by Helen Thorpe
Nothing deflated Debbie’s good spirits. “Had latrine duty!” she wrote cheerfully. She marveled at her pay; Debbie was now earning more than $1,000 every two weeks. Excitement swept the barracks when they learned that in a few days they would get their desert camouflage uniforms, or DCUs. “Can’t wait!” Debbie told her diary. The desert camo seemed surprisingly drab to her after the stronger contrasts of their familiar BDUs, but even Fischer posed for photographs in the dusty, washed-out colors of their future. Debbie’s one regret about being confined at Atterbury was that she could not leave the base to visit Jim, her closest childhood friend—the boy whose hair she used to cut for free. He now lived in Florida, and he had just learned that he had an inoperable brain tumor. “He has to wait till I get home so I can see him one more time,” Debbie wrote in her diary.
Toward the end of June 2004, everybody in the 113th Support Battalion had to pass a test in land navigation. They were given a compass, told to shoot an azimuth, and find three specific points in the woods. Desma Brooks slipped on some wet leaves, rolled down a hill, and hurtled straight into a pond, while wearing all of her gear. She emerged covered in muck, and dubbed her maneuver “rolling thunder.” When Debbie’s turn came, the needle of her compass kept getting stuck, but after she got a new compass she doggedly found every one of her points—even wading through boggy swampland, up to her knees in water, to do so. Debbie was her own harshest critic. “Getting slower at everything now that I’m older,” she wrote.
But she was not the slowest. That was Michelle Fischer. The girl got lost, gave up, was sent back out, and ultimately found her points only with help from another soldier named Jeremy Toppe who tagged along to babysit her on the supposedly solo exercise. Toppe reported to the rest of the unit that Fischer kept stopping to marvel at the cicadas blanketing the fields, and had babbled to him about the plenitude of butterflies, which she said were an indicator species, or a sign of the health of the local ecosystem. She had spent more time looking at the butterflies than she had at her compass, Toppe said; he had nicknamed her “Poison Butterfly,” and that’s what everyone started calling her. Fischer seemed to like the nickname. She did not aspire to be a good soldier; she did not care whether she could shoot an azimuth. She just wanted to go home.
Debbie mothered her anyway, and as the days went by, she began to admire Fischer’s outspokenness. The young woman kept voicing things that were true but that everybody avoided acknowledging. She went around calling one of the battalion’s leaders “a womanizing piece of shit,” for example; Debbie would never have put it that way, but she couldn’t argue with the assessment. They had all heard about how the man was busily hitting on vulnerable young women, despite the fact that he was married, and the female soldiers were reporting to him, which specifically violated military regulations. At one point, he had his eye on Michelle Fischer, according to several members of the battalion, although she rebuffed his advances. Eventually her immediate supervisor, Patrick Miller, decided to speak to the man, who was Miller’s superior in the chain of command. Miller saw it as his job to protect the young female soldier who was reporting to him from harm. “I had to tell him, ‘You can’t have her,’ ” Miller recalled.
At the moment, Fischer was locked in a battle of wills with her company commander over her habit of wearing a braid of rainbow-colored hemp around her ankle. Captain Nicholas Mueller was a beefy, barrel-chested man with a ruddy face and a dark blond buzz cut. He had spied the anklet during an inspection and demanded that she cut it off. Fischer had complied—and then braided herself a new anklet. Who packed rainbow hemp when heading off to a war zone? But Debbie was impressed with the way Fischer stubbornly made herself a new anklet every night, only to cut it off every morning. Debbie wasn’t like that; she did not rebel. The girl had spunk, Debbie decided.
