Soldier Girls (53 page)

Also, the kind of homecoming that the military had organized was not the way she wanted to greet her children. Some vast hoopla inside an airplane hangar—that's what Desma and Charity had walked into, right off the plane. Then, after perhaps an hour or two of socializing, the soldiers had separated from the crowd and boarded buses to Camp Atterbury for demobilization. Why drag the kids to some circus act, tell them she was back, and then tell them she was leaving again? It had been easier not to tell them she was home at all. “I needed to start to adjust on my own before I brought my kids into that,” Desma would say later. “And I don't like crowds, so when you come off the plane into this big hangar and they release you, it is a nightmare. We are all happy to see our families—we are ecstatic to see our families. But doing it in a dog and pony show . . . let's parade the soldiers in, and then put us back on a bus, and send us to Atterbury for five days. Let's just be traumatizing to our families again. I'm sure they would have loved to be there and greet me, but I did not want to have to tell them, I can't come home, I got to go to Atterbury. You drove up here to Indianapolis and missed a day of school for a crappy cookie and watered-down Kool-Aid.”

In the first weeks back, Desma spent most of her time reading. She worked her way through the entire
Inheritance Cycle
, by Christopher Paolini, a four-book series about a sixteen-year-old boy who receives a terrible battle wound and is magically healed by dragons. The books offered a complete escape from reality, and she buried herself in their pages. She called the children to wish them a Happy Thanksgiving but did not go see them over the holiday. Briefly, she tried taking online courses at the University of Phoenix, thinking she could complete the bachelor's degree that she had begun before the deployment, but she found it impossible to concentrate. She stopped taking the courses and started seeing Delia McGlocklin. Eventually, over the course of two years' worth of therapy, McGlocklin would come to define Desma's core psychological issues as the avoidance of thoughts or feelings associated
with trauma, anger management problems, and hypervigilance, but it took some time for McGlocklin to assess her new client. When they first met, McGlocklin simply asked how she had been spending her days. Desma said, “I'm just staying home and relaxing and reading a lot.”

It was all she could manage at the beginning. Then in December 2008, the girls mentioned that they were performing in a Christmas pageant, and Desma promised to be there. She picked up Josh first, then drove over to see her daughters. “It's about time,” said Alexis. They went to the pageant, drove up to central Indiana to spend the weekend together at Charity's place, and then Desma drove the children back to their respective guardians. Josh was sticking with his plan to live with his surrogate father through the end of high school. And Desma had decided it would be better for the two girls to remain with their father for the duration of the school year.

It was hard to pull a family back together again after a yearlong absence, as Desma learned in ways both big and small. While she was in southern Indiana, Desma found her dog Goldie at a neighbor's house. Jimmy had let the animal loose, and a young girl who lived up the street had adopted the stray. When Desma said she wanted Goldie, the girl said Desma was stealing her dog. “But in reality, it was the dog I left when I went to Iraq,” Desma said afterward. “And I wanted my dog back. I had the dog in my arms and I climbed in the car and I felt like such a shit bag for taking this kid's dog, but it was really my dog.” The problem was Goldie did not know she was Desma's dog anymore. After the dog started whining, Desma let go of Goldie, and watched the animal run back to the girl. She cried and cried about that, alone in her car, as she drove away. It was still her dog as far as she was concerned, even if nobody else understood.

Then she visited the elementary school where the two girls were enrolled and had a confusing conversation with the woman in the front office. Desma brought up the subject of how Paige was doing in fifth grade.

“She's in fourth grade,” said the woman behind the counter.

“What do you mean?” Desma asked. “She did fourth grade last year.”

“But she didn't successfully complete the fourth grade,” the woman said.

“Excuse me?” said Desma.

She could not fathom how one of her daughters could have failed
a year of elementary school and nobody thought to tell her. It would not have happened if she had been in Indiana, she was certain—Desma believed that Paige was repeating the fourth grade because her mother had been in Iraq, and her father had not known how to make her do her homework. When Desma asked Paige what had happened, Paige said that she had been told everything would be fine if she went to summer school. Desma could not help herself—she snapped at the child, saying apparently that hadn't gone so well, either. Paige's failure seemed commingled with her own choices, and she found it hard to separate herself from Paige enough to parent her well.

