Soldier Girls

by Helen Thorpe

  “I just don’t know why I’m here,” she said to Will at one point. “I wish I could be back over there. I feel useless here, like I’m not accomplishing anything. I think I could accomplish more if I went back over there.”

  “Well, are ya crazy?” Will replied. “You miss all that sand? You’re right where you need to be. You need to be right here, at home.”

  And that’s all it took, hearing Will’s voice say those words. It was like swimming in a cool lake on a hot day, it was like eight hours of sleep. She found herself refreshed, she calmed down, the blackness retreated. Jeff could say the same thing and it would not work—it had to be Will. She had to hear the voice of someone who knew about the AK-47s, and the B-Huts, and the sandstorms, and what it was like to take a shower inside a conex. Debbie apologized to Jeff. She said she was sorry that talking to Will helped and talking to him did not. But Jeff said, “Don’t worry about it, that’s all right. I wasn’t there. You just needed to talk to somebody who was there. It’s okay.”

  Debbie said maybe they should get married after all. Jeff had asked once before, but she had put him off. “Oh, no, I’m not interested now,” Jeff told her. He let her stew for three days, and then gave her a blue topaz ring. They flew to Mexico and eloped. When Jeff’s daughter was about to have a baby, she asked Debbie if she would like to attend the birth. Debbie said no, she didn’t have to be there. But her daughter-in-law said she had missed the birth of her own granddaughter—she should come. So she did, and it was miraculous. After Mallori was born, Debbie and Jeff began having their granddaughters sleep over at the same time, and although Jaylen and Mallori shared no blood, the two girls grew up like cousins. Debbie’s days filled up fast: she had appointments at the hair salon, she cared for one granddaughter or the other, and she tended to her mother, who had been sliding into ill health. She never felt quite the same sense of fulfillment that she had obtained from being a soldier, but she did not feel entirely worthless. And Debbie spent untold hours with Michelle, whom she practically adopted after Michelle moved to Bloomington. Michelle seemed thirsty for attention, for as usual her life was full of drama.

  2

  * * *

  Out of Uniform

  WHEN THE SHOCK of coming home wore off, they had to confront the question of which relationships to keep. Which friendships, forged in Afghanistan, would last back in the United States? The apartment Michelle shared with her friend Philip was across the street from the mall where Debbie worked, and after she moved to Bloomington, Michelle began dropping by the hair salon all the time. Sometimes she popped in to say hello and sometimes she made appointments to see Debbie for the same services she had gotten in Afghanistan. Then Michelle started visiting Debbie at home, too, where she got to know Jeff. Soon she began introducing Jeff and Debbie as her surrogate parents.

  That fall Michelle drove her Cabrio down to Evansville to pick up some more of her belongings, and while she was down in southern Indiana, she took a detour over to Rockport to see Desma. They had spoken endlessly by phone but they had not seen each other in person for a while. This was the first time Michelle had visited Desma at home. It was like old times, it was like seeing a sister. They laughed about smoking hash under the bedcovers and blowing the smoke into dryer sheets and about the vibrators and the vodka. Desma wanted to know how things were going with Ben Sawyer, and Michelle said she had loaned him a lot of money. They were still sitting in the living room when Desma’s children got home from school.

  “All right,” Desma said. “What kind of homework you all got?”

  Paige and Josh listed the homework they had to complete that evening. Alexis did not have any homework, as she was only in kindergarten.

  “Go sit down at the kitchen table, get yourselves a snack,” Desma said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  She turned back and saw that Michelle looked stricken.

  “I can’t take this,” Michelle said, and she fled.

  Desma could not fathom what had gone wrong. Later Michelle called to apologize. “I’ve never seen you as a mom before,” Michelle said. She had only known Desma as a badass soldier—the stubborn individual who would not use a regulation army wool blanket, who had said to take one Valium and one Ambien before a combat landing, who had brightened the drab surroundings of Camp Phoenix with a flock of pink flamingos. It had spooked Michelle, the sight of Desma as a mother—she had felt as though she were watching a Desma that was not Desma. Of course Michelle had known that her friend had children, but she had never confronted the children’s actuality, never witnessed the vulnerability written on their faces. To see how needy the children were, to watch the way they depended on Desma—it seemed unbearable to Michelle that Desma had left them for a year. Desma understood: everything was too much, when they first got back, all the ordinary things, toilet paper and cereal and laundry and the sight of children.

