Soldier Girls

by Helen Thorpe

  5

  * * *

  High Altitude

  MICHELLE HAD JUST fallen in love. In the fall of 2002, she had moved back in with her mother again, and started taking classes at the University of Southern Indiana once more, but the following year she applied to the University of Indiana in Bloomington and received the heady news that she had been accepted. She was nearly living her dream. When the bombs started raining on Baghdad, in the spring of 2003, Michelle flinched to see that they were the wrong hue; the explosions appeared green on her mother’s small television set, because they had been recorded through night vision technology. It disturbed Michelle that the media were reporting everything through a military filter and not showing her the true color of things. She started reading Adbusters, which satisfied her in a way the mainstream news did not. Then all of the Alpha girls vanished: every female soldier whom Michelle had known from middle school or high school—Angela Peterson included—they were all 88Ms (“eighty-eight Mikes”), all truck drivers, all gone. Two years earlier, when she had visited the recruitment office to sign up, that had been the alternate job specialty that Michelle had written down: truck driver. If she had not gotten her first choice, to become a weapons mechanic, then she would have been placed in Alpha Company, too, and she would have been headed for Iraq. She felt that call-up pass her by like a wind on her cheek, it brushed so close.

  Reading Adbusters and watching Democracy Now!, Michelle had a million doubts about the war in Iraq. Yet nobody else around her seemed to question what was taking place. Some of her peers even thought Iraq had something to do with 9/11, and told Michelle she was crazy when she said that was not the case. Political figures such as Rumsfeld and Cheney had begun using the terms “war on terror” and “weapons of mass destruction,” and then suddenly the Alpha girls were gone, and almost nobody in Evansville objected to their absence. It was as if the spectral language had justified what was going to unfold. Because the other students felt at no risk of being drafted, the remote conflicts did not touch them personally. They did not see the void that the missing Alpha girls left behind. It was war without the debate that had always accompanied war; war when only the poor had to serve. Without the Alpha girls, Michelle found the armory’s big bay more cavernous, more echoing. The guys who belonged to the 163rd still showed up, but most of her detachment was at Atterbury, getting ready to go to war. Michelle’s relief at missing the deployment was matched by the guilt she carried because people she had known for years had not been so lucky. It felt random, the question of who among them got sent off to a combat zone, even though there wasn’t anything random about the roster; the generals with responsibility for Iraq had asked for truck drivers, and Michelle was a weapons mechanic. It all came down to what you had studied back when you were in training. None of them had known, during those fat and innocent years, that the job specialties they had chosen would carry such life-altering ramifications.

  After Bush declared the war in Iraq to be a fait accompli—even as so many women she knew personally were preparing to deploy there—Michelle watched other people shrug off the idea of the wars, as if one or both were really over. Everybody seemed tired of the twin conflicts, and happy to put them out of mind. At USI, the students partied as if it were peacetime. Veronica and Colleen, who were on the verge of completing their sophomore year (by this point they were a full year ahead of Michelle in their schoolwork because of the time she’d lost in basic training and in Fort Wayne), had become the party queens of their peer group. On weekends, students flocked to the gatherings they hosted at their apartment. As much as she opposed the wars, Michelle could not help identifying with the Alpha girls, so it was impossible for her to participate in the collective amnesia. Was she paranoid or simply unusually perceptive in her habit of spying spider-webbed connections between the far-off wars and the humdrum? One day she turned a corner at Walmart and saw boxes of shotgun shells stacked into a pyramid, right beside an aisle full of toys. “Like it was candy or something,” Michelle objected. She started photographing the display. A manager threw her out of the store, and then she started boycotting Walmart. It was all interlaced as far as she was concerned: Bush, the weapons industry, the collective amnesia, the vanished Alpha girls.

