Soldier Girls (33 page)

This was not the best day for Phoenix. We lost four of our soldiers due to a land mine. . . . With all the rain + snow there have been a lot of mines uncovered that have been buried for many years. It's so close to going home but we still need to be alert. There's a memorial service tomorrow I will attend. A really sad Easter Sunday.

Fiscus and Hiester had been close friends; they had served together in Bosnia before being deployed to Afghanistan. Hiester had been a volunteer firefighter; he was married and had two children. Fiscus was also married and also had two children. The younger pair, Hershey and Snyder, were also close friends; they had roomed together. Snyder had been raised by a single mother who could not afford to send him to college, and he had signed up for the National Guard to obtain college tuition. He had been planning to enroll at Indiana State University in the fall. Hershey was already enrolled at Indiana University.

The loss of four colleagues at one time knocked the other soldiers sideways. Because Hershey, Snyder, Hiester, and Fiscus had belonged to the 151st, their closest alliances were there; they were not as well known to the 113th Support Battalion. Yet everybody who was part of the 76th Infantry Brigade got swept up in the sense of loss. “We lost four brothers,” Karen Shaw told the
Indy Star
. “Even though we weren't directly related, they are your brothers. They are your friends. They are who make you laugh. They are the only people you have in the midst of absolutely nowhere.” Debbie went to evening Mass on Easter Sunday, even though the service was in French. She did not know what the priest was saying but recognized key moments in the familiar routine. Questions beset her mind. How many times over the past few months had she driven over a land mine? One that was buried just deep enough? And why had she been spared? It pained Debbie to think of how young the soldiers were. They should have had their whole lives ahead of them—two of them were only in their twenties. And the other two had children to raise. I've had my fun, thought Debbie; I've raised
my daughter. Why not me? It would have been better, and I would have been willing to go.

Desma had known three of the soldiers who died. Working at the shop—it was the post's central hub, and Desma talked to everyone. Michael Hiester had belonged to the post's firefighting team and had helped sweep the post for fire hazards. Every time he had come through their tent, he had told Desma patiently that she had to take down the blanket hanging around her bed; she always put it back up again after he left. She had watched Brett Hershey play in the post's basketball league. But it was Kyle Snyder, the youngest, whom she knew best. Back at Camp Atterbury, he had flirted with Mary Bell. One night, over in the Romanian part of Camp Phoenix, Desma had bumped into Snyder. Neither one of them was supposed to be there, but it was fun because they served booze. Snyder was hanging out around a fire with some foreign soldiers. They had talked for a couple of hours. It had been something different, a break in the routine.

Snyder had just gotten back from leave. He had gone to Australia, and that seemed noteworthy to Desma—that he had squeezed in a final hurrah. Australia struck Desma as a once-in-a-lifetime kind of trip. It must have made him happy, she thought. It was not unusual to skip going home, because going home was hard. Soldiers who returned from a trip to Indiana came back saying you had to deal with everybody else's emotional needs, never got around to your own. Many of them chose to grab some R&R in a faraway place rather than confront the heartache of a reunion followed too swiftly by another farewell. They wanted to go home too badly to go home for just a little while. Desma had done that herself. She applauded Snyder for going to Australia, even though it meant that he had not seen his mother. You had to live for the moment, she thought. Because you never knew when it was all going to end.

Everybody in the 76th lined up in formation for the memorial service. Four sets of boots, four helmets, and four rifles stood on a platform. It was early in the morning and the weapons cast long shadows. Dog tags hung from the trigger mechs. Boots, guns, dog tags, helmets—almost a soldier. All that was missing were the men. They filed past to say good-bye, soldier by soldier. It hit the entire brigade pretty hard, the idea that
they were not so safe after all, the idea that the war could reach into their ranks and claim any one of them in an eyeblink.

