Soldier Girls (51 page)

Michelle also asked her friends if they could commit to renting a cabin in Brown County. Debbie wrote back that same day, saying she would love to do that. Michelle replied that she would book a cabin as soon as she heard from Desma. She never heard from her, though—Desma was so unreliable, Michelle thought, when it came to email. After Desma's silence stretched on past the point when they needed to make a decision, Beth went ahead and booked the Cozy Bear cabin in Brown County for December 26 and 27. With the military discount, each couple would owe $206.77, said Beth.

Michelle wondered in an email to Debbie if Patrick and Beth would
smoke pot; she figured they probably would not partake, but she hoped they wouldn't be offended if everybody else got high. Michelle planned to bring food to grill and asked Debbie to stock up on wine. They worried that Akbar might find them debauched, but then Michelle told Debbie that Akbar had recently said, “I am not the boy you remember, that blushes every time he is around a woman.” She wanted them to recapture some of the joy they had found in each other's company when they had served alongside each other in Afghanistan:

To tell you the truth Deb the thought of all of us being together again without a care in the world for a few days kinda chokes me up. It has been so long, our lives so different. . . . I'm not sure if Des will come, but I wanted to make sure she knew she was invited. I hope she does make it. I've never really met Charity.

And still Desma did not write. Michelle did not hear from her during the second half of October, nor in November. Debbie said nothing about the IED blast to Michelle. You did not worry people back home unless it was absolutely necessary, because the distance and the lack of control could make them hysterical, and then they would plague an exhausted, stressed-out soldier with emotional emails and phone calls, seeking reassurance. Meanwhile, Will wrote to say he wasn't sure if he and Linda would join them at the cabin. Debbie had missed his company terribly while she was in Iraq; her wish that Will could be there, too, had become a repeating refrain in her diary. (“I think it's different because here I don't have Will around,” she had written in September. “I'm by myself so much.”) Debbie called him to find out what was wrong and Will confessed that his new wife did not want to spend the night with the rest of the group. The amount he drank had become an issue, Will told Debbie—particularly the amount that he drank when he was around his friends from the Guard. “He said they would come during the day and stay into the evening,” Debbie wrote in an email to Jeff. “I don't see why they just don't stay. . . . I can't believe she won't let him enjoy his friends. He said he would not come without her.” Even though Linda was now
Will's wife, Debbie was shocked that he would choose Linda over the armament team.

Akbar still had not found work. He was too proud to accept help with airfare, and it seemed unlikely that he would join them at the cabin. Over the next several weeks, Debbie wrote to Akbar often. She said she would help him shop for warmer clothes; she wondered how the job search was going; she asked if he had tasted alcohol yet. “Michelle says you told her you were not the same shy boy you used to be,” Debbie told Akbar. She worried about his frame of mind. The stature Akbar had possessed in Afghanistan had not followed him to the United States; in South Carolina, his brown skin and his foreign accent led other people to treat him as though he lacked intelligence. Debbie fretted that Akbar seemed dejected. She wrote to Michelle, “He didn't sound as happy as I would of liked when he emailed me.”

By this point, James Cooper had almost completed his deployment in Afghanistan, too. Throughout that year, Cooper had been in regular contact: Michelle would pick up the phone and hear his voice from halfway around the globe. It would be nighttime in Afghanistan and morning in Colorado, or the other way around, and Michelle would put all the warmth she knew how to muster into her voice, hoping to span the awful gap between them. Cooper told her all about where he was. The city of Kandahar was the second largest in Afghanistan, and the area was known for pomegranates, grapes, and wool. Michelle told him to read
The Kite Runner
; maybe he could see Afghanistan through her eyes. To her surprise, Cooper proved a willing pupil; he avidly consumed the books she suggested, and when he called, she could hear the sound of marvel in his voice. After a while, Cooper began to tell her stories of his colleagues, and how he had to police them so they didn't run amok. The other soldiers had a hard time thinking of Afghans as fellow human beings, he said. Michelle started to think of Cooper as the conscience of his unit, the one who would prevent an atrocity. They found themselves in agreement about all kinds of things—the wonders of Afghanistan, the shittiness of deployments, the obliviousness of civilians. Michelle felt as though Afghanistan were working on Cooper, transforming him. Sharing a deployment to the same place, albeit four years apart in time, united them.

