Soldier Girls (37 page)

The rules were so different all of a sudden. In Afghanistan they had not hidden the relationship from their colleagues, except at the beginning of the deployment. By the end, everybody had known they were a couple. The rest of Bravo Company had gotten used to seeing married people in deployment relationships; they were all just trying to get through the year. Now Ben had returned to his family and it was hard for Michelle to adjust. During the deployment she had functioned more like a wife than a mistress; now the wife role was Amanda's position once again. What did that make Michelle? A home wrecker?

Michelle said Ben needed to make up his mind. He could stay with Amanda if he wanted to save his marriage, or he could try to make a go of it with Michelle, but he needed to make a choice. Otherwise they should stop seeing each other. At the end of the summer, Sawyer left his wife and petitioned for custody of his children. Michelle started visiting him on the weekends, and they took the children out to places like
Chuck E. Cheese's. Meanwhile, Michelle decided to move to Bloomington that August. She wanted to take her time getting settled there, before she started school in the spring. “It took me a while to pick myself up, and get the guts to go back to school,” she would say later. “I gave myself some time. I had plenty of money in the bank, so I didn't need to work.” When it came time to move, she called Pete, who was about to leave for California. Could he help her move her things to Bloomington? He had a big truck. If she tried to move everything herself in the Cabrio, she would have to make several trips. Pete said sure. Michelle took Halloween and her clothes in her new car and Pete took her bed and her desk in his truck, and they drove up Highway 41 in a caravan. When they got to Bloomington, Pete helped Michelle carry her belongings into the house that she was going to share with her friend Philip. Philip had been straight when Michelle had left the United States but he was gay by the time she got home; he understood what it meant to live through a hard turn in one's identity. In the months that followed, he would become the only civilian Michelle could talk to without difficulty.

Pete and Michelle went to Target, because there were all kinds of things Michelle needed—cleaning supplies, shampoo, toilet paper. Inside the store, Michelle grew edgy. There were too many things for sale and she did not know which brand was best. She slowed to a halt in the toilet paper aisle. There were an awful lot of different kinds of toilet paper. How did you choose? She thought of the pink crepe toilet paper in Afghanistan; she remembered giving a roll of it to one of the Afghan workers at the depot, who had considered it a grand luxury. It made Michelle a little queasy to behold an American display of toilet paper with her Afghanistan-schooled eyes. Was this what the war had been about? Protecting this sort of abundance?

Questions like these thronged her. She understood why the United States wanted to prevent terrorist strikes, and she knew that Al-Qaeda had established training camps in Afghanistan, yet she could not always fathom how the work they had been doing at Camp Phoenix was related to all that. And she had never understood why it had been necessary to invade Iraq, when the blame for 9/11 lay squarely with a small group of men who came primarily from Saudi Arabia. And how exactly had the two wars mushroomed into their present, bloated forms? Was she the
only one who wondered why the military had strayed so far from its original goal of finding Osama bin Laden? When would it all end? There was always the thought that she might be sent on another deployment. The longer the wars continued, the more likely this seemed. Meanwhile, the part of her intelligence that constantly analyzed things was waking up again and sometimes she felt filled with horror, wondering about the meaning of her deployment. What had it signified, that she had spent a year fixing broken AK-47s? Often she had a hard time staying in the present. She was standing in Target, she reminded herself; she was supposed to buy toilet paper. It was just hard to make up her mind.

“Stay here,” Pete said. “I'll be right back.”

He vanished, leaving her alone.

Panic. Her peripheral vision blackened, her sense of hearing dropped, her heart thudded in her chest. Primeval questions blared across her mind: Am I safe here? Is this a good place? She could not have justified why in rational terms, but it seemed to her that there was something fantastically amiss—something malignant, even—with a store that sold twenty-five different brands of toilet paper. How could this level of material abundance be morally acceptable, given the poverty on the other side of the globe? And now that the flesh of reality had been peeled back and she could look underneath the surface of things, she could see that she was utterly, utterly abandoned and surrounded by a yawning, nameless danger. Michelle began crying uncontrollably, heaving sobs, terrible sounds. By the time Pete found her, she could barely function. “I'm having a panic attack,” she managed to say. “Get me out of here.”

