Soldier Girls (14 page)

“Mary Ferren,” said the girl.

“How old are you?” Desma asked.

“Eighteen,” said Mary.

Oh, holy shit, Desma thought, but she just nodded. Mary said she had only recently finished basic training and she had not been able to say good-bye to her mother. In the middle of shock and awe, she had left a note on the kitchen table. And over there, on the other side of the room, happy soldiers were milling around with their families. Mary was white with anger. Then she broke into tearless convulsions. The two of them became inseparable. Ostensibly, Desma took Mary under her wing, although sometimes it worked the other way around. For Desma, Mary became the one constant in an ever-changing landscape of upheaval as plans for their unit altered almost daily. First there were
delays because of ghost records. The commander of Alpha Company had a large number of people on the roster who were not actually in the military anymore. Additional soldiers had to be called up to fill the empty slots. Then there were ghost trucks—they could not find all of the vehicles they were supposed to have.

Eventually their destination changed, too: they were not going to Fort Bragg after all, they were going to Camp Atterbury instead. Supposedly the reversal came about due to all of the media attention being paid to nineteen-year-old Jessica Lynch, who had just been rescued by a team of special forces. Lynch, Johnson, and Piestewa were not supposed to see combat, and yet the three female soldiers had driven right into it. The idea of more female truck drivers being captured by the Iraqi military had spooked the top brass, according to rumors. Alpha 113 was a truck driving company, and it had been open to women for a long time. Of the ninety soldiers in Alpha Company, the group that Desma was being deployed with, one-third were women. Supposedly the generals had decided that sending so many women to Iraq was a bad idea; the new plan was for them to support the infantry from the safety of Kuwait. Because they were going to train at a facility in Indiana, Desma would be able to see her children more often during the months before they mobilized, although each time they met, they would have to separate again, and the thought of having to part from her children repeatedly almost made her not want to see them at all, so painful did she find the act of leave-taking.

At Camp Atterbury, on her first evening, Desma looked up from a meal to see CNN broadcasting live from Baghdad. The sun was just coming up in Iraq, and bombs were dropping with ferocious rapidity. Desma stared at the TV screen, unable to eat. Noticing the pall that had fallen over the room, a master sergeant walked over and turned off the television. As the days slipped by, the invading forces plowed forward into the center of Iraq. By the middle of April, they had taken Baghdad, Kirkuk, and Tikrit. Meanwhile, Desma spent hours at the shooting range, certifying that she was qualified to use her weapon; took mandatory classes on sexual assault, because ever since women had joined the military, there had been ongoing reports of harassment, assault, and rape; took mandatory classes on equal opportunity law, because there
had also been allegations of workplace discrimination; attended lectures on the Geneva Conventions, because in a war zone soldiers sometimes did other things that were not legally permissible; and listened to briefings by Operations Security experts who instructed the soldiers not to discuss their mission, their deployment dates, the location of their sleeping quarters, their convoy routes, the names of their colleagues, their equipment, trends in morale, or security procedures. “Don't tell people shit,” was how Desma summarized the OpSec lectures.

They also repeated key parts of basic training. One day, they were doing three-to-five-second rushes—the soldiers lay down on the ground, as if they were under fire, and then jumped up and ran for three to five seconds with their weapons pointing forward, and then lay back down on the ground. During the exercise, Desma whacked the top of her rifle into her mouth so hard that she split her top right lateral incisor in two. A medic pulled the broken tooth, leaving her with a black hole in the middle of her grin. It made her look rakish.

Desma and Mary took advantage of every opportunity they had to leave the post. One day, they drove over to Edinburgh, Indiana, because they wanted to pick up some toiletries at Walmart. After that, they were just driving around aimlessly when they stumbled across a tattoo parlor.

“Hey, you want to get a tattoo?” Desma asked.

“Why not?” said Mary. “If I'm old enough to be sent to Iraq, then I guess I'm old enough to get a tattoo.”