Michelle wanted James Cooper to have her kind of deployment—the kind where you never had to fire your weapon—but she knew it wasn't like that in Kandahar. Not by this point. The Taliban had established a strong presence in southern Afghanistan in the years since Karzai had been elected, and US soldiers stationed there were squarely at the center of the ongoing conflict. Insurgents were placing more and more IEDs by the sides of the roads, making bigger and bigger explosions, and when Michelle didn't hear from Cooper for a few weeks, she began to worry. She started checking in with him whenever she could, even if it was just a sentence or two on Facebook. One day she wrote, “where are you? was hoping to catch you online today. hope all is well in kandahar.” Sometimes he would write back immediately but sometimes it took days.

In the fall, their communication lapsed briefly. On October 9, 2008, however, Cooper surprised Michelle by calling on her cell phone while she was at work. She dropped what she was doing and excitedly began asking questions, but then her boss walked into Michelle's office. She sent him a note on Facebook, apologizing for ending the call abruptly. On October 29, 2008, Michelle sent Cooper a short note. “Hi,” she wrote. “Miss you. Hope you're doing well.” Cooper wrote back on November 1, 2008, sounding dispirited; he had been in Afghanistan for almost a full year. “I am doing alright,” he said. “I miss you. Blah.”

A few weeks later, Michelle's cell phone rang. She heard Cooper's familiar voice on the other end of the line—but then he said, “I'm at Walter Reed.” “Oh, my God!” she cried. “What happened?” He had been on a mission just outside the city of Kandahar, Cooper told her, and they had gotten into a firefight in the middle of a vast field. There had been rows and rows of grapes. Then heavy gunfire. His buddies had run back for him, and carried him the length of six football fields before they had reached a place where it was safe for a helicopter to land. In Germany the military doctors had made sure he would live. Six days later he went into surgery at Walter Reed, to see what the doctors could do about his legs. A single round from an AK-47 had gone through both of his thighs.

As soon as she heard the term “AK-47,” Michelle thought it was a miracle James Cooper had not bled to death. She knew how big those rounds were. Then she asked herself: Had she worked on that gun? Had she checked its sights, or replaced its trigger mech? And even if she had
not worked on that gun, what about all the AK-47s that the armament team had repaired? How many people had been shot by those weapons since she had written down their serial numbers? Twenty thousand assault rifles, multiplied by four years of warfare, plus however many times they had been fired. Michelle could not stop crying. Cooper just listened to her, a little perplexed. It was horrible; everything was backward—she should have been comforting him. He was the one stuck at Walter Reed; he was the one who had been shot. But instead Cooper kept telling her that he was going to be okay, everything was going to be all right. The phone call opened a dam Michelle had not known she had constructed, and the guilt that came pouring out had been stored in some high place for a long time. She was awash for days.

In the weeks that followed, Michelle spoke to Cooper frequently. He called to say that he had stood up and taken a couple of shuffling steps. He thought he would be in the hospital for a short time. When the doctors at Walter Reed learned the full extent of the nerve damage in his legs, however, they told him it might take a while longer. They did surgery after surgery, and somehow the weeks turned into months. Cooper would stay at Walter Reed from November 2008 until March 2009. During the four months he spent in the hospital, Michelle called regularly. Sometimes he was in surgery and could not answer; sometimes she caught him while the nurses were changing the bedding, or in the middle of physical therapy. But at least once a week, she found him sitting around, watching television or reading a book, bored out of his mind. He was relentlessly upbeat. He worked at physical therapy with furious diligence. They distracted themselves from the tedium of his recuperation by talking about politics and books. She told him to read
A People's History of the United States
by Howard Zinn, and he did. They still did not agree on essential matters but they had constructed a common language. Cooper could walk again by the time he went back home. The ordeal was not over—he would return to the hospital with various setbacks in the years to come—but a person who saw him on the street would not have known he had been to war.

