Soldier Girls (40 page)

The subject of the wars proved touchy. Other students knew too little and Michelle knew too much. If she revealed that she had spent a year in Afghanistan, the other students asked if she had killed anybody, or if she had seen anybody die. She did not want to entertain them; they were too ignorant. The other students had only a hazy sense of current events and could not keep the two wars separate. “People get it wrong,” Michelle would recall. “You say you went to Afghanistan and ten minutes later in the same conversation they say Iraq, and you're like, No, I went to Afghanistan.” On this topic her classmates seemed unknowing, pampered, parochial. And while she shared their liberal bent, she did not share all of their opinions, not anymore. The memories of her
deployment brought up a welter of emotions, and somewhere in that mix, surprisingly, lay pride. She still hated Bush, and she still thought the invasion of Iraq unwarranted, but she had fallen in love with Afghanistan. The other students wanted her to say that being sent to Camp Phoenix was the worst thing that had ever happened to her, yet she could not disavow her experience. How could she wish for a comfortable life in which she never saw women wearing head-to-toe blue burkas or shoeless children thrusting their thumbs up in thanks or Akbar Khan flying a kite with a glass-encrusted string? Michelle could not say that she regretted Afghanistan because there she had known some of the most meaningful encounters of her life. And when she tried to explain this to the twenty-year-olds around her, they responded as if she were some kind of warmonger. So Michelle started hiding the truth. She stopped saying how old she was, and she stopped disclosing that she was a veteran. “I didn't tell in class, I didn't raise my hand,” she would say later. “I didn't want to be identified as older, I didn't want to be singled out. I didn't want to have to explain it. And I didn't want the really stupid questions. It was a very liberal crowd, people make assumptions. The stereotype that goes along with being a veteran, it didn't serve me well.”

In her first semester, Michelle earned mostly Bs. She thought she could do better, but forgave herself for getting off to a slow start—she had been through a lot. Sensitive about being older, she decided to finish college in the shortest time possible. She went to school full-time throughout the summer of 2006, completing another four courses while most of her classmates took their summer break, and in the fall of 2006 she signed up for a total of seven classes, and managed to earn As and Bs in all of them. “I was all business,” she would say later. “I didn't take a break the whole time I was at IU, because I was already having a hard time with how old I was going to be when I graduated, and how competitive I was going to be in the marketplace. I saw it as a giant flaw. I didn't see it as a strength. It took a long time before I could see it as a strength.”

On drill weekends Michelle left behind the world of the campus and reentered the world of the military, which now offered her a sort of respite. After they finished the obligatory exercises, she threw herself into socializing with her fellow veterans. She slipped back into her original friendship with Patrick Miller, once he was no longer her boss. Miller
represented the antithesis of the sneering, privileged students back in Bloomington—he wore Wrangler jeans and chewed tobacco and bragged about his days as a bull rider—and this was refreshing. One night at Shorty's, the bar in Bedford where many of the soldiers in their company liked to hang out, somebody put Willie Nelson on the jukebox. Michelle was already fairly drunk and Patrick knew how to dance. He spun her around so that her long blond hair fanned out in a circle. Michelle could have kept dancing with Miller all night long, but Ben Sawyer stepped forward and asked to cut in. Apparently he had been watching them dance for a while.

“I still love you,” Sawyer told Michelle.

She tried to smack Sawyer in the face but she had drunk too much and she missed, swatting only air.

“You don't love me!” Michelle yelled. “You don't know what love is! If you love me, then give me my fucking money back!”

Desma Brooks swooped down and wrapped her arms around Michelle's waist and hoisted her out of Shorty's facing backward with her arms and legs flailing. Michelle threw up on the ground, while a soldier whose given name was Richard held her hair out of her face. They all called him Big Dick. (One day back in Afghanistan Smitty had walked into the motor pool and said, “Have you seen my Big Dick?” to Desma, a story she loved to tell.) Big Dick carried Michelle over to Desma's car and laid her out on the backseat. The people she had deployed with watched out for her in a way the college kids never did. As best they could.

