Soldier Girls (42 page)

One day, after they boarded a truck to ride back to the barracks, Desma asked the other soldiers if they had gathered up the targets they had shot. Nobody answered. She turned to a male specialist and said, “Ask them if they gathered up the targets.” He repeated the question, and the men said they had. Desma was being shunned. Later she learned that the soldiers had been instructed to keep their distance from the female soldiers. They are not your friends, their squad leaders had supposedly told them. Don't talk to them, don't socialize with them.

Desma rode in silence from the range to the barracks. When her squad leader ordered the soldiers to shower and report back in two hours, Desma started walking the wrong way.

“Brooks, showers,” ordered the squad leader.

“Bullshit,” she responded.

Desma stalked over to the command post. “Who is in charge of this motherfucker?” she asked.

“Feathers are ruffled,” remarked one of the company's leaders.

“Hey, I'm supposed to be working in supply, but you got me doing range control. And I'm working with a bunch of people who won't speak to me,” Desma announced. “How about we have a discussion about how big of an EO complaint I have? And how I'm going to call the IG as soon as I walk out of this room?”

“It's for your safety and for the safety of my Joes,” responded one of the brass.

Nobody appeared concerned that she was accusing the 293rd of violating the army's equal opportunity standards and threatening to report them to the inspector general's office, according to Desma. She did not actually call the inspector general—she decided to wait and see if things got better—but things got worse. Everybody in the 293rd had to pass a weapons qualification test. Desma went to the range as ordered and fired at the targets in front of her, and afterward she was told that she had not qualified. Desma had never gotten a perfect score at the range, but she had never failed to qualify. Desma had already endured a yearlong assignment overseas—which was more than some of the younger guys in the 293rd could say. Failing to qualify wounded her pride. Thinking maybe she was rusty, she returned to the range a second time, and again she was told that she had failed. Four times Desma tried to qualify, and four times she was rejected. Desma felt pretty certain that her supposed failures were a lie.

The October training left Desma feeling more like a second-class citizen than any other experience in her life. After it was done, she rode on a bus back to Indiana with other soldiers from the 293rd. The bus dropped soldiers off at their respective armories. From Bedford, Desma drove to Mary's apartment in Indianapolis, where she spent the night. Mary had also been told she was going to Iraq. She was the one friend who had been through everything with Desma—the false deployment, Afghanistan, and this. Desma told Mary that she hated the 293rd.

The following morning Desma tried to call her children, but nobody answered the phone at their grandparents' house. She called the fire department and found the girls there with Dennis. She heard her
ex-husband tell their children that they should go to Aunt Jo's house. Joanne was his sister; Desma wondered why the girls had to go there. Later that day, Desma got a phone call from Joanne's husband, Gary, who let her know that Paula had just died.

“The girls don't know yet,” he said. “When will you be home?”

“I'll be home today, as a matter of fact,” Desma told him.

At the funeral, her father-in-law asked Desma to let the girls stay with him, as planned. That's what Paula would have wanted, he said. Desma wondered if it was a good idea—she thought maybe she should move the girls to her cousin's. But it would mean one more upheaval, and her cousin was already overwhelmed, and the girls had suffered a shock at losing their grandmother. This loss was their first experience with death, and it had come just as Desma was getting ready to leave for Iraq. Uprooting them now would be disorienting. Maybe it would be all right to let the girls stay with their grandfather. “Worst mistake I ever made,” Desma would say later. “I should have sent them back to my cousin's, but I let them stay with him.”

Several weeks later, Desma reported for drill at the 293rd's regular location, the National Guard armory in Warsaw, Indiana. Warsaw lay at the far northern end of the state, close to Fort Wayne, and it took her five and a half hours to get there. While she was there, Desma obtained a copy of her weapons qualification results. Every time Desma had fired a bullet, a computer had recorded her name and her lane and whether that bullet had hit the target. “I qualified four times,” she would say later. “And they were trying to tell me I didn't qualify at all. I qualified more than my fair share.” It made her livid to discover her true results. Before she left Warsaw, Desma printed out every score she had earned. She was going to need proof of her worth; it was going to be that kind of a deployment.

