Soldier Girls (52 page)

Will and Linda showed up on Saturday afternoon. They were friendly and everything seemed fine but they left after only a few hours. Then Desma arrived, as the sun was getting low, in a red Chrysler Pacifica that she did not own. She had just begun picking up the pieces of her
old life and was in the middle of everything. She was in the middle of buying a used car (the dealer had allowed her to borrow the Pacifica for twenty-four hours) and she was in the middle of training a new puppy (another pug and beagle mix named Princess) and she was in the middle of remembering how to care for her children. They were still living with other relatives, although the two girls were going to move in with Desma at the end of the school year. All three children were staying with her temporarily over the winter break. They were in the car, and the dog was in the car, too. Charity was not in the car. Once more Desma was looking to Charity to make her feel secure in the midst of upheaval, but Charity had been pulling away.

It was shocking for the others to see Desma. She was shattered, not herself, could not focus long enough to have a coherent conversation. Right in the middle of telling a story, Desma turned around, leaned over a fence, and threw up on the ground. She said she did not know if she had caught a stomach bug or if she was throwing up because of her head injury. “I have this unbelievable headache,” she said. “I have this headache that is just out of control.” Desma threw up again fifteen minutes later, while Michelle held her hair away from her face and Debbie ran inside for a towel. Desma said she had been seeing doctors at the VA hospital in Indianapolis, but they had not yet been able to find a medicine she could tolerate that was strong enough to subdue the pain.

After only an hour Desma said she had to go, and by then Michelle wanted to start weeping. She spent the rest of the day knitting intently, trying to stitch herself back together, but she was so jangled that she knit the yarn too tightly, and that part of the scarf did not match the rest, so she had to undo her work and stitch it together all over again. She finished the scarf, but it was stuck on the knitting needles, and if she pulled it off it would unravel. Debbie tried to help Michelle figure out how to cast off but they were both wasted and neither could determine how to resolve the final stitches. They puzzled over this dilemma and tried things that didn't work and laughed about what half-assed knitters they were. Finally Michelle pulled out her laptop and found a YouTube video that showed how to cast off. They watched the video four times before Michelle got the scarf off the needles. “That was when I realized that something was pretty wrong,” Michelle would say later. “My
friends were different, and not in a good way. And I felt a lot of guilt around Debbie, because she shouldn't have gone. Who sends a fifty-five-year-old woman to Iraq? I mean, we're sending our grandmothers to war. Twice. That's how hard up we are. I felt a lot of guilt about all of it, because I was out in Colorado, starting my new life, and they were going through that for no reason. A lot of guilt and a lot of—I was just really worried and afraid for them.”

C
OMING HOME AGAIN
—becoming a civilian again—proved harder the second time around. After Debbie had returned from Afghanistan, she had been part of a close-knit team, and she had stayed in touch with the rest of armament. Just picking up the phone and speaking to Will or Michelle had made a difference. This time, however, nobody she knew had served with her in Iraq. She did not feel as comfortable calling Will now that he was married to Linda—and then Will made it clear that she should not call at all. It happened after a raucous Fourth of July party that took place in Jeff's mother's yard. Debbie and Jeff brought deerburgers, hot dogs, pepper slaw, beer, and wine. Jeff put on a fireworks display of professional quality, using firing tubes he had constructed to launch glowing whirligigs into the night.

Everybody came away with conflicting versions of what took place next, but Michelle heard that Debbie drank too much wine and threw her arms around Will and gave him an embrace that to Linda had looked romantic. Afterward Will ceased all contact with Debbie. And Michelle now lived in Colorado. Besides, neither of them had been to Iraq. This time around, Debbie was on her own.

Some mornings she woke up with the sensation of being enveloped in Saran Wrap. Debbie called it being inside the bubble. It was a feeling of profound alienation, but it manifested itself as an almost physical sensation, as though there were literally a transparent barrier cutting her off from the rest of the world. If she did not have to go to work, she had
a hard time getting out of bed. A day without appointments or obligations terrified her; she wanted someone to tell her where to go and what to do. The appalling endlessness of the empty hours stretching before her suggested that her life had no meaning. And the problems with her memory worsened.

