by Helen Thorpe
Michelle had a particularly close relationship with her mother, and when she thought about basic training, which she was slated to start in June 2001, she thought about it as their first separation. Yet Michelle had also been parenting herself for a long time. Her mother, Irene, battled crippling anxiety, the legacy of a childhood trauma. One day, when Irene was nine years old, her parents had been burning trash in the yard, and Irene had picked up a stick and begun playing with the fire. Her dress had ignited. She spent almost an entire year in the hospital, and the extensive burns left white ripples fanning across her back and arms. Irene grew into a fearful woman.
Michelle’s father possessed the opposite sort of temperament. His given name was Wilfred, though he always went by Fred. He was a bluff, colorful ne’er-do-well whose storied life included many hard-to-believe moments, such as the time he shot his own stepson or the time he volunteered to grapple a declawed grizzly bear inside a wrestling arena. “My dad’s the guy who sticks his hand up, and he’s like, ‘I’ll wrestle it,’ ” said Michelle. “You know?” Before Irene had married Fred, she had been married to one of his cousins, and they had two children, Michelle’s half siblings Tammy and Donovan. Meanwhile, Michelle’s father had been married a total of six times to four different women: Twice he had married one woman, twice he had married Michelle’s mom, and then he also married two other women one time apiece. It was by one of the other wives that Michelle’s three other half siblings, Daniel, Ray, and Cindy, were conceived. After Michelle’s parents had divorced for the second time, they had lived together for a third stint before they split for good. This last iteration of their relationship—the only one that Michelle can really remember—had ended one night while Michelle was in first grade, after her father had gotten drunk and belligerent, and her mother had called the police. Michelle had been sent to her aunt’s house, and what she remembered most vividly about that evening was the brusque police officer who came to her aunt’s door and asked if she could draw a picture of where her father kept his guns.
Michelle was the youngest child, and the only one her parents had had together. Like her half brother Ray, Michelle strongly resembled her father in physical appearance—she inherited his button nose and his laughing brown eyes—while the other children looked more like their mothers. All of them were heirs to a family history in which many men had served in the military: Michelle’s paternal grandfather had driven tanks across France in World War II, and Michelle’s father, one of her uncles, and her mother’s first husband had all served during Vietnam. Only Michelle’s uncle and stepfather actually saw combat, however; her father had spent those years locked up in various military prisons for repeatedly going AWOL, according to Michelle.
After he had left the military, Michelle’s father had held a steady job for about a decade at a company called Swanson Electric. They manufactured motors. She remembered going to visit him once and being awed as she watched him lower an immense engine into a vat of varnish. After ninety years in operation, however, that company had closed abruptly, and Fred Fischer never again found such steady work. Meanwhile, Irene had worked as a bookkeeper for twenty-five years at an industrial recycling company called General Waste, but lost that job when General Waste also closed. Irene had started doing factory work instead, and in the process her earnings greatly diminished. Michelle attended four different elementary schools and three different middle schools, as they moved almost every year. They became visibly poor, and onetime friends shunned Michelle because she did not own the right sort of clothes. After Irene began working in a factory where she made rubber seals for car doors, she and her daughter moved into a particularly rundown trailer.
Irene was working the first shift, which meant that by the time Michelle woke up, her mother had already left. One day, while Michelle was in the middle of taking a shower, the water quit working, and she was stuck in the shower with no water and unrinsed shampoo in her hair. Michelle was eleven years old. She didn’t know how to fix the water, or whom to call, so she just stayed home from school. At times, Michelle and her mother relied upon food banks—beef stew out of a can, dried mashed potatoes. Michelle’s favorite movie was Return to Oz. Darker than the original, the movie depicts Dorothy unable to sleep, while the farm is about to fall into foreclosure. Dorothy is in trouble, and none of the adults around her can help—she is on her own. No matter how many times Michelle and her mother changed residences, Michelle rented that movie over and over again, and she found the act of repeatedly watching Dorothy endure her harrowing plights and come out all right in the end to be soothing.