Desma went on active duty status on December 10, 2007. Her mobilization orders stated that her tour was part of Operation Iraqi Freedom and would not exceed 392 days. Meanwhile, Desma had just gotten a series of text messages from Mary Bell, who had recently acquired a new boyfriend—an infantry soldier in the 293rd. Mary had texted four different photographs of four different pee sticks from four different test kits, and every one said pregnant. “What am I going to do?” Mary asked Desma. Desma wrote back, “Looks like you're going to have a baby.”
Both Desma and Mary showed up at Camp Atterbury as ordered, but after reporting the pregnancy Mary was sent home the following day. Missing her best friend, miserable about being assigned to the 293rd, and far from her family, Desma turned to Charity Elliott for solace. She decided that Charity was the love of her life.

As it happened, Debbie Helton—who had started going by the name of Debbie Deckard after she got married—had just joined Charity in the 139th Field Artillery. It was some kind of crazy snafu. At drill, the first sergeant had called her name when he read out the stay-back list. In 2004 she had wanted desperately to go with everyone to Afghanistan but she did not mind staying back in 2008, when her battalion was being broken up. All the soldiers who were being sent to Iraq had gotten their new assignments, and because they were being separated, the mood was grim. When she got home from drill that evening, however, Debbie's phone rang. Jeff looked at the caller ID.

“It says Indiana Department of Military,” he told Debbie. “Don't answer it.”

“I have to answer it,” Debbie said.

“They're going to tell you that you're going,” Jeff predicted.

“They can't tell me I'm going,” Debbie told him. “They just told me today that I was on stay-back.”

The phone stopped ringing. Debbie called back. The soldier on the other end asked if she was Specialist Helton. No, Debbie said. She was Specialist Deckard. She had gotten married. The soldier checked her Social Security number and said it matched the number on his list. She needed to report to the armory in Crawfordsville, because she was being deployed to Iraq with the 139th.

“No, I don't think so,” Debbie told him. “I was just at drill today. And I wasn't on any of the lists. There's no way. They already told me I'm on stay-back.”

The soldier said her name had just come across two hours earlier. He told her to report to the Crawfordsville armory the following day at 7:00 a.m. She would go from there to Camp Atterbury.

“First off, I can't be there at seven,” Debbie told him. “I run a salon, and I have a payroll due in the morning. I have people that have to get paid. There's no way I can be there at seven.”

The soldier said she didn't have a choice.

Debbie said she could be there by noon.

He said if she would absolutely promise to be there by noon, it would be all right. He would make a note that said, “Did contact, will show up at noon.”

“I promise you I will be there,” Debbie said. “I have never been AWOL. I have never missed drill. I'll be there.”

There was some sort of mistake, Debbie told Jeff—she would sort it out. At Camp Atterbury, Debbie crossed paths with a superior from the 113th, and he asked with confusion what she was doing there. She told him that apparently she was going to Iraq. “I put you down for stay-back,” he told her. “Why are they sending you?” Debbie wondered out loud if it could be due to the fact that she had changed her name. “I bet you anything it is your name change,” he said. Apparently the army had decided that Debbie Helton and Debbie Deckard were two different people, and although Debbie Deckard had been told that she would remain at home, Debbie Helton was being sent overseas. Debbie tried to explain to her new colleagues that she was not Debbie Helton anymore, but nobody in the 139th knew her history, and they would not listen.

Michelle Fischer was going to graduate from college that December, and she was in the middle of finishing the final exams of her senior year when Debbie called to say what was happening. Debbie and Jeff had promised to host a graduation party for Michelle at the end of that month, and Debbie began apologizing that there would be no party. “Stop apologizing, Debbie,” Michelle said. “Seriously! The party doesn't matter. I'm a little bit more concerned with the fact that you're going to Iraq.”

