Soldier Girls

by Helen Thorpe

  Of course Desma befriended talkative Debbie Helton. During one annual training, they found themselves stuck in a foxhole together, and Debbie asked, “Want something to drink?” They shared some whiskey. Both women belonged to Bravo, although they worked in different sections and spent time with different friends. When they socialized after their training exercises, Debbie gravitated toward the older crowd, a mostly male group that habitually drank at Shorty’s, while Desma ran with a younger crowd that frequented a variety of bars. Of everyone in her company, Desma grew closest to a woman named Stacy Glory—she happened to be the sister of the person who had originally dared Desma to join the Guard, and they lived near each other in Spurgeon. They carpooled to Bedford on drill weekends. Stacy had four children—two boys and two girls—and also was a single mother. She had joined the regular army straight out of high school, and when her term of service ended, she joined the reserves. She had deployed to the Gulf War, shortly after she had given birth to her oldest child. Stacy had found the yearlong separation painful, and later she transferred into the National Guard, because they did not send people overseas for lengthy tours of duty. Stacy had a degree in political science, and she and Desma talked politics in the car; they both listened to National Public Radio, and both followed international news on the BBC. Often they got so caught up in their conversations that they did not notice how late they were until they got to the armory and saw everybody else already standing in formation.

  Debbie Helton marveled at Desma’s insouciance, the way she and Stacy would casually stroll in late every single drill weekend. It got to be a running joke. The first sergeant would call out, “Brooks!” Invariably there would be no answer. “She’s on her way!” soldiers started calling out in response, to rolling laughter. Usually Desma would saunter in before the first sergeant had finished taking the roll, and make a face at the assembled company; this is what you get, she seemed to be saying. “I remember her always being late,” recalled Debbie. “Never on time. Really funny, and always late.” But Debbie approved of Desma’s high spirits and the way she never missed a chance to socialize and always put on something revealing. “And then when she wanted to clean up, she’d clean up. Like if we’d all go out at night, a bunch of us, then she’d be nice and cleavagey,” Debbie said. “She would wear the tops to enhance herself. That’s our Desma. Not shy—not a bit shy.”

  The keg parties and the euchre games and the late nights at bars made the experience of belonging to the National Guard a lot more fun than Desma had anticipated. In a few years, she realized that she had grown closer to her fellow soldiers than she had been to friends in school. During one annual training, Desma went out drinking with Peggy Weiss, the administrative NCO of Bravo Company 113—basically she made sure that jobs in the unit were filled and that Bravo Company soldiers got their paychecks. They returned to Camp Atterbury at about two in the morning, and by then Peggy had gotten loud and boisterous. They ran into Captain Hoskins in the orderly room. Despite the late hour, he was wearing a crisply pressed uniform, but he was accompanied by a disheveled lieutenant who was covered from head to toe in mud and grass. Peggy turned to Hoskins.

  “Sir, are you lazy?” she barked. “Or are you just too stupid to get down in the mud?”

  Hoskins just shook his head and walked away.

  “I’m going to bed,” announced Peggy. “People are pissy.”

  Desma lived for those moments.

  And she had come to depend on the extra paycheck. Desma and Dennis had purchased a stick-built house with yellow siding for $42,000. It had three bedrooms, one bath, a full basement, and a screened-in porch. They had signed up for a variable rate mortgage, however, and over time the interest rate climbed from 6.8 percent up to 23 percent. In the process, their monthly payments tripled, from $325 to almost $900. As the financial stress mounted, Desma’s husband began to have problems controlling his anger, according to Desma. Once he shoved her backward into a glass door that broke, and a shard of glass punctured one of her lungs, Desma said. She also remembered that Dennis could only hold on to a given job for a few months at a time. He quit one job while Desma was pregnant. Desma developed preeclampsia, and the baby had to be induced; after their daughter Paige was born early, the hospital sent a bill for $6,000. To help pay off the debt, Desma returned to work at Jasper Desk. When her husband lost his next job, she had to make their monthly house payments by herself for a while, according to Desma.

