Soldier Girls (56 page)

Now that Michelle lived in Colorado, it was rare for the three of them to have two days together, and the trip felt like a reunion. Desma had never been to Washington before, and they walked around sightseeing until their feet hurt. They saw the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument and the White House. They were standing on a corner when a motorcade passed by. As the car slowed to make a turn, someone inside started to roll up a window. Before the mirrored glass obscured her view, Desma glanced inside and found herself looking at the familiar face of President Hamid Karzai.

“Look, there's Karzai,” she told Roy.

“Who's that?” Roy asked.

“He's the current president of Afghanistan,” Desma said.

“Really?” Roy asked skeptically.

“Yeah,” Desma asserted. “He's a crook.”

Karzai had come to speak with President Barack Obama about his plans to withdraw troops. Obama had already begun withdrawing troops from Iraq, and had announced that he intended to start pulling soldiers out of Afghanistan in the middle of the following year. Since they had left that country, Desma had heard a lot about corruption there. It had tarnished the once shiny sense of pride she had taken in being part of a military force that had helped bring about Afghanistan's first democratic election. A lot had happened since that woman with the black scarf had knelt down before her in the middle of Camp Phoenix and said thank you.

That evening they went out to a Japanese restaurant. Desma ordered a margarita and they gave her Patrón on ice; everybody else drank too much sake. They sang karaoke: Sir Mix-a-Lot's “Baby Got Back” and then “Nobody” by Sylvia. At some point they moved on to a pool hall, where at last call Desma ordered not one but two drinks. It was a mad
scramble to catch the early flight home the next morning and at first Roy could not rouse Desma. He went for reinforcements. “Come help me get her dressed,” Roy begged Debbie and Michelle. “What's everybody doing here?” Desma asked when they finally got her conscious. Debbie and Michelle were fast friends with Roy after that.

In the summer of 2010, Desma moved in to live with Roy. “Patient reports that since her last appointment she has started to try to ‘let new people in my life,' ” wrote Delia McGlocklin. At about the same time, the therapist informed Desma that she would be leaving the clinic at the VA. McGlocklin would be able to see Desma for only a few more months. “Started to process with patient the writer's transition out of clinic,” noted McGlocklin. That fall, Paige and Alexis started over at new schools in Hagerstown, Indiana. Alexis began fifth grade and Paige began sixth grade. The problems Desma had been having with her daughters had not gone away; Alexis seemed perpetually angry and talked back a lot, while Paige grew quiet and started cutting herself. Desma covered Roy's refrigerator with notes to remind herself of the meetings she had with their teachers, but it was still a struggle to show up. She had never been that way before. Desma had always made certain to be the kind of mother who remembered commitments, because her own mother had not. The girls were disappointed in her and she was disappointed in herself.

Roy had no children of his own, and he met Desma's when they were half grown. They were not small, not adorable—he had missed all that. They were surly preteens going through what they would almost certainly look back on as a difficult period in their lives. Roy tried to muster the requisite patience but in some ways he was rigid. He fretted if Desma hung pictures in places where he would not have hung them; he asked Desma not to wash his clothes because he liked to fold his laundry in a certain fashion. The children were messy and they did not obey orders. He had to tell himself they were not part of a squad that was under his command. Put your dishes in the dishwasher, he said more gently. Don't speak to your mother like that. He was trying but there was friction.

Roy lived to the northeast of Camp Atterbury. Desma's commute to work was virtually the same as before, but the drive down to southern Indiana was more than twice as long. Her ex-husband started meeting her halfway so she didn't have to do all the driving. Nevertheless, that
November Desma was pulled over for speeding yet again. This time the police officer said she was a “habitual offender” and threw her into the county jail for the weekend. Desma shrugged off the episode. When asked later if she had been driving too fast, she would reply, “That's what he said. I coulda gone faster.” Michelle felt as though she were watching a statistic play out. “You know how veterans come home with dramatically increased risk behaviors?” she would ask. “Well, Desma was speeding to the point where they arrest you. She never had that behavior before.”