Debbie, Desma, and Patrick Miller came home at the end of November 2008, right in the middle of Cooper's early flurry of phone calls from Walter Reed. Desma told Michelle about the IED explosion in their first
phone call. Michelle was furious and hurt that she had not been told. “The soldier in me understands, but the friend in me is really upset,” Michelle would say later. In December Michelle flew back to Indiana to spend Christmas with her family in Evansville, then drove north to the rolling hills of Brown County. No other county in the state had more square miles of untouched forest. The parks had always brought Michelle a sense of peace, and she hoped it would be a restful place for the others, a chance to unwind.

They gave the master suite to Patrick and Beth, while Debbie and Jeff took one of the smaller bedrooms. Billy had decided not to join them, and instead Michelle had brought her mother, who spent the weekend reading cheap crime novels. There was a large fireplace, a wooden carving of a black bear, a front porch with a swing, and an outdoor fire pit. They made tacos for dinner, then built a fire outside and got drunk. The temperature dropped into the low twenties, but they huddled close to the flames and stayed warm. Michelle had brought craft beer and the rest of them teased her about being highfalutin. Patrick was drinking Bud Light and Debbie was drinking sweet white wine. When she was halfway plastered Michelle remembered all over again that she had little in common with the kind of people who were drawn to the National Guard, and even less in common with their spouses. She liked Beth, but she didn't like Beth. They would never have been friends if Beth had not been married to Patrick, and Patrick had not served with her in Afghanistan. Beth was obsessed with Kenny Chesney, and that twangy kind of music drove Michelle crazy. They battled over the CD player. They also battled over the subject of peace. At one point Michelle started talking about Iraq Veterans Against the War, and somehow that led to pacifism in general and the particular stance taken against Vietnam by John Lennon. Beth said John Lennon was the scum of the earth. Michelle was just sober enough to realize there would be no profit in conducting a drunken argument with Patrick's wife. It was always more of a stretch to meet her fellow soldiers' partners. They did not share a deployment, they did not have that glue. Michelle and Patrick stayed up late playing pool, which had been one of the things they had always done at Shorty's.

The following day, Michelle nursed a hangover and worked on a scarf she was knitting. She was still learning how to knit. As the hours
slipped by, the large ball of blue- and fuchsia-colored yarn slowly shrank and the scarf grew longer and Michelle got a better sense of what the last year had been like for Patrick and for Debbie. At first Michelle had been elated—the armament team was back together, her friends had made it home alive. She had thought that would mean she could stop worrying, yet the more time she spent with Patrick and Debbie, the greater grew her disquiet. Debbie was drinking so much that Michelle could hardly believe what she was seeing—was it really possible for one person to consume so much wine and remain standing?—and Patrick Miller was swigging Bud Light pretty fast, too.

Michelle had expected her friends to remain constant, but they had proved mutable in unexpected ways. Patrick had always been a diehard fan of country music but now he wanted to listen to reggae. When Michelle asked what was going on with him and Bob Marley, Patrick said Beth had become afraid of him because he was so angry, and had asked if he would listen to reggae music to calm down. The more Patrick drank, the more he talked: he did not know why he had been sent to Iraq, he did not know what they had accomplished, he had not been able to direct his soldiers properly because he could not understand the purpose of their missions. Patrick said this tour had been bullshit.

To hear Patrick sound so disenchanted alarmed Michelle—Patrick never used to talk like that. He was 100 percent promilitary when he was himself. All his buddies had been sent elsewhere, Patrick said, none of them had been with people they trusted. Now one of his close friends had just checked into a mental clinic after attempting suicide. And another guy Patrick knew had succeeded in killing himself. That was Ken Martinson, who had been Angela Peterson's fiancé. Angela and Michelle had not been close for a while but Michelle would always remember doing push-ups with her in the hotel in Louisville. Now the other Alpha girls were saying that Angela was falling apart in slow motion. Iraq had been far worse than anything she had imagined, Michelle began to realize.