by Helen Thorpe
Yet often Desma knew more about how to get things done in the military than her younger colleagues. The men in the 293rd wanted to believe they were better than her—and some of them had seen combat, and knew more than she did about war—but the young guys in supply did not seem to understand paperwork, filing, or accountability. As the 293rd started shipping equipment to Kuwait, Desma argued with colleagues about how best to ensure that the equipment would actually arrive where they wanted it to go. She got a reputation for being difficult, but simultaneously won the admiration of the first sergeant; she could be undiplomatic but she was often correct about how best to get things done.
Nevertheless, Desma decided that she wanted out of the 293rd. The idea to transfer came about one night, while Desma was talking on the phone to Charity. She wondered out loud if there was any way to get out of the 293rd, and Charity said, “I would give anything for you to be with me.” They decided Desma should request a transfer into the 139th. Desma tried to file a formal request, but after she filled out all of the paperwork a platoon sergeant in the 293rd said the request would never go through and put the paperwork into a shredder. Then she and Charity began talking to everybody they knew, lobbying to get Desma switched into the 139th. “That was the only unit that I knew of that I could go to and be treated fairly,” Desma said later. Plus, she could be with her lover. Desma called everybody she had ever worked for. “Get me out of here,” she said. “These people are going to get me killed.”
But the days kept slipping by. February drew to a close and still Desma remained in the 293rd. In March they flew to Kuwait. “Starbucks and Subway,” as Desma said later. “It’s like America East.” In Kuwait, Desma got to see Charity every day, because they lived much closer together. While they were there, Desma heard that Mary’s new husband had just gotten terrible news: Mary had lost the baby. When she called, her friend was a wreck; Desma tried to lift her spirits but it felt futile. Desma also heard from Michelle Fischer, who had just moved to Denver, Colorado. Michelle had found an apartment in Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, where Billy, who had refused to sign a lease with her, nevertheless spent almost every night. Michelle had just started working for AmeriCorps. She had made a batch of pot brownies and tried mailing them to Georgia, but Desma had already left by the time the package arrived. Shortly after Desma arrived in Kuwait, Michelle sent her an email.
Hi Des!
How’s it going over there? Just wondering where you are . . . if you’ve made it to Kuwait yet. . . . I miss seeing you daily, even if it was in a shitty situation.
Did you get the brownies? Were they any good??? I was worried, it was my first batch. . . . Baking is different in high altitudes. No, really. You have to add more water or some shit. . . .
I am working damn near for free ($10,908 annually before taxes) since I am in AmeriCorps. Did you know that when you swear in to AmeriCorps, you have to say the EXACT same oath as when you swear into the military??? No shit. I raised my right hand and was like, I feel like I’ve said this before. Then I realized I am working for the fucking government again. . . .
Ya, speaking of work . . . I should do some.
I miss you tons. Keep in touch or else.
Love,
Michelle
Desma never wrote back. She had a hard time staying in touch with friends over long distances; it was all she could do to maintain contact with her children. Josh turned fifteen on March 16, 2008, and Desma called to say happy birthday. She had already sent him a gift card. She told him that Kuwait looked a lot like Indiana—all the same chain stores.
“When can you come home?” he asked.
“Bub, you know I gotta do this,” Desma told him. “Pay attention in school, listen to your stepmother, don’t give your dad any trouble.”
She heard from her daughters the following day. Each of the girls wrote a short note inside an email sent by her father-in-law, and he wrote a quick line to Desma at the bottom.
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2008
Subject: Letters from home
DEAR MOMMY
I MISS YOU. I LOVE YOU! I’M DOING OK. HOW ARE YOU? I’M STILL DOING OK IN SCHOOL!
LOVE, LEXI
DEAR MOMMY,
HIYA DOIN’?.!I LOVE YOU. GRANDpA’S LETTING US USE HIS COMPUTER?!. I”M A GEEK. LOL, HA HA
T.T.Y.L
PAIGIE
POOH
I told the girls they could do this regularly so they could stay in touch.