  The uniform had erased so many of their differences, Michelle realized. It had made the soldiers seem more alike than they really were. It had taken away their origins and their destinations, their past and future selves, and left only their basic personalities, absent all the other signifiers that said who they were back home. She had never had to confront the reality that Ben Sawyer was married to Amanda, or that he was a father, or that he came from a family that was awash in addiction. She had never seen Debbie Helton inside of the beauty salon or at home with Jeff Deckard. She had never witnessed how badly Josh and Paige and Alexis needed Desma to be there when they got off the school bus. It was jarring, how much Michelle did not know about these people she thought she knew so well. She was astounded to glimpse who they had been before they had spent a year together on a former Soviet air base in Afghanistan, and who they were in the process of becoming again.

  Ben Sawyer sprang from poor soil. After he returned home, he found himself girdled by people who depended on drugs, and Michelle felt her impulse to fix Ben up countermanded by others who pulled him down. Some members of his own nuclear family abused pills, but Sawyer nevertheless occasionally depended on them to help with his children. Rose and Ryan were three years old and five years old, respectively. One day that fall, some friends from Bravo Company invited Ben and Michelle to go out to dinner. Ben left his children with a close relative. Toward the end of the meal, he got a call on his cell phone: Rose had been rushed to the emergency room. She had swallowed an OxyContin that she had found on the floor of the relative’s house, and doctors were going to pump her stomach. Michelle drove from Indianapolis to southeastern Indiana, with Ben decomposing in the passenger seat of her Cabrio. At the hospital, they found Rose white-faced and unconscious. The medical staff had inserted a tube down into her stomach and had suctioned up its contents, and then had given Rose charcoal to absorb any harmful substances. Rose threw up black bile, and it streaked across her white face. Seeing his small daughter in such distress undid Ben, who shook, bawling. “It was the saddest fucking thing I’ve ever seen,” Michelle would say afterward. “That was one of those moments where I was like, it’s just not ever going to be okay for him. Like, he’s not ever going to get a fair shake, because he has nobody to count on.”

  Michelle thought maybe Ben could count on her. She wanted to help him build a better life. So she bought him a car, a used black VW Jetta that cost about a grand. It did not seem fair that Amanda had blown through all of Ben’s combat pay; plus, Michelle wanted Ben to visit her in Bloomington. “I always spent a lot of money on Ben because I had it and he didn’t and I felt bad for him,” she said later. “We were the same rank. He worked as hard, he went through all the same stuff I did, and Amanda spent all his money on drugs. So I did a lot of stuff for him. And I didn’t think twice about it.”

  At the same time, however, Michelle was moving away from the soldier she had been. She resumed her friendships with people she had known in high school who were now living in Bloomington. Hanging out with her old friends, she started to remember that she was only twenty-three. During the deploymen
t, everybody else had been older: Debbie was fifty-three, Desma was twenty-nine, and Ben Sawyer was twenty-eight. They all had children, but none of her friends in Bloomington were shouldering those kinds of responsibilities. They did not have mortgages, or ex-wives, or daughters who had to be taken to the emergency room. As Michelle began spending more time with people her own age, she gained perspective on her relationship with Ben. Perhaps because he felt her pulling away, Ben grew increasingly possessive. He started asking questions about how she was spending her time. In October, when Michelle told her boyfriend that she had been invited to a Halloween party, he made clear that he wanted to go, too; Michelle wound up inviting both Ben and Mary Bell. She was planning to go as Wonder Woman; Mary was going to be a Native American squaw. Ben said he might not be able to afford the gas for the drive to Bloomington, however, because he was barely making ends meet. Later he called to say he had found a solution: he had bought some weed, it was in the trunk of his car, and he was planning to sell it for a tidy profit.

