Soldier Girls (38 page)

Jeff had not met Debbie in the big crowd. “He was going to meet me later because he felt like that was the time I should be meeting with my mom, my dad, and my daughter, and for the first time meeting my granddaughter,” Debbie would say later. “And he felt that he would rather wait until I got settled and then he would come and get me. And then we would do our own thing.” Jeff picked up Debbie and Will after they received their two-day passes—Will had no plans and had been
at loose ends—and drove them around Indianapolis. They meandered up and down the city's streets, looking for a decent place to stay. Jeff said he wanted to find the right sort of hotel, although Debbie said they could spend the night in a tent and she would not care. They wound up at a Holiday Inn. What Debbie did not say was that she was finding the reunion to be more fraught than she had anticipated. “It had been over a year,” she would say later. “You're a little apprehensive, because you haven't been with this guy for a year, and is he going to think you're just as attractive as you were then, or are you going to think he is? Are you going to feel different? Are you going to feel attracted to him when you see him? Are you going to feel sexual? Or not? Oh, yeah, totally overwhelming. And then what if you sit there and you have a conversation and you don't like the person anymore? You change, you change, and even though you talk and you say the same things on the phone, and you write emails, when you meet in person, you're like, Oh, my God, he might not like me anymore.”

They checked in at the front desk.

“I'm going to go to my room and get settled,” said Will. “I know you two have a lot of catching up to do.”

Jeff said drily, “Well, I doubt that's going to happen right away.”

In the hotel room, Debbie and Jeff sat on the bed and talked about nothing, just talked about the flight, and about the day, and about her granddaughter. Debbie decided maybe nothing had changed after all—“it had changed but it hadn't changed.” Jeff asked what she wanted to do. “Honey, you probably want to get out of them clothes,” he said. “You've been in them for twenty-four hours. Would you like to take a hot bath?”

“Yeah, but I want you to come with me,” Debbie said.

“Well, I don't have to, if you want to take a bath by yourself, I understand.”

“No, I think I want you in there.”

They lazed around in the tub for an hour, then called Will.

“Are you ready to go eat dinner?” Debbie asked.

“Yeah, I'm starved,” Will said.

They found a steak place nearby. Will came back to their room, had a few beers, but did not stay long. “Aw, I'm beat, guys,” he said. “I'm going
to bed.” By the following day, Debbie was not worrying about whether she and Jeff would stay together, because he kept making everything easy. It was all about her. What did she want to eat? Where did she want to go? He made no demands. It meant a lot to Debbie that Jeff had let Will join them. So many men would have gotten upset at the request to bring another man along. But Will had been her closest friend during the deployment, and Debbie had not wanted to leave him alone. Maybe Jeff could also see that Debbie needed Will; it would have been jarring for her otherwise, to leave the rest of her unit behind, and spend two nights with a man she had not seen in a year.

Shortly after they returned to Bloomington Debbie walked into a Kroger grocery store, realized immediately that she could not handle the experience, and turned around and left. She did not stay long enough to become panicked, and few people knew that Debbie struggled to get used to being home again. But she did, because she missed Afghanistan terribly. The life she had returned to struck her as meaningless by comparison. “When I got back, I felt pretty worthless,” she would say later. “Like, What am I doing? I'm just back working at a hair salon, and that's nothing. Well, yeah, my clients like it, but where's my life going?”

She slept poorly and some days it was hard to get out of bed. The question of what clothes to put on perplexed her; she had liked just knowing to put on a uniform. Debbie had always remembered everything about her clients—their names, the names of their spouses, the names of their children, even their pets—but at this point she found herself frequently going blank when she was greeting a client. She covered up her memory lapses by calling her clients “honey” and “dear” and hoped they did not notice. Her colleagues saw that she had trouble stocking the inventory, however, as she failed to order critical products when they ran low. Before the deployment, Debbie had been able to glance at the shelves and know instantly which products needed to be ordered, but now the shelves read like a foreign language; she could not remember which shades of hair dye were the most popular and needed to be stocked in greater quantities. When she did the payroll she found she could no longer perform basic math, and she had to count on her
fingers to determine that 8 plus 7 equaled 15. Debbie was frightened to see how many facts that had once moored her had unaccountably slipped away.

