Soldier Girls (44 page)

“Yes, sir,” Desma said.

“Specialist Brooks, I have an offer for you.”

“What is it, Sergeant Major?”

“Do you still want that transfer?”

“More than anything on God's green earth!” Desma said. “Please, I want out of here.”

The lieutenant colonel told Desma that if she agreed to take the job, she would serve with the 139th. That group was doing convoy security, and she would probably become a truck driver.

“I've not done any of the lanes training, sir,” Desma said.

Colonel Agron looked furious. He made certain that Desma spent the remaining time in Kuwait getting caught up. As she was transferring out of the 293rd, Desma's first sergeant buttonholed her to express his dismay.

“What is going on?” he asked.

“I told you I couldn't be here,” Desma replied. “I told you I had no business being in this infantry company because I wasn't going to be able to advance my career and I wasn't taken seriously as a soldier and I wasn't getting any training and to be honest it was because I didn't have a penis. I know that's hard for some people to hear, and they tell me to watch my mouth, but that's what it was, to be honest.”

“What can I do to get you to stay?” he asked. “I promise you, things will be different.”

“No, First Sergeant, they won't be.”

The exact nature of her job became more clear in the days that followed. She would report to Charity Elliott, who would serve as her truck commander. They would be toward the front of a supply convoy, and their mission would be to get the trucks safely down Iraq's highways without hitting any bombs. Desma figured she would learn on the job.

By coincidence, right before Desma Brooks transferred into the 139th, Debbie Deckard had transferred out of that regiment. The more time Debbie had spent training with Selby and Boone, the more anxious she had grown about being a truck driver. She had completed all the training, and her scores had been fine. But she worried about being responsible for some kind of catastrophe. Three days before they flew to Iraq, Debbie met with Colonel Agron. He asked how she was feeling about her job.

“Well, if this is the job I have to do, I will do it,” Debbie told him. “But I feel a little uncomfortable. I'm not sure I get all this driving stuff.”

Agron was surprised, because Debbie had scored well in the training exercises. “But you did a fine job the other day,” he told her. “I already rode with you. You reacted exactly as you were supposed to.”

“Well, I understand that,” Debbie said. “But no, I'm not really comfortable with the position.”

Colonel Agron had an idea: there was a young man assigned to the brigade's headquarters in Mosul. The job involved interacting with everybody who needed permission to come on and off the base regularly. “He's a very gung ho kid,” the colonel said. “He's a good kid. But he cannot sit still for anything in the world, and I don't think that he's mature enough. Didn't you work with people before you came here?”

“Yes,” Debbie said. “I was a manager.”

Agron said he thought the two of them should switch positions.

Debbie was relieved to accept the desk job. She had not wanted to bear responsibility for the lives of everyone in her truck out on the highways of Iraq. Coincidentally, Desma and Debbie changed jobs at almost exactly the same time, and Desma happened to take exactly the same job that Debbie had given up, although with a different crew. Later, when they discussed those last-minute moves that had taken place right before they left Kuwait, Desma told Debbie that asking for the change had been the right thing to do.

“I'm so glad they found you a different job,” Desma told Debbie. “You had no business driving with all that gear on for sixteen, eighteen hours at a time.”

“I know,” Debbie said with chagrin. “I'd have done it, though, if I would have absolutely had to.”

“I know you would have,” Desma told her. “But, Debbie—dadgummit. You ain't got no business doing that shit.”

Because it was a hard job, being truck driver.

I
RAQ: DUST, HEAT,
unremitting loneliness. The soldiers who belonged to the 113th Support Battalion had been sundered from one another and were now living far apart on different bases. At least Desma and Charity had each other—that was what Desma thought in the beginning. The two of them lived inside a containerized housing unit called a CHU—basically, half a conex shipping container—at Al Qayyarah Airfield West. The CHU was eight feet wide and forty feet long, and they had twenty feet of its length. A wall separated Desma and Charity from the two male soldiers who inhabited the other end of the same shipping container. The result was something like a trailer without indoor plumbing. The immense, sprawling airfield lay in central Iraq, near the city of Al Qayyarah (a conglomeration of industrial facilities, markets, and residences), 180 miles north of Baghdad, in the vast alluvial valley formed by the Tigris River. What Desma saw when she looked at the surrounding landscape was a lot of sand, some scrubby shrubs, and a few trees. There were no rolling dunes. It was flat, flat, flat.

