Soldier Girls (9 page)

At the armory, Michelle recognized half a dozen people. She knew Lucy Schneider and Agnes Harmon from middle school, for example, and she knew Angela Peterson and Bridget Palmer from high school. All of the women belonged to a small detachment of the 113th Support Battalion. The main part of the 113th drilled in Bedford, several hours away, but the detachment had been formed so that women could drill in Evansville, as the principal unit operating out of the armory at Evansville remained male-only, because it was field artillery. Michelle belonged to the 113th's Bravo Company, primarily a maintenance unit. The women whom Michelle recognized from her school days were all 88Ms (“eighty-eight Mikes”), or truck drivers, and they belonged to the 113th's Alpha Company, which drove the trucks that Bravo maintained. Sergeant Joe Haverty told Michelle that she was the first person they had gotten who was authorized to work on a howitzer—the archaic big guns still composed the bulk of the field artillery unit's inventory, and at first Michelle thought her skills would make her important. But actually the howitzers were kept in storage, and Haverty assigned her to a maintenance team that worked on trucks.

The rest of the maintenance team were 63Ws (“sixty-three Whiskeys”), or truck mechanics, and in the armory's vast, chilly garage, which smelled of motor oil and solvents, they taught her how to work on vehicles. She changed tires, changed radiator fluid, and once even changed the head gasket on a five-ton truck. The team consisted of her superiors Sergeant Haverty and Corporal Ezra Schmidt, as well as a young woman named Amber Macdonald, who had spiky blond hair, large breasts, and a bubbly personality. Macdonald enjoyed flirting and giggled a lot. Macdonald was not Michelle's intellectual equal, but she served as a reliable ally. One weekend, Macdonald called Michelle to warn her that everybody who showed up for drill was being subjected to drug testing, and Michelle, who had recently smoked pot, called in sick. Another weekend, Michelle showed up still drunk from the night before, and Macdonald walked her up and down the halls of the armory until she was sober enough to stand in formation. Their superior Corporal Schmidt hit on Michelle or Amber indiscriminately and often. After a while, Noah Jarvis joined the team, too. He had become a diesel
mechanic (“sixty-three Bravo”), and Michelle started working alongside him on drill weekends, sometimes lying beneath trucks, sometimes bending under their hoods together.

That winter, when Michelle watched the news on the small combination television set and DVD player that her mother owned, she found it hard to keep track of the cities in Afghanistan that the United States and its allies were capturing. It looked as though it would be a swift war; major parts of Kabul, Kandahar, and Herat had been hit with bombs and cruise missiles, and the United States and its allies had taken the Taliban-controlled districts of Zari, Keshendeh, and Aq-Kupruk. Then they captured the important city of Mazar-i-Sharif, the capital city of Kabul, and finally the Taliban stronghold of Kunduz. Michelle had never heard of these strange-sounding places; she did not know where to find the cities on a map. It was hard to follow the war's narrative. She took away only the gist of the story: American generals said the war was going well. And indeed, the war in Afghanistan got off to the kind of start that military historians would later call spectacular. US special operations teams and CIA forces worked with Afghan fighters who were loyal to their cause to topple the Taliban regime in less than three months, with only a dozen US fatalities. Michelle assured her mother there was no way anybody would send her to Afghanistan, and as the military alliance announced its string of victories, she began to believe that might actually be true.

Yet as the weeks slid by, the reports grew more confusing. Fighters aligned with the Taliban somehow smuggled weapons into a prison in Mazar-i-Sharif. Forty Northern Alliance fighters died, as well as an American CIA agent, Johnny Micheal Spann. Just before Christmas came dramatic news: supposedly bin Laden was holed up in an elaborate cave complex in the mountains on the country's eastern border, close to the legendary Khyber Pass. News reports said the caves of Tora Bora might be bin Laden's headquarters; it might be a vast hideout capable of sheltering more than a thousand people. Al-Qaeda might have stockpiled ammunition there, or maybe its fighters. All that could be said for certain was that the caves were in one of the least accessible areas in a country full of impassable mountains. For days, US and British special forces negotiated the brutally rugged terrain, first bombing the cave
complex and eventually breaching the caves themselves (which turned out to be smaller and less impressive than suggested). They searched the redoubt, but like a specter bin Laden had vanished.

