by Helen Thorpe
“The girls don’t know yet,” he said. “When will you be home?”
“I’ll be home today, as a matter of fact,” Desma told him.
At the funeral, her father-in-law asked Desma to let the girls stay with him, as planned. That’s what Paula would have wanted, he said. Desma wondered if it was a good idea—she thought maybe she should move the girls to her cousin’s. But it would mean one more upheaval, and her cousin was already overwhelmed, and the girls had suffered a shock at losing their grandmother. This loss was their first experience with death, and it had come just as Desma was getting ready to leave for Iraq. Uprooting them now would be disorienting. Maybe it would be all right to let the girls stay with their grandfather. “Worst mistake I ever made,” Desma would say later. “I should have sent them back to my cousin’s, but I let them stay with him.”
Several weeks later, Desma reported for drill at the 293rd’s regular location, the National Guard armory in Warsaw, Indiana. Warsaw lay at the far northern end of the state, close to Fort Wayne, and it took her five and a half hours to get there. While she was there, Desma obtained a copy of her weapons qualification results. Every time Desma had fired a bullet, a computer had recorded her name and her lane and whether that bullet had hit the target. “I qualified four times,” she would say later. “And they were trying to tell me I didn’t qualify at all. I qualified more than my fair share.” It made her livid to discover her true results. Before she left Warsaw, Desma printed out every score she had earned. She was going to need proof of her worth; it was going to be that kind of a deployment.
Desma went on active duty status on December 10, 2007. Her mobilization orders stated that her tour was part of Operation Iraqi Freedom and would not exceed 392 days. Meanwhile, Desma had just gotten a series of text messages from Mary Bell, who had recently acquired a new boyfriend—an infantry soldier in the 293rd. Mary had texted four different photographs of four different pee sticks from four different test kits, and every one said pregnant. “What am I going to do?” Mary asked Desma. Desma wrote back, “Looks like you’re going to have a baby.” Both Desma and Mary showed up at Camp Atterbury as ordered, but after reporting the pregnancy Mary was sent home the following day. Missing her best friend, miserable about being assigned to the 293rd, and far from her family, Desma turned to Charity Elliott for solace. She decided that Charity was the love of her life.
As it happened, Debbie Helton—who had started going by the name of Debbie Deckard after she got married—had just joined Charity in the 139th Field Artillery. It was some kind of crazy snafu. At drill, the first sergeant had called her name when he read out the stay-back list. In 2004 she had wanted desperately to go with everyone to Afghanistan but she did not mind staying back in 2008, when her battalion was being broken up. All the soldiers who were being sent to Iraq had gotten their new assignments, and because they were being separated, the mood was grim. When she got home from drill that evening, however, Debbie’s phone rang. Jeff looked at the caller ID.
“It says Indiana Department of Military,” he told Debbie. “Don’t answer it.”
“I have to answer it,” Debbie said.
“They’re going to tell you that you’re going,” Jeff predicted.
“They can’t tell me I’m going,” Debbie told him. “They just told me today that I was on stay-back.”
The phone stopped ringing. Debbie called back. The soldier on the other end asked if she was Specialist Helton. No, Debbie said. She was Specialist Deckard. She had gotten married. The soldier checked her Social Security number and said it matched the number on his list. She needed to report to the armory in Crawfordsville, because she was being deployed to Iraq with the 139th.
“No, I don’t think so,” Debbie told him. “I was just at drill today. And I wasn’t on any of the lists. There’s no way. They already told me I’m on stay-back.”
The soldier said her name had just come across two hours earlier. He told her to report to the Crawfordsville armory the following day at 7:00 a.m. She would go from there to Camp Atterbury.
“First off, I can’t be there at seven,” Debbie told him. “I run a salon, and I have a payroll due in the morning. I have people that have to get paid. There’s no way I can be there at seven.”
The soldier said she didn’t have a choice.
Debbie said she could be there by noon.
He said if she would absolutely promise to be there by noon, it would be all right. He would make a note that said, “Did contact, will show up at noon.”
