Soldier Girls

by Helen Thorpe

  Mary Bell sat beside Desma in the passenger seat, dressed in a pink tube top and a white tennis skirt. Behind them, on the wagon’s middle bench seat, were Michelle Fischer and her perpetual shadow, muscular, tattooed Ben Sawyer. Michelle claimed they were just friends but it looked like more than that to Desma. On the rear-facing backseat sat Suzy Allen and Don Southard. A devout Christian, Suzy had been leading a relatively wholesome life on post, despite the debauchery going on around her, but Desma had grabbed her anyway, figuring she had to be freaked out, too. Sawyer had persuaded Southard to join them on the way to her car; he was a good-looking married man who was fond of boxing.

  “We’re going to sneak off to the Classy Chassy,” Sawyer had told him. “Want to come?”

  “Hell, yeah!” Southard had said.

  The Classy Chassy was hopping. Drag cars hung from the ceiling, lit up by red neon, while black lights sucked the color out of everything in the room except the white parts of the strippers’ costumes. One stripper was dressed up as a cowgirl, another as Captain America. They saw other soldiers in the audience, but they were the only women. The DJ fanned the crowd into a frenzy when he played “Whip It,” and then Michelle requested Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” The chairs had wheels, and Desma and Michelle and Mary rolled from their table over to the area by the stage. The strippers lavished attention on them, delighted to be entertaining women. Desma stuck to her promise and ordered only Diet Cokes, but she harassed the bartender into making stiff drinks for her friends. “Listen, we didn’t drive all the way down here to drink juice and water,” Desma told him. “If I wanted them to drink juice and water I could’ve kept them at home.”

  Over the course of the night, Michelle consumed a total of nine vodka Collinses. They got so rowdy that the manager told them they were going to have to leave unless they settled down. They rolled back to their table and were quiet for a while but then a particularly attractive stripper came over and made purring sounds in their ears. She put her head down between Suzy’s legs, and vaulted upward into a headstand so that her tiny white underpants, which glowed under the club’s black lights, were nearly touching Suzy’s face. “Oh, my goodness!” exclaimed Suzy. The stripper’s underpants had tiny red cherries on them.

  “I need to get in the car,” Mary announced.

  Desma told the others that she was going to take Mary outside. They walked around the parking lot until Mary felt better and then Desma got her into the Vista Cruiser and rolled her window down and told her not to puke in the car. A lonely Mexican tried to chat with Mary, so Desma rolled up her window. He came around to Desma’s side.

  “Does she want to fuck?” he inquired.

  “Do you see her? She is knocked-out drunk.”

  “What about you?”

  “Get the hell away from me,” Desma told him.

  The others finally emerged, and the Mexican vanished. Desma got them onto 465, the highway that looped around Indianapolis.

  “I don’t feel good,” Mary said.

  “You need to tell me before you’re going to vomit so that I can pull over,” Desma instructed.

  “Okay,” Mary said.

  But the car had that floaty ride. Desma looked into the rearview mirror for a moment and saw that Ben Sawyer had put his arm all the way around Michelle and was holding his hand over her mouth to keep her quiet, while she was shaking with laughter. Behind them, Desma saw two feet, up by the roof of the car. Were those Suzy’s feet? Then she heard Mary make a little sound like a meow.

  “Did you just puke in my car?” Desma cried.

  “No—in my tube top,” Mary reported.

  “I know you got napkins,” said Ben Sawyer. “You’re a mom.”

  They could not clean Mary up sufficiently with the car moving floatily along at sixty miles an hour, so Desma pulled off onto the shoulder of the highway. Mary stumbled out of the car, pulled off her tube top, and flung it into the darkness. Desma and Michelle were mopping her pukestained breasts when another vehicle pulled up behind them. It was the company commander and the XO. Mueller and his second in command just sat in their van, taking it all in. “Oh, Mary, your boobies!” cried Michelle. She stepped behind Mary and cupped her friend’s naked breasts in her hands. They stood like that looking at the two leaders of their unit as Don Southard and Suzy Allen pulled on their clothes and stumbled out of the car. Alcohol-induced stupidity, Suzy Allen would say later, but she wasn’t sober yet, and she was looking at her commander.