They left without buying anything. Afterward Michelle thought the timing of the panic attack had been curious. She had survived the sound of nighttime rockets whistling around her at Bagram, only to be felled by a trip to Target? Why had that pushed her over the edge? Maybe some part of her recognized that on home soil it was permissible to go to pieces, or maybe coming home was simply much harder than she had anticipated, or maybe the transition from Evansville to Bloomington had been the last straw. Michelle unpacked her clothes and put the marble tea sets that she had bought at the bazaar in Afghanistan on the bookshelves. This was simply going to take some time, she told herself.

Desma Brooks had not wanted to meet her children in the crowded, noisy armory because she thought she might fall apart. Instead she had waited until after the five days of demobilization to call her cousin Lesley. She arranged to meet Lesley and the children at a McDonald's near Lesley's house. Lesley brought all the children, including her own, to the restaurant. Desma walked over and sat down at their table and for one split second she marveled at how much Lesley's son had grown. Then he said, “Hey, Mom.” It was Josh. He had been round and pudgy when she had left, but now he was all angles. “Where?” one of the girls said in response. “Where's Mom?” Desma had not recognized Josh; the girls had not recognized their mother. It had been a long time.

Desma told the children that she needed some time to unpack, and then two days later she drove to her cousin's house and her ex-boyfriend's house, collected her three children, and tried to pick up where she had left off. She was a mom; she should cook dinner. At Camp Phoenix the staff had cooked her meals, done her laundry, cleaned the bathrooms, mopped the kitchen floor. Her life had been highly regimented; she had been told where to be and what to do. Go to the motor pool, track vehicle maintenance, eat dinner, play cards, sleep; go to the motor pool, track vehicle maintenance, eat dinner, sleep. Each day mind-numbingly similar to the previous one. Now there were three children running around in a state of overexcitement and a grown man waiting to be fed and nobody to tell her what was on the menu. Desma opened the refrigerator and saw that it contained only condiments. Okay, there's no food in the house, Desma said to herself. I've got to go to the grocery store. She drove over to the Buy-Low, and it was just aisles and aisles of stuff. “And I'm like, I don't know what I need,” she said later. “I don't know what I'm supposed to cook. I don't know how this all works. It was like, What do they eat? What do they like? I haven't been here in over a year.”

Tunnel vision, racing heart. She abandoned her shopping cart in the aisle and went outside and called Stacy Glory. Stacy talked to Desma the entire time as she drove the fifteen miles to the Buy-Low, and then she accompanied Desma as she walked back into the store. After that, for a period of several months, Stacy went with Desma whenever she
ran errands, made sure she was never by herself. “She would go grocery shopping with me so I didn't freak out when I didn't know what to get,” Desma would say later. “I tried to come home and pick up my life, and I was like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do.” Stacy told her it was normal to be bewildered; she just needed time to adjust. That was reassuring, because otherwise Desma found her difficulties inexplicable. Nothing dire had happened to her in Afghanistan, so why did she stand in the cereal aisle for an eternity, staring at a box of Honeycomb, asking herself how it could be true that when she had left, the box had cost less than $3 and now the same box cost almost $4? Sometimes she got lost in her own head, puzzling over her place in the universe. “I came back and I realized how small I was in the whole scope of things,” Desma said later. “I was sitting at the picnic table in my backyard and I look up and there's a plane flying overhead and it's full of people and I don't mean jack shit to anybody. It was a huge problem when I first got home.”

One night her sense of being insignificant grew so acute that she called a suicide hotline. The woman she spoke to struck Desma as useless, and the phone call was more annoying than helpful. The interaction served a purpose, though—it made her want to speak to somebody who would not talk in platitudes. So she called Mary Bell, who came over and stayed with her until she regained a sense of worth. Desma felt like a freak, but she could say this to Stacy, or Mary, or Michelle. And Stacy kept telling her, Des, this is just what happens. You'll get used to going to the grocery store again. It's overwhelming at first, but you'll get used to it again. Everybody feels this way when they get back. But it was impossible to explain to civilians.

