Soldier Girls

by Helen Thorpe

  Akbar vowed to come to the United States to visit, but nobody knew if this would transpire. It seemed implausible—but Akbar had grit. They watched him walk through the gate of Camp Phoenix, asking each other if they would ever see the young Afghan again. And what of his country? They wanted to believe the year they had spent in Afghanistan had made some kind of difference, that they had done some good. That all those weapons would be used to further some cause in which they could believe. And they wanted to have faith that the other relationships they had forged here would also continue. As she watched Akbar walk away, Michelle wore a new silver band on her ring finger. She had wanted a souvenir that would memorialize the time she had spent in this place, and she had asked Akbar to accompany her to the bazaar, to help her buy the ring. He had translated for her the words she had wanted inscribed on the inside of the band. “My heart belongs to Ben,” the ring said in Dari, in a beautiful flowing script that she could not read. Those were the words she would wear next to her skin when she got home. It was her attempt to fix things in place, to secure this moment, to create something permanent out of all this change as she stood at the gate that divided Akbar’s world from hers, on the brink of yet another journey.

  III

  * * *

  Indiana, 2005–2007

  1

  * * *

  Welcome Home, Dad

  MICHELLE FISCHER HAD forgotten that anywhere could be so green. Bright emerald grass and the pale lime floating leafiness of trees and the dark olive profusion of bushes, it astonished her to see such fecundity. They were riding on a school bus from Indianapolis International Airport to a National Guard armory located ten miles away, on the west side of the city. It was the middle of the day. The school bus had been painted white, and its windows were latched halfway open. Michelle was struck with wonder at the smell of summer: humid, verdant, sweet. Had it always smelled so fragrant in Indiana, and she had simply never noticed? The trees seemed larger than trees had before. They towered over the highway, pressing forward with startling abundance. She caught sight of rows of young corn, still ripening and not yet ready for harvest.

  Michelle had left Afghanistan with Mary Bell on a C-17 that had taken off from Kabul International Airport. They had handed over their assault rifles and ballistic vests right before they boarded the plane—rifles carefully counted and put into one box, vests carefully counted and put into another, and the boxes loaded onto conexes. As the plane had taken off, Michelle had folded over and put her head down between her knees and wept, stricken at being separated from Ben Sawyer, who was returning later. There had been no sit-down toilets on the plane; male soldiers had urinated into hip-level funnels built into the side of the craft, while female soldiers had squatted over a bucket behind a curtain. The curtain had offered inadequate coverage, and Michelle had waited until Kurdistan, where she had said, “Somebody who lives here has to sprint me to a bathroom.” They had changed planes several times in various countries before they had touched down in Indiana. The rest of the battalion would follow, returning in staggered groups over the course of the summer.

  The white school bus pulled up at the National Guard armory on West Minnesota Street. The soldiers were told to drop their bags and stand in formation; they could hear people screaming from behind a set of rolling doors. There was nobody waiting for Michelle behind those doors, because she had not told her family when she was coming home. Mary also had not informed her family. The soldiers were being given two days of freedom before they had to report to Camp Atterbury for a week of demobilization, and Michelle and Mary were planning to spend those two days in Bloomington. Michelle’s friend Veronica was living there now, in a house she shared with her boyfriend, Russell, and their friend Philip. Veronica had transferred into Indiana University, partied too much, gotten kicked out, and was now taking classes at Ivy Tech instead. The idea of getting drunk with Veronica seemed more appealing than an emotional reunion with tearful relatives, and they figured that no harm would be done, since their families did not know when they were due back. But when the doors opened, the soldiers marched into the armory’s gymnasium, where they were swiftly enveloped by the hungry, screaming crowd, and out of the maw came Mary’s mother. She said the Family Readiness Group had let her know.