Roy saw that Desma was spending $1,200 a month to fill the tank of the red Pacifica. In December 2010 he cosigned on a loan so that she could buy a blue Prius. Desma lined up a series of five stickers on the rear bumper of the new car, her own little joke about the last decade. The bumper stickers said
AFGHANISTAN, SNAFU, WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT, BOHICA, IRAQ.
(Translated into civilian, that was, “Afghanistan, Situation Normal All Fucked Up, What the Fuck, Bend Over Here It Comes Again, Iraq.”) Desma kept driving long distances, but she did slow down. She also discovered books on tape, and listened to
The Help
and Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, which made the hours on the road less boring.

Even as Desma was pulling her personal life together, she fell out of favor at work. The people who had served with Desma in Iraq had known why she was angry, and had not judged her when her weapon had been taken away. As long as she worked alongside soldiers who had also deployed with the 139th, Desma had been understood. Her first NCO evaluations had been glowing. “Extraordinary initiative,” a supervisor in the 139th had written back in May 2009, just a few months after Desma had become an NCO. “Dedicated hardworking individual who shows her responsibility. . . . Exacting approach to work ethic; pays attention to detail. . . . Possesses the leadership skills necessary to lead any company on the battlefield.”

At the end of that year, however, Desma had been forced to transfer out of the 139th because it was a field artillery regiment and technically not open to female soldiers. She could be transferred into that regiment during a deployment when the soldiers in it were acting in a supportive role, such as providing convoy security, but she could not belong to it at home. After leaving the 139th, Desma had transferred into a unit
she had never belonged to before that was part of the 638th Support Battalion. Her next evaluation, written in January 2010, had remained positive. A supervisor had written, “Constantly sought ways to learn, grow, and improve. . . . Projected confidence and authority. . . . Always a team player.” But one year later there was a stark shift in how Desma was described. “Struggles with following up with tasks,” wrote another supervisor from the 638th in February 2011. “Lacks desire to improve overall physical fitness. . . . Needs to realize importance of tact when questioning orders.”

Desma received the critical assessment shortly after getting crosswise with her company commander. Desma had wanted to attend a Warrior Leader Course—the first leadership course that noncommissioned officers were supposed to fulfill to qualify for promotions. She enrolled in a class that was being taught in Utah. But her supervisor told her that she could not go because of her profile, which stated that she could not carry a weapon, and canceled her flight. Desma asked that the company commander write a memo stating that she was the victim of a combat injury, so that she would be deemed eligible to attend the class. “All he had to do was write a one-page memorandum saying that my profile was the result of a combat injury and that I was fully capable of going to school,” Desma would say later. “He would not do it.” According to Desma, the commander expressed doubt about Desma's claim to have been injured. Injudiciously, Desma lashed out with fury in her voice, telling the commander that he had no idea what soldiers went through.

Her commander said he knew what it was like to be in a combat zone.

“I know what it's like to be in a combat zone as well, sir,” Desma told him. “I've been there.”

“Well, how are you injured?” he wanted to know.

The commander did not appear to be aware that she had spent a year driving a gun truck at the front of a supply convoy or that she had hit an IED, according to Desma. Even after she described the bombing, he seemed unconvinced that she had suffered a real injury. Desma must have looked fine to him; perhaps he thought that because he could see no sign of her medical challenges, she was manufacturing everything. All over the country, soldiers with traumatic brain injury were running into similar problems. Within the medical community, it was widely
known that damage to the frontal lobe could cause memory issues, irritability, poor impulse control, and increased risk-taking due to a compromised ability to regulate behavior. But the public, including many in the military, did not know that traumatic brain injury caused these issues. Soldiers with TBI often just looked like difficult people. Medical personnel were calling traumatic brain injury “the silent epidemic” because they were seeing so many people with TBI and because it was so hard for others to grasp the extent of their liabilities.