“I promise you I will be there,” Debbie said. “I have never been AWOL. I have never missed drill. I’ll be there.”
There was some sort of mistake, Debbie told Jeff—she would sort it out. At Camp Atterbury, Debbie crossed paths with a superior from the 113th, and he asked with confusion what she was doing there. She told him that apparently she was going to Iraq. “I put you down for stay-back,” he told her. “Why are they sending you?” Debbie wondered out loud if it could be due to the fact that she had changed her name. “I bet you anything it is your name change,” he said. Apparently the army had decided that Debbie Helton and Debbie Deckard were two different people, and although Debbie Deckard had been told that she would remain at home, Debbie Helton was being sent overseas. Debbie tried to explain to her new colleagues that she was not Debbie Helton anymore, but nobody in the 139th knew her history, and they would not listen.
Michelle Fischer was going to graduate from college that December, and she was in the middle of finishing the final exams of her senior year when Debbie called to say what was happening. Debbie and Jeff had promised to host a graduation party for Michelle at the end of that month, and Debbie began apologizing that there would be no party. “Stop apologizing, Debbie,” Michelle said. “Seriously! The party doesn’t matter. I’m a little bit more concerned with the fact that you’re going to Iraq.”
Debbie was staying in a female barracks on the other side of Camp Atterbury from Desma. Charity lived there, too. When they finished their training exercises at the end of the day, Charity would walk across the post to visit Desma, or Desma would walk over to see Charity. Charity and Debbie told Desma they felt the 139th was a pretty good place to land. Even though the field artillery regiment had previously been all-male, neither Charity nor Debbie was being hazed. Debbie thought the guys had taken a wait-and-see attitude about her. She was optimistic about how things would turn out because she could see that the 139th had accepted Charity.
Starting on December 23, 2007, the soldiers were given ten days off so they could spend the holiday season with their families. Desma returned to Rockport and tried to create a festive air. She was still shopping on Christmas Eve, but she stayed up late to wrap each gift. They celebrated Paige’s birthday, which fell on New Year’s Eve. Mary Bell and her boyfriend got married on New Year’s Day, and Desma was the maid of honor. At the wedding Mary’s mother said, “How could you let this happen?” Desma said, “I tried to talk her out of it.” Nobody thought the union would bring Mary happiness. The groom was due to leave for an Iraq deployment in two days, and the couple had not been given enough time to build a strong relationship. Mary was upset that she was not going to Iraq with her husband and her maid of honor. All the people she cared about were going, and she knew they were going to come back altered in ways that would make it impossible to be close to them unless you had been there, too.
And then it was time to go. On January 3, 2008, the Indiana National Guard threw an enormous send-off for the 76th Infantry Brigade in the old RCA Dome in Indianapolis. Three thousand four hundred uniformed soldiers from the 76th as well as fifteen thousand family members filled the stadium. The soldiers hailed from ninety of Indiana’s ninety-two counties and represented Indiana’s largest single deployment since World War II. During the coming year, Indiana would have more members of its National Guard deployed than any other state in the Union. By this point, the war in Iraq had been grinding along for five long years; after a slew
of quick victories, and that optimistic moment when it seemed as though the war might end in a matter of months, things had bogged down. Every year had brought a steady rise in the number of violent incidents. The removal of Saddam Hussein had created a power vacuum, the elections had not solved the leadership issue, and the insurgency had blossomed into such a powerful force that some people were calling what was happening a full-scale civil war. The previous year had been the worst yet, in terms of the number of attacks on infrastructure, the number of homemade bombs, and the number of ambushes involving snipers, grenades, mortars, rockets, and surface-to-air missile attacks. The average number of attacks per month had climbed to more than five thousand. General David Petraeus had been named commander of all US troops in Iraq and had spent previous months implementing counterinsurgency strategies. Infantry soldiers who had been trained to kill the enemy were being asked to protect the friendly segments of the Iraqi population instead. The counterinsurgency doctrine was proving labor-intensive, time-intensive, and extremely costly, however; President Bush had responded to the latest uptick in sectarian violence by calling for a “New Way Forward,” in the form of a surge in troops. He had just sent 20,000 more soldiers to Iraq, bringing the total number of troops stationed there to 157,000.
