Soldier Girls (55 page)

By then, Desma had started seeing someone new. Earlier that year she had run into Roy Dishner at a workshop run by the National Guard in Bloomington. Dishner had been Desma's squad leader during the time she had spent in the 293rd, before she had transferred out of that unit. He was one of the few men who had been warm, when others had refused to speak to her at all. In October, Dishner had come to Lafayette to see Desma during her drill weekend. Because Desma had become a noncommissioned officer, too, the rules governing interactions between them had changed; previously they had been forbidden to fraternize, but now it was permitted. They had gone out to dinner and talked for hours. After that, Dishner had started calling frequently and they had seen each other a few more times. On the day after Christmas, when Desma pulled up at the trailer, carting a load of moving boxes in her red Pacifica, she found Roy parked in her driveway.

“I brought you some plates,” he said.

She wasn't sure what she wanted, but she liked that he was kind.

H
EALING TOOK YEARS.
In some regards, they never fully returned to the people they had been before. There was no going home, in the sense of going back to the way things had been earlier—there was only going forward. Maybe, out of them all, the person who changed the most was Akbar Khan. He came to visit that Christmas, just as Desma was moving. He had spent the better part of the previous year working at a Home Depot in Bayonne, New Jersey, operating a forklift for $11.75 an hour. He had moved to Oregon after failing to find work in North Carolina, and then to New Jersey, where he was sharing a small apartment with a friend from Afghanistan. He arrived bearing gifts. He brought Debbie a heart-shaped necklace, and Michelle a diamond ring. Akbar told Michelle that he could not really propose, because he was already married, but she was his soul mate. The implication was that if he had been allowed to make the choice, he would have picked Michelle to be his wife.

Michelle accepted the ring because of the high regard she had for Akbar and because he had saved $1,000 to buy it by operating a forklift at Home Depot, but when Michelle told Billy that she had accepted an engagement ring from another man, he got terribly angry. She loved Billy, so she did not bring the ring home—she left it with Desma. Desma kept the ring in her closet, along with the sky blue burka that Akbar had helped her find in Afghanistan. One day, while they were still at Camp Phoenix, she had put the burka on inside the B-Hut. Michelle had
walked right past her, thinking she was an Afghan woman. “I was a blue lampshade,” Desma would say later. Alexis and Paige had marveled over the burka when Desma had shown it to them. She let them dress up in it and show it off to their friends, who all wanted a turn looking out at the world from behind the blue mesh window.

Michelle and Akbar were that way for a long time: psychologically entwined, physically far apart, never able to muster a proper romance, never able to keep things truly platonic. They were like the two countries to which they belonged, unable to extricate themselves, yet unable to forge a real partnership. Then Akbar heard that a company called Mission Essential Personnel was paying linguists unusually high salaries. Akbar moved back to Afghanistan and began working inside the detention facility at Bagram Airfield. He earned $184,000 a year translating during interviews with detainees and during legal proceedings—the pay was so good because there were very few people who could do the work. It was an awful job, though. After he started spending his days at the prison, Akbar began to wilt into a darker person. He grew sarcastic and bitter, an entirely different person from the young man Michelle had tried to shield from Mountain Dew. It was not safe for him to let his family know where he was working; it was not safe for him to visit his wife or son; there was the question of whether it would ever be safe for him to work anywhere else in Afghanistan, after so many members of the Taliban had seen his face.

At the same time, he earned so much money that he bought a new house for his family, set his brothers up in business, purchased costly digital cameras for himself, and showered friends with gifts. He had to return to the United States every year to renew his visa, and during one of his visits, Akbar was hanging out with Debbie one day when he announced he was going out for cigarettes. He returned instead with a flat-screen television set, which he insisted on giving to Debbie, despite her vehement protests. Later he gave Debbie and Desma each an iPad, and Michelle an iPod Touch. Then he sent Michelle a pair of fancy sunglasses that had probably cost several hundred dollars. They had white plastic frames and gold-tinted lenses and made her look like a movie star.

