Kabul–Kandahar highway. Truckers had to abandon tankers full of aviation fuel, causing airlines to cancel dozens of flights. And at the airport, workers could not clear the runways. During the worst of the snowstorms, the Kabul airport turned away a Boeing 737 from Herat that was carrying 104 passengers. The plane went missing. Rescue teams located wreckage in the steep mountains, but when they finally reached the site, they found nobody alive.

Debbie moved into a B-Hut in between the two biggest snowstorms. Something about the new surroundings and the fresh plywood lifted her spirits, which had been low ever since she had lost Diamond. Gretchen was away on leave, and Debbie packed her tentmate's gear for her. She arranged their beds in a corner of the B-Hut, with a small table where they could use their laptops. “I'm pretty well settled,” Debbie wrote in her diary. “I like it + do have more room + a window. I'm going to make a flowerbed at my window.”

Debbie and Michelle both stayed up late to watch the New England Patriots take on the Philadelphia Eagles in the Super Bowl, which aired in the chow hall at the painful hour of 2:30 a.m. on Monday, February 7. Then Debbie spent many evenings crocheting a blanket for her grandchild. Ellen Ann and her husband, Jay, had settled on Jaylen—an amalgam of their names. “I'm almost done with her blanket but I don't think it's going to be big enough after all so not sure what I'm going to do,” wrote Debbie. She worried about whether Jeff was getting out of the house. “Today is Nascar day I hope he goes to the party but I bet he won't,” she wrote. “I'm making valentines for the DDR team tonight but I also want to check on the race.” Using glitter pens and construction paper sent by Ellen Ann, Debbie made cards for everybody on the armament team, including Akbar Khan, as well as an Afghan worker at the depot named Daoud.

Valentine's Day—another holiday away from home. By this time
Michelle had been cheating on Pete for six months, and still had not summoned the nerve to tell him. Later she would say she did not want to break the news to him in a phone call—she wanted to tell him face-to-face—yet she had not been able to schedule a leave until March. Perhaps it was also true that she could not wrap her mind around how her universe had been split by the war; in some ways it seemed as though she were leading two separate lives—a military life that was unfolding in Afghanistan, and a civilian life that had once unfolded and would someday unfold again back in the United States. And possibly Pete had become so unreal to her that she could somehow reconcile maintaining a theoretical relationship with him even as she engaged in an actual relationship with someone else. All around her she saw other people who were behaving in similarly divided ways. It was what a deployment did; it fractured reality.

Meanwhile, Ben Sawyer had practically moved into Michelle's B-Hut. He spent virtually every night there, and Michelle no longer dismissed their interactions as insignificant. Ben was like a fixer-upper, she had decided; he had potential. Maybe she could turn him around, maybe she could help him figure out what to do with his life. They had begun discussing the possibility of a future together—sometimes they talked about finding a place to share in Indiana. Ben had a volatile temperament, however, and when they fought he got mean; it scared Michelle. One day she came to work in a huff following a bad fight. She mentioned the spat to Patrick Miller. “Well, if you ever want to make Ben jealous,” Patrick said—then he raised one hand into the air—“pick me.” Great, now her boss was hitting on her, thought Michelle. That's life in the army for you. But she trusted Patrick—he would never force her to do anything she did not want to do. It never crossed her mind to report his comment. By now she thought of him like a brother.

Meanwhile, she still received letters, postcards, and care packages from Pete—he was going to Seattle, he told her, to check out their future home. For Valentine's Day, Pete mailed Michelle a bottle of Southern Comfort. Afraid to drink it, Michelle gave the liquor to a soldier from Bravo Company named Aaron Schaffer, who sometimes joined the armament team if they were short of personnel. He drained the entire bottle in one sitting and became so obviously drunk that she feared the alcohol would
be traced back to her. But Schaff just slept it off and nothing happened. Michelle sent Pete two Valentine's Day cards. The first had a white background with a red valentine cracked in two by a jagged line—a broken heart. “This is me,” the card declared, “without you.” Inside, she wrote:

Hey baby,

Valentine's Day is a fucking commercialized bullshit holiday. But I still hate not being with you for it. I miss you and love you more than you could ever know. . . .

Well, let's look on the bright side. I'll see you in a few weeks!!

I love you sweetie.

Sorry the card is so corny, not a huge valentine selection in Afghanistan.

Love you always

Michelle

Then she sent a second card that showed Piglet handing Winnie-the-Pooh a red valentine. “Being with you,” the card said, “is what I love best.” Inside Michelle scrawled:

Ha ha you're so awesome you get
two
lame VDay cards! I really miss you I hope that Seattle was fun. Chin up because baby I will see you
soon
!

Love Always

Your Girl

Michelle

As long as she remained in Afghanistan, she could sustain this state of irresolution, where she never had to confront the truth of what she was doing. She could see Ben in person and interact with Pete as an almost fictional being—but it was crazy, she knew. And it cost her emotionally in ways she had not even started to tabulate, trying to inhabit both worlds at once.

Desma cherished no illusions about her significance to Mark Northrup. She would have liked to hold on to a man of his caliber, but it was not going to happen, and she knew it. Sometimes he went out on
the road with Voodoo Child—as his roving maintenance team liked to call themselves—to rescue other soldiers who had gotten stranded in bad situations. Then she might not see him for several weeks. When he was on the post, they slept together fairly regularly, usually about once a week. They had sex in her hut, his hut, Mueller's office, an ambulance, the back of a van. Once Northrup asked her if she would have sex with him inside a Porta-John, but that was where Desma drew the line. “I think this affair is over if you think I am to the level where I will have sex with you in a Porta-John,” she told Northrup. “I am not that person, and you really do not need me to be that person.”

But he was not going to leave his wife, he was not going to marry her. Desma did not even dream that would happen. Nobody was supposed to find out about the affair, but it had become an open secret. At about this time, somebody posted a picture of Desma and a mechanic together on MySpace. Because of Desma's reputation, the mechanic's wife jumped to the wrong conclusion. “Apparently she totally flipped out, and thought we were sleeping together,” Desma said later. “And that was so not the case. Well, then, in his defense, bless his heart—I'm not mad at him, but he really shouldn't have handled it the way he did—he told her, ‘No, I'm not sleeping with her, Northrup is.' ” The photograph of Desma and the mechanic had been on MySpace for only twenty-four hours when Desma got a phone call from Stacy Glory, back at the armory in Bedford. Stacy called Desma at the motor pool (they were supposed to use the phone line only for military purposes, but sometimes they used it just to catch up) to warn her that the comment had made the rounds of the Family Readiness Group. The wives could be vicious. “Northrup's wife pretty much put it out that I was sleeping with everybody,” Desma said. “I wasn't.” After that, she and Northrup tried to be a little more discreet.