Debbie’s crowd, the older guys who had been in the Guard forever, were preoccupied with another drama—the emerging power struggle between Captain Nicholas Mueller and Bravo Company’s most experienced soldier, a Vietnam War veteran named John Perkins, who was known to everyone by the nickname John Wayne. To Debbie, Mueller appeared young and green, while she idolized John Wayne. He was tough and grizzled, used an old-fashioned straight razor to shave, and had seen combat. From Debbie’s vantage point it looked as though Bravo’s commander felt threatened by Perkins’s real-world expertise. When they split, she aligned herself firmly with John Wayne, on the side of experience—and when Mueller subsequently rearranged the unit’s leadership so that Perkins would not go to Afghanistan, Debbie lost faith in Mueller. “John Wayne came by what a small world always so glad to see him,” she wrote in her diary. “Love that man. Mueller is an idiot but oh well his loss . . . we need [Perkins] too bad they have a personality conflict.”
At the end of June, the soldiers participated in a three-day simulation of what life would be like inside the compound where they would be living in Kabul. There was no drinking, there were armed guards posted in the towers, and there was a lot of concertina wire. The post was locked down, and they had to show ID to get inside the wire. On the first day of the simulation, Debbie spotted a double rainbow, which she interpreted as a sign of good fortune. On day two, a female soldier from Alpha Company started cutting herself and was put on suicide watch. And then Michelle Fischer decided to go AWOL and attend a Dave Matthews concert. Debbie wondered how that stunt was going to work out—going AWOL constituted a significant offense. As it turned out, Fischer managed to sneak off-post without getting caught, but she missed the concert because she had ordered the tickets online, and the vendor had canceled the order after being unable to verify the transaction. Fischer had shrugged off the disappointment with a weary resignation, as if she had grown accustomed to things not going her way. On the last day of the simulation, Debbie wrote in her diary, “We saw another double rainbow tonight. Two in two days. Amazing it’s good luck!!” Brooks said she was not a religious person, but the second double rainbow meant that God still existed, even if she was stuck in this hellhole without her children. Fischer thought it meant she might get to go home.
After the simulation ended, everyone was given a pass for the weekend. Jeff drove up to get Debbie and brought along her dog. “Maxx just whined and cried and whined for 10 to 15 minutes,” wrote Debbie in her diary. “Then laid on my lap for twenty minutes of loving.” Back at their house, Debbie reveled in the sanctity of her bedroom, where she finally got a good night’s sleep. “So nice to wake up no fan!!!!” she wrote the next morning. She watched The Wizard of Oz with Maxx glued to her side. Then it was time to return to Atterbury. Back in the barracks, Fischer told her all about the romantic weekend she had spent with her boyfriend Pete at a hotel in nearby Edinburgh; Pete had driven three hours to meet her there, and Fischer was starry-eyed. Meanwhile, Brooks had caught a ride down to southern Indiana with another soldier. Jimmy had picked her up at the truck stop, and she had spent two bittersweet days with her children. Brooks seemed unusually subdued.
The break helped, but by July, the soldiers had grown restless and were chafing at the confinement. Some of them thrived in the regimented environment; Ben Sawyer from missile, for example, shed his hangdog look and acquired a stance with greater purpose. Others wilted from the boredom. Flush with cash and eager for distraction, the soldiers started buying laptops and DVD players. Debbie watched countless episodes of M*A*S*H with Will Hargreaves. Later she borrowed Desma Brooks’s player to watch Harry Potter. “It really was a good idea I didn’t think I would like it but I did really enjoy it,” she wrote afterward. Then she bought a laptop computer herself—it was amazing to be able to afford such a luxury. Debbie watched Seabiscuit on her new laptop and then played a lot of solitaire.
Fischer and Brooks had emerged as Bravo Company’s two natural troublemakers, and they were spending increasing amounts of time together. Fischer kept getting drunk with Brooks and then wandering off to sing “I’m a Little Teapot” with Patrick Miller and his friends. Ben Sawyer walked
her back to the barracks a lot, and seemed to be trying to act like a gentleman. Once Brooks got so wasted that she slept outside on a picnic table, under a tarp that somebody threw over her, in case it rained. It was often impossible to get Brooks out of bed in time for formation, and a female lieutenant tried to discipline her by rousting her early one morning and ordering her to say the pledge of allegiance, but Brooks brazenly said the pledge while standing naked in the middle of the female barracks, and that was the last time the sergeant woke her up early. Later, Brooks had the crazy idea to buy a kiddie swimming pool and stage a mud-wrestling contest between soldiers who were covered in baby oil. Half the battalion turned out to watch that sloppy debacle.