As the two wars had ground along, the US military had been drawing heavily from all parts of the military, including the National Guard, and multiple deployments had become routine. For most of the soldiers under the dome, this was their second or third deployment; if they had not already been to Iraq, then they had been to Afghanistan or to Bosnia. Politicians including Governor Mitch Daniels and Senator Richard Lugar delivered speeches to the troops. “Our roles today are backwards,” then Congressman Mike Pence told the crowd (he would later be elected governor of the state). “It is I and all of us on this stage who should be sitting in your seats, and you before the microphone. It is one thing to speak of courage; it is quite another to be courageous.” Pence said it was a significant moment in Operation Iraqi Freedom, a moment of “widening American success,” and asserted that the surge was working. Desma did not know whether that was true; she just knew that she was tired. As the soldiers waited to board buses back to Atterbury, Desma lay down on the floor of the stadium. “I took a nap on the same floor the Colts had spit on,” she would later recall. “You know? I slept on the ground in December, in the cold, waiting for a bus so that I could go to God only knows where and God only knows whether or not I was coming back alive.”
The soldiers from Indiana spent the next three months training full-time at Fort Stewart. Forty miles southwest of Savannah, Georgia, Fort Stewart was the largest active duty military base east of the Mississippi, and it was home to twenty thousand soldiers and thirty thousand family members; the Department of Defense operated three elementary schools on the post. On one side of the base, Charity and Debbie shared an enormous tent with other women who were training with the 139th, while Desma lived about fifteen miles away, in a female barracks in the post’s cantonment area. Charity and Debbie were learning how to provide security to supply convoys. Charity had been given the job of truck commander and was working with a crew of two young men, a driver and a gunner. Her job involved being constantly on the radio, listening to people back at headquarters, relaying information to the rest of the convoy.
Debbie was assigned to drive a truck with a different crew. Her truck commander, Sergeant Craig Selby, was in his early twenties, and her gunner, Tucker Boone, was only nineteen. They were polite, serious, scared. They appeared surprised to be working with a woman in her midfifties; hardly anybody in the regiment was older than thirty. “They were a little skeptical,” Debbie would say later. “It was like, What are you doing here? You don’t really belong.” A little standoffish at first, Selby warmed to Debbie over time. He struck her as conscientious, determined to do a good job. He had different ideas than Debbie was used to, however; he wanted the crew to spend every waking minute together, and instructed the others to meet him for breakfast. “Well, I don’t really eat breakfast,” Debbie said. “Can I just meet you where we are supposed to start our training?” Selby said, “No.” He eased up later when he realized that she would always be where she was needed. As Debbie would say, “He didn’t act as crazy about having to eat breakfast together.” It was Selby’s first deployment, and Boone’s, too.
They spent most of their time inside a Humvee. It was Debbie at the wheel, Selby on the radio, and Boone up in the turret. Debbie practiced driving out on country roads, mud roads, dirt roads, roads full of potholes. The official name for the exercise was lanes training, although the route never resembled a lane; Debbie had to concentrate fiercely to keep the Humvee on the twisting, sloppy byways. As she drove, they were fired upon, and had to decide whether to forge through the hail of fake bullets, or stop and shoot back. They came upon bombs. They learned to scrutinize everything: an empty Coke can with wires running out of it, a trash bag left by the side of the road, a dead animal with explosives stuffed into its guts, a plain wire drawn across the road. The ordnance was not live but sounded real. They also learned to read routes by mapping out proposed paths on tables covered with sand, moving miniature trucks along pretend roads of colored yarn. Debbie could see it was going to be critical that she not make a wrong turn. You did not want to get lost in Iraq.