Desma hated working for that particular commander, but she could not find another job that would pay as well. She reenlisted with the National Guard for an additional six years—her new official end of service date fell in 2016—so that she could keep her job. As time went by, her standing did not improve. “Life is easier in a combat zone,” Desma declared at one point. All she meant was that in many ways, her life had been simpler at Q-West, when other people had done her laundry, fixed her meals, and planned her day. Her supervisors appeared to view the comment as a sign of instability, however, as someone added a note to her military file that said, “Process for fit for duty.” If a commander considered a soldier unable to perform a job, for physical or mental reasons, the commander could ask the army's Medical Evaluation Board to determine whether the soldier was fit for duty. If the soldier was deemed unfit, the finding could result in involuntary retirement. Desma went to her next therapy appointment and said she believed she was being pushed out of the Guard. “Patient reports that since her last appointment she had discovered that she may be being medically-boarded from the service due to her PTSD,” wrote McGlocklin.

The idea of being forced out unnerved Desma because she could only hold on to her well-paying job as long as she remained in the military. When she spoke to the company commander, he said he had no intention of forcing her out of the service. She did not fully trust him, however, and upon reflection she thought perhaps the best way out of the unhappy situation was to seek a medical retirement voluntarily. If she could not take leadership courses, and could not advance in her career, she might as well find another way to make a living, Desma figured. She spent several months amassing the documents she would need—she had to prove that she had done two tours of active duty, had been in an IED blast, had
sustained traumatic brain injury, had PTSD, and could no longer perform capably as a soldier. If she could demonstrate all of the above, the medical board might allow her to retire early with a partial pension, perhaps 50 to 70 percent of her active duty salary—which would be $1,700 a month. Desma sent off her documents and waited. It would take more than a year to hear back, the Medical Evaluation Board told her.

The ten-year anniversary of the airplane hijackings that had started the two wars fell on September 11, 2011. All US combat troops had pulled out of Iraq by then, and the drawdown of US troops from Afghanistan had just begun. That fall, however, as the war in Afghanistan persisted, it surpassed Vietnam to become the longest war in US history. Michelle was thinking of returning to graduate school to become a physical therapist or an occupational therapist—she wanted to work with veterans who were returning with traumatic brain injury. She had just learned that she could use the GI Bill to defray part of the cost of the tuition. Meanwhile, Debbie had been speaking with Delia McGlocklin about how she might fill the void that retirement had created, and with the encouragement of her therapist Debbie had started studying welding at Ivy Tech, the tuition subsidized by her benefits. Everybody else in her welding classes wanted to work at one of Indiana's factories, but Debbie wanted to make sculptures. She completed most of her course work by the spring of 2012. To celebrate, Jeff took Debbie to Mexico for what was meant to be a second honeymoon, but while they were partying in Puerto Vallarta, Debbie got the news that her mother had been hospitalized for complications having to do with pneumonia and heart disease. Debbie wanted to cut the trip short. Everybody at home said her mother seemed to be improving, however, and urged her to stay in Mexico. Unexpectedly, Debbie's mother died several hours before Debbie's plane landed in Indianapolis. After years of caretaking, Debbie did not get the chance to say good-bye—anytime she left the country, it seemed, somebody important passed away.

As luck would have it, when this occurred, Akbar Khan had just returned for another visit to the United States. Michelle, Desma, and Akbar knew that Debbie was going to have a terrible time forgiving herself for being on vacation when her mother died. Akbar was already planning to fly to Indiana; Michelle jumped on a plane and flew there, too. One week after Debbie's mother's funeral, they drove to Bloomington and picked
up Debbie, then drove to Roy's house. By this point Desma owned three dogs: a fast German shepherd named Ginger, a tiny Chihuahua named Tori, and a roly-poly black Labrador mix named Sammy. Sammy had just given birth to a litter of ten, and the newborn puppies were crowded around their dam, all trying to nurse at the same time. When they woke the next morning, Desma discovered that one of the puppies had died in the night. Michelle and Akbar volunteered to bury the one dead puppy, and told Debbie her job was to get an eyedropper and feed the nine puppies that were still alive.