by Helen Thorpe
Michelle wanted James Cooper to have her kind of deployment—the kind where you never had to fire your weapon—but she knew it wasn’t like that in Kandahar. Not by this point. The Taliban had established a strong presence in southern Afghanistan in the years since Karzai had been elected, and US soldiers stationed there were squarely at the center of the ongoing conflict. Insurgents were placing more and more IEDs by the sides of the roads, making bigger and bigger explosions, and when Michelle didn’t hear from Cooper for a few weeks, she began to worry. She started checking in with him whenever she could, even if it was just a sentence or two on Facebook. One day she wrote, “where are you? was hoping to catch you online today. hope all is well in kandahar.” Sometimes he would write back immediately but sometimes it took days.
In the fall, their communication lapsed briefly. On October 9, 2008, however, Cooper surprised Michelle by calling on her cell phone while she was at work. She dropped what she was doing and excitedly began asking questions, but then her boss walked into Michelle’s office. She sent him a note on Facebook, apologizing for ending the call abruptly. On October 29, 2008, Michelle sent Cooper a short note. “Hi,” she wrote. “Miss you. Hope you’re doing well.” Cooper wrote back on November 1, 2008, sounding dispirited; he had been in Afghanistan for almost a full year. “I am doing alright,” he said. “I miss you. Blah.”
A few weeks later, Michelle’s cell phone rang. She heard Cooper’s familiar voice on the other end of the line—but then he said, “I’m at Walter Reed.” “Oh, my God!” she cried. “What happened?” He had been on a mission just outside the city of Kandahar, Cooper told her, and they had gotten into a firefight in the middle of a vast field. There had been rows and rows of grapes. Then heavy gunfire. His buddies had run back for him, and carried him the length of six football fields before they had reached a place where it was safe for a helicopter to land. In Germany the military doctors had made sure he would live. Six days later he went into surgery at Walter Reed, to see what the doctors could do about his legs. A single round from an AK-47 had gone through both of his thighs.
As soon as she heard the term “AK-47,” Michelle thought it was a miracle James Cooper had not bled to death. She knew how big those rounds were. Then she asked herself: Had she worked on that gun? Had she checked its sights, or replaced its trigger mech? And even if she had not worked on that gun, what about all the AK-47s that the armament team had repaired? How many people had been shot by those weapons since she had written down their serial numbers? Twenty thousand assault rifles, multiplied by four years of warfare, plus however many times they had been fired. Michelle could not stop crying. Cooper just listened to her, a little perplexed. It was horrible; everything was backward—she should have been comforting him. He was the one stuck at Walter Reed; he was the one who had been shot. But instead Cooper kept telling her that he was going to be okay, everything was going to be all right. The phone call opened a dam Michelle had not known she had constructed, and the guilt that came pouring out had been stored in some high place for a long time. She was awash for days.
In the weeks that followed, Michelle spoke to Cooper frequently. He called to say that he had stood up and taken a couple of shuffling steps. He thought he would be in the hospital for a short time. When the doctors at Walter Reed learned the full extent of the nerve damage in his legs, however, they told him it might take a while longer. They did surgery after surgery, and somehow the weeks turned into months. Cooper would stay at Walter Reed from November 2008 until March 2009. During the four months he spent in the hospital, Michelle called regularly. Sometimes he was in surgery and could not answer; sometimes she caught him while the nurses were changing the bedding, or in the middle of physical therapy. But at least once a week, she found him sitting around, watching television or reading a book, bored out of his mind. He was relentlessly upbeat. He worked at physical therapy with furious diligence. They distracted themselves from the tedium of his recuperation by talking about politics and books. She told him to read A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, and he did. They still did not agree on essential matters but they had constructed a common language. Cooper could walk again by the time he went back home. The ordeal was not over—he would return to the hospital with various setbacks in the years to come—but a person who saw him on the street would not have known he had been to war.