In the months since they had trained together at Aberdeen Proving Ground, James Cooper had not reached out to Michelle, so that winter she got in touch with him. Michelle found his home number in the telephone directory and sweet-talked his parents into providing updated information. After she tracked Cooper down, they started talking on the phone. He was unmoored, and she felt the same way. In search of the assurance Cooper had provided, Michelle went to visit him for a week. He took her to Niagara Falls and kissed her while the water thundered around them, and she thought it was one of the most romantic moments of her life. With scant encouragement, she then moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana, so they could be geographically closer. In the spring of 2002, instead of returning to the University of Southern Indiana, she enrolled at the campus jointly operated by Indiana University and Purdue University in Fort Wayne. Located in the far northeastern corner of Indiana, Fort Wayne was a six-hour drive from Evansville, where she had to go to drill, and a six-hour drive from western New York, where James Cooper lived. It was as close as Michelle could get to the object of her desire while still serving in the Indiana National Guard. Before the trip, Michelle had taken out her first loan and bought a red 1999 Mercury Cougar with a growly V6 engine for $10,000. She hoped the fast car would allow her to secure the new relationship while still obtaining a college degree.

Thanks to her membership in the National Guard, Michelle qualified for 100 percent of her tuition, just as Sergeant Granderson had promised. Unexpectedly, however, she had to wait ninety days for the credit to show up in the system, and during those three months she could not obtain her housing allowance or her kicker bonus. This threw her into a cash crunch. Meanwhile, she had rented a studio apartment for several hundred dollars per month, and now she also had to make car payments. Michelle got a job at the Golden Corral in Fort Wayne and started working full-time to make ends meet.

Finding herself back at the Golden Corral, after she had made so many sacrifices, proved disheartening. She knew nobody in Fort Wayne, and Cooper drifted away. Desperate for affirmation, Michelle
zeroed in on a handsome classmate, but he proved unattainable. She spent her time worrying about boys and lost the ability to focus on her studies. Then Noah decided to move to Fort Wayne, which Michelle allowed to happen. Noah drove up in his gray Astro van and got a job at a bong shop. She found his familiar presence comforting even as she wondered whether their relationship should continue. They both became devoted fans of the left-leaning television show
Democracy Now!
That spring the Bush administration began arguing more consistently that the United States should take action against Iraq because it possessed “weapons of mass destruction.” Vice President Dick Cheney toured eleven Arab nations to build support for the Bush team's policies in the region.
Democracy Now!
hosts Amy Goodman and Juan González ran a series of stories ripping into the Bush team for its eagerness to attack Iraq. The reports painted a sinister picture of Cheney's motivations, interpreting his actions through the prism of his ties to the massive oil field services company Halliburton. “Why is the United States going after Iraq, when in Saudi Arabia, for example, you have a government that has not cooperated with the investigations of the hijackers?” Amy Goodman asked. “Fifteen of them were Saudi.” The answer, according to
Democracy Now!
, had to do with the close relationship between the Bush family and the Saudi royal family, and the fact that Iraq possessed upward of 143 billion barrels of oil, making its oil reserves the third-largest in the world.

Michelle and Noah shared Goodman's antiauthoritarian leanings, and they figured the whole “weapons of mass destruction” argument was a scripted hoax. Michelle thought she might as well have been watching theater; the actors already knew they would go to war with Iraq, they just needed to scare the audience into going along. It was jarring to listen to Amy Goodman and then report for drill, but Goodman served as a stiff antidote to the military mentality. Michelle cleaved to Noah as the only other person who could understand both why she was in the Guard and why she would need such a countermeasure. Once Noah moved to Fort Wayne, however, Michelle stopped going to classes regularly and ceased turning in her homework. She could have aced her courses but she simply lost the will; she gave up on herself and on school. At the end of that dismal semester, she had earned a total
of only six credits. She had obtained an F in political science and a D in early developmental psychology; those credits would not transfer. That summer, she moved back to Evansville and signed up to return to USI in the fall, although she continued to stay in touch with Cooper by phone. She was right back where she had started before she had signed up for the Guard—living in Evansville, partying too much—except now she was almost a year behind her peers in terms of college credits.