  After she had returned from Fort Wayne, Michelle had lurched through a series of ill-advised flings and then withdrawn from romantic interactions entirely. During the spring of 2003, Michelle had dated nobody during what friends jokingly called her “semester of celibacy.” By May, however, as she was slogging through textbooks to prepare for her final exams, Michelle had begun spending time with a friend of Veronica’s named Pete Peterson. Pete had gauged ears and nipple rings and smoked pot. He was tall, with sandy hair, light blue eyes, and a gentle merriness. A music fan, he worked at WSWI, known as “the Edge,” the college’s award-winning radio station. Pete and Michelle quickly discovered their shared passion for music, even though Michelle was now listening to more melodic groups such as the Dave Matthews Band, while Pete liked heavier stuff—Queens of the Stone Age, Disturbed, Godsmack. Pete continued to split an apartment with an ex-girlfriend named Sharon, and had also begun sleeping with Veronica, yet he found himself intrigued by Michelle, a small, curvaceous figure with flowing blond hair in bell-bottom blue jeans who surprisingly put on a uniform to drill with the National Guard. “It was like, ‘You go to the National Guard every other weekend?’ ” he would say later. “It was like, ‘What?’ ”

  One evening, during another party at Veronica and Colleen’s apartment, Pete asked Michelle why she had joined the military.

  “For school,” she said.

  “We just invaded Iraq,” he observed.

  “Yeah, I screwed up,” she told him. “That whole September eleventh thing happened after I had already enlisted.”

  Pete was sympathetic. His mother, his father, and his stepfather had all served in the navy, and Pete had grown up on or near various naval bases in Hawaii, California, Connecticut, England, and Puerto Rico. After his mother remarried, she and Pete’s stepfather had a daughter, Stephanie. Pete’s mother left her two children behind with Pete’s stepfather for one year when she was assigned to work on an oiler that was refueling ships in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, and she left the family again when she was stationed for several months at a naval base in Bahrain. That summer, Veronica went on an extended trip to Europe. Pete swore to Michelle that his relationship with Sharon had ended, even though their lease had not, and declared he was not interested in Veronica. He liked Michelle. Michelle let Pete take her to Burdette Park, a vast complex of lakes, tennis courts, waterslides, and playgrounds. Later she would write in a letter to Pete: “I remember the way it felt to kiss you at Burdette, for the first time, surrounded by crazy ducks. I felt like I had waited an eternity for that moment.”

  Michelle and Pete began meeting on the sly—at his house if his ex-girlfriend was not there, or at Michelle’s house if her mother was working. They wanted to keep their romance a secret until they could tell Veronica. One night, however, Pete’s ex-girlfriend Sharon walked into the apartment when she was supposed to be visiting her parents. Pete threw a blanket over Michelle, but his ex figured out who was underneath. She grabbed a knife and ran outside and slashed the tires on Michelle’s red Cougar. After this, Pete wrote Michelle a lengthy apology—for sleeping with her friend Veronica, for getting her embroiled in the ongoing saga with Sharon—in a steno notepad. Certain he had ruined the chance to have a serious relationship with Michelle, he described his desperate state of mind. “[There is a] black feeling in my chest,” wrote Pete. “Sick.” Then Pete recounted a painful moment in his childhood that had occurred during his first lengthy separation from his mother. His words made clear, despite the passage of time, how much had been left unresolved for the child whose mother was serving in the military:

  Let me paint this picture. . . . My mom is my world and it hurt to see her go. She left around the springtime of my sixth grade year and
would be gone for one year. We coped. My dad cooked and cleaned and I watched Stephanie. This is the way life moved on. . . .

  This story takes place around Christmas time. It was after school and my dad was not home so I had the chore of watching Stephanie. The day was overcast and we had nothing but the tree lights on. . . . The phone rings. . . . It’s [my friend] Charlie doing a very bad crank call. I know it’s him and laugh and hang up. I make my way to the living room and the phone rings again and again the same. . . .

  Time goes by and the phone rings I run to the phone Stephanie trails closely behind. I answer “Ricco’s Pizza” there was nothing. Stephanie laughs and I put down the phone. . . . [T]he phone rings again. I run and answer the same “Ricco’s ha ha Pizza” I can’t contain my laughter.