Debbie, Desma, and Patrick Miller came home at the end of November 2008, right in the middle of Cooper’s early flurry of phone calls from Walter Reed. Desma told Michelle about the IED explosion in their first phone call. Michelle was furious and hurt that she had not been told. “The soldier in me understands, but the friend in me is really upset,” Michelle would say later. In December Michelle flew back to Indiana to spend Christmas with her family in Evansville, then drove north to the rolling hills of Brown County. No other county in the state had more square miles of untouched forest. The parks had always brought Michelle a sense of peace, and she hoped it would be a restful place for the others, a chance to unwind.
They gave the master suite to Patrick and Beth, while Debbie and Jeff took one of the smaller bedrooms. Billy had decided not to join them, and instead Michelle had brought her mother, who spent the weekend reading cheap crime novels. There was a large fireplace, a wooden carving of a black bear, a front porch with a swing, and an outdoor fire pit. They made tacos for dinner, then built a fire outside and got drunk. The temperature dropped into the low twenties, but they huddled close to the flames and stayed warm. Michelle had brought craft beer and the rest of them teased her about being highfalutin. Patrick was drinking Bud Light and Debbie was drinking sweet white wine. When she was halfway plastered Michelle remembered all over again that she had little in common with the kind of people who were drawn to the National Guard, and even less in common with their spouses. She liked Beth, but she didn’t like Beth. They would never have been friends if Beth had not been married to Patrick, and Patrick had not served with her in Afghanistan. Beth was obsessed with Kenny Chesney, and that twangy kind of music drove Michelle crazy. They battled over the CD player. They also battled over the subject of peace. At one point Michelle started talking about Iraq Veterans Against the War, and somehow that led to pacifism in general and the particular stance taken against Vietnam by John Lennon. Beth said John Lennon was the scum of the earth. Michelle was just sober enough to realize there would be no profit in conducting a drunken argument with Patrick’s wife. It was always more of a stretch to meet her fellow soldiers’ partners. They did not share a deployment, they did not have that glue. Michelle and Patrick stayed up late playing pool, which had been one of the things they had always done at Shorty’s.
The following day, Michelle nursed a hangover and worked on a scarf she was knitting. She was still learning how to knit. As the hours slipped by, the large ball of blue- and fuchsia-colored yarn slowly shrank and the scarf grew longer and Michelle got a better sense of what the last year had been like for Patrick and for Debbie. At first Michelle had been elated—the armament team was back together, her friends had made it home alive. She had thought that would mean she could stop worrying, yet the more time she spent with Patrick and Debbie, the greater grew her disquiet. Debbie was drinking so much that Michelle could hardly believe what she was seeing—was it really possible for one person to consume so much wine and remain standing?—and Patrick Miller was swigging Bud Light pretty fast, too.
Michelle had expected her friends to remain constant, but they had proved mutable in unexpected ways. Patrick had always been a diehard fan of country music but now he wanted to listen to reggae. When Michelle asked what was going on with him and Bob Marley, Patrick said Beth had become afraid of him because he was so angry, and had asked if he would listen to reggae music to calm down. The more Patrick drank, the more he talked: he did not know why he had been sent to Iraq, he did not know what they had accomplished, he had not been able to direct his soldiers properly because he could not understand the purpos
e of their missions. Patrick said this tour had been bullshit.
To hear Patrick sound so disenchanted alarmed Michelle—Patrick never used to talk like that. He was 100 percent promilitary when he was himself. All his buddies had been sent elsewhere, Patrick said, none of them had been with people they trusted. Now one of his close friends had just checked into a mental clinic after attempting suicide. And another guy Patrick knew had succeeded in killing himself. That was Ken Martinson, who had been Angela Peterson’s fiancé. Angela and Michelle had not been close for a while but Michelle would always remember doing push-ups with her in the hotel in Louisville. Now the other Alpha girls were saying that Angela was falling apart in slow motion. Iraq had been far worse than anything she had imagined, Michelle began to realize.