Two weeks later, all three children came to spend the Christmas holiday. They did not do much—Desma did not even try to make fudge or chocolate-covered pretzels, which she usually did at that time of year—mostly watched a lot of movies and ran a few errands. Desma took the children along with her when she went to buy a new car. At the dealership, she asked for something used, with all-wheel drive, and a third row of seats. Her head hurt and it was hard to make decisions. The salesman brought her a new Ford with two-wheel drive. Desma told him, “Don't yank my chain, I said something used with all-wheel drive.” He said he had this one vehicle. Her kids were inside the Pacifica before Desma could get a good look at the car. “Mom, it's got a DVD player!” Paige announced. “Mom, it's got leather seats!” cried Alexis. Josh took a look at the sticker on the window and said, “Mom, you can't afford this.”

Desma checked out the car: it was three years old and had thirty thousand miles on the odometer. She could haul three kids and still have room for friends. Both her mom and her mom's oxygen tank would fit inside. But Josh was right; it was more than she should spend. She hesitated. Then she told the car salesman that he had probably bought the car at an auction for no more than $2,000, so there was no need to toy with her on the price, and by the way, she had just gotten back from Iraq and she understood he gave discounts to people who served in the military. The car had been priced at $21,000 but the salesman offered it to her for $11,000. He let her drive the car out to Brown County and back again. She bought the Pacifica the following day. Perhaps only Desma's closest friends, like Stacy Glory or Mary Bell or Michelle Fischer, could
see how heroic it was, that she had managed to buy a car while caring for her children at the same time. Desma could barely function.

Driving freaked her out. The roads were wide open, and she felt frighteningly unprotected. Trusting civilians barreled along without scanning the roadsides, and hers was the only moving dot on the GPS. She missed the rest of her convoy. Desma was driving the Pacifica through Bedford, with a marked police car on her tail, when she spotted several small black plastic bags of trash in the middle of the road. She locked the brakes and swerved. The cop almost rear-ended her. Desma could not see properly, could not breathe, could not think. The cop pulled up behind her, lights flashing.

“I'm so sorry!” Desma told the officer. “I didn't mean to freak out, but you don't understand.”

“Well, help me understand,” he said.

“I just got back,” Desma said. “I've been home all of a few weeks and somebody's put all this trash in the road!”

“Just got back from where?”

“Iraq.”

The cop said they should get out of the road and talk. They both pulled into the parking lot in front of a pizza place. Desma sat on the curb and the cop sat down beside her. He asked her what had happened. She had hit a roadside bomb, Desma said. It had just looked like a box. Now there were bags of trash in the road—people should pick up their shit! Her hands were still shaking. The cop told her that she needed to get less panicky, or maybe she should not drive.

But Desma spent many hours on the road. Charity lived in central Indiana, while her children lived seventy-five miles to the south. On the weekends, Desma drove down to pick up the girls and Josh, back up so they could spend the weekend in central Indiana with Charity, down again to bring the children back to their guardians, and up again to get herself back home. On the highway, she hugged the bumper of the car in front of her, driving as close as she could, because that's what you did in a convoy—you did not leave room for the enemy. The other drivers did not know they were in a convoy, however, and they sped up to put distance between themselves and Desma. So she sped up, too. She got
pulled over for speeding so many times that she lost track of the number of tickets. Maybe it was thirteen traffic violations? Two for disregarding stop signs, two for reckless driving in a construction zone, nine for speeding—something like that. At one point, driving too fast out on a country road, Desma topped a hill and saw trash strewn across the road. She spun out.