At home she had crying jags. It was unlike her, and it startled Jeff. He noticed how much better she seemed after speaking with Will, however, and urged her to call Will more often. And it was true, speaking to Will always helped. Debbie needed that particular connection—she needed to talk to someone who had been with her in Afghanistan, preferably another member of the armament team. Will or Michelle, their voices produced the right chemistry. They were the ones who could lift her out of a black mood or restore her sense of having value. “I'm just having a really bad day and I just need to talk to you for a little bit,” Debbie would say. The first time Michelle got one of those phone calls, she was caught off guard—it was so unlike Debbie. And Debbie hated not being herself, hated being needy. She criticized herself for losing perspective, for lacking self-control, for letting in the blackness. She thought she was supposed to be strong, like her father. She did not want to be like her mother, who had suffered nervous breakdowns. She did not want to be weak. But Debbie had to admit out loud that she was struggling to find any relief. Soon Michelle and Will got used to Debbie's calls, because she frequently needed to talk.

“I just don't know why I'm here,” she said to Will at one point. “I wish I could be back over there. I feel useless here, like I'm not accomplishing anything. I think I could accomplish more if I went back over there.”

“Well, are ya crazy?” Will replied. “You miss all that sand? You're right where you need to be. You need to be right here, at home.”

And that's all it took, hearing Will's voice say those words. It was like swimming in a cool lake on a hot day, it was like eight hours of sleep. She found herself refreshed, she calmed down, the blackness retreated. Jeff could say the same thing and it would not work—it had to be Will. She had to hear the voice of someone who knew about the AK-47s, and the B-Huts, and the sandstorms, and what it was like to take a shower inside a conex. Debbie apologized to Jeff. She said she was sorry that talking to Will helped and talking to him did not. But Jeff said, “Don't worry about it, that's all right. I wasn't there. You just needed to talk to somebody who was there. It's okay.”

Debbie said maybe they should get married after all. Jeff had asked once before, but she had put him off. “Oh, no, I'm not interested now,” Jeff told her. He let her stew for three days, and then gave her a blue topaz ring. They flew to Mexico and eloped. When Jeff's daughter was about to have a baby, she asked Debbie if she would like to attend the birth. Debbie said no, she didn't have to be there. But her daughter-in-law said she had missed the birth of her own granddaughter—she should come. So she did, and it was miraculous. After Mallori was born, Debbie and Jeff began having their granddaughters sleep over at the same time, and although Jaylen and Mallori shared no blood, the two girls grew up like cousins. Debbie's days filled up fast: she had appointments at the hair salon, she cared for one granddaughter or the other, and she tended to her mother, who had been sliding into ill health. She never felt quite the same sense of fulfillment that she had obtained from being a soldier, but she did not feel entirely worthless. And Debbie spent untold hours with Michelle, whom she practically adopted after Michelle moved to Bloomington. Michelle seemed thirsty for attention, for as usual her life was full of drama.

W
HEN THE SHOCK
of coming home wore off, they had to confront the question of which relationships to keep. Which friendships, forged in Afghanistan, would last back in the United States? The apartment Michelle shared with her friend Philip was across the street from the mall where Debbie worked, and after she moved to Bloomington, Michelle began dropping by the hair salon all the time. Sometimes she popped in to say hello and sometimes she made appointments to see Debbie for the same services she had gotten in Afghanistan. Then Michelle started visiting Debbie at home, too, where she got to know Jeff. Soon she began introducing Jeff and Debbie as her surrogate parents.

That fall Michelle drove her Cabrio down to Evansville to pick up some more of her belongings, and while she was down in southern Indiana, she took a detour over to Rockport to see Desma. They had spoken endlessly by phone but they had not seen each other in person for a while. This was the first time Michelle had visited Desma at home. It was like old times, it was like seeing a sister. They laughed about smoking hash under the bedcovers and blowing the smoke into dryer sheets and about the vibrators and the vodka. Desma wanted to know how things were going with Ben Sawyer, and Michelle said she had loaned him a lot of money. They were still sitting in the living room when Desma's children got home from school.