Will and Linda showed up on Saturday afternoon. They were friendly and everything seemed fine but they left after only a few hours. Then Desma arrived, as the sun was getting low, in a red Chrysler Pacifica that she did not own. She had just begun picking up the pieces of her old life and was in the middle of everything. She was in the middle of buying a used car (the dealer had allowed her to borrow the Pacifica for twenty-four hours) and she was in the middle of training a new puppy (another pug and beagle mix named Princess) and she was in the middle of remembering how to care for her children. They were still living with other relatives, although the two girls were going to move in with Desma at the end of the school year. All three children were staying with her temporarily over the winter break. They were in the car, and the dog was in the car, too. Charity was not in the car. Once more Desma was looking to Charity to make her feel secure in the midst of upheaval, but Charity had been pulling away.
It was shocking for the others to see Desma. She was shattered, not herself, could not focus long enough to have a coherent conversation. Right in the middle of telling a story, Desma turned around, leaned over a fence, and threw up on the ground. She said she did not know if she had caught a stomach bug or if she was throwing up because of her head injury. “I have this unbelievable headache,” she said. “I have this headache that is just out of control.” Desma threw up again fifteen minutes later, while Michelle held her hair away from her face and Debbie ran inside for a towel. Desma said she had been seeing doctors at the VA hospital in Indianapolis, but they had not yet been able to find a medicine she could tolerate that was strong enough to subdue the pain.
After only an hour Desma said she had to go, and by then Michelle wanted to start weeping. She spent the rest of the day knitting intently, trying to stitch herself back together, but she was so jangled that she knit the yarn too tightly, and that part of the scarf did not match the rest, so she had to undo her work and stitch it together all over again. She finished the scarf, but it was stuck on the knitting needles, and if she pulled it off it would unravel. Debbie tried to help Michelle figure out how to cast off but they were both wasted and neither could determine how to resolve the final stitches. They puzzled over this dilemma and tried things that didn’t work and laughed about what half-assed knitters they were. Finally Michelle pulled out her laptop and found a YouTube video that showed how to cast off. They watched the video four times before Michelle got the scarf off the needles. “That was when I realized that something was pretty wrong,” Michelle would say later. “My friends were different, and not in a good way. And I felt a lot of guilt around Debbie, because she shouldn’t have gone. Who sends a fifty-five-year-old woman to Iraq? I mean, we’re sending our grandmothers to war. Twice. That’s how hard up we are. I felt a lot of guilt about all of it, because I was out in Colorado, starting my new life, and they were going through that for no reason. A lot of guilt and a lot of—I was just really worried and afraid for them.”
2
* * *
Happy Bomb Day
COMING HOME AGAIN—becoming a civilian again—proved harder the second time around. After Debbie had returned from Afghanistan, she had been part of a close-knit team, and she had stayed in touch with the rest of armament. Just picking up the phone and speaking to Will or Michelle had made a difference. This time, however, nobody she knew had served with her in Iraq. She did not feel as comfortable calling Will now that he was married to Linda—and then Will made it clear that she should not call at all. It happened after a raucous Fourth of July party that took place in Jeff’s mother’s yard. Debbie and Jeff brought deerburgers, hot dogs, pepper slaw, beer, and wine. Jeff put on a fireworks display of professional quality, using firing tubes he had constructed to launch glowing whirligigs into the night.
Everybody came away with conflicting versions of what took place next, but Michelle heard that Debbie drank too much wine and threw her arms around Will and gave him an embrace that to Linda had looked romantic. Afterward Will ceased all contact with Debbie. And Michelle now lived in Colorado. Besides, neither of them had been to Iraq. This time around, Debbie was on her own.