Michelle harbored complicated feelings toward her father. She knew her precarious economic situation stemmed from his inability to provide support to her mother. She glowed when he bestowed his oft-wandering attention, but disliked the way he grew unpredictable after five or six drinks. She also became embarrassed by his garishness. One night, when she was invited to an awards ceremony at one of her middle schools, she felt excited about the prospect of bringing both of her parents to the dinner, as she rarely got to be with the two of them at the same time. Then her dad showed up at their trailer wearing short sleeves, and Michelle could clearly see the tattoo on his forearm, an image of a naked Indian squaw with particularly generous breasts. White trash, that’s what the other students would think. Michelle announced that she felt sick, and they skipped the awards ceremony.
Beginning when Michelle was about fourteen, she and her mother started sharing various homes with a series of relatives. First they lived with one of Michelle’s half sisters, and later they moved in with Michelle’s half brother Donovan. Michelle had looked forward to sharing a home with Donovan—they had been close when she was small, back before he had joined the navy. While they were living with Donovan, however, Michelle’s mother began working the night shift, and after Irene went to work, Michelle often watched Donovan do meth with a friend. The house Donovan had rented was an old, rambling place, and Michelle grew afraid of being alone there, since it creaked so much and had so many inscrutable corners. At the beginning of her sophomore year of high school, Michelle spent all of her school clothes money on a black Lab puppy that she named Potato. She threw tantrums when Donovan did meth around the dog, because she thought the stinky fumes would harm Potato.
After she got to Central High, Michelle announced that she was done with being the new girl—her mother could move again (and did), but Michelle would stay at Central. For the first time in her life, Michelle formed enduring friendships. In her freshman year, she hewed to a girl named Veronica. Like Michelle, Veronica had grown up poor, yet was smart and ambitious. Veronica was also wickedly funny, and Michelle admired her boldness. She thought it was cool when Veronica introduced her to pot. During her sophomore year of high school, Michelle and her mother began sharing a home with Michelle’s maternal grandmother. In that house, Michelle was not allowed to use the microwave, not allowed to use the back door, not allowed to use the telephone. If she wanted to use the bathroom, she had to ask permission. And her grandmother made Michelle take Potato to the pound. Michelle figured that her grandmother, a strict Catholic, must have hated Michelle’s father because he had divorced her mother not once but twice, and therefore hated Michelle, who so closely resembled him.
Partway through sophomore year of high school, Michelle and Veronica had a falling out. Michelle, now fifteen, attached herself fiercely to a boyfriend named Joe Hill, who lived less than a mile away from her maternal grandmother. Joe Hill wore black clothes and smoked Marlboro reds and looked like Sid Vicious. Despite his dangerous looks, Michelle found Joe Hill waiting for her faithfully in his gray Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera in the parking lot at Central High School every single day when the bell rang. She could set her watch by Joe Hill. Together they discovered grunge, then punk rock, blasting the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. To memorialize their union, Michelle and Joe went to a photography studio and took a formal portrait: Joe spiked his black hair skyward and donned a Ramones T-s
hirt and a necklace of heavy chain links, while Michelle wore a choker made of ball bearings and a T-shirt that said PORN STAR. She looked like a lost angel, blown off course. Michelle’s father proudly hung it up on the wall of his trailer.
During her high school years, Michelle tried asking her father to wear long sleeves because the sight of his tattoos caused her mortification, but he just laughed. Eventually Michelle learned to laugh, too, even about his six marriages and the stints in jail, though she considered her family a dark kind of comedy. The one bright thread running through the otherwise gloomy tapestry was the bond she forged with her paternal grandparents, who lived in one home for the entirety of Michelle’s childhood, and cherished her all their lives. Michelle spent many magic nights and weekends there, particularly after her mother started working at the factory. In the evenings, she could count on her grandfather to take out his banjo or guitar or violin—he played each of those instruments with equal virtuosity—and fill the house with music. Meanwhile, her strict, Bible-reading grandmother fed Michelle a proper meal and put her to bed at a set hour. Her grandparents provided all the safety she had ever known.
