Soldier Girls

by Helen Thorpe

  Desma had put on weight since becoming a mother but she remained an attractive, sociable brunette with tan skin, brown eyes, a square face, movie star cheekbones, and naturally ruddy cheeks. She offset her beauty with a habit of dressing in football jerseys and blue jeans, and while she had a gorgeous smile she also smoked cigarettes until they gave her voice a raspy edge. With friends, she was capable of extraordinary loyalty, but she had a hard time with authority figures. She had a lengthy belly laugh that chugged upward through a variety of registers, starting down low and ending up high, and it was infectious. The fact that Desma had enlisted was an accident, as far as she was concerned—something that was true of most pivotal events in her life. Agency she ascribed to others.

  Desma had grown up in Spurgeon, Indiana, a town buried deep in the southern part of the state and small enough for her to ride her bike from one end to the other. She had grasped early that her mother could not function. “I call her a manic-depressive, because she never came out of her bedroom,” Desma would say later. “But I don’t know. Let’s just say my mom was crazy. I love her, but she was crazy.” Most nights, Desma made dinner and brought food to her mother; her mother drove them both to the grocery store, but Desma did the shopping. Her three older siblings had married and left home before she was born, and by the time she came along her mother had stopped trying. Desma was on her own from a young age.

  Desma was extraordinarily bright, and before she finished elementary school, she devoured The Secret Garden and Little Women. Later she raced through Oliver Twist and The Raven. The books spirited her away from her surroundings and shielded her from her mother’s rage. Her mother vacillated between catatonia and violence, according to Desma; when displeased, she might beat a child, but if Desma was reading, her mother left her alone, Desma said. In seventh grade, both Desma and her younger brother, the last of the five children in their family, were placed into foster care. The notes that would eventually come to be contained in Desma’s Veterans Administration file alluded to some kind of abuse, but she did not want to discuss the incident, even years later with her VA therapist. “It’s not who I am,” Desma said. “It has nothing to do with how I handle my day-to-day. It has nothing to do with how I raise my children. I raise my children in a better atmosphere than I grew up in, that’s the only way that affected [me].”

  Caseworkers assigned Desma to a foster home in the same county where her mother lived, and she kept attending the same middle school, although she took a different bus. The couple that had agreed to foster her had previously adopted two children and were also fostering two more, making Desma the fifth child they were sheltering in their two-bedroom house. Initially, Desma expected to stay for only a short period, but then her mother was injured in a car wreck, and the weeks stretched into months. Desma began fighting with her foster parents’ adopted daughter. Her foster father worked for Whirlpool and had an even temperament, but her foster mother was an evangelical Christian with a fragile personality. Eventually the placement ended after the foster parents said they could not handle Desma. “I know in their hearts they were trying to be good people,” Desma said later. “And, you know, he was. She should never have been a mother, but, whatever—that’s not my call. Not a very good parent, the house got filled, she got stressed, and I left.”

  The move occurred abruptly. One day, after Desma had finished school, a caseworker picked her up, suggested that they take a ride in her car, and then dropped Desma off at a group home. Residents were supposed to graduate after five weeks, provided they completed the program. Desma progressed rapidly at first, but then balked after she was ordered to clean an oven in which someone else had exploded a green bean casserole; she thought the person who had made the mess should clean it up, and refused to touch the burned splatter. She got bumped back down to the beginning of the program. Later she stumbled across a group of friends and forgot about the time and missed curfew. Then she got caught smoking. “I spent ten months in a five-week program,” said Desma with a long raspy laugh. “I learned how not to get caught smoking, and where to hide your cigarettes—that’s what I learned in the group home.”

  Halfway through eighth grade, a caseworker placed Desma in a second foster home, belonging to a couple named Mike and Diane Lewis. Again, she became the fifth child in a busy household: Mike and Diane had two children of their own and were fostering two boys when Desma arrived. But she soon grew to appreciate Mike and Diane. “They were good people,” she said. “They held jobs and they went to work and they took care of the kids. Made sure you hit the appointments you needed to. It was a normal household.” Desma would stay in contact with both sets of foster parents for the rest of her life, but she always considered Mike and Diane the two people who had really been there for her when it had mattered most.