Some mornings she woke up with the sensation of being enveloped in Saran Wrap. Debbie called it being inside the bubble. It was a feeling of profound alienation, but it manifested itself as an almost physical sensation, as though there were literally a transparent barrier cutting her off from the rest of the world. If she did not have to go to work, she had a hard time getting out of bed. A day without appointments or obligations terrified her; she wanted someone to tell her where to go and what to do. The appalling endlessness of the empty hours stretching before her suggested that her life had no meaning. And the problems with her memory worsened.
When Debbie went to the VA clinic in Bloomington for medical appointments, her doctor asked how she was doing psychologically. At first Debbie maintained a cheerful front and said she was great. Later, when she revealed that she was having difficulty going to sleep at night and getting out of bed in the morning, the doctor recommended that she speak to a therapist. “Oh, no, I’m fine,” Debbie said. She hewed to the belief that mental issues were things a person should settle on her own. Surely there were other soldiers who needed the sessions more than she did. “Why should I take something if I wasn’t really injured?” she would say later. “I didn’t lose a leg. I didn’t get blown up.”
During Debbie’s childhood, her mother had experienced two nervous breakdowns, and had required medication to pull herself back together; Debbie did not want to be so weak. Her dad would have pulled himself together, she was sure, if he had gone to war. Over the next several months, however, Jeff pointed out that Debbie was having crying jags, and Michelle said she had grown concerned because she could not get Debbie on the telephone, as she was now screening calls, and had started to isolate herself. Debbie did not leave the house; she did not answer the phone; she did not seek out friends. Once the most gregarious person in the entire battalion, Debbie now shied away from human contact. People who had known Debbie for years said she was not herself.
One day, when Michelle flew back to Indiana to visit family, Debbie picked her up at the airport, and Michelle saw that she was drinking alcohol out of a coffee mug while she drove, smack in the middle of the day. Red-flag behavior, Michelle thought. To Michelle, it seemed as though the Debbie she knew was slowly vanishing.
Michelle spoke to Desma about her worries, but felt shy about confronting Debbie, who was thirty years her senior. The older woman was an authority figure—it was like confronting a parent. Eventually, however, Michelle and Desma told Debbie they feared that she might be drinking too much. “They do [worry],” Debbie would acknowledge later. “And I know they do. And probably it’s somewhat accurate, in a sense, that they worry. For me, having that whole year [in Iraq] kind of to myself, there was something about being alone like that—you can find solace in things that maybe you shouldn’t. Being the oldest one, I probably take what they say with a grain of salt and go on my way. Not that that’s the right approach, necessarily. But it’s just stuff that I have to work through myself. I always feel if you are able to pay your bills, and take care of other people, and keep a job, then what’s wrong, as long
as you are not hurting anybody else?”
And Debbie could still hold a job, and pay her bills, and take care of other people. Soon after she returned from Iraq, she resumed caring for everybody in her family. As her mother’s health deteriorated, Debbie spent increasing amounts of time accompanying her mother to doctors’ offices. Debbie’s parents turned to her for help with basic household chores such as grocery shopping. Then Debbie’s daughter ran into marital problems and subsequently lost her job. Debbie tried to help by caring for Jaylen, sometimes overnight. Often she invited Jeff’s granddaughter Mallori to sleep over, too. The two girls shared no blood, but they had the common bond of knowing Jeff and Debbie as their grandparents. On the weekends, Jeff built big fires outside, and they roasted marshmallows as the sparks flew upward into the dark.
Debbie gave and gave and gave. She did not know how to receive support, though, except from Jeff, who had a quiet way of providing help without fuss. Most of her peers had retired from the National Guard, and Debbie found she had fewer friends at drill. She turned fifty-seven in the summer of 2009, and there was talk of another deployment coming the following year, when she would turn fifty-eight. She could see sixty approaching; Debbie did not think she had another deployment in her. She retired in 2010. Belonging to the National Guard had been an essential part of her identity for almost a quarter century, and severing her membership in the group left a large void. She found herself still automatically checking the calendar to see when her next drill weekend might be, even though for her there would be no more drill weekends.
