Soldier Girls (47 page)

She does know all her letters and colors, numbers not bad for three.

EA has done a good job with her.

Michelle wrote back the same day:

Things are good out here. I am working with Mile High Youth Corps, a nonprofit that works with at risk youth in Denver doing education and community service. We have energy and water conservation programs, trail building programs, and low income housing construction programs. We help kids get their GEDs and scholarships for college etc. . . .

How are things going there with you? I hope you're making some good friends, that is so important to having a sane and healthy year. Did Desma get sent somewhere else? She [doesn't] respond to my emails so I worry for her. . . . I miss everyone a lot; we will have to get together when you guys get back. . . . Life goes by so fast, you really have to grab time with people.

After Debbie had been working on the base for several months, one of the younger Turkish workers began making a point of dropping by to see her. He had an Arabic-sounding name but Debbie just called him Smiley. She figured he was perhaps twenty-two. Debbie was fifty-five. Smiley started coming to see Debbie most evenings, ostensibly to get the key to a soccer field on the post. One evening, however, he asked how late Debbie was working. Probably until 11:00 p.m., she said. Smiley asked if he could talk to her after she got off. “Why?” Debbie asked.
“I just want to talk to you,” he said. They sat outside, in an area in front of the building where there were some trees, and chatted for about an hour. Technically, Debbie wasn't supposed to fraternize with the foreign nationals, but she figured an innocent conversation would not cause a problem.

Smiley wanted to know if Debbie was married.

“Yes, I am,” she said.

“But are you happy?” he asked.

“Yes, I'm happy,” Debbie said. “Why are you asking me these questions?”

“I really like you,” Smiley told her. “I just want to get to know you a little bit.”

“Well, you mean, get to know me as a friend?”

“Yes,” he said. “I want to be your friend—I want to learn about the United States.”

They talked about Indiana. Smiley returned the following night, and the night after that. Eventually he confessed that he hated working on the post, and he missed the company of women. “You know, you've just got to tell your husband that you're going to run away with a Turkish man!” he declared. “Honey, I'm too old for you,” Debbie said. Smiley insisted Debbie was not too old. “Yeah, I am,” Debbie replied. “I'm really way too old.” This went on for a while. In the end, Debbie had to tell Smiley firmly that they could only meet again if he could accept that the relationship would remain platonic. Friendship was enough for the young man for several weeks—but then he announced that he was in love. “I really, really, really do love you,” he told Debbie. “I really would like to be with you.”

She said, “Honey, you're just too young. I'm very flattered, but I cannot do that.”

Smiley announced dramatically that his heart was broken.

“There's plenty of young women in the world,” Debbie told him.

“But you're always so nice,” Smiley told her.

Debbie told Jeff about her suitor. “Well, I guess I've got an Iraqi boyfriend,” she said during one of their phone calls. Jeff started laughing when she told him the story of the smitten twenty-two-year-old construction worker. Before they said good-bye, however, he turned serious. “Honey, I know you have to be nice to people,” Jeff said. “But you do
walk home by yourself at night. And it is dark when you leave. Will you please just be careful?”

“Well, what do you think I've got a gun for?” Debbie told him. “I'll just shoot him if he gives me trouble.”

Jeff started laughing again. “Okay,” he said. “But just be careful.”

Later, Debbie went to take a shower by herself one evening late at night. She had been warned never to walk around the post alone when it was dark, but she did not want to bother anyone else, and routinely went by herself to shower at midnight or even 1:00 a.m. That night, she encountered another woman she knew in the women's bathroom. The other female soldier also worked second shift, and also took showers at night. “If you ever come in here by yourself at night you may want to lock that door,” the woman told Debbie. “I had somebody come in here and assault me.” Debbie did not press for details, but assumed the other woman had been raped. She knew that rapes occurred on a disturbingly regular basis across the post, because the information was included in the statistics that came through her office, and the senior officers who worked there had warned her about the phenomenon.