  Mary’s mother gave Michelle a ride to Columbus, where they dropped her off at a gas station. It was hard to be severed from Mary; whenever they had left the post, they had traveled in pairs, and Michelle thought she needed a battle buddy. But the civilian world had other routines. Veronica picked her up, said it was karaoke night at a bar called the Office and that a group of friends were gathering there to celebrate her return. Michelle no longer fit into her civilian clothes—over the course of the deployment, she had dropped several sizes—so they went to the mall. There were no windows, there were too many stores; it was overwhelming. Disoriented, Michelle hardly paid attention to what they bought. It did not matter what the purchases cost, because she had $20,000 in her bank account. When Michelle put on the tube top and the tight jeans Veronica had chosen, she liked the way the clothes emphasized her new figure but hated the way they revealed her farmer’s tan. She imagined that every other person at the bar would look at her brown neck and forearms and her white shoulders and know that she had been in the military. She got falling-down drunk. It was a relief to know that she could drink and not worry about running into an infantryman on the way home.

  Then she returned to Camp Atterbury for five days of demobilization. Back again amid that sea of identical yellow cinder-block buildings, Michelle filled out reams of paperwork. One of the forms was a questionnaire called a postdeployment health assessment. None of the soldiers wanted to admit to any difficulties, which would only get them tangled up in the army’s cumbersome bureaucracy. Michelle could not wait to put aside her desert camo uniform and raced through the form in a way that was not entirely truthful but was intended to convey the impression that she had sailed through her deployment. No, she had not seen any dead people. No, she had not seen anyone get wounded. No, she had not been engaged in direct combat. No, she had not shot anybody. All true. No, she had not experienced any diminishment in pleasure (although she had). No, she did not have nightmares (although she did). No, she was not feeling depressed (although she was). If she answered yes to any of those queries, Michelle thought, she would only get stuck at Atterbury. Better to claim that she was entirely cheerful, that she had no bad dreams. She did admit to having been exposed to burning trash, loud noises, and vehicle exhaust fumes. But she did not admit to any critical feelings about the military. Did she think her unit leadership had taken care of her during this deployment? “Yes,” Michelle wrote. What events made her feel this way? “Good chain of command.”

  The same form asked if the soldier was presently in a committed relationship. Michelle said she was, thinking of Ben Sawyer. She was asked to rank, on a scale of one to five, how she felt about the following statements. “My relationship with my partner is more important to me than almost anything else in my life.” Five out of five, answered Michelle. “I want this relationship to stay strong no matter what rough times we may encounter.” Five out of five. The form offered more such statements, but changed the rating scale from one to seven. “I believe we can handle whatever conflicts will arise in the future.” Five out of seven, said Michelle. “I feel good about our prospects to make this relationship work for a lifetime.” Six out of seven, said Michelle. “I am very confident when I think of our future together.” Six out of seven.

  Then she headed back to Evansville. Michelle did not feel ready to enroll at Indiana University that fall, but planned to resume her college education there the following semester, in the spring of 2006. She was not sure exactly how she was going to occupy herself until then. As it turned out, not much held her interest. With no medics around to write new prescriptions, Michelle gave up the pills that she had been taking nightly, but began consuming a lot of alcohol. She slept on Colleen’s couch.
Her friends had busy, civilian lives, while she had mislaid hers, and the month of July passed by in a foggy blur of hangovers, Advil, and beer.

  At some point she called Pete to let him know she was back from Afghanistan. She said she knew that she needed to remove her belongings from his apartment as soon as possible, but she didn’t yet know where she was going to live. “Don’t worry about it,” Pete said. “I promise not to pee on your clothes. You can get them when you’re ready.” In the weeks that followed, Pete figured he should wait and see if she called. She did, but not often. There was this looming army guy in her life; the soldier assumed enormous significance in Pete’s mind. Then he got a phone call from a friend who was living in Los Angeles and working on a movie. The friend said he could get Pete a job on the set. Why not? There was nothing keeping him in Indiana. Pete asked Michelle to keep Halloween for a little while, until he got settled in L.A. Somehow the cat had become his while she was gone.