  A small, distant voice says “Pete?” It’s my mom standing on the street in Greece on a pay phone with traffic whizzing past her. . . . She tries to talk “Pete?” She was crying now, half the world away, on a busy street, not seeing us in months, using time and money to call us. . . . She was crying the strongest woman I know is crying because of me. I don’t know how to handle that I really don’t to this day I don’t know. . . . My dad took this the wrong way, he had no idea how I suffered and how I suffer to this day. I got beat.

  Pete told Michelle that he had gotten “that feeling” again when he worried that she might not want to see him anymore. Pete closed the letter by promising never to hurt Michelle again. “I need you . . . ,” he wrote. “I can’t let go of the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  Michelle wrote a six-page response on the same steno pad. “Every moment I am with you has become the only time I am allowed to be myself,” she told Pete. “You’ve swept me away into a dreamland. . . . I know you and I are good for each other.” Michelle worried that she would have to choose between maintaining her friendship with Veronica or having a relationship with Pete. “Then I remember that ideally I’ll be going away to school [in Bloomington] next year. So if we are going to separate . . . is all this anguish worth what will end up as a guaranteed broken heart anyway?” But she told Pete that his actions had not compromised her feelings. If anything, she believed they had grown closer because of the difficulties they had experienced.

  I’m scared for our future together, simply because I want so badly for there to be one. . . . No matter what happens, you have to understand how much you mean to me. . . . I know you look at this and see all the complications you’ve brought to me. But there is so much more to us than that. Us.

  Pete found a new apartment on the ground floor of an old brick building on the west side of Evansville. Veronica and Colleen lived upstairs, and Michelle confessed her involvement with Pete as soon as Veronica returned. Her friend took the news better than Michelle had expected, and soon Michelle was spending almost every night at Pete’s. The apartment had old linoleum floors and Formica countertops and kitchen cabinets that looked like wood but were actually made of metal and clanged when they closed. Pete and Michelle got an old sofa with no legs, and a tiny gray kitten they named Halloween. On the walls they put up a movie poster from Trainspotting. They got high and lay on the sofa in each other’s arms for hours. If they felt ambitious, they went upstairs to watch Sex and the City with Veronica and Colleen.

  In the summer of 2003, when Michelle had to report to Camp Atterbury for annual training, she found it excruciating to separate from Pete. Furious about all of the national security measures that had been adopted, Michelle decided to reread George Orwell’s classic novel 1984. She borrowed Pete’s copy, wanting to take something of his along with her. Pete could always tell which of his books she had been reading, for he kept his books pristine, whereas his new girlfriend tended to fall asleep on top of them, or to stuff them into her bag. By the creased spines and rumpled covers, Pete could see she had worked her way through his copies of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the Zombie Survival Guide. At Camp Atterbury, Michelle immersed herself in Orwell’s satire about a society that had willingly surrendered all of its liberties to live in a state of never-ending war, then lifted her head and was confronted by identical rectangular cinder-block buildings that repeated themselves endlessly in all directions. The book allowed her to cope with the daily act of putting on her uniform—it was her way of being subversive, of declaring she did not belong.

  One day, Michelle crossed paths with a few of the Alpha girls who were staying in a female barracks nearby. They radiated animosity. Everyone else they knew had just showed up to play pretend war games, while they had been stuck at Atterbury for months, gearing up for the real thing. When her unit set up camp out in the woods, Michelle found the training exercises had gotten more serious, as if the leadership thought they might be next. General Martin Umbarger, who was in charge of the Indiana National Guard, wanted every soldier in the state ready to go to war. As a result, Patrick Miller, the cocky, swaggering ex-marine who had worked in missile repair, now had a new job. He was no longer part of the missile team but had been assigned to investigate whether other soldiers were correctly performing the prescribed war exercises. Miller confided to Michelle that he hated ratting out colleagues, and said he was planning to quit the Guard as a result. Michelle figured he must be confiding in her because he knew she was unorthodox. Miller offered Michelle some dip; sucking the sour tobacco made her nauseated, but Michelle did not want Miller to think her weak. When she finished reading 1984, she handed it over to his friend Frank Perez, who was still working in missile repair. “Here,” she said. “See what you think of this.” Perez hardly came out of his tent, he became so enraptured by Orwell’s story. And as usual, their colleague Ben Sawyer trailed after Michelle everywhere.