When Debbie went to the VA clinic in Bloomington for medical appointments, her doctor asked how she was doing psychologically. At first Debbie maintained a cheerful front and said she was great. Later, when she revealed that she was having difficulty going to sleep at night and getting out of bed in the morning, the doctor recommended that she speak to a therapist. “Oh, no, I'm fine,” Debbie said. She hewed to the belief that mental issues were things a person should settle on her own. Surely there were other soldiers who needed the sessions more than she did. “Why should I take something if I wasn't really injured?” she would say later. “I didn't lose a leg. I didn't get blown up.”

During Debbie's childhood, her mother had experienced two nervous breakdowns, and had required medication to pull herself back together; Debbie did not want to be so weak. Her dad would have pulled himself together, she was sure, if he had gone to war. Over the next several months, however, Jeff pointed out that Debbie was having crying jags, and Michelle said she had grown concerned because she could not get Debbie on the telephone, as she was now screening calls, and had started to isolate herself. Debbie did not leave the house; she did not answer the phone; she did not seek out friends. Once the most gregarious person in the entire battalion, Debbie now shied away from human contact. People who had known Debbie for years said she was not herself.

One day, when Michelle flew back to Indiana to visit family, Debbie picked her up at the airport, and Michelle saw that she was drinking alcohol out of a coffee mug while she drove, smack in the middle of the day. Red-flag behavior, Michelle thought. To Michelle, it seemed as though the Debbie she knew was slowly vanishing.

Michelle spoke to Desma about her worries, but felt shy about confronting Debbie, who was thirty years her senior. The older woman was an authority figure—it was like confronting a parent. Eventually, however, Michelle and Desma told Debbie they feared that she might be drinking too much. “They do [worry],” Debbie would acknowledge
later. “And I know they do. And probably it's somewhat accurate, in a sense, that they worry. For me, having that whole year [in Iraq] kind of to myself, there was something about being alone like that—you can find solace in things that maybe you shouldn't. Being the oldest one, I probably take what they say with a grain of salt and go on my way. Not that that's the right approach, necessarily. But it's just stuff that I have to work through myself. I always feel if you are able to pay your bills, and take care of other people, and keep a job, then what's wrong, as long as you are not hurting anybody else?”

And Debbie could still hold a job, and pay her bills, and take care of other people. Soon after she returned from Iraq, she resumed caring for everybody in her family. As her mother's health deteriorated, Debbie spent increasing amounts of time accompanying her mother to doctors' offices. Debbie's parents turned to her for help with basic household chores such as grocery shopping. Then Debbie's daughter ran into marital problems and subsequently lost her job. Debbie tried to help by caring for Jaylen, sometimes overnight. Often she invited Jeff's granddaughter Mallori to sleep over, too. The two girls shared no blood, but they had the common bond of knowing Jeff and Debbie as their grandparents. On the weekends, Jeff built big fires outside, and they roasted marshmallows as the sparks flew upward into the dark.

Debbie gave and gave and gave. She did not know how to receive support, though, except from Jeff, who had a quiet way of providing help without fuss. Most of her peers had retired from the National Guard, and Debbie found she had fewer friends at drill. She turned fifty-seven in the summer of 2009, and there was talk of another deployment coming the following year, when she would turn fifty-eight. She could see sixty approaching; Debbie did not think she had another deployment in her. She retired in 2010. Belonging to the National Guard had been an essential part of her identity for almost a quarter century, and severing her membership in the group left a large void. She found herself still automatically checking the calendar to see when her next drill weekend might be, even though for her there would be no more drill weekends.