Michelle left her position at AmeriCorps, began working at Colorado
Brownfields Foundation, and then got a job at a nonprofit called Veterans Green Jobs, which sought to reduce dependence on oil. Her car died, and Akbar tried to buy her a new one, but she told him she could not accept a vehicle from him—it would not be fair to Billy. They were trying to make things work. Michelle was twenty-eight years old, and half her friends had gotten married. She wanted more than anything else in the world to have children. Billy felt their relationship had some negative aspects, however, and he was not sure they could fix what was wrong.

After Michelle started working at Veterans Green Jobs, she became close friends with her colleague Garett Reppenhagen, the son of a Vietnam War veteran and the grandson of two World War II veterans, who had worked as a sniper in Iraq. While there, he had started writing an antiwar blog and later had become the first active duty member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. Reppenhagen introduced Michelle to Denver's progressive veterans community. The Veterans of Foreign Wars had been established in Denver in 1899 by veterans returning from the Spanish-American War, and Michelle started hanging around with some of the other veterans she met at VFW Post 1, the oldest VFW post in existence. Izzy Abbass, a forward-thinking veteran of the Gulf War, was in the middle of transforming the post. He had stopped serving alcohol, had started holding meetings in the Rooster and Moon coffee shop, and was organizing a lot of outdoor activities. He was also trying to make the organization friendly to women.

For the first time, Michelle found a group of people who shared both her personal history and her political orientation. Michelle stopped hiding her past and talked openly about her deployment. It was a relief. She began to see that it had been somewhat haphazard, who had experienced an easier deployment, and who had experienced a harder one; who had escaped physically untouched, and whose bodies had been changed forever. At one point Michelle went snowshoeing in Rocky Mountain National Park with a group of veterans from Colorado. Michelle and a nurse who was in her sixties were the only two women in the group. They talked about how much the role of women in the military had changed during their lifetimes; when the nurse had enlisted, that job had been the only option available, but by the time Michelle had
enlisted, women could become truck drivers or weapons mechanics. Now people in Washington were discussing the possibility of allowing women to serve in combat positions.

Coincidentally, every individual in the group had chosen to wear their combat boots. Michelle had not been able to find anything better than her well-worn Gore-Tex boots, in terms of waterproofing and warmth; apparently the other vets all felt the same way. They had so much in common and yet they were so different. “I was making jokes about being able to get pedicures at Bagram,” Michelle would say afterward. “Because I did—every time I went to Bagram I would get a pedicure. But I was joking with some of these ex-marines, and I was speaking to someone who was in Fallujah. Jordan, who was with us, he got hit with an RPG, and it almost killed him. He was a marine. So, you know, me saying stuff like that to those guys, it makes my experience seem so trivial. And they look at it that way, too. I mean, they were like, Oh, my God, we were sleeping on cardboard boxes. So then it's like, why do I have any feelings that are negative about my experience at all? Because it was very easy, compared to that. But these wars are different for everybody, and they're different every day, in terms of easy, difficult, painful, fun. At any given moment, something could happen to you that will change the rest of your life. That's the thing about living in a combat zone. You could live through a whole year and escape unscathed, where the worst scar that you have is your smallpox vaccination, but it depends on where you're standing and in what moment. Everything is so random that you never know.”

Jordan had gotten hit, and Michelle had not, but she remembered the sound that the RPGs had made when they had fallen around her. She joked about getting pedicures, and she could not compare her experience to that of a marine who had been to Fallujah, but she also knew that she could have hit an old land mine or a new IED. While spending time with other members of Colorado's progressive veteran community, Michelle heard the term “economic draft” for the first time, which was another moment of epiphany—yes, she thought, that's what George W. Bush had done. He had used money to draft the same poor people over and over again to fight his fight, and he had left his own class virtually untouched. Most of the veterans she befriended
were men, and sometimes they made Billy feel uncomfortable. “I would like to meet one other female veteran who has a successful relationship with a civilian man,” Michelle would say later. “The gender stuff is really wacky. Because it is really important for me to be in the veteran community, which is also 85 percent male. And I had a very masculine job. You know, it gives me a very colorful past, and I think when I first met him he was fascinated by it, but now I feel it's just some sort of a liability. I don't know, it's so hard for me to reconcile being with him and being a veteran. He's really antimilitary. Anytime he talks about my experience he paints me like a victim. And I don't think I see myself like that. But he's really important to me. He's a really amazing man. Good men are hard to find.”