The parties got wilder and the drinking escalated. When the governor of Indiana arrived to celebrate the sacrifices they were making, they had to stand for hours under the hot sun, and they could smell the rancid alcohol fumes sweating out of each other’s bodies. Two women passed out during the ceremony. The soldiers standing next to them caught their limp bodies before they fell to the ground, and passed them toward the back, away from the dignitaries. Illicit affairs sprang up across the post. Sex was one way to blow off steam, Debbie figured, and they had few other distractions. It was almost as if they lived in two coexisting universes; they knew they still had families back home, but in this world it seemed as though they only had each other. Debbie spent all her free time with Will, who also served on the armament team with her and Michelle Fischer, but nothing romantic took place. It was just nice to have a companion; somebody to drink beer with, somebody who asked if you wanted to watch M*A*S*H. As a widower, Will relied heavily on Debbie for female company. When Jeff came to visit, he drove the three of them to a nearby lake because Jeff knew that otherwise Will would be on his own.
Debbie turned fifty-two that month. Desma Brooks surprised her with a sheet cake decorated with a picture of Maxx, and Debbie started crying when she saw it. That was just like Brooks, Debbie decided—she had a way of making you feel like you were family. One day later, the first group of soldiers from the 113th Support Battalion left for Afghanistan. The rest of them would follow in staggered bunches. Fischer and Brooks were going next, at the end of July. Will and Debbie were going last, at the beginning of August.
* * *
Desma Brooks looked like she was having fun, but actually she was in a slow boil of fury. Finding herself back on the post, separated once more from her children, had left her enraged. Plus, Mueller had stuck her in supply. Desma had been trained to do logistics; supply was a whole different story. She had to spend hours filling out an annoying form called a 2062 in triplicate, ordering wrenches, screwdrivers, hoses. They were a company of mechanics, and her job was to fill up the toolboxes. Then the copy machine broke, and she had to fill out the 2062s by hand. The military wanted her to abide by the rules: everybody in uniforms at all times; yellow building after yellow building; “Yes, sir.” And she was not in the mood. So she flaunted her purple comforter, she put up the tiki torches, she stepped outside of the barracks in her pajamas to smoke cigarettes. And she started a kick-ass affair with one of the unit’s leaders. Desma was notorious for conducting illicit affairs. “Yeah, that was part of my reputation,” she would concede later. “It’s why I was always in trouble. If you couldn’t find me, I was out having sex somewhere.” Generally, it was the same guy for a few years. And then he’d move on, and she would move on. She considered the affairs a relatively innocent form of diversion. What happened at Atterbury was supposed to stay at Atterbury. It was like Vegas—a place apart, another world.
But she never imagined she would have the opportunity to sleep with Lieutenant Mark Northrup. He was whip smart, good-looking, kept himself in shape, had a decent job out in the real world. They had begun a flirtation perhaps two years earlier—back before he had become a noncommissioned officer. They had spent an entire day at the same roadside checkpoint collecting for the March of Dimes, and wound up friends. Unlike most of the men in the unit, Northrup could keep up with Desma in a conversation, and she adored his acerbic sense of humor. Then Northrup had gone away to officer training while Desma had endured her false deployment. By the time she had rejoined Bravo Company, he seemed beyond reach. “He was way out of my league,” said Desma. “The preppy boy in high school who you don’t figure ever notices you.”
But that summer, back at Atterbury again, she was assigned to be his driver. It was one of her extra duties, and it meant they saw each other regularly, often just the two of them alone in a vehicle. “We were talking and talking and talking. It was just flirtation. And then all of a sudden it was, oh, God, some of the best sex I’ve ever had in my life.”