Michelle never knew when Ben Sawyer might show up at her door. He had been appearing at random intervals, ranting and irate. Later, when Sawyer started failing to show up for drill regularly, Michelle felt a selfish relief because it was easier for her when he wasn't around; yet she felt sad, too, because failing to show up for drill was a violation of his contract with the military, and it meant he was diving into trouble. When Sawyer did show up, Debbie Helton told him, “Get it together, son.” Sawyer told Debbie he was going to start showing up every month, but instead he stopped coming at all. Then he did time in jail for dealing meth. Michelle thought of Rose and Ryan growing up the hard way, and asked herself if some piece of their struggle might be her fault. She did not want that to be true, but it seemed hard to assign responsibility
cleanly, when for a while she and Ben had lived so closely intertwined, and everything had gotten so jumbled.

In this way, Michelle led two separate lives. There was her primary life, as a college student, where she worked tremendously hard and made few close friends. And there was her secondary life, as a National Guard soldier with one deployment under her belt, and a big, dysfunctional family of fellow veterans to whom she felt intimately bound. The two worlds didn't align much, except that anytime she needed to, Michelle could walk out of a class and over to the beauty salon and get a hug from Debbie. And she could text Desma at any hour and get an instant response. Michelle found solace in her burgeoning relationship with Billy—he told Michelle he had never been in love before, not the way he was with her—although her ties to the military occasionally proved a source of conflict. Billy sometimes found it threatening that Michelle liked to socialize with male soldiers, and because he avidly opposed the two wars, he sometimes wondered if her friendships with other veterans were healthy. He would have wished for Michelle that she never had to be part of the military at all.

On rare occasions Michelle achieved a moment of harmony between her two worlds. When she took a psychology class called Managing Behavior in Public Organizations, Michelle struck up a warm relationship with the professor. At one point she went to see him during office hours, and confided that she had served in Afghanistan. He responded with curiosity, and she found herself telling him about the work she had done. At the end of the semester, when she sat down to take the final exam in that class, she saw on the last page that the professor had included an extra credit question. It was a picture of an assault rifle, and he asked the students if they could name the person who had invented this particular type of gun. “Mikhail Kalashnikov,” Michelle wrote confidently. She knew the professor had included a question about an AK-47 solely for her. At least one person at the university recognized that in Afghanistan she had obtained an education of a different kind and that it should be acknowledged.

And in a class called Poverty and Public Policy, Michelle asked for permission to write her final paper on poverty in Afghanistan. The scope of the class was domestic poverty, but her professor granted permission
for her to write about a foreign country after she explained that she had spent the last year living on a military base there. Michelle summarized the history of Afghanistan since the reign of Muhammad Zahir Shah, described how after his monarchy had ended in 1973 the country had been gripped by turmoil for the next three decades, sketched the destructive roles played by the Soviet Union and the United States during the 1980s as they struggled for control of Afghanistan, showed the rise of the mujahideen, and then described how they tore the country apart with their squabbles and paved the way for the Taliban. In the process, the Afghanistan economy had fallen apart, and its people had grown poorer, and their country had become less able to govern itself. Warlords traded in opium, heroin, and morphine, but otherwise there were few legitimate exports. She listed the stark statistics describing how meager life in Afghanistan was after this ruinous history: that 70 percent of the country's population survived on less than $2 a day, that life expectancy there was twenty years lower than in neighboring countries, that more than 80 percent of Afghan women were illiterate, that more children died than in almost any other country on the globe, and that the leading causes of death among children were preventable ailments such as diarrhea and respiratory illnesses. Michelle wrote about efforts to salvage what was left of Afghanistan, to rebuild a viable nation so the country would no longer serve as a breeding ground for terrorists, including the UN attempt to disarm the warlords and transfer weapons to the Afghan National Army through the program known as Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration. “Enhancing security and rule of law through vigorous security sector reform and capacity building (with emphasis on the Afghan National Army, police force, and justice system) are necessary to keep the country moving in the right direction and keep insurgencies low,” wrote Michelle. “Without security not much progress can be made.”

Her paper was twenty-one pages long, well researched, and cogently written. She got an A. Michelle felt as though she had been carrying around thousands of puzzle pieces and could only now see how they fit together—why she had been living on a former Soviet air base, why the warlords had possessed so many AK-47s, why she had been asked to repair those weapons, why all the children they had driven past had lacked shoes. Michelle emailed the final version to Patrick Miller, George
Quintana, Debbie Helton, and Akbar Khan—the armament team. She would have sent it to Will Hargreaves as well, but she didn't have his email address. “That was the first time I tried to intellectually synthesize what I had gone through,” Michelle would say afterward. “That was the first time I tried to put it in the context of history. You know, when I first got home, I didn't want to touch the subject. I didn't want to look at anything that reminded me. I just wanted to pretend like it didn't happen. I wanted to go back to college and be a college kid. But it just doesn't work that way. It's impossible.”