The former Iraqi Air Force “superbase” had been built in the 1970s and had served as a launching site for Iraqi Mirage fighter jets and MiG-25s during the war with Iran. It was later bombed heavily during the Persian Gulf War and again during the early part of Operation Iraqi Freedom—in the blistering air strikes that Desma had watched on television while at Camp Atterbury back in 2003, during her false deployment. When American-led ground forces took the air base, the soldiers had found
weapons storage igloos, aboveground aircraft hangars made of concrete reinforced with steel plates, and subterranean aircraft hangars equipped with hydraulic lifts that had been constructed to withstand a direct hit by a nuclear bomb. An engineering battalion out of Fort Bragg had repaired the damage to the runways, which were riddled with craters, and the air base had reopened as a major entry and exit point for US troops. Officially the post was known as Al Qayyarah Airfield West, but the soldiers who poured into the base started calling it Q-West, and after that, Key West. The base was famous for its unforgiving vistas, remote location, unreliable Internet access, limited phone service, and infrequent outgoing mail deliveries.

Desma and Charity pushed Desma's twin bed under the window, at one end of the shipping container. They pushed Charity's twin bed against one of the other walls so that the two beds made an L. They had also been given two wall lockers and two nightstands. That was it. If they wanted to pee, or brush their teeth, or take a shower, Desma and Charity walked to the communal women's bathroom. They were supposed to make sure they had a buddy. Desma ignored that rule if Charity was not around, for she felt safe enough going to the showers by herself, but after an active duty unit moved into a nearby compound, she started carrying a knife at all times. They had air-conditioning in the CHU—when they had power. It was already hot, and getting hotter. Desma described the CHU briefly in an email that she wrote to Mary on April 1, 2008. “Nice, but small,” said Desma. “Would you send my robe & junk when you can?? I really wish you were here.”

They did not hang anything on the walls of the CHU. Inside her wall locker, though, Desma taped several pictures of her children. One showed Alexis and Paige playing on a swing set at the park; another showed Paige lying down with a large plastic car on her belly, as if she had gotten run over by the toy; then there was Alexis with a close friend, and Josh's eighth-grade school picture. Desma knew that when she opened the locker she would see the children, and yet it still knocked her sideways to see their faces. She did not carry any pictures with her when she left the post, because looking at images of her children when she was on a mission made her feel physically sick.

As she had during her year in Afghanistan, Desma made certain to
speak to the children at least once a week, never on the same day of the week, never at the same time of day. She tried as best she could to do the things a mother would do, albeit long distance. On April 8, 2008, Josh wrote to Desma:

hey my phone doesn't work anymore because the charger piece broke in it, but other than that im doin good. THIS IS JOSH BY THE WAY. do you think you could help me pay for it to get it fixed? Hows work going? I LOVE YOU and ill talk to you later bye

Desma wrote back:

I will send you a new phone. I will have it sent from WalMart. That way you can keep your number and all your time. . . . I will set it so you can pick up the phone at the store if I can. I LOVE YOU TOO!!! Mom

But it was easier to do her job as a soldier if she walled off the part of herself that was a mother. She could no longer mix the two roles easily, because the separate halves of her identity were no longer coherent. So she let a certain amount of distance creep between herself and her children, to insulate herself from the pain of the separation. “It was easier to continue what I was doing with being overseas and what have you if I wasn't wound up in what was going on at home,” Desma would say later. “Maybe it was the wrong approach to take, but otherwise I might have actually just left. Ta-da, good-bye.”

They lived about a mile from the dining facility. Desma and Charity bought a pair of mountain bikes at the PX—one was blue and the other was red—and used them to ride to and from meals. For some reason, the bicycles would not hold air in their tires for very long, but they were good enough for a ride to the PX or the chow hall or the post office. Then Desma saw a flyer that said, “
MOVING SALE, EVERYTHING MUST GO
.” Some guys in the 101st Airborne Division were heading home. For twenty bucks she and Charity bought a nineteen-inch Magnavox TV, two blue canvas lawn chairs, and a coffeepot. Later Desma found a Sony
PlayStation for sale at the PX, and they started competing to see who could make it past the devil on Guitar Hero, or else they watched movies on the American Forces Network.