  Michelle was unprepared for what her uniform was going to mean to other people. She still thought of herself as someone who loved alternative music and hated George Bush and voted for Ralph Nader, but to some members of the extended family she had become a symbol: a soldier, a veteran, a hero. A great-aunt she did not know had started emailing and was signing her notes “love in Christ.” She also sent Michelle a picture of her daughter with George W. Bush. The woman seemed to view Michelle as the personification of a whole confluence of matters that were hugely meaningful but she also seemed to have a hard time seeing the actual Michelle. “This woman never met me, she didn’t know me at all,” Michelle would say later. “I’m not a Christian, I’m not a Bush fan. She was the opposite of everything I was.” Meanwhile, Michelle’s mother’s first husband, who had served in Vietnam—her father’s first cousin—asked if she would join him in a parade at a 4-H fair in Evansville. Michelle said yes, because she felt obligated. But as her father was driving her over to his cousin’s house, she held the familiar desert camo in her hands and was filled with dread. She was going to have to wear the uniform again at drill, which would resume three months after her return, but she had not put it on since the deployment.

  “I can’t do this,” Michelle said. “Dad, I can’t put this uniform back on.”

  “That’s okay, honey,” Fred Fischer told his daughter. “Let’s turn around. We’ll go to Denny’s instead.”

  Not many people accepted without query that she might have gone astray, but she never had to explain the difficulty of finding her way back home to her father. Being lost, that he understood. Michelle gave him the medals she had earned. Everybody in the battalion had been given a combat action badge because of the RPGs that had been fired over their compound (although Desma had immediately scoffed, and swore she would never wear hers, saying the tour had involved no actual combat). Michelle gave him that and the special commendation for all the AK-47s. She didn’t want them, but she didn’t want to throw them away, either. Otherwise, some of the interactions she had with family members proved jarring. She had been gone for a long time, and they could not fathom where.

  “This is my sister—she just got back from Iraq,” her sister Tammy told a friend at one point.

  “Actually, I was in Afghanistan,” Michelle said.

  “Where in Afghanistan?” asked her sister’s friend.

  “I was in Kabul.”

  The friend looked blank-faced.

  “It’s the capital,” Michelle snapped. “Look it up sometime.”

  Nobody at the parties that Colleen brought her to had heard of places like Kandahar or Helmand, and they could not say if Mazar-i-Sharif was a city or a province. Michelle remembered with a sense of shocked recognition that the wars were incomprehensible to most Americans. They could not list the major developments in either narrative. A few people had heard that there had been an election in Afghanistan, but none of them knew the name of the man who had been elected. “You think people are really stupid and fat and lazy,” Michelle would say later. “They just work to buy shit they don’t need. Over there, everything is really simple. You get back here—we make our lives really, really complicated. You meet people here in America and it’s like, nothing is ever enough. They want to make more and they want to be more and it just seems so irrelevant and trivial and pathetic, and it’s really hard to be around people. It’s like, You really have no priorities, you ought to just go sit in a third world country for a while, and then you might feel a little better about your life.”

  For weeks, the only human being whom Michelle could bear to be with was Mary Bell, who came to see her in Evansville several times. On one of those visits, Mary accompanied Michelle when she went to buy a used Cabrio. Afterward, Mary taught Michelle how to drive a stick shift. Mary was easy to talk to, and she got mad about all the same things—the stupid questions, the obliviousness, the lack of recognition. Then Desma came home at last, at the end of July. Mary and Michelle drove to Indianapolis to greet her inside the same armory on West Minnesota Street. The armory’s gym was filled with balloons and flowers and flags, as well as homemade signs, many of which said, WELCOME HOME, DAD. The din made Michelle flinch. The soldiers marched into the gym and then dissolved into the crowd. They spotted both Debbie and Will but lost them quickly in the pandemonium. Finally they saw Desma, looking travel-worn and weary in a wrinkled uniform. They had forty-eight hours before she had to get on the bus that would take her to Camp Atterbury. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Desma said. They drove to a hotel and they ordered takeout food and they did nothing but watch movies on TV for two whole days.