Meanwhile, Desma kept speeding. On March 29, 2010, she was pulled over for doing eighty-four in a seventy-mile-per-hour speed zone. She had been trying to make it to Indianapolis for an appointment at the VA. “Case manager spoke with patient by phone,” wrote a staff person at the VA hospital. “Patient . . . is being detained by state police. . . . Case manager could hear the police in the background during phone conversation. Patient asked that message be relayed to Dr. Mottley. Patient did not foresee that she could make the appointment on time.”

That same month, Desma heard that the military was going to evaluate veterans for PTSD according to different measures. She called the VA hospital and said she wanted her disability rating to be reconsidered. “Veteran would like to appeal her rating,” noted a staff person. “Veteran believes she should be rated for PTSD.” After that phone call, the VA staff added a progress note to Desma's VA file saying that she had tested positive for PTSD. The note enumerated the symptoms Desma had described in the phone call. Did she have nightmares or difficult thoughts about a traumatic experience? Yes. Was she constantly on guard, or easily startled? Yes. Did she feel numb or detached from others? Yes. From her surroundings? Yes. Along with the earlier diagnosis of TBI, the PTSD diagnosis boosted her overall disability rating to 50 percent. This increased the financial compensation she received for her disabilities to $1,150 a month.

Desma had been dating Roy Dishner since Christmas, even though they lived 130 miles apart. The trailer where she lived was outside
Bedford, while his house was close to Hagerstown, two and a half hours to the north. Roy courted her with old-fashioned industry. They talked on the phone frequently, and about once a month he came to spend the weekend. Roy lived by himself in a large, two-story house, and he had the air of a person who had been lonely for a long time. He was also reliable, punctual, polite, and scrupulously honest; Desma found his trustworthiness comforting. He was careful and precise, a mechanic who always kept track of his tools. Locked in the basement of his house was his extensive gun collection, and he liked to fix old tractors for fun. When he was not wearing his uniform, he often wore a gray T-shirt that said
ARMY
, and in his free time he watched movies on the Military Channel about soldiers doing heroic things.

At first Michelle viewed the relationship with skepticism, but then she learned that Roy believed in saving energy as passionately as she did. After he had returned from his deployment to Iraq, he had decided the best way to avoid future bloodshed would be to transform his home into a model of energy conservation: he had insulated the walls, weather-stripped every door, replaced all the windows, and put in a geothermal heating system. Michelle approved of Desma's new romance.

In May 2010, Michelle persuaded Desma and Debbie to meet her in Washington, DC, to support the work of Veterans Green Jobs. A clean energy bill known as the American Power Act had been introduced by Senator John Kerry and Senator Joseph Lieberman. One month earlier, an oil rig had exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, and it was spilling crude oil into the water at the rate of one thousand barrels a day; people in Washington thought the disaster might boost support for the bill. Veterans Green Jobs was arranging conversations between veterans from swing states who believed in clean energy and staffers on Capitol Hill. Michelle asked Desma to recruit other soldiers, too, so Desma called Roy and said, “Hey, you want to go to DC for the weekend?” Roy wanted to know how much that was going to cost. “Apparently it's all-expenses-paid, you just have to have business attire,” Desma said. She helped Roy buy his first suit, and the guys at the armory taught him how to make a knot in his tie.

When they met with the young, middle-class staffers who worked for
members of Congress, few of whom had volunteered, Desma stole the show. She told the staffers about driving the gun truck, about running ass, about what had happened when the bomb had gone off. It was the first time Michelle had heard her speak in detail about the IED. Desma made all the connections—how the supplies that she had been escorting were going to military bases to feed soldiers who were guarding an oil pipeline.