During senior year of high school, Michelle broke up with Joe Hill, although they remained friends. By this point, Michelle and her mother had moved into an apartment building called Maple Manor. The once-grand house, a ramshackle old redbrick mansion with a wraparound porch, had been divided into six apartments. Michelle and her mother shared a one-bedroom on the second floor, which featured fading fleur-de-lis wallpaper. Michelle’s mother was still working nights and Michelle secretly dated a cocaine addict for a while but she started having bad panic attacks, which ceased only after she ditched the cokehead. She and Veronica made up and Michelle spent the rest of senior year partying with her best friend.
The following year, Joe Hill introduced Michelle to his friend Noah Jarvis—a fellow guitar player—and Michelle started dating Noah during the fall semester of her first year at the University of Southern Indiana. Noah was a lanky, six-three stoner with olive skin, dreamy brown eyes, brown hair, and a goatee. He played guitar in a local punk rock band named Crank Case. Methamphetamine, or crank, was ubiquitous in southern Indiana, and by this point, half of Michelle’s siblings were hooked on it, but it wasn’t something she wanted to sample. She and Noah mostly just got high. They hung out with Veronica and Veronica’s other best friend, Colleen, who had both gone to Central High and were now both enrolled at the University of Southern Indiana, too. During their first year of college, Veronica and Colleen threw frequent parties in a raucous apartment they had furnished with old couches and band posters. Noah and Michelle listened to Pink Floyd a lot and talked about how much they hated the status quo. In November 2000, Michelle cast her first vote in a presidential election for Ralph Nader. In the tumultuous weeks that followed, as lawyers for Al Gore and George W. Bush debated hanging chads in Florida, some of Michelle’s ardently Democratic friends castigated her for giving her vote to a third-party candidate. Michelle replied that she could see little difference between the two big party candidates. Politically, she tended to cataclysmic scenarios of redemption. In a strange sort of way, four months later, the same kind of thinking impelled Michelle to enlist. The two acts appeared to be at odds—until Noah Jarvis joined her unit, Michelle often wondered if there was one single other Nader fan serving in the entire Indiana National Guard—but in both cases, she had been trying to flee from what scared her most: abject hopelessness. She had voted for Nader because she wanted to upend the political universe, and she had signed up for the Guard because she wanted to upend her life. She wanted to run away from her lousy job and the easy classes and all the meaninglessness she found up and down the Lloyd Expressway. She wanted to escape her father’s ruinous life and her mother’s sad dysfunction. She wanted to get out of this forgotten place where good jobs evaporated and bad jobs drained the life out of people. She wanted to leave behind the booze and the pot and the meth. She wanted not to end up like her older siblings, with blurry tattoos and raging addictions. That’s what she thought she was signing up for when she told Granderson that she would enlist: the opposite of what she knew, a way out.
Right before Michelle left for basic training, her half sister Tammy threw her a going-away party. Tamara, known as Tammy, held the party in her front yard. Noah showed up in a pair of blue jeans and a short-sleeved button-down shirt worn over a long-sleeved T-shirt. He slouched down low in a lawn chair, holding a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Michelle’s friends Veronica and Colleen dropped by on their way to another party. Most of her complicated family came, including her father, who drove up from Sebree, Kentucky, with his latest wife, a woman named Kathy. To celebrate Michelle’s decision to enlist, Fred Fischer had gotten a new tattoo on his other forearm—a naked soldier girl. He showed it off proudly. She wore only boots and a helmet, but she carried a big gun. Michelle got falling-down drunk on Mike’s Hard Lemonade and threw up in front of her church-loving grandmother. For years afterward, shame seared her at the thought of her grandmother watching her get so sloppy.