Be Careful out there
The weeks in Kuwait slipped by quickly. After Desma complained that she was not getting as much training as her male colleagues, the first sergeant sent her out in the field for four days with two platoons of infantrymen. They shared the same tent. “Asshole to elbow, I’m telling you,” Desma would say later. “Everybody was nut to butt, except for this one square in the corner that was mine, and it was marked off by chairs.” She was the only soldier to be given a cot; the infantrymen were sleeping on the ground. Desma took the cot, and folded it up, and chucked it out the door. She got the chairs, stacked them up, and put them in the corner. “I was like, ‘Look, fuckers. We have to live together for the next year. You’re going to have to pull your heads out of your asses.’ ” Desma tried to earn the respect of the other soldiers by sleeping on the ground, too, but it made no difference. The following day, she could not find another soldier who would accompany her when she had to go to the bathroom, although they had been forbidden to go by themselves. “It was me and two platoons, boys,” Desma would recall. “And nobody wanted to walk the girl to the bathroom.” Finally a squad leader took pity on Desma and escorted her to a secluded area. He told her not to tell anyone.
At the last minute, just before they left the safety of Kuwait for Iraq, the brigade’s leadership shuffled a series of people around, trying to make certain that every soldier had been given the right job. Desma was outside smoking a cigarette when Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Agron approached her, along with a sergeant major. The sergeant major asked if she was Specialist Brooks.
“Yes, sir,” Desma said.
“Specialist Brooks, I have an offer for you.”
“What is it, Sergeant Major?”
“Do you still want that transfer?”
“More than anything on God’s green earth!” Desma said. “Please, I want out of here.”
The lieutenant colonel told Desma that if she agreed to take the job, she would serve with the 139th. That group was doing convoy security, and she would probably become a truck driver.
“I’ve not done any of the lanes training, sir,” Desma said.
Colonel Agron looked furious. He made certain that Desma spent the remaining time in Kuwait getting caught up. As she was transferring out of the 293rd, Desma’s first sergeant buttonholed her to express his dismay.
“What is going on?” he asked.
“I told you I couldn’t be here,” Desma replied. “I told you I had no business being in this infantry company because I wasn’t going to be able to advance my career and I wasn’t taken seriously as a soldier and I wasn’t getting any training and to be honest it was because I didn’t have a penis. I know that’s hard for some people to hear, and they tell me to watch my mouth, but that’s what it was, to be honest.”
“What can I do to get you to stay?” he asked. “I promise you, things will be different.”
“No, First Sergeant, they won’t be.”
The exact nature of her job became more clear in the days that followed. She would report to Charity Elliott, who would serve as her truck commander. They would be toward the front of a supply convoy, and their mission would be to get the trucks safely down Iraq’s highways without hitting any bombs. Desma figured she would learn on the job.
By coincidence, right before Desma Brooks transferred into the 139th, Debbie Deckard had transferred out of that regiment. The more time Debbie had spent training with Selby and Boone, the more anxious she had grown about being a truck driver. She had completed
all the training, and her scores had been fine. But she worried about being responsible for some kind of catastrophe. Three days before they flew to Iraq, Debbie met with Colonel Agron. He asked how she was feeling about her job.
“Well, if this is the job I have to do, I will do it,” Debbie told him. “But I feel a little uncomfortable. I’m not sure I get all this driving stuff.”
Agron was surprised, because Debbie had scored well in the training exercises. “But you did a fine job the other day,” he told her. “I already rode with you. You reacted exactly as you were supposed to.”
“Well, I understand that,” Debbie said. “But no, I’m not really comfortable with the position.”
Colonel Agron had an idea: there was a young man assigned to the brigade’s headquarters in Mosul. The job involved interacting with everybody who needed permission to come on and off the base regularly. “He’s a very gung ho kid,” the colonel said. “He’s a good kid. But he cannot sit still for anything in the world, and I don’t think that he’s mature enough. Didn’t you work with people before you came here?”