Desma leafed through albums, studying pictures of tattoos, wondering what image to take with her. Mary knew what she wanted right away: a big heart with wings and her father's name underneath. He had died of a heart attack and she missed him terribly. While the tattoo artist worked on Mary, Desma found a picture of twining vines and orchids, which she decided would look nice spread across her lower back. After about an hour, the tattoo artist finished working on Mary, and told her to sit up.

“Whoa, I think I'm going to be sick,” said Mary.

“Hold on a minute,” said the tattoo artist.

“No, really. I'm going to be sick,” said Mary.

She threw up everywhere. The tattoo artist had to close the shop so that he could clean up properly. Desma returned the following day. The
needle hurt so much that she told the tattoo artist to stop after he had completed only the outline, but he said no, he couldn't send her off to Iraq like that. He rubbed lidocaine on her back to make it numb, and then he made the leaves green and the flowers pink.

Desma figured she was ready. But Alpha Company was not. The more the Alpha Company commander tried to get organized, the more disorganized the company revealed itself to be. After he rounded up additional soldiers, the commander had tried to locate the missing trucks and trailers. In a misguided attempt to rectify the situation, a group from Alpha Company allegedly stole a trailer from another location and tried to disguise it as one of their own by painting new numbers on its side. The military began an investigation into the alleged theft, soon dubbed “Trailergate.” During the ensuing commotion, the commander of Alpha Company was replaced, and for about a month the executive officer filled in as acting commander.

On May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush put on a flight suit and got into a Lockheed jet that landed on the deck of the hulking gray USS
Abraham Lincoln
, an aircraft carrier that had just returned from combat missions in the Persian Gulf. Bush posed for photos under a red, white, and blue banner that said
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
. Then he made a speech in which he declared that major combat operations in Iraq were over. Saddam Hussein had gone into hiding, and Bush suggested all the troops needed to do now was mop up. It made Desma wonder why she was still stuck at Camp Atterbury. The soldiers in premobilization—who were still being told that they were being deployed—gossiped feverishly about their prospects, given Bush's proclamation. If combat operations were over, would they still be sent overseas?

In June, the rest of the 113th Support Battalion arrived for their two weeks of annual training. Desma was walking toward her barracks when a vehicle pulled up alongside her. She looked inside and saw Debbie Helton and a truckload of the older guys whom Debbie liked to socialize with. They said they were on their way to the PX. Everybody got out of the truck to give her a hug. Debbie gave Desma a tight squeeze. “Are you doing okay?” she asked. “Is there anything you need? Just say what it is, and I'll be glad to send it along.” It was nice for them to stop, Desma thought, although seeing everyone who had not been asked to deploy
also made her wonder all over again why had she been plucked out of Bravo Company.

Desma was relieved when she learned that a new commander had been selected for Alpha Company. It was a man she had worked with before and trusted completely. He came by to speak with them as soon as the news was announced. “I could hug you!” Desma told him. “Come here,” the new commander said, and gave her a bear hug. But the following weekend, he had an accident in a motocross race, hit his head multiple times, and did not regain consciousness. The Alpha soldiers were utterly demoralized. Were they jinxed? A rumor swept through the ranks saying that because they had lost two different commanders, and because major combat operations in Iraq had been declared over, they were now going to be sent to Djibouti, Africa. For months, whenever Alpha Company stood in formation, they had hollered, “Let's roll!” (It was what Todd Beamer had said on board United Airlines flight 93 before he and other passengers had tried to tackle the hijackers.) After their commander's accident, Desma and some other soldiers started yelling, “Demob!” instead. Alpha Company was losing its motivation.

Toward the end of June, Desma loaded thousands of dollars' worth of gear onto a conex bound for the East Coast, including a footlocker filled with personal items such as knee pads, elbow pads, a sleeping bag, a Sony PlayStation, and assorted video games. She was slated to leave any day. Then Alpha Company got word that they were not getting a new commander after all—they were going to demobilize. Desma was not going to Iraq; she was not going to Kuwait or Djibouti. She was going home. Alpha threw a killer party that night, wall-to-wall madness. Halfway through the celebration someone offered Desma some kind of drink that involved a lot of grain alcohol, and several hours later Desma found herself on all fours, throwing up in a ditch, while Mary Ferren stood over her, whooping and hollering with one fist in the air, pretending to ride her like a horse. The following day Desma wearily collected her children and headed back to southern Indiana. That August, when she reported for her monthly drill weekend as usual at the armory in Bedford, she ran into Debbie Helton and stopped to talk, because Debbie had cared enough to ask whether she needed anything, when Desma had thought she was about to be shipped overseas.