During this same period, Debbie found she could not extricate herself from a stubborn depression, and finally realized she needed help. She started seeing a therapist who worked at the VA clinic in Bloomington.
Delia McGlocklin was a veteran herself—she had been in the air force—as well as a licensed clinical social worker. She was in her thirties, served as the president of her homeowners association, had a husband and children, and had an impressive collection of fashionable shoes. McGlocklin helped Debbie acquire a prescription for antidepressants. And when Debbie told the social worker about the sensation of being trapped inside Saran Wrap, McGlocklin said it was normal to have such feelings after a deployment. Debbie wanted to hug the woman, because she had thought she was losing her mind.

Desma Brooks was now living with Charity Elliott in a small town outside of Bedford, Indiana, in the central part of the state, but she drove down to southern Indiana almost every week, ferrying her children back and forth between different households. Desma often stopped in Bloomington to see Debbie on her way to or from southern Indiana. It was good to get out of the car and stretch her legs. And it was good to see someone else who had been through the same two deployments and the same two attempts to make it back home. But Desma could see that everybody else relied on Debbie, and she didn't want to add to Debbie's burdens, so she kept things light and rarely disclosed her struggles. At one point, however, Desma happened to mention that she was seeing a therapist at the VA hospital.

Debbie said, “So am I.”

“Really?” Desma said. “Who are you seeing?”

“Delia McGlocklin,” said Debbie.

“Me, too!” Desma said.

It was an immense relief for Debbie to learn that she was not alone in seeking help. At least with Michelle and Desma, maybe she did not have to hide her problems so scrupulously. “There's no judgment there,” Debbie would say later. Debbie and Desma gossiped about Delia McGlocklin—Desma marveled at how many pairs of shoes the social worker owned, and Debbie described introducing Delia to her favorite doughnuts. They asked each other if the therapy sessions helped. Yes, they concluded—although Desma was locked in a battle of wills with the therapist over how far back into her past they should dig.

For months, McGlocklin had been trying to get Desma to talk about her childhood. What had happened when she was in middle school? Why had she been put into foster care? The therapist suspected that the answer to some of Desma's current problems lay in unresolved issues from the past. Psychologists had been puzzling over the question of why some soldiers returned with post-traumatic stress disorder and others did not, even when they had been exposed to similar kinds of shock. Two million soldiers had been sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, and hundreds of thousands had returned with PTSD, but there was not a direct correlation between the severity of the soldiers' wartime experiences and their psychological responses. One theory held that soldiers who had experienced traumas earlier in life might be more vulnerable to PTSD. Delia McGlocklin believed that something had happened to Desma in her youth that was sudden, unexpected, and out of her control—some other silver box had gone off. Perhaps Desma's experiences in Iraq were even more disturbing than they would otherwise have been because they were compounded by that earlier disaster.

When McGlocklin asked about the incident that had led to her removal from her mother's care, however, Desma told her it was of no consequence. It had nothing to do with today. There was no point in bringing up stuff she had left behind so long ago. As far as Desma was concerned, the therapist's inclination to probe into the past only added to her stress. “Patient reported that since our last session she has been thinking about her avoidance to talk about the bad stuff,” McGlocklin wrote in one of her many progress notes that became part of Desma's lengthy VA file. “Patient reports that when she started to think about it, it started to flood her with emotion.” But the only emotion Desma could name was anger—anger with McGlocklin for making her return to matters she wanted to keep at a distance. McGlocklin suggested that Desma attend a women's group therapy session. Desma said, “I don't want to sit in a circle and hold hands and talk about our problems, I really don't.”

Desma had been dealing with a difficult constellation of symptoms ever since she had arrived home at the end of 2008. During those first days at home, Desma had not even told her children that she was back in Indiana, because she did not feel well enough to care for them. She went to sleep with a headache and she woke up with a headache—her head
hurt all the time. On some days she was sensitive to light and on others she had vertigo. Noise magnified the headache. She could not remember things properly. And Desma was angry, all the time, every day. It was a snarly, pissy kind of rage, her primary souvenir from Iraq. She did not think she would be a good mother in that condition.