  Desma stepped forward and observed tartly that she believed the company’s two leaders were AWOL. “You’re not supposed to leave the post,” she announced. “So what exactly are you doing out on this highway?”

  Mueller sighed. He asked if she was sober enough to drive and told them to go back to Camp Atterbury.

  Desma bumped into Mueller the next morning.

  “How’s everybody feeling?” Mueller asked drily.

  “We’re feeling just fine,” Desma told him. “Where did you go?”

  “We went to the Red Door. Where did you go?”

  “We went to the Classy Chassy.”

  “That’s why everybody was puking in your car.”

  “Oh, not everybody was puking,” Desma said.

  * * *

  Michelle Fischer was twenty-one years old, and she hadn’t gambled on any of this. She hadn’t gambled on 9/11, hadn’t gambled on Camp Atterbury, hadn’t gambled on Afghanistan. She was as scared as she had ever been. Every night, she drank herself into a stupor, trying to subdue the bone-gnawing anxiety. Mostly she drank Hypnotic, a pale blue mixture of prepackaged vodka, cognac, and fruit juice. She called it “ghetto fabulous.” But she put on a brave front when she communicated with her parents, because she did not want to make them worry. At the beginning of May, she wrote her father a short letter in a chipper tone. She told him:

  I am trying to make the most of my time here. Right now I’m trying to organize a recycling program for my company. We drink so much beer in cans, so I’m trying to convince my first sergeant to let me recycle them. I’m having a hard time, but I’m stubborn. (Thanks to you and Mom!) I drink almost every day here. There’s not much else to do. I just let myself drink whenever I want to because I know I can’t drink at all in Afghanistan so I don’t have to worry about coming home with a drinking problem. . . .

  I’m not afraid of this experience anymore and I’m not mad about it. All I can do is keep myself positive. . . .

  I love you Daddy!

  But in a letter to Pete, written on the very same day, she struck a different tone.

  This sucks. I really miss my old life, this army shit is for the birds. . . . There is no one here like me, not even close. I have a few close friends but even they don’t have much in common with me. Oh well—at least I won’t have to worry about anyone wanting to borrow my Adbusters. . . .

  Kiss Halloween for me. I miss him. When I get home he’ll be a cat. Not a kitten.

  Michelle’s old hip injury flared up after one of their runs, and she asked the medics to look, hoping the stress fracture from basic training had reemerged. They sent her down to Louisville, Kentucky, where the doctors pronounced her fine. Then Michelle was out of excuses. She made a calculated decision not to renew her Indiana driver’s license when it expired, however, because driving a truck in a war zone was probably the most dangerous job that the military was assigning to women. And she stubbornly kept wearing her rainbow hemp anklet.

  In other respects, however, it was simply easier to conform. The PX carried certain basics, but otherwise everybody went to Walmart. Buses took the soldiers over to Walmart and brought them back to the post. It was the only place the buses would go. So Michelle ended her boycott and resumed shopping at Walmart. The military was vast, and it did not tolerate idiosyncracy. It was exhausting to fight all of the time to maintain her identity. At least she would be rich when she got back, Michelle figured. In the middle of May she got her first active duty paycheck: she was now earn
ing $994.68 every two weeks. Once she got to Afghanistan, she would earn hazard pay, too. And while she was there, she would pay no federal income tax. Her income would skyrocket—and all her meals would be provided, her laundry would be done, and movies would be shown at night for free.

  Michelle lost Pete’s ring one day in the pool, and she slept with Ben Sawyer shortly afterward. She still loved Pete, but Sawyer was there and Pete was not. She had been shit-faced on Hypnotic when it happened—drunk, lonely, and scared. Most other people would have found her behavior understandable, but she could not forgive herself. She did not tell Pete what had happened because she wanted so badly for it not to have taken place. But when she wrote to him next her words were imbued with an unmistakable tone of regret.