Michelle shipped off to basic training on June 4, 2001. Her mother drove her to the armory, and Noah came along to say good-bye. Michelle’s mother broke down in tears, triggering Michelle to follow suit, and even Noah misted up. Then Michelle clambered into the van that would take her to the airport, where she boarded an airplane for the first time in her life and flew to South Carolina. She had dressed in her most beloved clothes: a faded pair of Paris Blues jeans, an orange Roxy surf hoodie, and a light pink athletic T-shirt that had once belonged to Noah. As soon as she arrived at Fort Jackson, however, she was told to put her civilian clothes away.
VICTORY STARTS HERE, the post’s motto trumpeted. Fort Jackson was the army’s busiest point of entry, where half the country’s soldiers got their introductory training. It was hot and startlingly humid. Drill sergeants started yelling at the new recruits as soon as they got off the bus—Michelle had to drop and do push-ups right there in the parking lot—and quickly she became just another soldier in green, brown, and tan camo. She was issued four sets of battle dress uniforms, or BDUs, as well as a field jacket, and gray and black army workout clothes. She had to give up wearing her contact lenses—during basic, soldiers with bad eyesight were given identical brown plastic glasses. The glasses were so ugly that everyone called them birth control glasses, or BCGs, the idea being that nobody would have sex with you if you were wearing a pair.
Michelle had to wear her long hair pulled back into a bun or a braid; she was not allowed to tie it back in a ponytail. She was not allowed to use lacy scrunchies, fancy bows, barrettes with butterflies or sparkles or fake gems; she was not allowed to wear jewelry unless it was of a religious nature; she was not allowed to wear brightly colored eye shadow or visible lipstick. There was no time to put on makeup anyway. Suddenly there were acronyms for everything, and Michelle looked exactly like everyone else. In her BDUs and her BCGs, Michelle felt as though she had surrendered her entire identity. She found herself bitterly homesick and pined for home in the letters that she faithfully wrote to each of her parents. Michelle’s mother lost every letter that her daughter sent, but Michelle’s wayward father hung on to each one. He numbered the letters and kept them inside a red, three-ringed binder, along with the Valentine’s Day cards she had drawn for him when she was a little girl. “I love you and making you proud is really important to me,” Michelle wrote on June 17, 2001. Then she wished him a happy Father’s Day.
At the point when Michelle mailed that letter, she was in the middle of the first three weeks of basic, known as the red phase, when the drill sergeants were introducing the idea of total control. The recruits had to make their beds perfectly, with sharp corners and no wrinkles. They had to keep their personal areas immaculate. They had to wake up in pairs in the middle of the night for CQ duty, which basically meant standing guard. The fundamental idea was to get new soldiers into the habit of following orders, no questi
ons asked. There was an ice cream machine in the chow hall, but Michelle was not allowed to go near it. She was not allowed to talk during a meal. At one point, Michelle’s mother mailed her photographs of the party at Tammy’s house, and Michelle wrote to her father, “Mom sent me some pictures of my going away party, so I have a picture of me, you & Kathy together. But I’m not allowed to hang it up because you & I have beer in our hands! I’m not allowed to hang up pictures w/alcohol in them. So that eliminates just about every picture from that day. But I showed them to my friends and they all say we look so much alike it looks like I was ‘picked out of your ass’! Go figure.”
Basic training proved to be an astonishing fitness program, and Michelle shrank in size as fat turned to muscle. The army had different standards for soldiers depending on gender and age. Before she could graduate, Michelle had to be able to perform thirteen push-ups and forty-seven sit-ups, and she had to be able to run two miles in at least nineteen minutes and forty-two seconds. (By comparison, a young man her age had to do thirty-five push-ups, forty-seven sit-ups, and two miles in sixteen minutes and thirty-six seconds.) As the days went by she kept shaving time off her clocked runs. “I just finished my physical strength test,” she wrote in her next letter to her father. “I missed my run time by thirty-five seconds . . . I am so mad at myself! I could have sucked it up and pushed myself a little harder. But I passed my push-ups and sit-ups.”