  It was strange, once they were all back, because Michelle felt as though Debbie and Desma were now her family, yet they lived in far-flung places. Debbie lived two hours to the north of her, while Desma lived almost an hour to the east. They did not have to return to drill for three months, and Michelle did not see anybody from Bravo Company unless she made a special effort. It was odd to wake up and not see those familiar faces in the dining hall over breakfast. Estranged, Michelle called Debbie and Desma constantly. They spent hours on the phone, because nobody else understood. Michelle missed her unit terribly.

  And she craved Ben Sawyer in a famined, visceral way. Previously they had eaten dinner together every evening and spent every night intertwined on a narrow bed, but now they lived two and a half hours apart and could barely manage to speak on the phone. He lived in a town 140 miles to the east, and had returned to his wife after he got home that summer. Ben told Michelle that he had nothing left in his bank account to show for Afghanistan—his wife, Amanda, had torn through all of his combat pay, he said, every penny. His life struck Michelle as so unfair.

  Yet now Amanda took precedence in a way that had not been true during the deployment. Suddenly it was almost impossible for Ben and Michelle to see each other, and even difficult to speak. Ben and Amanda shared a single cell phone, and Michelle was only supposed to call when Amanda was at work. One day she phoned at the wrong hour. When Amanda answered, Michelle hung up without saying a word, but Amanda barraged her with texts. Who is this? she wanted to know. Sorry, wrong number, Michelle replied. I know who you are, Amanda wrote back. Ben was irate.

  The rules were so different all of a sudden. In Afghanistan they had not hidden the relationship from their colleagues, except at the beginning of the deployment. By the end, everybody had known they were a couple. The rest of Bravo Company had gotten used to seeing married people in deployment relationships; they were all just trying to get through the year. Now Ben had returned to his family and it was hard for Michelle to adjust. During the deployment she had functioned more like a wife than a mistress; now the wife role was Amanda’s position once again. What did that make Michelle? A home wrecker?

  Michelle said Ben needed to make up his mind. He could stay with Amanda if he wanted to save his marriage, or he could try to make a go of it with Michelle, but he needed to make a choice. Otherwise they should stop seeing each other. At the end of the summer, Sawyer lef
t his wife and petitioned for custody of his children. Michelle started visiting him on the weekends, and they took the children out to places like Chuck E. Cheese’s. Meanwhile, Michelle decided to move to Bloomington that August. She wanted to take her time getting settled there, before she started school in the spring. “It took me a while to pick myself up, and get the guts to go back to school,” she would say later. “I gave myself some time. I had plenty of money in the bank, so I didn’t need to work.” When it came time to move, she called Pete, who was about to leave for California. Could he help her move her things to Bloomington? He had a big truck. If she tried to move everything herself in the Cabrio, she would have to make several trips. Pete said sure. Michelle took Halloween and her clothes in her new car and Pete took her bed and her desk in his truck, and they drove up Highway 41 in a caravan. When they got to Bloomington, Pete helped Michelle carry her belongings into the house that she was going to share with her friend Philip. Philip had been straight when Michelle had left the United States but he was gay by the time she got home; he understood what it meant to live through a hard turn in one’s identity. In the months that followed, he would become the only civilian Michelle could talk to without difficulty.

  Pete and Michelle went to Target, because there were all kinds of things Michelle needed—cleaning supplies, shampoo, toilet paper. Inside the store, Michelle grew edgy. There were too many things for sale and she did not know which brand was best. She slowed to a halt in the toilet paper aisle. There were an awful lot of different kinds of toilet paper. How did you choose? She thought of the pink crepe toilet paper in Afghanistan; she remembered giving a roll of it to one of the Afghan workers at the depot, who had considered it a grand luxury. It made Michelle a little queasy to behold an American display of toilet paper with her Afghanistan-schooled eyes. Was this what the war had been about? Protecting this sort of abundance?