Soldier Girls (39 page)

At the same time, however, Michelle was moving away from the soldier she had been. She resumed her friendships with people she had known in high school who were now living in Bloomington. Hanging out with her old friends, she started to remember that she was only twenty-three. During the deployment, everybody else had been older:
Debbie was fifty-three, Desma was twenty-nine, and Ben Sawyer was twenty-eight. They all had children, but none of her friends in Bloomington were shouldering those kinds of responsibilities. They did not have mortgages, or ex-wives, or daughters who had to be taken to the emergency room. As Michelle began spending more time with people her own age, she gained perspective on her relationship with Ben. Perhaps because he felt her pulling away, Ben grew increasingly possessive. He started asking questions about how she was spending her time. In October, when Michelle told her boyfriend that she had been invited to a Halloween party, he made clear that he wanted to go, too; Michelle wound up inviting both Ben and Mary Bell. She was planning to go as Wonder Woman; Mary was going to be a Native American squaw. Ben said he might not be able to afford the gas for the drive to Bloomington, however, because he was barely making ends meet. Later he called to say he had found a solution: he had bought some weed, it was in the trunk of his car, and he was planning to sell it for a tidy profit.

“You're driving around in the car that I bought you with weed in the trunk?” Michelle asked in disbelief.

“What about it?” Ben said.

“You have two children that have one good parent,” Michelle told him. “And if you got pulled over right now, they would have nothing. And you're doing all of that because you want to come to some party with me?”

But he was slipping beyond her sphere of influence. They no longer ate dinner together every evening, nor spent every night on her twin mattress. There were other forces at work on him, and they were more powerful than Michelle. Sawyer did not remain a model soldier. He did not enroll in school and use the GI Bill to get ahead. Instead he was slowly reverting to the person he had been before he had worn the uniform every day, someone who took shortcuts. It scared Michelle, the idea of dating a man who would risk a felony conviction for a quick buck. She broke up with Sawyer over the phone.

He called her repeatedly in the days that followed. Michelle tried to explain. She said they had been able to make things work in Afghanistan because they had more in common there, such as the post itself and the chow hall and the uniform and the routine and a common circle of
friends, but once they got back home they had begun moving in different directions. They were living in different places, they were different ages, they had different friends and different lifestyles. He was twenty-eight and she was twenty-three; he was a working father and she was a college student. They just did not have as much in common. Sawyer did not agree, however, and starting in October, they had to go to drill together. After moving to Bloomington, Michelle had begun reporting for drill in Bedford. That November, when Michelle showed up for drill weekend, she saw Sawyer in the parking lot. He grabbed her and started yelling that they could not separate. Michelle tried to reason with him, but her words only fanned his fury. At one point he hurled his cell phone down on the ground with such force that it shattered into pieces.

The encounter left Michelle afraid for her safety. How unstable was Sawyer? At the end of that weekend, he stopped by Michelle's apartment to pick up some of his things. When she opened the door, he spat directly into her face; she was wearing her glasses, and his spittle landed all over the lenses. Mary Bell had slept over the night before but was not yet awake. Mary had been going through hard times—the man she had married right before they deployed now had another woman living with him. She was in the middle of getting a divorce. As Michelle stood in the doorway, trying to decide whether it would be safe to let Sawyer enter, she wished that Mary would wake up, because she feared Sawyer might hit her. But Mary kept sleeping, and Sawyer got his stuff and left without striking her. When Mary finally woke up, Michelle told her about the encounter. She said that she could no longer wear the silver ring Akbar had helped her buy at the bazaar, the one that said
My heart belongs to Ben
. Mary said she would take the ring; it was too beautiful to throw away. Michelle had grown closer to tall, slender Mary Bell; by this point she felt as close to Mary as she did to Debbie or Desma. Consequently, Michelle did not expect what happened next: Mary Bell began sleeping with Ben Sawyer and wearing Michelle's ring. Michelle stopped speaking to Mary after that.

