Soldier Girls (4 page)

Michelle learned how to operate a machine gun, how to dismantle a land mine, how to fire a grenade launcher, and how to throw a hand grenade. The real grenades felt unexpectedly heavy. Her drill sergeant told her she would blow herself up if she made a mistake, which made her clumsy with terror, but as she leaned against a wall clutching two grenades against her chest, a trainer standing beside her asked where she was from, and when she said Indiana, he brought up Bobby Knight. So then they chatted about college basketball while she pulled out the pins and threw the grenades over the wall, and she lobbed them far enough to survive. After that, the drill sergeants let the trainees have a rare day of
freedom, when a band performed a rock concert. The afternoon ended badly when a soldier tossed a full plastic bottle in the air, causing a long silver arc of water to splash over the crowd. The drill sergeants made the entire crowd kneel down for the rest of the concert.

One week later, it was time for the last phase of basic, the blue phase: night ops and MREs. In the second week of August, Michelle and the rest of her platoon began the final test, a seventy-two-hour war simulation exercise. They rucked out in all their gear, hiked six miles, then started digging foxholes. The temperature climbed to a high of 99 degrees, although with 97 percent humidity, the sweat-drenched soldiers experienced a heat index of 107 degrees. That night, while Michelle was helping to unload MREs off a truck, lightning flared, and she finished the job wrapped in sheets of rain. Michelle slept in a leaky tent, curled up in a cloth sleeping bag, lying in a puddle. Sometime after the rain ceased, drill sergeants threw tear gas into her tent, and then at dawn, they hustled everybody into the foxholes. They were supposed to watch for an attack, but instead Michelle rested the edge of her Kevlar helmet on a post, closed her eyes, and slid into a lucid dream in which a drill sergeant leaped into the foxhole to berate her.

The following day, when the heat index hit 102 degrees, the merciless drill sergeants took them home by a more circuitous way, so that the foot march lasted nine miles instead of six. They finished by trudging through an enormous expanse of sand, where Michelle's calves began to burn and her hip began to ache and she fell farther and farther behind. She had developed a stress fracture in her hip due to the training exercises, although she did not know this yet; all she knew was that she could not keep up. Her friends Davidson and McDonough dropped back to make sure she finished the exercise, and toward the end of the hike, the two young men took her by the elbows and half carried Michelle across the sand. When they neared the barracks, they heard Survivor's “Eye of the Tiger” blaring over the intercom. “Had the guts, got the glory,” reverberated across the post. “Went the distance, now I'm not gonna stop.” Not her kind of music, but it meant the ordeal was over. As they lined up in formation, she saw that half of the newly minted soldiers around her were crying.

On August 16, 2001, Michelle put on her dress greens and marched
to her graduation ceremony. She felt bold, able, ready for action. Her body had grown lean and she knew the name and function of every single part of her assault rifle. She had also proved to herself that she could survive nine weeks of separation from her mother, who drove all the way to Fort Jackson for Michelle's graduation. In the years since she had lost her bookkeeping job, Irene had grown antisocial, to the point where she rarely left the house except to go to work. Yet she had made the marathon drive—ten hours in a car with Donovan and Noah. Thrown by the unfamiliar surroundings of the busy military base, Michelle's mother appeared uncomfortable, wilting in her baggy shorts and T-shirt. She complained about the humidity, which was her way of voicing that she felt off-center, but Michelle was so happy to see her that she didn't care.

Noah arrived wearing black Doc Martens, black jeans, and a T-shirt that said
DR. FUSION'S FUNK BAND.
Michelle's mother snapped a photograph of the pair of them standing together—Michelle in her crisp dress greens, Noah in his grunge attire. The difference in their clothes spoke of how far Michelle had traveled from her old self in only two and a half months. She had called Noah every single week, but when she first saw him in person, she could not stop giving him hugs. Donovan wore a sleeveless orange shirt with gaping armholes that let him sweat unimpeded through the blazing day. He had been the first of their generation to put on a uniform: Michelle had been five or six years old when he had joined the navy. She had missed him terribly when he left. He had sent back dashing pictures of himself in his dress blues, but after he was discharged Donovan had come home aimless, lacking a clear future, and then came the losing battle with meth. Michelle knew it had to be hard for Donovan to set foot on an active duty post and loved that he had come to celebrate her accomplishment.

