Soldier Girls (41 page)

The orders that she had so narrowly missed and the news from Cooper made Michelle realize how painful it was going to be to watch her wish come true. She would remain at home, as she had fervently hoped. But almost everybody she cared about in the Guard was going to be sent somewhere dangerous, and she would worry for the entirety of the time they were gone about whether they would make it back. She was going to be given a life of ease while everybody else would suffer. It felt entirely wrong. She was young and had no children, while Desma was a single mother with three kids, and Patrick Miller's wife had just given birth to a second child. Michelle had imagined that being released from her commitment to the Guard would offer sweet relief—and, briefly, it had—but she had never imagined being left at home while her entire battalion shipped off to Iraq. She considered herself less encumbered than many of the soldiers who were getting ready to go, and she was nonplussed to realize that she would have traded places willingly with any of them, if only she could spare them what was coming. The one person Michelle cared about who was not going to Iraq was Noah Jarvis. When he had heard a deployment was likely, he and his closest friend in the Guard had hastily transferred into another unit that was based in Louisville,
Kentucky. Everybody in Evansville was derisively calling Jarvis and his pal the Kentucky Flyers (after a local cycling club), but Michelle did not blame him for ducking a war he did not support. She would not have been able to shoulder the guilt if he had come back maimed or hurt or not at all, given that she had persuaded him to enlist in the first place, six long years before.

B
ECOMING SOLDIERS AGAIN,
that was the task. This time they were given almost an entire year to prepare. Desma had been telling her children for months that there might be a deployment coming, but when she said it's definite and it's Iraq and it's happening this year they were shocked. “You're just going to leave again?” Josh asked in disbelief. “It's not like I have a choice,” Desma told him. “You'll understand when you're older.” That fall, Alexis was going to start second grade, and Paige was going to start fourth grade, while Josh would begin his freshman year of high school. All of them were old enough to anticipate what a year's absence would be like, and they had three-quarters of a year to fret. The girls grew clingy; Josh kept his distance. He said, “I want to finish high school where I start high school. I'm not going to keep moving around.” Desma said all right, he could stay with his surrogate father Keith in Gentryville during all four years of high school, although it kind of broke her heart. Then she spoke to her cousin Lesley about minding the two girls again. Lesley said she would do it if it was what Desma really needed, but she had a lot going on. Desma understood: it was too hard. So she made other arrangements. Her daughters would stay with their paternal grandparents, who lived close to the girls' father, down in Spurgeon, Indiana.

It was the same town in which Desma had been raised. The girls' grandparents lived in a house that Desma remembered being occupied by some boys who used to pick on her when they rode the school bus.
Spurgeon was about an hour's drive from Rockport, where Desma lived, and Desma had maintained a close connection to her in-laws even after her divorce from their son, Dennis Brooks. Like everybody in southern Indiana, it sometimes seemed, they had fallen on hard times; Desma's father-in-law, Ray Brooks, had worked for a company that had closed, and had started over with an entry-level job at a furniture factory in Jasper. The girls had a particularly warm and affectionate relationship with their grandmother, Paula Brooks, whom they called Ma-maw. Desma thought it would be a good arrangement. “She loved the girls,” Desma would recall. “They were her pride and joy, kept her going every day. She never faulted me for our divorce, she loved me very much. And was thankful for the opportunity to spend as much time as she got with the girls.”

Desma had to report to Camp Atterbury for two weeks of training each month in May, June, July, and September 2007. She tried to hang on to her full-time job at the Kentucky United Methodist Homes for Children and Youth, but eventually asked for a leave of absence. Her boss said he would keep the job open until she got back, and her coworkers made her a quilt. The coming deployment pretty much ended Desma's relationship with Jimmy. He said he had endured one yearlong absence already and would not do it again. If she went to Iraq, she would not find him waiting for her when she got home. Jimmy said she had chosen the military over him. Desma said that was fine with her, he should not wait. Her lease did not run out until July 2008; Desma wrote enough checks to cover the rent until then, and gave them to Jimmy to mail as the months went by. She told Jimmy he could stay in the house while she was gone. All she asked was that he look after her dog, Goldie. Mary Bell had given her the dog—a pug and beagle mix—after Mary had been unable to care for it. Desma and Jimmy were still living together but they started leading separate lives; Desma spent half of her time at Camp Atterbury, and Jimmy spent many weeks on the road.