What they saw around them was white CHU after white CHU after white CHU, in a sea of gray gravel. Boxy metal islands in a stony ocean. Outside their CHU, Charity and Desma set up a little area where they liked to hang out as long as the
shamal
winds were not blowing. After the rainy season, the shamal winds sprang up, beginning in May and intensifying through June and July. The strong windstorms could blow for days, carrying vast clouds of dust that sometimes towered fifteen thousand feet in the air. The dust was fine and silty and crept everywhere. It had the consistency of baby powder. Puffs of it rose every time Desma took a step; she made a little cloud just by walking. But between the dust storms, they enjoyed any breeze they could find, sitting outside in the blue lawn chairs. They placed a can for cigarette butts in what they came to think of as their front yard, and put a wooden step by the front door, as well as a rock on which they wrote, “Elliott and Brooks live here.” Then they found magnetic letters at the PX and stuck them onto the metal door of the shipping container, so that they could leave messages for each other.
AT THE PX
, Desma wrote to Charity. And Charity wrote back,
WENT TO LUNCH
.

In time, Desma and Charity grew fond of some of the guys in the 139th, particularly Josh Stonebraker, who served as the gunner in one of the scout trucks that led their convoys. He was a big, burly guy who worked as a guard in a women's prison near Terre Haute, Indiana. Everybody called him Stoney. He was a 100 percent devoted family man, and although they saw each other nearly every day in a place where there were hardly any women, he never tried to take advantage of his friendship with Desma. Stoney was a joker. He and Desma began a series of pranks executed on the down days. Usually they ran a mission one day, had a down day the next. They spent the down days cleaning trucks or conducting preventive maintenance checks on their vehicles. The lengthy maintenance checks had once annoyed Desma, but she no longer questioned the practice—a working vehicle had become her lifeline.

Stoney shared a nearby CHU with the driver of his truck, Dustin
Ford, while their truck commander, Jeff Stacey, lived about two shipping containers farther away, in a CHU that he shared with the platoon sergeant. The guys from the lead scout truck were a tight group, ran around as a crowd, and Stoney was the magnet that held them together. Once Desma put Vaseline all over the door handle to Stoney's CHU—“so, like, when he grabbed it, his hand would slip off, and he'd be gooey.” As it happened, a dust storm blew in, and the Vaseline became a muddy slop. Stoney liked that experience so much that when Desma and Charity left to go and take showers, he rearranged their yard. They returned to find their two mountain bikes, the two blue canvas lawn chairs, the wooden step, the rock, and the butt can all perfectly arranged in their usual configuration, up on their roof. Stoney laughed his ass off at their dumbfounded expressions.

One night Desma heard scuffling, muffled laughter, and the noise that duct tape makes as it is unrolled. She figured maybe Stoney was duct-taping them inside the CHU. Actually he was duct-taping a can of shaving cream to the outside of the conex, and a string to the doorknob so that when she opened the door she would get covered in shaving cream. Desma opened the door a sliver, saw about eight people, and tried to slam the door closed, but the guys shoved it open and shot white foam everywhere. Stoney dropped by often, and when Desma and Charity were not home, he made sure they knew he had been there. They would come back and find
STONEY IS A GOD
or
HEY BITCHES
written across the side of their CHU.

Talking over the radio from their separate vehicles during missions that could last for twelve, fourteen, even sixteen hours, they dropped into the habit of referring to each other by nicknames they found out there in the Iraqi desert. Charity became Mojo Mama, or just plain Mama. Stoney became Papa. They called Desma Brooksy or Hooker, a term of endearment. Stoney's truck commander, Jeff Stacey, had buckteeth, and somebody nicknamed him Beaver. He also had a temper, and eventually Desma started calling him Angry Beaver, after a character in a cartoon that her kids liked to watch. The names became who they were—back in Kuwait, they had been Desma and Charity; now they were Mama and Hooker.