Shortly after coming home, she had been reduced to panic in the aisles of Target, without the ability to articulate what was wrong. Now fourteen months had passed, and she could say, in a term paper, exactly what had happened in Afghanistan—what she had witnessed—that would reduce her to such a state. She had achieved her dream of going to the kind of college that had trees and demanding professors, and at the same time she had discovered that the means by which she had paid for that dream also rendered it impossible for her to fully enjoy college in the way that she had once imagined. Because of what she had been through, she did not truly fit in. But she moved past that when she wrote the paper on Afghanistan, because she discovered that she could use the tools of the classroom to make sense of her journey, and it did bring her some catharsis.

Michelle began her senior year at Indiana University in January 2007. She was planning to graduate that December. On drill weekends, however, there was talk of another deployment; Michelle could hardly bear the idea of her college education being interrupted once again. As it happened, she reached the end of her commitment to the National Guard in March 2007—six years after she had first sat down with Sergeant Wilber A. Granderson—without receiving orders to deploy. Michelle felt so finished with the Guard that after her last drill weekend she folded up her military uniform and hoped with a fierce intensity that she never had to put it on again. She and Billy had started talking about moving to Colorado. All that Michelle wanted was the chance to start over in a new place, without the military stealing another year of her life. It seemed her prayer might be answered.

Two weeks after she completed her last drill, however, the majority of the soldiers in the 113th Support Battalion got official word of the next deployment. Almost everyone whom Michelle knew in the National Guard was going to be sent to Iraq. The soldiers would go on active duty status at the end of that calendar year, they were told. It took nine months for everybody to get their assignments—nine long months of knowing they had to go, before they actually left. Later, Desma Brooks would say she honestly didn't know which was worse, not being given any notice at all that she had to leave her children for an entire year, or knowing for nine whole months that she was going to have to leave them. Debbie Helton was told that she would stay back, but that is not exactly how things unfolded.

And then that summer, while everybody in her old unit was doing extra training to get ready for Iraq, Michelle got a phone call from James Cooper, her ex-boyfriend from Aberdeen, with whom she had stayed in contact. Cooper told Michelle he had just gotten his orders: he was being sent to Afghanistan. The level of violence faced by US troops in that country had escalated dramatically since Michelle had left. Although the Afghan war had gotten off to a successful start, subsequently several things had gone wrong. Leaders of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda had been permitted to flee to Pakistan, where they had established strongholds, and from there they began orchestrating missions inside Afghanistan along its southern and eastern borders. Meanwhile, Afghans had grown increasingly disenchanted with the democratic government that the United States had helped establish, due to rampant corruption. And as the war in Iraq had turned to mayhem, that conflict had siphoned off critical resources from the war in Afghanistan. For several years, Iraq had been receiving the bulk of military equipment and attention. “The ratio of key ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] assets divided between Iraq and Afghanistan was typically 4 to 1 or 5 to 2,” wrote Seth G. Jones in his book
In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan.
“That is, for every four Predators that were shipped to Iraq, one went to Afghanistan. Or for every five Predators shipped to Iraq, two went to Afghanistan. Special operations forces were also reallocated. . . . Low levels of money, energy, and troops made it nearly
impossible to secure Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban regime and almost certainly increased the probability of an insurgency.” Whereas the Iraqi insurgency had spread with rapid intensity immediately after the United States had invaded, opposition to the US presence in Afghanistan instead built slowly and quietly. American soldiers had only felt the full brunt of the resistance perhaps four years after the start of the war in that country. From that point forward, however, violence had started to bloom quickly. “The increase in violence was particularly acute between 2005 and 2006,” noted Jones. “The number of suicide attacks quadrupled, remotely detonated bombings more than doubled, and armed attacks nearly tripled between 2005 and 2006. The following year would bring more of the same, as insurgent initiated attacks rose another 27%.” Billy comforted Michelle while she fretted about the well-being of a man she had once slept with, many years ago, and who was now being sent to Kandahar. There was a full-blown rebellion raging there by this point, and it was the scene of some of that war's most intense fighting.