That summer, while Desma did her two-week trainings in June and July, the girls stayed with their grandparents in Spurgeon and Josh stayed with his father in Gentryville. After each training session, Desma picked the children up and they all returned to Rockport. With the mandatory trainings taking her away so much, however, she found it hard to care
for her children in a consistent fashion, and she did not want to disrupt the children's schooling by having them switch institutions in the middle of the year. Beginning in August 2007, she sent the children to live with the relatives she had chosen to parent them while she was gone, even though she would not go on active duty status for another four months. “You know, let's not uproot them in the middle of the school year,” she said later. “Let's do it at the beginning and start off fresh.” She did not make too much of the transition. “I'll see you on Friday,” she told the girls casually before turning them over to their grandmother. Same with Josh. “See you at the weekend.”

Josh established himself at his father's house quickly. He had lived there before, and already had friends in the area. But the girls entered a household that was about to be thrown into turmoil. Their grandmother had been experiencing health problems, and within weeks, Paula got a routine scan and unexpectedly learned she had cancer. The girls gleaned that their grandmother was ill after the house filled with worry and they were brought on rushed visits to doctors. In September, while Desma was at Camp Atterbury again, her mother-in-law was briefly hospitalized. Not until the following month, however, shortly before Desma began another two-week training session, did Paula share word of her illness with Desma. She barely had a chance to assimilate the news. The 113th Support Battalion was not being deployed as a coherent entity—instead, individuals from the battalion were being distributed across the rest of the 76th Infantry Brigade, wherever there were empty slots that needed filling—and she had just been told to report for a two-week training session with the 293rd, a previously all-male infantry regiment. She would serve in Iraq alongside a group of men she had never known.

Desma buried herself in Harry Potter. She reread every book in the series, working her way up to the
Deathly Hallows
, which came out that summer. She also started spending a lot of time with a woman named Charity Elliott. Charity had drilled with Desma in Bedford for years, but had been left behind when the rest of the 113th Support Battalion had gone to Afghanistan. She had volunteered to go so that she could rejoin her own unit, but instead had been sent to Iraq with a National Guard battalion out of Pennsylvania. When the 113th had returned from Kabul, Charity had still been in Ramadi. While in Iraq, Charity had been walking
back to the post with a group of soldiers when a car bomb had exploded nearby. Half of the group had just turned a corner, but the other half had been exposed. In her civilian life, Charity worked as an emergency medical technician, and she immediately ran back to do triage. She tried but failed to save the life of a major whom she respected. It had been hard for Charity to settle back into civilian life, and she was eager to deploy again. “Once is never enough,” Desma would later say, commenting on Charity's appetite for war service. “Once is never enough.”

Between deployments, Charity had been assigned to work in retention with Debbie. They had a bumpy relationship. Charity went to a retention training class and returned with a bunch of recruitment posters that said,
ARMY OF ONE
(a slogan that did not last long). Then she pronounced the trailer a mess. Debbie had viewed the hot dog truck as a place to get away, but by the time Charity had finished straightening up, it looked like a regular recruitment office. “Debbie was fit to be tied, because this was supposed to be a place to relax and hang out, and now it's all army,” Desma would recall. “Charity was taking over, and Debbie wasn't used to having somebody else managing her space.”