Desma depended upon Stacy, Mary, Michelle, and Debbie, in that order, and she wished that Michelle would forgive Mary so that they could all hang out together again. But Michelle was stubborn, and she would not relent. That fall, after she signed up for the college classes that
she would take in the spring, Michelle joined Facebook. She used the social networking site to reconnect with other people she had known from high school and from her years at the University of Southern Indiana, as well as people who were going to Indiana University at Bloomington. (At first nobody she knew from the military joined Facebook, but one year later she would become Facebook friends with both Desma Brooks and James Cooper, her old flame from Aberdeen Proving Ground.) She was moving into more civilian circles, and she might have put Afghanistan behind her, except that she emailed with Akbar Khan almost every week. He had decided that he wanted to move to the United States, and was applying for a visa to make this possible. Michelle got the XO of Bravo Company to write a letter of support.

That November, Pete flew back from California for Thanksgiving. He drove up to Bloomington to see Michelle and to pick up Halloween. Michelle could not see Pete without thinking of all that might have been, and at the same time seeing Pete reminded her of her own infidelity. A war had come between Michelle and Pete, and she could not imagine how to put back together what the deployment had pulled apart. To complicate matters, she had just met a young man named Billy, who had begun pursuing her avidly after they had crossed paths one night at a bar and again at a party. Pete did not have much luck with Michelle or the cat. Halloween behaved as though Pete were a stranger, hissing and backing away. “Man, that cat was my best friend!” Pete would say later. “And now he won't even say hello.” They decided that Halloween should stay with Michelle after all. Then it was time for Michelle to go back to college.

T
HEY SETTLED BACK IN
, they moved on with their lives, they became civilians again. They acted as though there would not be another deployment. Wasn't it likely the wars would end before their battalion got sent anywhere else? In January 2006, Michelle began taking classes at Indiana University—her dream come true. She had transferred into IU with a total of sixty-one credit hours (forty-two credit hours from the two years at the University of Southern Indiana, six credit hours from the misbegotten semester at Purdue University in Fort Wayne, and another thirteen credit hours that she had earned for her military service in Afghanistan). Her plan to major in environmental science looked too daunting, as she could not stomach the idea of retaking all of the required science courses she had tried and failed to complete back in the spring of 2004. Instead she opted for a bachelor of science in public affairs, with a major in nonprofit management. Her dream, trimmed a little. That first semester she took four classes: Introduction to Computers, Finite Mathematics, National and International Policy, and Urban Problems and Solutions. She also started seeing Billy.

Two years older than Michelle, Billy had already completed one undergraduate degree and was working on a second. He had gotten a degree in economics from Wabash College, as well as a minor in religious studies. Then he decided to get a second undergraduate degree, in international relations, from the University of Evansville. There he considered himself “kind of an outsider,” because he was older than most of the students. Michelle
and Billy had this in common—not quite belonging. They were also both highly intelligent, and held political views that put them to the left of the mainstream. Back in 2003, when the Iraq War had begun, as chance would have it, Billy had been in Turkey with other students from Wabash College who were taking a class on world religions. It had changed his life, to be in Istanbul when George W. Bush had told Saddam Hussein he had to leave Iraq within forty-eight hours or else. The Turkish people were not happy. Billy had glimpsed what his own country looked like from another vantage point, and Michelle knew what the United States looked like from Afghanistan. “We were both outside the US bubble,” Billy would say later. He was also tall, handsome, and charismatic. He had olive skin, dark red hair, hazel eyes, and a warm manner. He had an unusual capacity for emotional intelligence. He told Michelle he could not believe the United States was sending single mothers and grandmothers to war. It was a sea change, he said. He could not believe that he had gotten to stay at home while somebody such as Debbie had been deployed. Michelle would say later that he had brought her back to life.