On the other side of Fort Stewart, Desma kept distributing supplies to the male soldiers she was supposed to be training with in the 293rd—although from her perspective, it seemed like the men were getting all the training. They ran lanes, she did not. They did tables, she did not. They identified roadside bombs, she did not. As time passed, Desma began to grow concerned that she was not being adequately prepared. “I didn’t come here to not get any training, but I wasn’t getting any,” Desma would say. “I wasn’t allowed. I was the bullheaded female. And I say female with a nasty tone because that’s what they did. I didn’t go out in the lanes, I didn’t do any tables, I didn’t go on any convoys. I didn’t shoot anything, other than my personal weapon. I ran a supply area. I handled equipment. I gave ’em how much ammo they needed to go out and do their range, and when they come back I picked up their brass. I set up ammo and I took brass, I set up ammo and I took brass. Never once did I go out on a lane. Never once did I have positive identification of a roadside bomb. Never once.”
Desma did not see Debbie at all during the three months they spent at Fort Stewart. Only rarely—perhaps three times—did she manage to contrive a face-to-face meeting with Charity, although they stayed in touch by text and by phone. Desma was struck by the difference in their experiences; Charity sounded engaged by her work and happy with her unit, and there was energy in her voice as she regaled Desma with stories about running lanes. Desma made friends with the other women who also had been attached to the 293rd and found them each to be as miserable as she was. It was just a lousy unit to be in if you were a woman, Desma concluded.
The women had been warned not to walk around the post on their own because it wasn’t safe, and because there were so few of them in the 293rd they were constantly playing the role of battle buddy for each other. Perhaps Desma’s closest friend at Fort Stewart was a female soldier named Bridget Palmer, who was also attached to the 293rd. Palmer was from Evansville—she had gone to high school with Michelle Fischer, had sat right behind her in math class. One evening Desma wrote in a small notebook:
Palmer!
Hey Babe! In the shower. Please will you be my battle to go to the coffee shop + PX?
Love you!
Desma
Palmer wrote back:
You only love me when you want somethin’.
Desma never filed a formal complaint about how women were being treated, but she believed that another female soldier did, because while they were in Georgia the regiment received an unexpected visit from the inspector general’s office. At one point Desma was standing in the back of a truck, tossing out boxes of ammo, when her first sergeant offered to
help; then a two-star general walked up and climbed into the truck. The first sergeant stood beside Desma, listening to everything they said. The general wanted to know how things were going. Were there real issues of discrimination?
“Sir, I’ve not been one to complain about getting my hands dirty,” Desma replied. “And I can tell you, I’ve worked with the infantry on several occasions, but I’ve never been treated so badly.”
The first sergeant shot her a sharp look.
“You know that’s right,” Desma told him. “You were part of the problem when you told them they couldn’t talk to me.”
She turned back to the general. “Sir, it’s getting better,” she said. “The cohesion has got to have time to build.”
But the cohesion did not build. Instead, after she was allowed to participate in more of the training exercises, there was sexual tension. At one point, while a group of soldiers were practicing hand-to-hand combat moves, a staff sergeant kept telling Desma that she was doing a move wrong. He said, “Here, lay down.” He sat on top of Desma, as she had been sitting on top of the other woman, straddling Desma in a chokehold position. “Shouldn’t I be on top?” Desma asked. She was not even trying to make a joke, but the staff sergeant’s face reddened. “Because right then and there, he envisioned me on top,” Desma would say afterward. “And it wasn’t meant to be sexual, but he totally took it there.”
Desma’s hair became an issue. Per regulations, she tried to keep her hair in a bun, but throughout the course of the day, her hair had a tendency to work its way loose. At one point Desma took her hair down for a moment so that she could put it back up again—but the sight of a woman with loose hair enraged her company commander. “You!” he bellowed. “Put your fucking hair up! I don’t ever want to see that shit again!” Loose hair had transformed her in his mind, apparently—from a soldier into an object of desire. “There was that sexual tension, flat out,” Desma would say later. “He found himself attracted to me when I had my hair down.” Desma and Charity got a four-day pass and took a trip to Savannah, Georgia, where Desma found a salon and cut her hair short like a boy. “And the repercussions from that were crazy,” she recalled. The company commander wanted to know who had given her authorization to cut her hair. No pleasing him, Desma decided.