  Dennis remembered everything differently. He said that Desma was the cause of their financial problems, as she kept spending more money than he was earning. She bounced one check after another, according to Dennis—and according to court documents Desma was charged with several counts of check fraud (for amounts ranging from $28 to $38). He was never out of work for more than a few days at a time, Dennis said, and even when he lost one factory job, he still worked part-time as an emergency medical technician in an ambulance. Dennis also recounted an alternate version of the story about the fight where Desma wound up with glass in her back: he did give her a “little shove” that sent her into a glass door, which did break, Dennis conceded, but that’s not when the glass went into her back; according to him, the glass went into her back about ten minutes later, when she stepped backward and accidentally bumped into the already broken shards of glass.

  Figuring that they had better not have any more children, Desma got another Norplant device; it suppressed her heavy periods, just as the previous device had done, which she considered a blessing. Several months later, however, she began to puzzle over the fact that she could no longer button her favorite jeans. A doctor discovered that she had somehow conceived another child, despite using the birth control device. At this point, her husband was working again, but according to Desma, Dennis lost the job before she gave birth, and once again Desma delivered a child without health insurance. Their daughter Alexis was born in 1999—Desma opted for a tubal ligation after the birth, to avoid getting pregnant again—and they got another hospital bill, this time for $9,000.

  A few weeks after giving birth, Desma found a factory job in Huntingburg, Indiana. She caught baseboards as a router spat them out and stacked them on a skid, and she made $7.50 an hour. Her relationship with her husband continued to fray. Desma felt that Dennis was failing to support their family and in her estimation his temper got worse. At one point, Desma said, he shoved a rifle so far into her mouth that he chipped one of her back teeth. Dennis vehemently denied that this ever happened. Desma’s drill weekends turned into a form of escape—a way to get away from the perpetual financial worry and the perpetual conflict. The Guard offered camaraderie, a supplemental income, and an alternative arena in which to prove her competence.

  Desma could be brittle, especially around her superiors, but they could see that she was a wizard with gadgets. In the spring of 2000, the battalion was issued a shipment of used SINGCARS radios that had been passed along by active duty army troops. SINGCARS stood for Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System, and the new radios employed voice encryption and frequency hopping systems to defy an enemy’s ability to listen in—although the frequency hopping system sometimes meant that even friendly soldiers heard only garble. Desma took a class at Atterbury and learned the radios had digital clocks that needed to be synched within three seconds, and painstakingly retimed every radio in Bravo Company so that the soldiers could actually hear one another talk. She spent drill weekend after drill weekend teaching everyone else how to use the radios without accidentally changing the timing.

  Later that spring, the 113th Support Battalion traveled to Fort Polk, Louisiana, to spend two weeks in joint readiness training exercises. While most of Bravo Company flew to Louisiana, Desma instead rode in a convoy down to Louisville, Kentucky, where she helped load trucks onto river barges. The barge operators balked at allowing Desma herself to board, as there were no other women in the flotilla, but after a short commotion during which she cursed a lot, she was allowed onto a barge. They f
loated slowly down the Ohio and then the Mississippi. At Fort Polk, the contingent that had come by water met up with the others who had come by air, carrying Debbie Helton’s potatoes in their rucksacks. Hoskins grew frustrated when he discovered that only Bravo Company could use their radios; soldiers in the other companies kept causing the radios to malfunction. And if the soldiers couldn’t talk to each other, they couldn’t do joint readiness exercises. The whole point of joint readiness was acting in concert, which was only possible if they could communicate.

  Hoskins sent Desma around to fix what was wrong. She walked all over Fort Polk, stopping at one truck after another, giving impromptu courses on the radio’s digital timing. Desma delivered her lessons in plain language, never made people feel dumb, cracked jokes about the idiocy of the military in giving them this complicated shit, and made the radios work. At one point, Desma realized she had been retiming radios straight through the night and had not slept at all. The Louisiana sun blazed overhead. She crawled under a trailer because the shade looked so inviting. A sergeant major found her napping there.