The following day, Michelle had to report to Aberdeen Proving Ground, on Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, for the second half of her training. She was going to spend the next thirteen weeks at Aberdeen, studying to become a weapons mechanic. Noah had volunteered to drive her there. On August 17, 2001, they loaded Michelle's belongings into his rental car: her civilian identity folded up inside her backpack (Roxy hoodie, Paris Blues jeans, Noah's old pink T-shirt, flip-flops), and her military self packed into a dark green duffel bag (two pairs of
shining black boots, black wool socks, BDUs, PT clothes, white athletic socks, sneakers, underwear, sports bras). Nobody else she knew from Fort Jackson was coming with her to Aberdeen, and Michelle said good-bye to all of the people she had just grown close to. Then she said good-bye to her mother and her brother. She and Noah headed north on I-95.

Nine hours away, Aberdeen Proving Ground was where the army and the marine corps trained their weapons mechanics. Michelle had elected to become a small-weapons mechanic—a 45B, in military shorthand, which everybody pronounced as “forty-five Bravo”—because it seemed better than becoming a truck driver or a truck mechanic, which were the only other job specialties open to her at the armory in Evansville. She would spend the next thirteen weeks learning how to take apart and put back together every small weapon used by the army. Noah dropped Michelle, her backpack, and her duffel bag off at the building that housed the post's command. He teared up as they said good-bye, and hating to see the pain she was causing him, Michelle cut their farewell short. She ducked inside the building, then caught sight of Noah through a window; as he drove off, she saw him execute a sad salute in her direction.

When Michelle checked in at the post's command, a drill sergeant introduced her to a short, heavyset white girl wearing black glasses. He told the girl to show Michelle to the barracks. The other young woman had already completed most of her time at Aberdeen. She explained to Michelle that the female barracks were under construction, and for the time being women were being housed in a restricted hallway in an otherwise all-male barracks. There were not very many women there. At Fort Jackson, Michelle had belonged to a company that had included roughly equal numbers of men and women, but at Aberdeen there were about one hundred soldiers in Alpha Company, 16th Ordnance Battalion, 61st Ordnance Brigade, and on the day she arrived, Michelle became the company's fourth female. As they walked to the barracks, the other woman looked Michelle over, noticed her curvy figure, long blond hair, face still shining with innocence. “They are just going to love you,” she announced drily.

The female soldier escorted Michelle down a hallway of white cinder block and white linoleum to the small room that she would now share with Julieta Mendoza, a Latina soldier from New Mexico. Mendoza
would become Michelle's closest friend at Aberdeen. Everybody went by their last names, and Michelle never learned the first names of the other women who lived on their hallway: Jackson, an African American soldier from Florida, and later Nguyen and Cordero, who were Vietnamese American and Native American, respectively. Soldiers arrived and departed from Aberdeen at staggered intervals, and over the thirteen weeks that Michelle spent there, the number of women in the company would rise to ten, but women would always remain a scarce commodity.

The drill sergeants were vigilant and fearsome. They inspected rooms at all hours, and Michelle and Mendoza learned to keep theirs spotless. The most alarming drill sergeant was a woman who could veer with astonishing swiftness from likable into what Michelle called “bitch mode.” She ripped their rooms apart, even tossing the ceiling tiles to check for contraband cigarettes. The female soldiers took turns cleaning the bathroom and the hallway. Once a week, one of them would sweep and mop the white linoleum floor, and then polish the floor with an enormous buffing machine. When it was her turn, Michelle put on headphones and cranked up Incubus, her favorite band. At night, when they did CQ duty, sometimes Michelle could not resist putting her head down on her arms and closing her eyes, even though she knew she would pay a penalty if the drill sergeants caught her napping. There was a square white telephone on the desk that was only supposed to be used in an emergency, but bored soldiers often used the phone to order Chinese food or pizza, or to sneak phone calls to friends. Michelle had not reported her hip injury until she arrived at Aberdeen because she had feared being “recycled,” or having to start basic all over again. The drill sergeants at Aberdeen hassled her about being unfit, saying she shouldn't be there at all, but they sent her to physical therapy and let her continue.