  Halfway through freshman year of high school, a caseworker announced that it was time for Desma to go back home. Her younger brother had already returned to their mother’s care and seemed to be thriving. “Semester break, I went back to—ugh—I went back home,” Desma said. Her mother still could not run a household and Desma missed Mike and Diane’s orderly routines. The following year, Desma contracted a protracted case of strep throat, which turned into tonsillitis, and then a doctor recommended surgery. By the time she returned to school, she was not able to understand what was going on in her classes. Desma had thought she would get extra help to catch up, but that assistance did not materialize. She went to the principal to complain. “He basically told me that he had better things to do with his time than worry about me,” Desma said. “So I told him to piss off. I threw all my books at him and I left. Told him I quit, I’m not coming back. And I didn’t.”

  In the area where she lived there were no jobs for a carless teen, so Desma left home and moved to Jasper, Indiana, where she shared an apartment with friends she met on the streets. “I immediately started looking for work,” she said later. “Not much you can do at fifteen. But I turned sixteen the following January, and then I got a job.” Over the next few months, she worked as a cashier at Hardee’s, then began making pizzas at Papa John’s. “It was a job. I got a paycheck. Paid my rent.” After that she found work with a construction company that assembled mobile homes. Before a year had elapsed, however, she learned that she was pregnant. All she ever says about that is the child was born of a not so good situation; her son Joshua was born on March 16, 1993, two months after Desma turned seventeen, and immediately became the central source of love and affection in her life.

  Desma moved back in with her mother again, and asked for a birth-control implant to be surgically inserted into her upper arm, to make sure she did not have any more children. Josh had colic and during the night Desma read Gone With the Wind while pacing around her bedroom with the fussy baby in her arms. When he was about four months old and finally sleeping, Desma enrolled in a program to get her GED. She obtained her high school equivalency degree a full year before she would have finished high school. When she took the GED exam, she scored in the 90th percentile, compared with the rest of the state. She also wrote an essay that won her an invitation to breakfast at the Governor’s Mansion in Indianapolis with Governor Evan Bayh. She had never been to Indianapolis, but studied a map to learn the way. She put on her Sunday best—a pretty brown and white patterned dress, carefully cinched at the waist—and left her house at dawn. She drove her mother’s old gray Chevy Citation north on Highway 231 until the engine sputtered and fell silent. She did not make it to the breakfast.

  While caring for her infant son, Desma also began babysitting for a man who lived down the street—his name was Keith and he was a single father. After several months, Desma began dating her employer. “It was convenient,” she said. “We were already there. He lived right up the street from me.” Soon Desma and Josh moved in with Keith. As Josh began to speak, Desma’s boyfriend prompted her son to call him Dad, and Josh and his surrogate father developed an enduring relationship, such that Keith essentially became volu
ntary kin to the boy. After she and Keith broke up, Desma got an apartment of her own, but Josh continued to spend time with Keith. When Desma’s first set of foster parents called to ask how she was doing and heard she was living out of a cooler, they took her to the Whirlpool store and bought her a refrigerator. After only six months, it became clear that she could not afford the rent, and she and Josh and the refrigerator moved back into her mother’s house.

  Desma likes to say she joined the military on a dare. It’s a story she tells often. “A friend of mine showed up at the house,” said Desma. “We were neighbors, and she was dating a recruiter from the National Guard. And she says, ‘Hey, come with me. Let’s go take the ASVAB test.’ ” It was March 1996, and Josh was three years old. Both Desma’s older brother and her new boyfriend, a man named Dennis Brooks, had served in the navy. At the time, she was making office credenzas at Jasper Desk for $8.65 an hour. “I ain’t got nothing better going on, and Josh was with Grandma,” said Desma. “She was keeping him all night. So I jumped in the car with her and the boyfriend and we went to Evansville and I took the ASVAB and scored really well.”