  “Soldier, get out from underneath that truck!” he hollered.

  Desma snapped, “Sergeant Major, I’ve been running my ass off for twenty-three hours out of the last twenty-four. What have you done today? When did you get out of bed?”

  He marched off in a huff and she went back to sleep.

  When she got all the radios up, Hoskins was so relieved that he gave Desma a medal of commendation. “Specialist Brooks was selected by the joint readiness training center’s observer controllers as a unit logistics warrior for the training period,” wrote her commanding officer. “Her knowledge of the SINGCARS operation was instrumental in the success of the mission. . . . Specialist Desma D. Brooks devoted attention to all of her many responsibilities with resourcefulness and enthusiasm. Specialist Brooks displays a winning personality coupled with a positive attitude which resulted in her surpassing the standard in setting the example for other soldiers to follow.”

  Years later, Desma would call that moment her single greatest achievement. Sometimes Desma seemed compromised in other areas of life, yet when the military put her in front of a piece of technology, she performed like a virtuoso. Her friend Stacy Glory was the unit’s most adept user of the complicated military software known as SAMS (Standard Army Maintenance System), and she taught Desma the system’s rules and kinks. Soon Desma became known as a whiz on the SAMS system, too. In the summer of 2000, when it came time to renew her contract, Desma did not hesitate to sign up for another three years. “I got friends,” she said. “I only have to show up one weekend a month and hang out for two weeks in the summer. Yeah, it’s a bitch, but it ain’t so bad. It’s an extra paycheck, you know? They ain’t going to send me anywhere, no big deal.” She got another $2,500 bonus for reenlisting.

  That fall, Desma voted for George W. Bush for president. She did not consider herself a Republican, necessarily; she voted for the person who struck her as the most real human being, regardless of their place on the political spectrum. She was moved by small, idiosyncratic revelations of character—she followed the news closely, and read current events like a novel, zeroing in on particular moments she found telling. She decided not to vote for Gore after she saw him fail to recognize a marble bust of George Washington, for example. She voted for Bush because she thought he was no bullshit. Also, she had liked his father. Back in the 1990s, Desma had devoured news of the Persian Gulf War. She had been surprised to learn that before the war, the United States had helped to bolster Saddam Hussein’s hold on power so as to thwart Iran. Desma thought if you were going to carry a gun, you might as well try to understand the context in which it might be fired.

  Initially, she had applauded getting the US troops out of the Gulf quickly, before too many American soldiers lost their lives, but in the years that followed, after she heard about Hussein’s alleged atrocities, she came to view the decision to leave him in power as a mistake. Desma was troubled by Hussein’s alleged barbarity, such as the killing of thousands of Kurds in what became known as the Halabja massacre. “If you didn’t agree with him and you were not of his particular Muslim belief—Sunni, Shiite, whatever—he mustard-gassed them. He drew them into an auditorium, offering land by parcel, first come, first served, shut the doors, and killed four thousand people with mustard gas.” She did not believe in allowing despots to remain in power.

  Early in 2001, Desma’s marriage fell apart. Desma recounted the developments in this way: her husband started a new job and told her he was earning enough to cover their bills, but somehow the mortgage payments did not get paid, and the bank announced it was going to put the house into foreclosure. Dennis moved out, and they began divorce proceedings. Josh started third grade that fall, while Desma was still in the middle of trying to unsnarl the financial tangle. The girls were only two and three years old, and spent their days at home with Desma, or with her cousin Lesley, when Desma had to go to work. One morning that September, Desma put Josh on the bus and turned on Good Morning America while she fixed eggs for her daughters. Jury selection had begun in the trial of Andrea Yates, a woman who was accused of drowning her five children. Then the hosts interrupted the show. “There’s been some sort of explosion at the World Trade Center in New York City,” said Diane Sawyer. “One report said, and we can’t confirm any of this, that a plane may have hit one of the two towers of the World Trade Center.” Desma stared at a live image of black smoke billowing out of the tower, then she watched as a second airplane plowed into the other tower.