  It was fun to flirt with the guys from missile, but Michelle longed for Pete. She purchased a writing tablet at the PX and wrote daily letters to him. “Hey sweetheart,” she began. “Day 2, round noon, sitting in the barracks with nothing to do. It’s making me miss you even worse than I thought I would. This is horrible, I want to come home, I want you to hold me.” In another letter, Michelle bemoaned being woken up from a vivid dream of being in Pete’s arms, only to have to report for guard duty. “I was pissed I had to leave my warm sleeping bag and sweet thoughts to go freeze my ass off outside,” she wrote. Stuck in a foxhole, bored and cold and tired, Michelle began texting Pete during the predawn hours. He sent messages back and forth with her until her shift ended. She wrote later that she had never loved anybody else as much as she loved him. “I’m on radio check, watch, whatever, the easiest damn job I’ve ever had,” she said. “I just sit and read in a heated trailer. Think of you and decide to pick up my pen. Missing you bad, thinking of all the ways I want to kiss you.” The more time they spent apart, the more passionate her letters became.

  It’s day 11, only four days left to go and we’ll be together again. . . . I can’t believe we’ve been apart for this long. It seriously feels like two months instead of two weeks. . . . When I lie in my sleeping bag and I’m bored and I can’t sleep, I think about making love to you and my imagination is so vivid, and my memory can call out the smallest details of the way you look naked, the way it feels to have you inside of me, our rhythm, everything. And it’s like I can’t stop torturing myself. I can’t stop thinking about you. I miss you. It’s almost over, it’s almost over, it’s almost over.

  Michelle moved in with Pete as soon as she got home. They both worked long hours at menial jobs, and their schedules did not align. Michelle got a job making $7.62 an hour at Berry Plastics, where she manufactured disposable cups for fast-food restaurants. Pete worked the evening shift at Staples, and the overnight shift at WGBF, a for-profit FM rock station. They left each other domestic updates and love notes on the steno pad and the writing tablet. Michelle wrote to Pete that she had left clothes in the dryer, then added, “You mean everything to me.” Pete wrote to Michelle that a mechanic had called about her car and signed off, “I worship you.” Michelle thanked him for cleaning the apar
tment and added, “PS Will you marry me?” And Pete wrote, “Yes!!”

  In August 2003, when Michelle reported for drill weekend, she experienced immense relief to see the missing Alpha girls had returned. Their false deployment made Michelle hope that perhaps the war in Iraq might really end without anybody from her battalion being sent there. That same month, NATO took over what was being called “peacekeeping” in Afghanistan, and Michelle let herself imagine that war drawing to a close, too. Perhaps she might be able to realize her dreams after all. Pete and Michelle planned to live apart while she attended college in Bloomington, starting in the fall of 2004, and then they planned to move to Seattle together. They hung a large map of Seattle over their bed so they could get to know their future home.

  Michelle’s final semester at USI, in the spring of 2004, was grueling: physics, chemistry, calculus, and Spanish. She wanted to get a degree in environmental science, and she was trying to get two of her science requirements out of the way before she switched schools, because she thought the courses would be easier at the University of Southern Indiana. She spent most of her waking hours poring over her textbooks. Right after she started her spring classes, however, Michelle heard that the battalion she belonged to was going to be deployed sometime in the coming year. Supposedly most of the fighting was over, and the nation-building had begun, yet large numbers of soldiers were still required. At the armory, her supervisor instructed everyone to get into better physical shape, because they were going to be stationed at high altitude. Michelle went home and looked up the elevations of the capital cities of Iraq and Afghanistan: Baghdad sprawled across a vast alluvial plain, at an elevation of only 112 feet, while Kabul rested in an alpine valley at 6,000 feet above sea level. Odds were she was headed for Afghanistan.