“You are different,” Jimmy said. “What happened to you?”

“I dunno, there ain't nothing wrong with me,” Desma told him.

Suddenly it was time for the kids to return to school. Alexis was starting kindergarten that year, and Paige was starting second grade, while Josh was going to enter the seventh grade, in a different middle school than the one he had attended while she was gone. She bought them new shoes and new clothes and new backpacks and then she looked at her bank account and realized that if she did not go back to work soon the money would run out. She had been paying $600 to her cousin and $300 to Josh's father every month the whole time she was gone, and had
ordered gifts and necessities on the Internet for the children as well, so she didn't have nearly as much money saved as her childless friends. Desma still felt dazed by basic domestic routines and not yet competent at civilian life, but she returned to work anyway.

While she was gone, the truck stop had turned into a strip joint, so she didn't go back there. Instead she returned to her part-time job at the Kentucky United Methodist Homes for Children and Youth, and tried selling life insurance on the side. She gave up the life insurance gig after she figured out that the clients were even more broke than she was. Then Kentucky United got a big grant and promoted Desma to full-time and boosted her hourly pay to $10. Trying to work forty hours a week, run errands, clean the house, and feed the kids, Desma could not manage. “I had a back porch area—it was enclosed, and I had my washer and dryer out there,” Desma said later. “They had so much laundry, and I had a full-time job. I could not keep up with it. Then it was mounding in these baskets and I didn't know how to take care of it.” It baffled Desma to watch herself fail to cope. She had not been shot; she had not seen anybody get blown up. She had spent her days at the motor pool. Why could she not do the laundry? But there was so much of it, and she hadn't done any for a year. Among Jimmy, the three children, and herself, the household produced an extraordinary number of tasks. In those early days, it just felt like too much. Everything felt like too much.

Desma slept with Mark Northrup once or twice more, and then the relationship fizzled. The end came after he broke the rules, and called her from his home phone—although they had agreed they would only communicate on drill weekends. Northrup's wife must have grown suspicious, because one Saturday afternoon Desma started getting phone calls from Northrup while she was sitting in a movie theater with nine teenagers from the group home. She was working that day, and the teens had earned the privilege of an outing. Perplexed to see that Northrup was calling when it was not a drill weekend, Desma let several calls go to voice mail, and then she received a text message saying, You really need to call back. When Desma called back, Northrup put her on speakerphone. He said he was sitting with his wife.

“Oh, okay,” said Desma. “What's going on?”

Northrup announced that he had told his wife about all the flirtation
and the connotations, and said it had to stop. Desma played along, for the sake of his marital harmony, although she could not believe what he was doing—denying the affair, pinning the whole thing on her, taking zero responsibility.

“That's cool with me,” Desma told Northrup. “I didn't mean to cause any harm. It was all in fun. I know you're married. I didn't figure I could take you home.”

“Well, it has to stop,” Northrup said again.

“Fine,” Desma said.

She never slept with him again. “I was beyond done,” Desma would say later. “He could kiss my ever-loving ass—you know, put me on speakerphone with the wife. Own up to your own shit, and let's not blame it on me.”

When Debbie Helton had arrived home, Ellen Ann had been waiting for her in the crowd at the National Guard armory, and she had brought her baby along. Both of Debbie's parents had been there, too. Debbie wound up on the front page of the
Indianapolis Star
after a reporter had learned that she was meeting her granddaughter for the first time. Jaylen had reached for the name badge on Debbie's uniform as the
Indy Star
reporter questioned Debbie about her age; because the military needed additional recruits for the war effort, the Pentagon had just asked Congress to raise the age cutoff for new enlistees to forty-two. Debbie suggested people should think hard before they enlisted but told the
Indy Star
that she had not allowed her age to stand in the way of her dream to become a soldier. “I was determined enough that I wasn't going to fail,” she told the
Star
's Rebecca Neal. “If you're determined, if you want to do something, put your mind to it and you can.”