Going to school in Bloomington proved all that Michelle had hoped for, in certain respects. One year before,
Newsweek
had named Indiana University the “Hottest Big State School,” in part because the institution had embraced the information age and was offering fast networks, extensive wireless capability, and superb computer support services. Michelle loved the school for other reasons—she found the setting spectacular, thanks to the original woods that still flourished at the heart of the campus. The Olmsted brothers, who had designed Central Park in Manhattan, had laid out the campus, and they had decided to keep Dunn's Woods intact. After the university embraced the idea that a forest should stand at the center of the campus, the vast thicket of trees became a defining attribute. “There are few places in the world where great laboratories, classrooms, libraries, auditoriums, and other such centers of intellectual and artistic creativity are located in an environment which retains its primeval character—few places where one may so quickly and so completely cast off the tensions and anxieties of this complex modern world in quiet meditation,” wrote Paul Weatherwax, a botanist and a longtime member of the faculty. Michelle found constant replenishment walking through Dunn's Woods, under the boughs
of ash, beech, buckeye, hickory, maple, red oak, sycamore, and walnut trees. Because her school protected the woods, and was literally built around the trees, Michelle understood the university to be a place that shared, at its core, her values. And the buildings themselves, built of locally quarried limestone, spoke of soaring ambition and lofty goals; they had been built to last, and built to inspire.

At the same time, Michelle struggled to complete her schoolwork. Indiana University was more demanding than any other institution she had attended, and the class material seemed so abstract compared to the concrete, practical tasks the army had asked of her. Thinking critically, synthesizing information—she was rusty. While serving in the military, she had shut down the part of her brain that engaged in critical thinking. A soldier had to react fast, respond quickly in a predictable manner; a soldier was not supposed to overthink. Writing her midterm papers, in March 2006, proved excruciating.

Indiana University was also big. Forty-two thousand students attended classes at the flagship campus, four times as many as at the University of Southern Indiana. Socially it was hard for Michelle to get her bearings. She had studied a map of the physical campus and familiarized herself with the names of all the buildings, but nobody could give her a map of the campus's social groupings, and she was jumping into the mix as a junior—after other students had already spent two years forming close alliances. Also, she was several years older than the norm, because of the time she had spent in basic training and the time she had spent in Afghanistan. Her present classmates were twenty or twenty-one, and when she mentioned that she was twenty-three the other students seemed put off. It was not a big age difference, but in that setting it mattered. When the subject of her military service came up, however, Michelle found the conversation tended to slip sideways. Her roommate Philip had an extensive network, and at one point a friend of his who was an art major dropped by. When she caught sight of Michelle's marble tea sets, she crouched down to admire them.

“These are beautiful!” the art student exclaimed. “Where are they from?”

“They're from Afghanistan,” Michelle said.

“What were you doing in Afghanistan?” the art student wanted to know.

“I've been in the military,” Michelle said. “I was deployed there for a year.”

The art student left soon after, and Michelle could see that she had been written off; any possibility of friendship had evaporated. Bloomington was like that—it was a town filled with young people who thought of themselves as open-minded, yet were closed on the subject of the military. They hated George W. Bush, and they hated the wars; by extension, they thought they knew better than the kind of people who had signed up. Michelle could see clearly all the ways in which the art major was like the rainbow-hemp-wearing person that she had been before her deployment, but she could also see clearly that the art major came from a different socioeconomic background. She was rich; Michelle was not. And Michelle had been changed by the deployment. She had spent a year serving alongside Patrick Miller and Debbie Helton and Desma Brooks. Michelle could not look down on the kind of people who joined the military. Nor could she look up to students who had never considered bartering their freedom for tuition. What Michelle could not forgive was the obliviousness that accompanied the art major's privilege. “This girl had never known anybody in the military,” Michelle would say later. “And she obviously did not care. I almost hated her. Look at what I went through! And you're not going to ask me any questions? Meanwhile, your dad's paying for your liberal arts education. That's nice.”