In the end, though, the hazards that Debbie faced in Iraq were simply not those kinds of dangers. No man ever jumped her at night, and she never found herself presented with any physical threat. Rather the difficulty of Iraq, for Debbie, was entirely emotional. She never left the post, she never met anybody like Akbar Khan, and she did not share a rich communal life with people she had known for years. During her first deployment, she had forged some of the deepest friendships of her life and done work that struck her as meaningful. In Iraq she had a desk job and had been hit on by a besotted twenty-two-year-old, and that was perhaps the most meaningful interaction she had with another human being.

Everybody from the 113th Support Battalion was finding the deployment to Iraq far more difficult than the deployment to Afghanistan, both because the wars had taken an ugly turn and because they were separated from each other. Desma had Charity, but they had jumped into an intimate relationship hastily, and after two months of constant contact, their closeness had started to fray. Desma was living with, working with, and reporting to her lover while surrounded by other people
she had only known for a short time. When the new relationship began to founder, Desma found she had nowhere to turn.

During the grinding slog of missions, maintenance, missions, and more maintenance, Desma had grown disenchanted with Charity's leadership and her lack of emotional accessibility. Out on the highways of Iraq, Desma decided that Charity was a lax truck commander. It bothered Desma that Charity did not require their gunner to wear his body armor, as he was supposed to. Of course, they all hated the gear. With every passing day, the temperature climbed another notch or two, and the gear was hot, heavy, and irritating. They wore flight suits made of flame-resistant material, ballistic vests with heavy ceramic plates, Kevlar helmets, and angel wings (ballistic shields they strapped around their arms). “Well, after you've sat in a truck for so long, it doesn't matter what you do, that stuff is just not feasible to move in,” Desma would say later. But she wore it, as she was told. Peaches took his off, however, and Charity did not reprimand him. Nor did she require Peaches to shower as often as Desma would have liked. The rank odor of the gunner's body filled the truck; it smelled as though he put on the same filthy, sweat-stained clothes over and over, without washing them. They had little to distract them during the interminable hours they spent inside the ASV, and sometimes Desma fixated on the stink, sometimes on Charity's failure to remedy it. Inside their CHU, Desma found that she and Charity had less and less to say to each other. Charity was not forthcoming, and although their physical relationship remained satisfying, Desma did not feel as close to her as she did to Mary, Stacy, or Michelle. There was one other person at Q-West who had served with them in the 113th, but Charity got mean every time he showed up. Jealous, Desma figured. In her own way, Desma felt almost as isolated as Debbie.

Desma poured her heart out to Mary in an email with the subject line “Rough Week.”

Mary,

This is going to be the longest deployment of my life. I hate 90% of these people. . . . I really have no one to talk to. Yes, Charity is here, but I truly cannot talk to her. . . . I hate to
bitch when I write; I just need to get it out. I miss having you around. I hope that I have never taken you for granted. I really do feel alone here. I feel trapped, caged, under siege. Like I am drowning and there is no one to call out to. I would give anything to hear your voice. . . . I just wish I had someone else to talk to. Sorry for being such a downer. Thanks for listening. Love Des.

Mary wrote back:

Desma,

Well you know how deployments can be. Being with someone so much can either make you love them, or hate them. It's definitely not the same as having a relationship here in the states. Over there, you can't get a break or say that you are busy on Friday. They know you're not busy. :) I'm really sorry it's not working. . . .

Keep a journal, listen to music, scream into your pillow, whatever you have to. . . .

I'm kinda worried about when you guys get back. You know how it is when people come back from deployment and they are all buddy buddy. . . . I don't want to be a damn deployment outcast. I wish I was over there so bad. I would give ANYTHING to be there. Augh!

Anyway . . . I love you girl and I miss you really bad. And you can tell me anything, you never have to feel bad about it.

Mary

In June, after two months of night missions up to Zakho, Desma and Charity's platoon traded roles with a platoon that had been doing day missions in the opposite direction. Once they switched roles, they started staging at around 3:00 a.m., and by the time the sun was up, they were checking the fuel levels in the trucks, and looking at all the tires. They got on the road by about 8:00 a.m. and generally reached their destination by 2:00 p.m. Sometimes they still went north to Zakho, or maybe just up to Mosul for fuel, but more often they escorted the trucks
that had come down out of Turkey on the next leg of the supply run, south to Tikrit—along the route that saw all the action.