As it happened, Desma's time in the Guard was about to expire. She dropped by the hot dog trailer to discuss her future with the retention team, later that weekend. Debbie explained the newly enhanced benefits that she could earn if she reenlisted: Desma would qualify for the GI Bill now, provided that she reenlisted for six years, Debbie said. In exchange for a six-year commitment, Desma would get 100 percent of her college tuition and a $5,000 signing bonus, and if she enrolled in college, she would also receive an extra $200 monthly kicker bonus as well as a $600 monthly allowance to cover the cost of books and other items. Peggy Weiss told Desma she was crazy if she did not accept. Stacy Glory agreed. “You should go to college,” Stacy said. “You're really smart, Des. You could make something of yourself. You could become a licensed clinical social worker.” Desma thought about how reenlisting would allow her to obtain the college degree she had always coveted. Why did she have to struggle all the time? If she went to school, she could get a better job. It seemed as though the war in Afghanistan might be winding down, and surely the war in Iraq would not drag on much longer. And if not—well, maybe she would get deployed. “I didn't care,” she would say afterward. “I wasn't even thinking about it. It wasn't an issue. Yeah, they'll probably come back and get us again. But, you know, by that time you're already in it. And you don't want to send your friends off without you, you know? You don't want to be that guy. Nobody wants to be that guy.” She loved the euchre games and the keg parties and the camaraderie, she could not envision a more attractive future. Before the weekend was over, Desma signed up for another six years.

Even though Bush had declared the war in Iraq to be practically finished, many soldiers from the Indiana National Guard continued to serve there, including some whom Desma knew personally. The 293rd Infantry Regiment was over there, and the 152nd, too. While the rest of America seemed to forget about the wars, Desma kept hearing about injuries and fatalities. That fall, one of her high school classmates, Darrell Smith, died after his Humvee rolled off a road and fell into a river. He drowned somewhere near Baghdad, leaving behind a wife and three children. Desma did not know exactly what was happening in Iraq, but she decided Bush's announcement had been a little premature.

It was hard to get a clear sense of the war's trajectory from news
reports. The US military had become adept at steering journalists away from its mistakes and toward its victories. That December, the media went into a frenzy when Saddam Hussein was captured outside a farmhouse near Tikrit. Hussein looked half-mad in the humiliating images of him that aired on television, stumbling out of a hole in the ground. Surely the end of the conflict must be near, Desma's colleagues told each other, if they had toppled an enemy like Hussein.

Meanwhile, Desma had enrolled at Ivy Tech Community College, over in Evansville. It was hectic: Desma dropped her children at school in the morning, went to class herself until noon, took a nap in the afternoon, woke up in time to cook dinner, then got her children into bed, and went to work from 10:00 p.m. until 6:00 a.m. She decided to major in human services, hoping that would deepen her ability to help delinquent teens. In the fall of 2003, she aced general psychology, basic algebra, and English composition, but ran into problems in speech class. One day, Desma was giving a required “how to” oral presentation to the class. She had chosen the subject of how to operate a turn signal. Props were required, and she had brought in a hollowed-out steering column complete with a working turn signal, as well as an electronic board that showed how the interior wiring of the steering column worked. Near the end of her talk, however, she noticed that the instructor was apparently texting on his cell phone. “I would kindly thank you to pay attention!” Desma snapped. “If you're going to be grading me, you should be listening!” He gave her an F.

Desma figured she would make up the credits in the spring. She did enroll in courses, but she did not get to complete them. Instead she got a phone call shortly before April 1, 2004—she liked to call it her second great April Fool's joke—from Greg Addis, her platoon sergeant.