  I love you so much, and I really miss you. I’m sorry that this experience is changing me. I know that you can tell the difference already. . . . I miss my colorful life so much. Some days I am okay, but only if I am really busy. I can’t think too much. But when I do it’s always of you, or Halloween. And the little things I miss like Sex and the City. Just dumb shit you take for granted every day of your life. Let’s take this year to dream, because when I get home I’ll have enough money and we can do whatever we want.

  The following month, Michelle went with Ben Sawyer to Fort Benjamin Harrison, over in Lawrence, Indiana, to become certified as a combat lifesaver. “It was the most nerve-racking thing, I never, ever thought I could stick a needle in somebody’s vein,” Michelle wrote in a letter to her father. “But I did it perfectly. I am so squeamish around blood, but now that I’ve done it once I feel like I could do it a million times.” By then she had gotten falling-down drunk once more, and had sex with Sawyer again. She had not intended to repeat her mistake, but she had no self-control when she was plastered.

  Michelle wrote one final letter to Pete before she left the country. She found a card with a drawing of a green olive. Inside, the card said, “Olive you!” It was an inside joke. At the radio station on campus, when Pete had been behind the glass, unable to hear anything Michelle was saying to him, she used to pantomime kisses and hold up notes that said “olive juice.” She knew he would get the joke. Inside she wrote:

  Dear Pete,

  You are the love of my life and I am forever grateful for your love. I know that I could not make it through this experience without your support. You are my only support, you’re my family, my partner, my love, and my best friend. Thank you so much for everything you do for me. I’ll always love you. Keep your chin up. Think of Europe, Bloomington, Seattle, and all of the dreams that we share. I’ll be home soon.

  Love always,

  Michelle

  She went AWOL and snuck out to the Classy Chassy with Desma right after she mailed the letter. Even the nine drinks she ordered could not obliterate her sense of guilt at having cheated on Pete, nor the terrible fear that was fueling her need for physical reassurance. They left for Afghanistan the following day. Michelle, Desma, and Desma’s friend Mary boarded an airplane that left the United States on July 20, 2004. The next time Michelle saw Debbie Helton was in Kabul.

  II

  * * *

  Afghanistan, 2004–2005

  1

  * * *

  Off Safety

  MICHELLE’S GROUP GOT stranded in Germany for days, sleeping on cots in an enormous tent on the sprawling Rhein-Main Air Base just outside of Frankfurt. It was run jointly by the US Air Force and NATO and served as the primary way station for American soldiers passing through Europe. The chow hall was all blond wood and bright lights, and reminded Michelle of an IKEA cafeteria. Nobody wanted to leave because they served such good food—huge plates of sausages and immense slabs of cake. When their first two flights out of Germany were canceled for mechanical reasons, Michelle began to imagine being granted a reprieve. One night at dinner, she heard that a group that had left after them had already arrived in theater. Was there a reason they could not get where they were going? The following morning the soldiers lined up to depart again, only to be told that a powerful storm had devastated the airport; the roof of their terminal had collapsed. That evening, Michelle saw another double rainbow. It was a sign, she knew it. The soldiers were told they could go out drinking. Michelle, Desma, and Mary found a bar with a sand volleyball court, and whooped it up for hours, trying different German beers. Michelle got wasted, then called Pete to say she thought there had been some kind of mistake, she would be home soon. She stumbled back to her cot in a beery stupor and passed out. She had been asleep for only a few hours when an officer walked in, flipped on the lights, and said, “It’s time to go.”

  As they boarded the immense green C-17 Globemaster troop transport aircraft, Desma announced that the perfect cocktail for riding in a plane that was going to do a combat landing was one Valium and one Ambien. She handed those two pills to Michelle and to Mary. “One plus one equals you don’t feel a thing,” Michelle would say afterward. None of them stirred much when the plane stopped to refuel in Turkey; when they neared Kabul, the C-17 plunged downward in a dive so steep that some of the other soldiers felt as though weights had been placed on their bodies, but neither Michelle nor Desma retained clear memories of the landing. “Sank into that cargo webbing like it was my mother’s womb, slept the whole way,” Desma would say later.