Desma told nobody. Her lover was happily married, and probably would never have started sleeping with her if he had not been forcibly separated from his wife. He was also her superior officer, which meant that the affair was prohibited. Plus, Jimmy was waiting for her back at home. The affair had to remain a secret, which added to the excitement, as far as she was concerned. In all of these ways—purple bedding, tiki torches, partying like hell, secretly screwing one of her supervisors—Desma channeled her fury into an angry sort of fun.
After a while she decided to have some fun over at supply, too. The federal government had a national database where you could look up serial numbers for everything. One day, she and her friend Mary—who had gotten married and was now Mary Bell—discovered that the federal database had about thirty different serial numbers for condoms: ribbed or regular, lubricated or unlubricated, extra sensation, all sizes. Although, as Desma discovered when she tried to order a batch, condoms were categorized as medical supplies. That meant they belonged to goods in class eight, and class eight didn’t fall under her realm. She could only order from classes two, three, six, seven, and nine. Then Desma found the national serial number for hamburger meat, frozen and pattied; another for hot dogs; buns, ketchup, mustard. Food fell under class six, miscellaneous—no problem.
“Hey, Mary,” said Desma. “Let’s throw a party. We can call it a family day.”
“About time!” said Mary.
They ordered three hundred pounds of frozen hamburger meat, three hundred pounds of hot dogs, vast quantities of mustard and ketchup, and ten kegs of beer.
“We need something for morale,” Desma told Mary. “It’s just not enough to have family day—I want a horse.”
Livestock was class ten, technically out of her domain, but she could probably purchase the horse, if the supervisors in Building Three signed off on the 2062. Desma ordered a Clydesdale. She also ordered a bridle, saddle, and blanket. Unfortunately, a scrupulous supervisor spotted the unusual request and sent the 2062 back, along with a note asking for a letter of justification. Desma wrote up a beautiful memorandum; all it needed was the company commander’s signature. She stapled the 2062 behind the memo and slipped them both into the middle of a stack of counseling statements for Mueller to sign. He whipped through the counseling statements, signed the letter of justification, and then paused to read the memo. Desma heard him bellow from half a block away.
“Goddamn it!” yelled Mueller. “Addis!”
Desma’s boss, Gregory Addis, looked shaken when he came to find Desma.
“You need to get over there,” Addis told her.
Desma put on a big smile as she stood at attention.
“Why in the hell did you order a horse?” Mueller demanded.
“Morale and welfare, sir!” said Desma.
“What the hell are you going to do with a damn horse?”
“I’m going to ride it, sir! Didn’t you notice that there’s also a requisition for the saddle, the bridle—all its tack?”
“Get out of my office,” Mueller told her. “Don’t go back to supply. I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, but you can’t work there anymore.”
Great, Desma figured; no more 2062s. They did not get the Clydesdale, nor the kegs, but they did get the hamburger meat and the hot dogs. The s
tory of Desma trying to order the horse made the rounds and just the idea of the Clydesdale had a galvanizing effect. Michelle Fischer, for example, loved hearing that Brooks had tried to order a horse, and decided afterward that being friends with Desma Brooks was how she would survive Afghanistan. At the end of July, right before they had to board the airplane, they snuck off-post together. It was Desma who coined the idea to go to the Classy Chassy, a strip club with an Indy 500 race car theme, over on the south side of Indianapolis. Their departure was looming and they were desperate for distraction. Desma rounded up people she thought needed to be shown a good time and herded them into her Vista Cruiser, a vast station wagon with paneled siding and a floaty ride. It was the middle of the week and they had no permission to leave post. What the hell, Desma figured, the advance party had already left, and pretty soon they were all going to be in a war zone. It seemed like a good idea to go AWOL now, while they were still surrounded by the forgiving cornfields of Indiana, which lit up every evening with galaxies of fireflies. One last hurrah before they left all this behind. She said that she would be the designated driver.