“All right,” Desma said. “What kind of homework you all got?”

Paige and Josh listed the homework they had to complete that evening. Alexis did not have any homework, as she was only in kindergarten.

“Go sit down at the kitchen table, get yourselves a snack,” Desma said. “I'll be there in a minute.”

She turned back and saw that Michelle looked stricken.

“I can't take this,” Michelle said, and she fled.

Desma could not fathom what had gone wrong. Later Michelle called to apologize. “I've never seen you as a mom before,” Michelle said. She had only known Desma as a badass soldier—the stubborn individual who would not use a regulation army wool blanket, who had said to take one Valium and one Ambien before a combat landing, who had brightened the drab surroundings of Camp Phoenix with a flock of pink flamingos. It had spooked Michelle, the sight of Desma as a mother—she had felt as though she were watching a Desma that was not Desma. Of course Michelle had known that her friend had children, but she had never confronted the children's actuality, never witnessed the vulnerability written on their faces. To see how needy the children were, to watch the way they depended on Desma—it seemed unbearable to Michelle that Desma had left them for a year. Desma understood: everything was too much, when they first got back, all the ordinary things, toilet paper and cereal and laundry and the sight of children.

The uniform had erased so many of their differences, Michelle realized. It had made the soldiers seem more alike than they really were. It had taken away their origins and their destinations, their past and future selves, and left only their basic personalities, absent all the other signifiers that said who they were back home. She had never had to confront the reality that Ben Sawyer was married to Amanda, or that he was a father, or that he came from a family that was awash in addiction. She had never seen Debbie Helton inside of the beauty salon or at home with Jeff Deckard. She had never witnessed how badly Josh and Paige and Alexis needed Desma to be there when they got off the school bus. It was jarring, how much Michelle did not know about these people she thought she knew so well. She was astounded to glimpse who they had been before they had spent a year together on a former Soviet air base in Afghanistan, and who they were in the process of becoming again.

Ben Sawyer sprang from poor soil. After he returned home, he found himself girdled by people who depended on drugs, and Michelle felt her impulse to fix Ben up countermanded by others who pulled him down. Some members of his own nuclear family abused pills, but Sawyer nevertheless occasionally depended on them to help with his children. Rose and Ryan were three years old and five years old, respectively. One day that fall, some friends from Bravo Company invited Ben and Michelle to go out to dinner. Ben left his children with a close relative. Toward the end of the meal, he got a call on his cell phone: Rose had been rushed to the emergency room. She had swallowed an OxyContin that she had found on the floor of the relative's house, and doctors were going to pump her stomach. Michelle drove from Indianapolis to southeastern Indiana, with Ben decomposing in the passenger seat of her Cabrio. At the hospital, they found Rose white-faced and unconscious. The medical staff had inserted a tube down into her stomach and had suctioned up its contents, and then had given Rose charcoal to absorb any harmful substances. Rose threw up black bile, and it streaked across her white face. Seeing his small daughter in such distress undid Ben, who shook, bawling. “It was the saddest fucking thing I've ever seen,” Michelle would say afterward. “That was one of those moments where I was like, it's just not ever going to be okay for him. Like, he's not ever going to get a fair shake, because he has nobody to count on.”

Michelle thought maybe Ben could count on her. She wanted to help him build a better life. So she bought him a car, a used black VW Jetta that cost about a grand. It did not seem fair that Amanda had blown through all of Ben's combat pay; plus, Michelle wanted Ben to visit her in Bloomington. “I always spent a lot of money on Ben because I had it and he didn't and I felt bad for him,” she said later. “We were the same rank. He worked as hard, he went through all the same stuff I did, and Amanda spent all his money on drugs. So I did a lot of stuff for him. And I didn't think twice about it.”