“Yes,” Debbie said. “I was a manager.”
Agron said he thought the two of them should switch positions.
Debbie was relieved to accept the desk job. She had not wanted to bear responsibility for the lives of everyone in her truck out on the highways of Iraq. Coincidentally, Desma and Debbie changed jobs at almost exactly the same time, and Desma happened to take exactly the same job that Debbie had given up, although with a different crew. Later, when they discussed those last-minute moves that had taken place right before they left Kuwait, Desma told Debbie that asking for the change had been the right thing to do.
“I’m so glad they found you a different job,” Desma told Debbie. “You had no business driving with all that gear on for sixteen, eighteen hours at a time.”
“I know,” Debbie said with chagrin. “I’d have done it, though, if I would have absolutely had to.”
“I know you would have,” Desma told her. “But, Debbie—dadgummit. You ain’t got no business doing that shit.”
Because it was a hard job, being truck driver.
2
* * *
Hooker
IRAQ: DUST, HEAT, unremitting loneliness. The soldiers who belonged to the 113th Support Battalion had been sundered from one another and were now living far apart on different bases. At least Desma and Charity had each other—that was what Desma thought in the beginning. The two of them lived inside a containerized housing unit called a CHU—basically, half a conex shipping container—at Al Qayyarah Airfield West. The CHU was eight feet wide and forty feet long, and they had twenty feet of its length. A wall separated Desma and Charity from the two male soldiers who inhabited the other end of the same shipping container. The result was something like a trailer without indoor plumbing. The immense, sprawling airfield lay in central Iraq, near the city of Al Qayyarah (a conglomeration of industrial facilities, markets, and residences), 180 miles north of Baghdad, in the vast alluvial valley formed by the Tigris River. What Desma saw when she looked at the surrounding landscape was a lot of sand, some scrubby shrubs, and a few trees. There were no rolling dunes. It was flat, flat, flat.
The former Iraqi Air Force “superbase” had been built in the 1970s and had served as a launching site for Iraqi Mirage fighter jets and MiG-25s during the war with Iran. It was later bombed heavily during the Persian Gulf War and again during the early part of Operation Iraqi Freedom—in the blistering air strikes that Desma had watched on television while at Camp Atterbury back in 2003, during her false deployment. When American-led ground forces took the air base, the soldiers had found weapons storage igloos, aboveground aircraft hangars made of concrete reinforced with steel plates, and subterranean aircraft hangars equipped with hydraulic lifts that had been constructed to withstand a direct hit by a nuclear bomb. An engineering battalion out of Fort Bragg had repaired the damage to the runways, which were riddled with craters, and the air base had reopened as a major entry and exit point for US troops. Officially the post was known as Al Qayyarah Airfield West, but the soldiers who poured into the base started calling it Q-West, and after that, Key West. The base was famous for its unforgiving vistas, remote location, unreliable Internet access, limited phone service, and infrequent outgoing mail deliveries.
Desma and Charity pushed Desma’s twin bed under the window, at one end of the shipping container. They pushed Charity’s twin bed against one of the other walls so that the two beds made an L. They had also been given two wall lockers and two nightstands. That was it. If they wanted to pee, or brush their teeth, or take a shower, Desma and Charity walked to the communal women’s bathroom. They were supposed to make sure they had a buddy. Desma ignored that rule if Charity was not around, for she felt safe enough going to the showers by herself, but after an active duty unit moved into a nearby compound, she started carrying a knife at all times. They had air-conditioning in the CHU—when they had power. It was already hot, and getting hotter. Desma described the CHU briefly in an email that she wrote to Mary on April 1, 2008. “Nice, but small,” said Desma. “Would you send my robe & junk when you can?? I really wish you were here.”