  Two weeks later, the same friend showed up again and urged Desma to take the physical exam, too.

  “I don’t want to join the army,” Desma said.

  But the following day, her friend showed back up, along with the military recruiter she was dating, and they urged her to join the Army National Guard. It was not such a big commitment, they said—just twelve weekends a year, two weeks in the summer.

  “I dare ya,” her friend said. “Just go do the physical—I bet you won’t make it in.”

  Desma’s friend said she was planning to sign up, too. They drove down to Louisville, Kentucky, together. At the military processing station, Desma made the rounds, culminating with the duckwalk in her underwear. “And they herd you all into this one big room and there’s some guy with a big, powerful voice telling you that it’s the finest thing to serve your country and the next thing you know, he’s like, ‘Raise your right hand and repeat after me.’ And I couldn’t hear a word of the oath he said. All I heard was, blah blah, blah blah blah. So that’s what I did, I raised my right hand, and apparently that meant I was in the army [National Guard] now. Completely unintentional.” Afterward, Desma found her friend crying in the canteen—she had failed the physical because she had psoriasis. Desma refused to speak to her for months.

  The story Desma never tells is the one about the military recruiter who actually processed her enlistment. Her friend’s boyfriend had introduced Desma to the recruiter who handled her paperwork. “Turned out to be a real dirtbag,” said Desma. He sexually assaulted her after she signed her contract, according to Desma, although she never reported the incident. Desma enlisted for three years and received a $2,500 bonus. She was told to be ready to leave for basic training at the end of the summer. Perhaps because she was about to leave for an extended period, Desma’s relationship with Dennis turned serious. In June she accepted his proposal. “I know it was retarded,” she would say later. “I don’t know why I did it.” Dennis was nine years older, and for a while, he had been treating Desma like a princess. They went for long drives, and they walked through coal country, nothing fancy, but he said nice things. The idea of marriage appealed to Desma for a highly practical reason: The military did not allow single parents to enlist, and she had gotten around this by not mentioning that she had a son. She had been planning to solve the problem by giving custody of Josh to her mother, but after Dennis proposed, she decided it would be helpful to get married, too. Then nobody could accuse her of being a single mom.

  The wedding took place on July 20, 1996, in the living room of Dennis’s parents’ home. Desma wore an off-white dress that fell below her knees and had cost $6 at a local thrift store. Dennis wore blue jeans and a dress shirt with sleeves that were too short. Desma had gotten a meat and cheese tray from the supermarket, and half a dozen two-liter bottles of pop. “It was awful,” she said later, laughing her belly laugh. “Threw it together in less than a week.” According to Desma, on their wedding night, after they had gone to a hotel, Dennis caught her off guard by saying, “It will be over my dead body that you ever leave me.” She described him as having a controlling nature, but said that she only came to see this side of his personality fully after basic training. Dennis Brooks would later dispute much of what Desma said about him, and described Desma as someone who slanted stories about their relationship so that she came out in a better light and he came out in a worse light when that was not exactly how it was in real life.

  On August 19, 1996, Desma Brooks left for Fort Jackson, South Carolina. She had never held a gun before, and it was the first time she had traveled outside of the state of Indiana. She had a gritty determination that served her well, however, and she responded positively to the structured environment, even as she also proved injury-prone. Halfway through the training, Desma rolled her right ankle while running. She limped back to the barracks. Her company was slated to rappel down a wooden tower that afternoon—and to get to the tower, they were going to road-march three miles. Desma didn’t want to complain of an injury, for fear of being forced to restart basic training from the beginning, because she felt she was already spending too much time away from her son. Desma did the road march, crossed three styles of rope bridges, and then rappeled down the wall while a belayed rope passed under one thigh and over the opposite shoulder. The soldier who went before her was supposed to make sure the rope belayed smoothly, but he gave Desma a jerky descent, culminating in an abrupt drop. She landed hard and buckled. A drill sergeant started hollering at the soldier who had done belay, but Desma interrupted.