It struck her friends as a little bit crazy how much time she spent behind the wheel—a little too much like being assigned to run convoy security—but Desma resisted any suggestion that she was purposefully repeating the past. “I feel like all my time is spent in the car,” Desma told her therapist. Delia McGlocklin advised Desma to spend less time on the road, given that she had hit a roadside bomb, and driving was clearly stressful. Desma snapped that she did not have a choice. She could not imagine rearranging her life so that she did not always have to drive—she lived with Charity, and her children lived seventy-five miles away. That was the way it was. Beginning in February 2009, she also started commuting to a new job at Camp Atterbury that required her to drive an hour and twenty minutes each way. Driving to work, sometimes Desma would go into the mindless trance she knew from Iraq—that stupor she used to enter, ten or eleven hours into a mission, when she would just follow the vehicle in front of her without thinking. One day Desma snapped back into the present moment and saw a sign by the side of the highway that said
GREENWOOD
. What the hell was she doing up there? She had driven forty minutes past the exit for Camp Atterbury. But she did not have an unconscious desire to relive the hours she had spent as a truck driver in Iraq, she said—it was just the way things were.

Desma had told the group home for troubled youth that she could not return to work there shortly after she got back. She did not trust herself to be around kids in the foster care system. “After being hit with an IED—I am a much angrier person,” she would say later. “I had to go and tell them that, you know, with the headaches and the anger and the issues I was having after my last tour, I was unable to come back to work. And they were distraught. I still get emails saying I really wish you were here from the staff.” The job at Camp Atterbury paid $40,000 a year, approximately double what she had been making at the group home. She considered herself lucky—the salary transformed her finances. She had
to reenlist to get the job, however, because it was known as a dual status position, meaning that it could only be filled by a soldier currently serving in some branch of the military. Desma reenlisted for one year. If she wanted to keep the job at Atterbury, she would have to sign up again the following year.

At Camp Atterbury, Desma did the same type of work she had done at Camp Phoenix, in Afghanistan—she tracked maintenance on military vehicles and equipment. The job was familiar and Camp Atterbury was familiar. What was unfamiliar was how the new job put her inside the military environment full-time. Her deployment had ended, but she still wore a uniform, addressed her superiors by rank, and took orders. On the one hand, she was surrounded by constant reminders of what had happened in Iraq, and on the other hand, she was also surrounded by people who understood what she was living through. One day in March 2009, another soldier who worked in the motor pool plugged in a carbon monoxide detector to see if it worked. The carbon monoxide detector emitted a high-pitched squeal. Desma was back in the vehicle, surrounded by darkness, listening to that sound. She could smell the smoke, she could taste the dirt.

“I got to go,” she told the other soldier, and stumbled outside.

He came out, too, sat down beside her. “I'm so sorry,” he said.

He had been in Iraq—she didn't have to explain.

Later a battalion that was about to deploy set up an IED simulation right outside the motor pool. There was .50-caliber fire and M4 fire and the thump of roadside bombs. None of it was live, but it all sounded real. Desma was not the only person in the motor pool who hit the ground. At home, Desma started hollering in the night. “I'm never going to get any sleep if you don't shut the hell up,” Charity told her. When Josh spent the weekend, he said, “Mom, what's wrong with you?” After Desma woke up, however, she remembered nothing. “Denies nightmares but significant other reports that she screams out for help in her sleep,” wrote Delia McGlocklin in her notes.

Meanwhile, at a routine health assessment that had taken place during the same month when she had started working at Camp Atterbury, Desma had gotten labeled a problem. Medical staff on contract with the military had been checking soldiers' hearing, vision, physical strength,
and mental health. At every station, Desma had been forced to sit and wait. Toward the end of the process, she found herself sitting next to a guy who had just been told to repeat the entire process all over again; she knew he had already gone through every station, because she had waited with him at each juncture, but somehow the staff had neglected to check off his progress on the required list. As far as the army was concerned, he hadn't done the exercise at all. The whole experience was aggravating—the stupidity of the assessment, the idiocy of the guy being told to go through it twice, the way the exercise was consuming valuable hours. Her head was screaming. The doctor who conducted her mental health screening bragged that he was going down to Haiti to provide assistance after the earthquake. He sounded pretty pleased with himself.