Debbie was staying in a female barracks on the other side of Camp Atterbury from Desma. Charity lived there, too. When they finished their training exercises at the end of the day, Charity would walk across the post to visit Desma, or Desma would walk over to see Charity. Charity and Debbie told Desma they felt the 139th was a pretty good place to land. Even though the field artillery regiment had previously been all-male, neither Charity nor Debbie was being hazed. Debbie thought the guys had taken a wait-and-see attitude about her. She was optimistic about how things would turn out because she could see that the 139th had accepted Charity.

Starting on December 23, 2007, the soldiers were given ten days off so they could spend the holiday season with their families. Desma returned to Rockport and tried to create a festive air. She was still shopping on Christmas Eve, but she stayed up late to wrap each gift. They celebrated Paige's birthday, which fell on New Year's Eve. Mary Bell and her boyfriend got married on New Year's Day, and Desma was the maid of honor. At the wedding Mary's mother said, “How could you let this happen?” Desma said, “I tried to talk her out of it.” Nobody thought the union would bring Mary happiness. The groom was due to leave for an Iraq deployment in two days, and the couple had not been given enough time to build a strong relationship. Mary was upset that she was not going to Iraq with her husband and her maid of honor. All the people she cared about were going, and she knew they were going to come back altered in ways that would make it impossible to be close to them unless you had been there, too.

And then it was time to go. On January 3, 2008, the Indiana National Guard threw an enormous send-off for the 76th Infantry Brigade in the old RCA Dome in Indianapolis. Three thousand four hundred uniformed soldiers from the 76th as well as fifteen thousand family members filled the stadium. The soldiers hailed from ninety of Indiana's ninety-two counties and represented Indiana's largest single deployment since World War II. During the coming year, Indiana would have more members of its National Guard deployed than any other state in the Union. By this point, the war in Iraq had been grinding along for five long years; after a slew of quick victories, and that optimistic moment when it seemed as though the war might end in a matter of months, things had bogged down. Every year had brought a steady rise in the number of violent incidents. The removal of Saddam Hussein had created a power vacuum, the elections had not solved the leadership issue, and the insurgency had blossomed into such a powerful force that some people were calling what was happening a full-scale civil war. The previous year had been the worst yet, in terms of the number of attacks on infrastructure, the number of homemade bombs, and the number of ambushes involving snipers, grenades, mortars, rockets, and surface-to-air missile attacks. The average number of attacks per month had climbed to more than five thousand. General David Petraeus had been named
commander of all US troops in Iraq and had spent previous months implementing counterinsurgency strategies. Infantry soldiers who had been trained to kill the enemy were being asked to protect the friendly segments of the Iraqi population instead. The counterinsurgency doctrine was proving labor-intensive, time-intensive, and extremely costly, however; President Bush had responded to the latest uptick in sectarian violence by calling for a “New Way Forward,” in the form of a surge in troops. He had just sent 20,000 more soldiers to Iraq, bringing the total number of troops stationed there to 157,000.

As the two wars had ground along, the US military had been drawing heavily from all parts of the military, including the National Guard, and multiple deployments had become routine. For most of the soldiers under the dome, this was their second or third deployment; if they had not already been to Iraq, then they had been to Afghanistan or to Bosnia. Politicians including Governor Mitch Daniels and Senator Richard Lugar delivered speeches to the troops. “Our roles today are backwards,” then Congressman Mike Pence told the crowd (he would later be elected governor of the state). “It is I and all of us on this stage who should be sitting in your seats, and you before the microphone. It is one thing to speak of courage; it is quite another to be courageous.” Pence said it was a significant moment in Operation Iraqi Freedom, a moment of “widening American success,” and asserted that the surge was working. Desma did not know whether that was true; she just knew that she was tired. As the soldiers waited to board buses back to Atterbury, Desma lay down on the floor of the stadium. “I took a nap on the same floor the Colts had spit on,” she would later recall. “You know? I slept on the ground in December, in the cold, waiting for a bus so that I could go to God only knows where and God only knows whether or not I was coming back alive.”