  “I’m all right, I’m all right,” she said. “I just need help up.”

  They marched three miles back. At the barracks, she could not get her boot off. Her battle buddy alerted another drill sergeant.

  “What the hell is wrong with you, Private?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know, Drill Sergeant, I hurt myself.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “Because I didn’t want to be recycled.”

  He took out a Gerber and cut the boot off. Desma’s foot was black and blue up to her shin. The drill sergeant said she could try doing kitchen duty for a couple of days and see if the injury healed. She missed the gas chamber and hand-to-hand combat, but rejoined her platoon for the rest of basic training. She injured herself a second time, after she got her foot tangled in the straps of a duffel bag while standing on the tailgate of a truck, and fell, landing on her tailbone, which split in half. But she made it through the final exercises without reporting the second injury.

  When Desma made an appointment with a medic to have the Norplant contraceptive removed, thinking she might want to have children with her new husband, the doctor had to dig out six plastic cartridges from her newly muscular bicep. She still could not say why she had joined the military, but she was proud of what she had achieved. “Nobody thought I would make it through basic training,” she said afterward. “And just out of spite, I finished it. I hated every minute there, it was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. But at the end, I cried. I had accomplished something. And to somebody out there, it was something meaningful. Maybe not so much to myself, but whatever. You know? I proved them wrong.”

  Desma went straight from Fort Jackson, South Carolina, to Fort Lee, Virginia. She had chosen to become an automated logistics specialist, or a 92A (“ninety-two Alpha”), because she thought it would give her job skills that would translate into the civilian world. A logistics specialist ran computer programs that allowed battalions to order vehicle parts, guns, night vision goggles, and other equipment. Men and women enrolled in the classes in roughly equal numbers, and at Fort Lee Desma found herself in an environment in which she drew no special attention for her gender. She trained on large desktop computers, using four-inch floppy disks.

  When Desma returned home for Christmas, she was shocked t
o discover that during her five-month absence, Josh had developed a stutter. She had intended for Josh to stay with his surrogate father, Keith—the man for whom Desma used to babysit—but instead Josh had been bounced around, staying alternately with Keith, Desma’s new husband, and Desma’s mother. Dennis was living with his parents, and Desma moved in there, too. They shared his old bedroom in the upstairs part of his parents’ house. “Josh didn’t want to stay there—he wanted to stay with Grandma,” recalled Desma. “So at night, I would take him down to Grandma’s and first thing in the morning I would go get him. He was my sunshine. I would rock him and sing the Barney song and he would go to sleep in my lap.”

  Desma turned twenty-one on January 28, 1997. Flush with cash for a change, she decided to buy a car. She had never owned one before. She bought a used Chevy Corsica, gray with a red interior. Her older sister had the same car in the opposite color scheme—red with a gray interior. When she showed up for drill for the first time that February, Desma could see her reflection in the toes of her boots. “Oh, a newbie,” said a noncommissioned officer, looking her over. “That’ll wear off quick.” In the months that followed, Desma stopped pressing her uniform but stubbornly continued to shine her boots; she took pride in the fact that she could make a mirrored toe and heel. Her chugging belly laugh and ready smile endeared her to other members of Bravo Company, and she fit easily into the unit. She worked in the section that handled automotive repair and weapons parts. That’s what she was supposed to do; actually, the National Guard armory in Bedford had few parts. Mostly Desma and her fellow soldiers counted tent poles and camo netting, then played euchre. At annual training, they did the usual required exercises, and played war games in the woods. To burn off their extra ammo, they would hide wearing their MILES gear—it stood for multiple integrated laser engagement system—and shoot blanks at each other. You put the gear on over your uniform, and if you were shot it would beep incessantly, indicating that you were dead, until somebody came and turned it off with a key. Bravo Company and Charlie Company ganged up on Alpha Company; it had become a tradition after the time when Alpha had gotten their trucks tangled up in their own concertina wire. Bravo and Charlie would kill off everyone in Alpha, declare the war over, and then drink a keg of beer. Desma loved the camaraderie.