The most dangerous moment came about two-thirds of the way to Tikrit, around the city of Baiji. Located on the same highway that continued south to Baghdad, Baiji was a major center of industry. It was home to Iraq's largest oil refinery, and the site of several major weapons and chemical plants. It also occupied one corner of the Sunni Triangle, a densely populated area of Sunni Muslims who had proved loyal to Saddam Hussein and hostile to the American-led military coalition and their Shiite allies. As Iraq had become consumed by sectarian violence, Baiji had become known for the large number of attacks mounted in that vicinity. Sometimes the insurgents hit the oil refinery or its pipelines; sometimes they hit the supply trucks that constantly passed through the area. Soldiers in the 139th were warned never to drive through the city itself but always to pass around it. The bypass could get congested, however, and frequently they found themselves stuck in heavy traffic as they tried to skirt disaster.

Their final destination was Forward Operating Base Speicher, a military base on the outskirts of Tikrit. When she went to the PX at Speicher for the first time, Desma saw fresh vegetables, frozen meat—ribs, steaks, hamburgers, all imported from Germany. The PX at Q-West had nothing like it. “I'm going to cook!” Desma told Charity. They bought frozen T-bones, corn, and a hibachi. The following day, they invited the guys from the lead scout truck over for steaks how you like 'em. They gnawed at the T-bones while holding them in their hands because they had no utensils but the steaks tasted like home. After that, they grilled about once a week. Usually Stoney and his crew would join them, sometimes other guys, too. They grilled ribs, steaks, chops, sausages; they tried everything that was sold at Speicher. The guys were grateful. It made one day seem less like every other.

On another run to Speicher, Desma spotted a friend from the 113th Support Battalion who said supposedly Patrick Miller was running a motor pool on the other side of the base. Desma got directions and drove over in her ASV. Miller stormed out of his shop with a tight expression on his face, looking like who the hell are you? when Desma stuck her head out of the hatch. “I'll be damned,” Miller said. He showed
her around his shop and walked her over to a designated smoking area. After that, she dropped by regularly. Patrick wrote to Michelle, “I see Des every now and then, they got her driving an ASV, with Charity being her truck commander. She stops by my shop when she is on our base. I guess Charity is driving her nuts. Starting to get a jealous streak when she talks to men. I don't know. Better go, time for me to get ready for work.”

By July it had ceased to rain entirely, and the shamal winds had picked up. The dust storms were monstrous, and temperatures rose into the 120s. They celebrated Independence Day with another barbecue—hamburgers and hot dogs. At this stage, the men in the unit had accepted Desma and Charity so completely that they no longer viewed the two female soldiers as women who had transferred into the formerly all-male regiment—they were just part of the team. The turning point, as far as gunner Brandon Hall was concerned, came one day that month, after tempers had begun to unravel because of the harsh routine and the heat. Some of the guys started to argue over something stupid in a way that turned personal, and Charity and Desma got up and left. “Mama and Brooksy went back to their CHU and got this big old dildo,” Hall recounted. “They came back and slammed that thing down on the table. ‘Mine's bigger than all of yours, so shut the fuck up.' ” Hall marveled at the tool; he had never seen anything like it. Brooks and Elliott were as good as any of the guys, in his view—he had grown to love them each. “Both of those women are more of a man than I'll ever be,” he said.

A few days later, Desma and Charity went on a night run to Zakho. They figured it would be a breeze—less traffic, less chance of getting ambushed. But a particularly severe dust storm reduced visibility to nothing and their departure was delayed. As they waited to get on the road, Desma visited a Porta-John, knowing that once she got behind the wheel, she wouldn't have a chance to go until they reached Dahuk. While she was inside the plastic enclosure, the ground rumbled beneath her feet. Five miles to the north, in a culvert that the convoy should have been driving over about then, hundreds of pounds of explosives had blown apart the road. When she drove past the crater, she estimated it to be forty feet across. The dust storm had saved their lives, she believed.