At about the same time, Stacy Glory—the single mother Desma carpooled with—had begun working in retention, too. Desma had been spending a lot of time in the hot dog truck, because of her close ties to Stacy and Debbie, and in the process she got to know Charity better. Charity struck her as funny, warm, kind, and competent. “She had all her ducks in a row,” Desma would say later. Charity had been assigned to 3rd Battalion, 139th Field Artillery Regiment, another formerly all-male part of the brigade that trained in Evansville. Rockport was not far away, and Desma invited Charity to stay over during one of her training sessions. Charity had a girlfriend, and at first the relationship with Desma remained platonic. Charity's sexual orientation was an open secret. The military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy prohibited discrimination against closeted gays or lesbians, but barred openly gay or lesbian members from serving their country—and so Charity did not declare she was a lesbian publicly but did confide the truth to Desma. “I got to hanging out in there [in retention],” Desma later explained. “And she and I just got to talking. And we went out and had a few drinks, and went out another time, and had a few more drinks. And then there was the drunk
‘wish you were here' text. She and her girlfriend were going through a nasty time. The girlfriend had pulled a knife on her because she thought that Charity was sleeping with me. And at the time, we weren't. It was really close, but we hadn't. And then we did.”

Charity possessed an allure for Desma because she was knowledgeable, easy to talk to, and their physical relationship proved satisfying. “Great sex!” Desma would say. She also made Desma feel more comfortable with the idea of going to Iraq, since she had been there already and had made it back in one piece. Desma didn't discuss her new relationship with many people, however, because talking about it publicly could have gotten her kicked out of the military. And she said nothing to Jimmy. “Jimmy had already pretty much told me to piss off. If I was going to Iraq, he wasn't waiting on me, and there was nothing we had in common anymore.” She introduced Charity to her children—they took Paige and Alexis out to dinner in Jasper one evening, and stayed over at a hotel that had a pool—although she never explained that they were having a romantic relationship. It seemed like a lot to get into right on the eve of her departure.

Desma started training with the infantry regiment's 293rd Alpha Company in October 2007. The 293rd was based in Fort Wayne, Indiana, way up north at the opposite end of the state from where she lived, and she did not know the soldiers in that regiment. The men who served in the 293rd were also National Guard, and also belonged to the 76th Brigade, but they were infantrymen. They dismissed soldiers who served in support positions and never left the safety of the military post as “Fobbits,” from the acronym for forward operating base, or FOB. (“A Fobbit never leaves the wire,” the saying went—it was a play on the line “A hobbit never leaves the shire.”) They were better, they thought. The soldiers in the 293rd trained harder than other Guard units; they took special classes in hand-to-hand combat and martial arts. They had been to Iraq once already, four years earlier, when they had become the first Army National Guard battalion to see combat since the Korean War.

Most of the men who were serving in the 293rd had never served alongside women. Recent changes in policy allowed female soldiers to be transferred into formerly all-male regiments such as theirs, if the
regiments were being deployed in a noncombat role (in this case, the 293rd was providing security to supply convoys). In October, during the first training session that she completed with the 293rd, Desma traveled to Camp Grayling, in Michigan, where she found herself part of Alpha Company, a group that consisted of about one hundred men and only a couple of women. Similar ratios prevailed in the regiment's other companies. The men made it abundantly clear that they had preferred being an all-male group. “There was a lot of animosity,” Desma would say later. “They wanted to push the women out, because women meant nothing but trouble.”

A few leaders in the 293rd treated her in a friendly fashion—among them a meticulous, thoughtful noncommissioned officer named Roy Dishner, who served as Desma's squad leader—but the rank-and-file soldiers were unwelcoming. Male soldiers kept a wide berth around Desma in the chow line and would not sit with her during meals. Her close friend Stacy Glory had also been attached to the 293rd, but was serving in a different company; when possible, Desma ate with Stacy. Desma had been told she would work in supply. The sergeant in charge of supply sent her down to the range. Desma was fluent on the military's complicated logistical software, she was a whiz with radios, and nobody in the 113th would have thought working at the range was a good use of Desma's talents, but she spent her days making sure the infantrymen had enough ammunition and could qualify safely with their weapons.