Three of the coffins went back to Indiana. Hershey's parents had moved to Pennsylvania, and his coffin went to that state instead. Out on the tarmac near the cargo building at Indianapolis International Airport, members of the Indiana National Guard wearing blue dress uniforms carried one coffin at a time off the airplane. There were no speeches, nothing was said. Snyder was first, and they carried him past his mother and over to a gray hearse. They carried Hiester to another gray hearse. Fiscus's father saluted the coffin that held the body of his son. The only sound that could be heard was the deep rumble of jets taking off and landing all around them.

People back in Indiana seemed inclined to believe that the Taliban could strike down their soldiers; it was hard to grasp how a land mine from a previous war could have caused such a catastrophe. But everyone who had spent the past eight months at Camp Phoenix found it plausible that the ground might have betrayed them. They had seen children missing legs, or hands, or other body parts. They had watched a boy run across a field and nearly die. And they thought of the Taliban as a ragtag sort of enemy. In either case—land mine or IED—Afghanistan had reminded them that it was a dangerous place. But they could not go home yet; they had several months left in the deployment.

M
ICHELLE NEVER SAW
the empty boots, she was not present for the memorial ceremony. By the time the service took place, she and Ben Sawyer were in Kuwait. They had heard about the explosion while they were still at Bagram. Michelle had caught sight of Desma and Mary's platoon sergeant, looking harried. Why was he wearing his ballistic vest in the middle of the day when there were no sirens blaring? Four guys just died, he told them curtly. There were two theories: the Taliban or the rain.

Michelle thought about how much rain had fallen, and figured it was likely the deluges could have caused some long-buried land mine to migrate. Still, for weeks afterward, she found herself wondering if the official story was fiction. Truth seemed elusive in a war zone, and both sides had motivation for their theories. Could the US military be using false narratives as well as armor and bullets? She didn't want to think so, but she had read a lot of left-wing periodicals. Maybe her commanders wanted to blame the weather to make the Taliban seem less powerful. In the years that followed, charts of violent incidents would show that during the months of March, April, May, and June 2005, there was a sudden spike in the use of IEDs across Afghanistan. That year's fighting season was when the war took a darker turn, in other words. Later—when it would become clear that Afghan insurgents had gotten much better at building bombs that particular spring—it would seem more likely the
Taliban might have played a role, but by then the families had already been told the official story about the rain.

Meanwhile, Michelle and Ben had concocted a false story of their own. Both of them were expecting to return to stressful scenarios in Indiana. While they were still in Afghanistan, Michelle had called her father from Ben's cell phone and he had let her know that he had been arrested for dealing methamphetamine (although he would later plead guilty to a lesser charge, possession of methamphetamine). He and a friend had been busted for running an illegal meth lab on his property, according to Michelle. He had needed money for bail and Michelle had sent him several hundred dollars. She was dreading her return both because she would have to confront the sordid mess her father had gotten into and because she was planning to tell Pete the truth about the affair.

And Ben Sawyer told Michelle that he had been watching his bank account be drained from afar, presumably because his wife was spending the money he had been earning. Because he had been amassing combat pay, he kept depositing significant amounts into the account, and he had been spending hardly anything, yet Michelle got the impression that the money kept melting away. Ben told Michelle that his wife had supplied vague answers when he had asked where the money was going, but his friends had shared their suspicion that in his absence Amanda had grown reliant on OxyContin. The military had required that Ben give his wife access to his earnings, to make sure she would be able to support their children while he was gone—it was standard practice—and he had no authority to take that access away from Amanda as long as they remained married, because she and the children were his dependents. By this point, however, his wife seemed to have spent tens of thousands of dollars, and Ben told Michelle that he feared much of the money might have gone to pay for drugs.