  Michelle stumbled off the C-17 in a groggy state of disbelief and for one disorienting moment thought maybe they had landed on the sun. When her eyes adjusted to the glare she noticed there was no sign of the army unit that was supposed to greet them. The empty-bellied C-17 took off anyway, leaving them marooned on the tarmac without any ammunition. Somebody wondered out loud if they might get shot before they left the airport. Mary hunkered down by her hand luggage, onto which she had tied a small pink and orange worm that she had nicknamed Gwormy—many of them had brought mascots, as if the toys could keep them safe. Desma slowly absorbed the fact that barbed wire orbited them, and small red triangular signs posted on the barbed wire warned of mines, and beyond those signs a flock of small children had gathered. They were staring at the soldiers. The children wore mismatched clothes, some too big and some too small, nothing that belonged together, as if they had found the items at Goodwill. The soldiers looked like astronauts ready for a moon landing. They had on desert camo pants, desert camo jackets, bulletproof vests, Kevlar helmets, M4 assault rifles. The gear obscured the question of what shape or what gender they might be underneath, and everything matched perfectly. What unearthly prospect did they present? Desma watched a boy run away from them through the field full of land mines, and only after he had gotten quite far did she perceive that he was following a well-worn path.

  The regular army arrived and gave the Army National Guard soldiers ten bullets apiece. “Load up,” a sergeant instructed gruffly. “Don’t lock. Leave the chamber empty. Take your weapons off safety.” Neither Michelle nor Desma had ever taken their weapon off safety before, except when they were aiming at a target. He said they should not trust children and they should watch out for cars approaching at high speed and for roadside bombs. A box, a bag of trash, a pile of dirt. He said there could be Taliban out there. Then the army soldiers herded them into the backs of open-air trucks lined with sandbags. Michelle grabbed a seat next to Desma. As they peered out between the planks, they saw rocky, barren terrain ringed on all sides by mountains so tall they looked blue. Kabul itself appeared bleak: bombed-out buildings, bullet holes, junked cars, debris by the side of the road. But the traffic milling around them was fantastic; they saw wildly painted trucks, people wearing robes, barefoot children, donkeys, goats, and women cloaked from head to toe in blue burkas. And then billowing clouds of dust consumed it all.

  At Camp Phoenix, uniformed guards cleared them through the gate. Their battalion belonged to the 76th Infantry Brigade from Indiana, which was taking over from the National Guard soldiers from Oklahoma, and the turnover had been staggered. For the time being, both sets of soldiers were going to be double-bu
nked in the same quarters. On their first night, Oklahoma set up a big screen in the middle of the main courtyard and played the movie Groundhog Day. Michelle skipped the forced entertainment, but Desma watched Bill Murray wake up over and over again to the exact same reality. It was 5:59, then 6:00. Put your little hand in mine, there ain’t no hill or mountain we can’t climb. I got you, babe. Over and over. Afterward, Oklahoma made sure they got the joke—their days at Phoenix would be so mind-numbingly unchanging as to seem identical. “Yeah, we got it,” Desma told them. “We’re not dumb.”

  About those hazy, sleep-deprived first days, living double-bunked in a ten-person tent with twenty other women, Michelle kept only smeared, partial memories. There was no privacy, and Michelle found herself observing other women changing their tampons as well as their clothes. Even Debbie Helton, who got to Camp Phoenix about ten days later, squirmed with self-consciousness due to the communal living arrangements. “I’ve got gas galore these poor people in my tent,” Debbie wrote in her diary. “It’s really bad.” The elevation of 5,869 feet rendered them short of breath, and their bodies required time to adjust to the dry climate, too. Many of the newly arrived soldiers got nosebleeds. The temperature routinely hit one hundred degrees (though later in the year the temperature would drop below freezing), and they had arrived just as the region was staggering through the last phases of a blistering seven-year drought. The wind that constantly scoured the land was literally blowing the ground into the air, and whenever she drew a breath, Michelle felt as though she were inhaling sand. The grit crept into her eyes and ears and undergarments. It stuck to her teeth and it coated her scalp. Her pen no longer rolled smoothly over paper when she wrote letters.