They did not hang anything on the walls of the CHU. Inside her wall locker, though, Desma taped several pictures of her children. One showed Alexis and Paige playing on a swing set at the park; another showed Paige lying down with a large plastic car on her belly, as if she had gotten run over by the toy; then there was Alexis with a close friend, and Josh’s eighth-grade school picture. Desma knew that when she opened the locker she would see the children, and yet it still knocked her sideways to see their faces. She did not carry any pictures with her when she left the post, because looking at images of her children when she was on a mission made her feel physically sick.
As she had during her year in Afghanistan, Desma made certain to speak to the children at least once a week, never on the same day of the week, never at the same time of day. She tried as best she could to do the things a mother would do, albeit long distance. On April 8, 2008, Josh wrote to Desma:
hey my phone doesn’t work anymore because the charger piece broke in it, but other than that im doin good. THIS IS JOSH BY THE WAY. do you think you could help me pay for it to get it fixed? Hows work going? I LOVE YOU and ill talk to you later bye
Desma wrote back:
I will send you a new phone. I will have it sent from WalMart. That way you can keep your number and all your time. . . . I will set it so you can pick up the phone at the store if I can. I LOVE YOU TOO!!! Mom
But it was easier to do her job as a soldier if she walled off the part of herself that was a mother. She could no longer mix the two roles easily, because the separate halves of her identity were no longer coherent. So she let a certain amount of distance creep between herself and her children, to insulate herself from the pain of the separation. “It was easier to continue what I was doing with being overseas and what have you if I wasn’t wound up in what was going on at home,” Desma would say later. “Maybe it was the wrong approach to take, but otherwise I might have actually just left. Ta-da, good-bye.”
They lived about a mile from the dining facility. Desma and Charity bought a pair of mountain bikes at the PX—one was blue and the other was red—and used them to ride to and from meals. For some reason, the bicycles would not hold air in their tires for very long, but they were good enough for a ride to the PX or the chow hall or the post office. Then Desma saw a flyer that said, “MOVING SALE, EVERYTHING MUST GO.” Some guys in the 101st Airborne Division were heading home. For twenty bucks she and Charity bought a nineteen-inch Magnavox TV, two blue canvas lawn chairs, and a coffeepot. Later Desma found a Sony PlayStation for sale at the PX, and they started competing to see who could make it past the devil on Guitar Hero, or else they watched movies on the American Forces Network.
What they saw around them was white CHU after white CHU after white CHU, in a sea of gray gravel. Boxy met
al islands in a stony ocean. Outside their CHU, Charity and Desma set up a little area where they liked to hang out as long as the shamal winds were not blowing. After the rainy season, the shamal winds sprang up, beginning in May and intensifying through June and July. The strong windstorms could blow for days, carrying vast clouds of dust that sometimes towered fifteen thousand feet in the air. The dust was fine and silty and crept everywhere. It had the consistency of baby powder. Puffs of it rose every time Desma took a step; she made a little cloud just by walking. But between the dust storms, they enjoyed any breeze they could find, sitting outside in the blue lawn chairs. They placed a can for cigarette butts in what they came to think of as their front yard, and put a wooden step by the front door, as well as a rock on which they wrote, “Elliott and Brooks live here.” Then they found magnetic letters at the PX and stuck them onto the metal door of the shipping container, so that they could leave messages for each other. AT THE PX, Desma wrote to Charity. And Charity wrote back, WENT TO LUNCH.
In time, Desma and Charity grew fond of some of the guys in the 139th, particularly Josh Stonebraker, who served as the gunner in one of the scout trucks that led their convoys. He was a big, burly guy who worked as a guard in a women’s prison near Terre Haute, Indiana. Everybody called him Stoney. He was a 100 percent devoted family man, and although they saw each other nearly every day in a place where there were hardly any women, he never tried to take advantage of his friendship with Desma. Stoney was a joker. He and Desma began a series of pranks executed on the down days. Usually they ran a mission one day, had a down day the next. They spent the down days cleaning trucks or conducting preventive maintenance checks on their vehicles. The lengthy maintenance checks had once annoyed Desma, but she no longer questioned the practice—a working vehicle had become her lifeline.