Neither of the two was looking forward to going home—although they both felt compelled to return—so they had lied to their families about the duration of their leave and said they had been given only ten days, when in truth they had been given two weeks. This allowed them to steal five days for themselves, five days when they would answer to nobody, and not wear uniforms, and not have to confront any of the
difficulties waiting for them. They took military transport all the way to Louisville, Kentucky, but did not leave the airport. They walked through international customs, went to a different terminal, and caught a commercial flight to Orlando, Florida. They stayed at a fancy resort, ate big meals, drank a lot of booze, went shopping, and lazed on the beach. Michelle looked spectacular in her bikini. Then they went to Sea World. It was free for military personnel, and Michelle, the nature lover, had always wanted to go. Ben was happy to go anywhere with Michelle as long as it meant that he could defer the impending confrontation with his wife. They saw beluga whales and bottlenose dolphins and sea lions and manatees. They saw schools of tropical fish—silver, yellow, orange, green—that whirled in stunning unison. They did not like the crowds, but as long as they were looking at sea creatures they had a sense of being transported to a place where nothing bad would happen. Then Michelle and Ben flew back to Louisville and feigned an arrival straight from Afghanistan.

Michelle told nobody about the five stolen days in Florida, not even Veronica, who met her at the airport. While they drove to Evansville—past gray fields stubbled with last year's corn, as a gray sky hugged the gray landscape—Michelle did tell Veronica everything else. She described how Ben had shadowed her, and how other men had called her by name even though she did not know who they were, how she had slept with Ben by accident, and how it just kept happening. Michelle described how cold it had been and how warm Ben had kept her. As Veronica sped along the highway, Michelle speculated about whether the new relationship might continue after the deployment. Veronica just listened. She did not show surprise or criticism. For that, Michelle was grateful. She felt unburdened for the first time in months.

Veronica drove her straight to Pete's apartment. He still lived in the same place, the one they had shared. Michelle was not naturally a deceitful person—she was needy, but not untruthful—and hated herself for hiding the affair for such a long time. Now that she was seeing Pete face-to-face, she could think of nothing else except telling him about Ben Sawyer, but it was late by the time she arrived and when she walked into the apartment she found Pete and Halloween asleep in bed. So she just climbed into bed with them and fell asleep, too. She was home, she
thought, as she drifted off. In the morning, she told Pete everything. He shied away from the subject of her infidelity, as if it disturbed him too much to discuss, and just said in a tone of wondering dismay that she had changed in so many ways he felt as though he hardly recognized her. Where was the Michelle he knew? Even her body was different—she had grown so muscular. Michelle bristled. She was proud of her body, she told Pete defensively. She had worked hard to look like this. You've become vain, Pete said. And you don't even smell the same.

They got into an epic fight. Michelle stormed out the back door and sat down on the chipped concrete steps. She hunched over to make the tightness in her middle go away, but it was a stubborn kind of tension. After a while, Pete came out and sat down beside her.

“I'll forgive you,” he said. “I'll forget all about this, if you'll just stay with me.”

“I can't,” Michelle told him. “I love him.”

She spent the rest of the week at her mother's place.

Irene had moved again while Michelle was gone and was now living in the middle of nowhere, without a telephone. Her half sister Tammy and her two kids were living there, too. Michelle had no way to call and let them know when she was going to arrive, so she just showed up. Her mother was reading in the bedroom, Tammy was occupied in the kitchen, and her nephew Cody was playing by himself, wearing only a diaper. “Hi, Michelle,” Cody said brightly when she walked into the trailer, as if she had been gone for only a few hours. Tammy gave Michelle a tight hug and whispered to be quiet so they could surprise their mother. Irene melted at the sight of Michelle.

Later Colleen and some other friends took Michelle to a male strip club and made sure that she got spanked onstage. It somehow seemed appropriate at the time—how else did you celebrate having stayed alive? She did not know what she actually needed, so she went along for the ride.

At various points during the week Michelle returned to the apartment where Pete was living, because she needed some of her belongings, or because Colleen and Veronica lived upstairs and she just happened to be in the building. Pete had taken the entire week off work, expecting to be able to spend it with Michelle, and instead she had dropped that
bombshell on him. Each time she returned to see how he was doing, she found him sitting on the sofa in his boxers, in a catatonic state. She did not want to be responsible for putting a human being in that position so she told herself that Pete had conflated her abandonment of him with his mother's decision to leave him for an entire year when he was just a child. And who knows, maybe there was some truth in that explanation, or maybe she was just using it to make herself feel better about an awful, awful thing.