  “You’re driving around in the car that I bought you with weed in the trunk?” Michelle asked in disbelief.

  “What about it?” Ben said.

  “You have two children that have one good parent,” Michelle told him. “And if you got pulled over right now, they would have nothing. And you’re doing all of that because you want to come to some party with me?”

  But he was slipping beyond her sphere of influence. They no longer ate dinner together every evening, nor spent every night on her twin mattress. There were other forces at work on him, and they were more powerful than Michelle. Sawyer did not remain a model soldier. He did not enroll in school and use the GI Bill to get ahead. Instead he was slowly reverting to the person he had been before he had worn the uniform every day, someone who took shortcuts. It scared Michelle, the idea of dating a man who would risk a felony conviction for a quick buck. She broke up with Sawyer over the phone.

  He called her repeatedly in the days that followed. Michelle tried to explain. She said they had been able to make things work in Afghanistan because they had more in common there, such as the post itself and the chow hall and the uniform and the routine and a common circle of friends, but once they got back home they had begun moving in different directions. They were living in different places, they were different ages, they had different friends and different lifestyles. He was twenty-eight and she was twenty-three; he was a working father and she was a college student. They just did not have as much in common. Sawyer did not agree, however, and starting in October, they had to go to drill together. After moving to Bloomington, Michelle had begun reporting for drill in Bedford. That November, when Michelle showed up for drill weekend, she saw Sawyer in the parking lot. He grabbed her and started yelling that they could not separate. Michelle tried to reason with him, but her words only fanned his fury. At one point he hurled his cell phone down on the ground with such force that it shattered into pieces.

  The encounter left Michelle afraid for her safety. How unstable was Sawyer? At the end of that weekend, he stopped by Michelle’s apartment to pick up some of his things. When she opened the door, he spat directly into her face; she was wearing her glasses, and his spittle landed all over the lenses. Mary Bell had slept over the night before but was not yet awake. Mary had been going through hard times—the man she had married right before they deployed now had another woman living with him. She was in the middle of getting a divorce. As Michelle stood in the doorway, trying to decide whether it would be safe to let Sawyer enter, she wished that Mary would wake up, because she feared Sawyer might hit her. But Mary kept sleeping, and Sawyer got his stuff and left without striking her. When Mary finally woke up, Michelle told her about the encounter. She said that she could no longer wear the silver ring Akbar had helped her buy at the bazaar, the one that said My heart belongs to Ben. Mary said she would take the ring; it was too beautiful to throw away. Michelle had grown closer to tall, slender Mary Bell; by this point she felt as close to Mary as she did to Debbie or Desma. Consequently, Michelle did not expect what happened next: Mary Bell began sleeping with Ben Sawyer and wearing Michelle’s ring. Michelle stopped speaking to Mary after that.

  Desma depended upon Stacy, Mary, Michelle, and Debbie, in that order, and she wished that Michelle would forgive Mary so that they could all hang out together again. But Michelle was stubborn, and she would not relent. That fall, after she signed up for the college classes that she would take in the spring, Michelle joined Facebook. She used the social networking site to reconnect with other people she had known from high school and from her years at the University of Southern Indiana, as well as people who were going to Indiana University at Bloomington. (At first nobody she knew from the military joined Facebook, but one year later she would become Facebook friends with both Desma Brooks and James Cooper, her old flame from Aberdeen Proving Ground.) She was moving into more civilian circles, and she might have put Afghanistan behind her, except that she emailed with Akbar Khan almost every week. He had decided that he wanted to move to the United States, and was applying for a visa to make this possible. Michelle got the XO of Bravo Company to write a letter of support.