The rest of the female soldiers in her company were studying welding or maintenance of military vehicles, and when her weapons classes began Michelle discovered that she was the only woman in the room. The other students were National Guard, regular army, marines—but all men. The instructors handed out manuals with yellow paper covers and mimeographed sheets. They began with the fundamentals, then worked their way through each one of the guns jointly used by the army and the
marines. They started by studying the M16 assault rifle that Michelle had just learned to shoot, followed by the .50-caliber machine gun, and an automatic grenade launcher. Michelle memorized the parts of each gun and soon became fluent with the workings of trigger mechanisms and firing pins. She excelled on tests, which infuriated a highly competitive army soldier from Illinois who vied ferociously with her for top marks. Michelle often outscored the gung-ho soldier, but when it came time for the class elections, the other students voted him their leader. Michelle got it. She wasn't part of the club—you had to be male to belong.

In the classroom, Michelle could not earn full respect from the male soldiers, but outside of the classroom, she could not escape their attention. Even when she slouched around the barracks wearing a pair of baggy sweatpants and a gray T-shirt that said
ARMY
in block letters, male soldiers fell over each other to compete for her favor. Soldiers were expected to look sharp, and at first Michelle stayed up late wearing a headlamp, struggling to press the wrinkles out of her uniform, but then two different male soldiers declared they really liked ironing and volunteered to press her uniform for her. The help allowed Michelle to focus on her boots. In the common room where everybody gathered in the evenings to watch television, other soldiers vied to teach her how to use a heat gun to open up the pores in the leather to get that glassy shine.

Of her many suitors, the most assiduous was Alfred Turner, a handsome, sweet-talking soldier from North Carolina. Alfred was nineteen years old, African American, with mahogany skin, a muscular body, dark brown eyes set wide apart, full lips, a pencil mustache, and a radiant smile. He had signed up to serve in the army reserves, and was studying the maintenance of Bradleys. Alfred had a sentimental nature, and sought opportunities to prove his devotion. Where the women's hallway intersected with the rest of the building, a large sign announced in red letters
FEMALE SOLDIERS ONLY.
Failure to comply would result in disciplinary action according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, warned the sign. This did not stop Alfred from sprinting down the hall to slip love notes decorated with hand-drawn flowers underneath Michelle's pillow. He called the sprints “night missions,” and conducted them while other soldiers gathered in the common room.

As the weeks slipped by, Michelle slowly warmed to the sweet-talking
soldier from North Carolina. She intended to remain faithful to Noah, but as Alfred waged his fervent pursuit, she began to question how long she would be able to hold out. Alfred was spectacularly handsome—“he was easy on the eyes,” Michelle would say later—as well as persuasive. During study breaks, they began sitting together in a small wooden gazebo, where Alfred crooned to her, singing amorous lyrics from R&B songs while listening to the originals on his Discman. One day, Alfred presented Michelle with a tiny silver key, possibly taken from his luggage, upon which he had scratched a homemade engraving of a valentine. It was the key to his heart, he said. Alfred's attention caused Michelle's self-esteem to soar and made her longing for Noah dwindle. Realizing that she was not going to be able to honor her commitment, Michelle broke up with Noah in a letter, then stole secret moments with Alfred. They secluded themselves in the laundry room, one of the few places on the base where they could achieve any sort of privacy, and held trysts while washing their clothes. Michelle took a ridiculous photograph of Alfred with a French fry stuck up his nose and hung it inside her wall locker.

In the middle of their nascent romance, Alfred told Michelle that he was going to leave the reserves and join the regular army. He loved the military, he said, he had found his calling; he wanted to serve in the army full-time. He made the change while they were at Aberdeen. Alfred had arrived there before Michelle, and he finished his training at about the time Michelle reached the midway point of her thirteen weeks. Alfred was ordered to leave for a US Army base in Germany, but first he went home to see his family in North Carolina. He called Michelle frequently on the CQ phone, once causing a ruckus when a drill sergeant answered. On September 7, 2001, Alfred wrote Michelle a steamy letter. He used a stamp that said
LOVE
with a red rose where the O should have been, drew roses twining up and down the borders of the letter, and told her that he saw her face every time he closed his eyes. He described listening to a voice mail Michelle had left for him over and over again, and apologized for getting her in trouble by calling on the CQ phone. He also enclosed a calling card so that they could spend more time on the pay phone. Mentioning a memorable interlude in the laundry room, he wrote: “Hooah!” He promised to visit Aberdeen at some point, although coyly he refused to say when.