  “My God!” cried Diane Sawyer. Her cohost, Charles Gibson, announced, “This looks like some sort of a concerted effort to attack the World Trade Center.”

  Desma agreed; she knew what she had just seen was not an accident.

  A neighbor called. “Are you watching this?” she asked in disbelief.

  “Holy shit, what does this mean?” Desma said.

  “I don’t know—I just needed to call somebody,” her neighbor replied.

  Desma heard from her readiness NCO later in the day, but all he said was, “We’re not going anywhere, we’re not doing anything right now. Just wait for more instructions.”

  “Well, if you need me, I’m here,” Desma said.

  That evening, she kept the television on, hoping for survivors, but every time Josh saw the airplanes fly into the skyscrapers he told his mother that another attack was occurring. “Pick a movie,” Desma finally told him. They turned off the news and watched The Lion King. That was how 9/11 unfolded for Desma—live TV, phone calls from friends in the Guard, and then a Disney movie. She did not find it incongruous to yaw from conversations with fellow soldiers to caring for her children; these were the various aspects of her life, her incoming and outgoing tides, and they felt to her like an integrated whole. She happened to be both a soldier and a mother, and did not see the two roles as being at odds.

  In the days that followed, anti-Muslim sentiment flared across southern Indiana. Desma drove through Petersburg and saw a sign in the window of a family-owned gas station that said, RUN, RAGHEADS, RUN. She and Stacy Glory made bets on who would utter the most racist comments inside the Bedford armory, but neither of them anticipated hearing that kind of talk from one particular leader, a man they had always respected.

  “Drop a bomb, kill ’em all,” Desma heard him say. “Fuckin’ ragheads.”

  “How can you say that?” she objected. “I can understand you being angry, but Jesus Christ! You can’t just wipe out an entire nation of people because of a small group of extremists. Then you’re no better than Hitler, or those people in Rwanda!”

  But she might as well have been speaking Latin.

  Although Desma did not like the blanket hatred that she saw around her, she supported President Bush’s “war on terror.” He had to take decisive action, she thought, he couldn’t just stand by and let it happen; otherwise more people would do the same thing. She took note of the subsequent vote in Congress
, and felt scorn for the individual who had cast the lone dissent. How could you vote against a war on terror? The new security measures at the airport should have been adopted long ago as far as she was concerned. At the same time, Desma held part of herself in reserve, waiting for fallout. That was what she did in a crisis—put part of herself away for safekeeping. He has to do something, God help him, Desma thought; I think he’s doing the right thing, but I’m going to wait and see.

  In the months that followed, Desma tried to track the course of the war in Afghanistan, but she had trouble finding good news coverage. It drove her crazy that the reports were so niggling; only BBC Radio seemed to disburse much information. As casualties began to accrue, she was struck by how few people around her seemed aware that the war was resulting in deaths. The following year, Desma sold her house in lieu of foreclosure, and used the proceeds to pay off the outstanding property taxes and mortgage payments. She made no money on the deal, but succeeded in wiping out their debt. After her divorce became final, Desma got a new job waiting tables at a nearby truck stop. It served food and fuel to the traffic flowing along Interstate 64. A modern-day river of freight, I-64 echoed the course of the nearby Ohio as it cut from east to west across southern Indiana. The truck stop was near the town of Dale, right where the interstate crossed Highway 231, then the longest north-to-south route in Indiana. Desma dropped her children off at her cousin Lesley’s house on her way to work; she paid her cousin to care for the two girls while Josh went to school. Sometimes Lesley watched Josh, too; Lesley had two children of her own, one of them a boy close to Josh’s age, and the pair of them wrangled like brothers.