  That November, Pete flew back from California for Thanksgiving. He drove up to Bloomington to see Michelle and to pick up Halloween. Michelle could not see Pete without thinking of all that might have been, and at the same time seeing Pete reminded her of her own infidelity. A war had come between Michelle and Pete, and she could not imagine how to put back together what the deployment had pulled apart. To complicate matters, she had just met a young man named Billy, who had begun pursuing her avidly after they had crossed paths one night at a bar and again at a party. Pete did not have much luck with Michelle or the cat. Halloween behaved as though Pete were a stranger, hissing and backing away. “Man, that cat was my best friend!” Pete would say later. “And now he won’t even say hello.” They decided that Halloween should stay with Michelle after all. Then it was time for Michelle to go back to college.

  3

  * * *

  Answered Prayers

  THEY SETTLED BACK IN, they moved on with their lives, they became civilians again. They acted as though there would not be another deployment. Wasn’t it likely the wars would end before their battalion got sent anywhere else? In January 2006, Michelle began taking classes at Indiana University—her dream come true. She had transferred into IU with a total of sixty-one credit hours (forty-two credit hours from the two years at the University of Southern Indiana, six credit hours from the misbegotten semester at Purdue University in Fort Wayne, and another thirteen credit hours that she had earned for her military service in Afghanistan). Her plan to major in environmental science looked too daunting, as she could not stomach the idea of retaking all of the required science courses she had tried and failed to complete back in the spring of 2004. Instead she opted for a bachelor of science in public affairs, with a major in nonprofit management. Her dream, trimmed a little. That first semester she took four classes: Introduction to Computers, Finite Mathematics, National and International Policy, and Urban Problems and Solutions. She also started seeing Billy.

  Two years older than Michelle, Billy had already completed one undergraduate degree and was working on a second. He had gotten a degree in economics from Wabash College, as well as a minor in religious studies. Then he decided to get a second undergraduate degree, in international relations, from the University of Evansville. There he considered himself “kind of an outsider,” because he was older than most of the students. Michelle and Billy had this in common—not quite belonging. They were also both highly intelligent, and held political views that put them to the left of the mainstream. Back in 2003, when the Iraq War had begun, as chance would have it, Billy had been in Turkey with other students from Wabash College who were taking a class on world religions. It had changed his life, to be in Istanbul when George W. Bush had told Saddam Hussein he had to leave Iraq within forty-eight hours or else. The Turkish people
were not happy. Billy had glimpsed what his own country looked like from another vantage point, and Michelle knew what the United States looked like from Afghanistan. “We were both outside the US bubble,” Billy would say later. He was also tall, handsome, and charismatic. He had olive skin, dark red hair, hazel eyes, and a warm manner. He had an unusual capacity for emotional intelligence. He told Michelle he could not believe the United States was sending single mothers and grandmothers to war. It was a sea change, he said. He could not believe that he had gotten to stay at home while somebody such as Debbie had been deployed. Michelle would say later that he had brought her back to life.

  Going to school in Bloomington proved all that Michelle had hoped for, in certain respects. One year before, Newsweek had named Indiana University the “Hottest Big State School,” in part because the institution had embraced the information age and was offering fast networks, extensive wireless capability, and superb computer support services. Michelle loved the school for other reasons—she found the setting spectacular, thanks to the original woods that still flourished at the heart of the campus. The Olmsted brothers, who had designed Central Park in Manhattan, had laid out the campus, and they had decided to keep Dunn’s Woods intact. After the university embraced the idea that a forest should stand at the center of the campus, the vast thicket of trees became a defining attribute. “There are few places in the world where great laboratories, classrooms, libraries, auditoriums, and other such centers of intellectual and artistic creativity are located in an environment which retains its primeval character—few places where one may so quickly and so completely cast off the tensions and anxieties of this complex modern world in quiet meditation,” wrote Paul Weatherwax, a botanist and a longtime member of the faculty. Michelle found constant replenishment walking through Dunn’s Woods, under the boughs of ash, beech, buckeye, hickory, maple, red oak, sycamore, and walnut trees. Because her school protected the woods, and was literally built around the trees, Michelle understood the university to be a place that shared, at its core, her values. And the buildings themselves, built of locally quarried limestone, spoke of soaring ambition and lofty goals; they had been built to last, and built to inspire.