Once she got back home, Michelle decided to make up for what had happened by focusing intently on her courses at USI, so that she could succeed in transferring to Indiana University. But she did not need Noah as badly as she had in Fort Wayne, and they parted ways again. She still saw him regularly, of course, because they drilled together every month. It was awkward at first, but eventually the awkwardness got familiar. That summer, Michelle attended her first annual training. She rode in a truck for three hours with her superiors Haverty and Schmidt, heading north to central Indiana. Their destination was Camp Atterbury, a sprawling army base that served as the main training hub for the Indiana Army National Guard, as well as the main point of departure for thousands of regular army, reserve soldiers, and marines who were shipping off to Afghanistan. When they arrived, Michelle saw a sea of identical low cinder-block buildings, all painted lemon yellow, with brown shingled roofs, stretching away in all directions. The chapel; prison; Laundromat; Subway; and the NCO Club, where the noncommissioned officers went to drink—each of those establishments was also made out of cinder block and also painted lemon yellow. The astonishing conformity of the buildings and the troops, all wearing nearly identical uniforms, left Michelle disoriented. She could not find her way around, as the identical buildings left her no way to get her bearings. They stayed in the barracks for a few days and then it was time to head into the woods, so they could pretend they were also at war. Instead of fixing trucks, Michelle was assigned to the armament team, again under the direction of Haverty and Schmidt. There were no broken weapons to fix, however, so they just participated in the group exercises, setting up a perimeter, digging foxholes, unrolling concertina wire, and keeping guard.

During the two weeks they spent at Camp Atterbury, the small detachment of soldiers from Evansville trained alongside the rest of the
soldiers in the 113th Support Battalion. This meant that the other soldiers from Bravo Company who drilled up in Bedford were getting their first look at Michelle Fischer and Amber Macdonald. The arrival of the two young women caused an intense commotion. Young men hounded them, old men, too. One night, a noncommissioned officer named Frank Garrison, who was twice Michelle's age, climbed into a foxhole with her, although he had not been assigned overnight guard duty. Garrison offered to take Michelle to a rock concert because he knew she loved music, and when she declined, he continued to seek out opportunities to spend time with her. Technically he outranked her, and she did not know how to keep him at bay. Several nights later, Michelle woke in the dark to discover that Garrison had put his cot right next to hers, and was sleeping with his face only inches away. She started calling him Nose Hairs.

In response to all of the ruckus, Haverty and Schmidt sequestered Fischer and Macdonald inside their truck and forbade them to step outside of the vehicle without permission. Eventually they put up camo netting next to the truck, which slightly expanded the terrain claimed by the armament team. When they did step outside of the camo netting, Haverty instructed the two young women not to walk around in their T-shirts. Instead he ordered them to wear their tops, the camouflage shirt that matched their camouflage pants. Most days, the temperature was more than ninety degrees, and none of the men were wearing their tops over their T-shirts, but Michelle and Amber did as they were told.

Haverty's attempts to sequester Michelle and Amber away from the rest of the unit backfired, however, when Michelle and Amber discovered that just on the other side of their camo netting were four young men who had been assigned to the company's missile repair section—Patrick Miller, Ben Sawyer, Timothy Reeves, and Frank Perez. Within days Michelle had become friends with the guys in missile. She could flirt with them through the camo netting as much as she liked without violating the letter of Haverty's prohibitions. She wasn't sure if she wanted to sleep with any of the soldiers from missile, but she liked the fact that missile so clearly wanted to sleep with her. Patrick Miller was cocky, short, high-strung, and married; he had been a marine and thought he knew everything. But it was Ben Sawyer who most successfully attached himself to
Michelle. Sawyer was also married. Instead of trying to seduce Michelle, he simply became her friend. Michelle allowed herself to get drawn in, certain that nothing would ever happen between them.