Soldier Girls (21 page)

Visine (a shit ton)

lipgloss or chapstick with SPF

really good lotion (Aveeno)

Beach Blonde Wavemaker

She hoped the last product would help her deal with her hair, which had lost its curl in the dry air. It was ridiculous to fret about her appearance while living in a combat zone, she knew, but she had to wear an ugly uniform every day, and there wasn't much left that made her feel feminine. Another woman in her tent was compulsively applying makeup for hours at a time. Later that week, Michelle mailed Pete the silk tapestry she had found at the bazaar, telling him someday they would hang it up in the house they were going to share in Bloomington. Pete mailed Michelle all of the items on her wish list. He also sent a sand bucket, since she wouldn't stop talking about how sandy it was. Michelle used it as her shower caddy. The women's showers had been constructed inside of a shipping container; everybody called them conexes. The showers did not drain well, and Michelle kept having to clear large clumps of other women's hair. The latrines, which were located elsewhere, flushed with a kick pedal. Then somebody found a viper by the latrines. It was just a small snake, but supposedly that meant they should watch out for the rest of the nest. Over in Debbie Helton's tent, somebody caught a rat—the trap snapped closed loudly in the middle of the night, causing
a ruckus. A few days later, Debbie told everybody excitedly that she had just seen her first scorpion. Michelle knew she was supposed to worry about the Taliban, but it was the snakes and bugs that she could not get out of her mind.

The altitude and the sand and the wind and the Lariam and the pills and the lack of sleep transported Michelle to a place of sun-drenched surreality. She showed up for work as instructed and did as ordered, but she could not have said what she was doing. There were hardly any weapons to fix, and Patrick Miller, the ex-marine who was now in charge of armament, grew testy as he struggled to figure out how to keep his crew busy. Michelle used the spare time to write letters. “Hey! How are you doing?” she wrote to her father. “I hope this letter finds you well. I am sitting at the shop where I work with nothing to do. This deployment isn't anything like I imagined. Sometimes I have work to do but I spend most of my time sitting around bored off my ass.”

Back in Indiana, the previous summer, Patrick Miller had been friendly to Michelle—sharing his dip, confessing his unhappiness—but after they got to Afghanistan, he became an entirely different person. He himself said that he had been Patrick Miller when they had horsed around, but now he was Sergeant Miller instead. Sergeant Miller seemed frustrated with the state of affairs in general and with Michelle Fischer in particular. Michelle kept showing up late, and when she did arrive, she was sulky. Miller annoyed her with his driven, promilitary attitude. He was a slight man with a buzz cut and an Alabama twang; they were about the same height. “Huge Napoleon complex,” Michelle would say later. When she showed up late yet again, Miller threatened to give her a written reprimand. She said insolently, “Go ahead, write me a counseling statement, I really don't care.” Miller cursed her out fluently, berating her until she broke down. The rest of the armament team could see both sides: on the one hand, Sergeant Miller was used to the discipline of regular military life; on the other hand, Michelle Fischer had voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 and had not seen 9/11 coming. Even Debbie Helton—who had arrived bubbling over with enthusiasm and kept saying that Afghanistan was the single most exciting thing that had happened in her entire life—could see that from Michelle's point of view the yearlong deployment looked like a raw deal.

Debbie's journey to Afghanistan had been uneventful. Her group had stopped in Ireland, where one commander had told them they could have a pint and then another had nixed the idea, which had disappointed Debbie. Then they had flown to Budapest, and the following day to Kyrgyzstan. “The days are drifting together,” Debbie had written. “I've had little sleep.” She had strapped herself into a harness inside a green C-130 Hercules headed for Afghanistan, full of exhilaration to be leaving the civilian world behind. Even the steep plunge of the combat landing did not dismay her. “What a wild ride that was,” she wrote. “During descent because of pressure your body feels like it's becoming squished down completely.”

In the open-air trucks that picked them up, she grabbed a seat next to Will Hargreaves. Everything in close proximity was pale tan. But the mountains—Debbie had never seen anything like those twilight-colored peaks.

“Well, you finally finagled a way to get here,” Will teased. “You probably did something to the guy who collapsed to get his spot.”

“No I didn't!” she laughingly protested.

“Are you scared?”

“Not really scared, just anxious to see how this fits together. I wish John Wayne was here.”

They were the last group to arrive, and they found the rest of the battalion already in full swing. Debbie was grateful to be given two days to acclimate before she had to go to work. At the Green Beans coffee shop, she ordered her first chai tea and, charmed by the taste of cinnamon and nutmeg, soon returned for more. The bazaar captivated her. “Has many great things to buy not too expensive,” she wrote. “Cheap like Mexico.” She decided to save up and buy all of her Christmas presents there. For a few nights she was assigned temporary quarters in a tent filled with strangers, but then Oklahoma pulled out. On Saturday, August 7, 2004—three days after Debbie had arrived, and almost two weeks after Michelle and Desma had gotten to Camp Phoenix—Indiana shuffled people around into more permanent berths. Debbie and her friend Gretchen found a spot together in a tent with some medics from Charlie Company and a noncommissioned officer from Alpha. (Gretchen Flood had gotten married right before they left for Afghanistan and had
changed her name to Gretchen Pane.) Because their tent was an amalgam of women from different ranks and companies, at first it lacked cohesion. Later Debbie would become grateful for the level of maturity inside her tent, but at the beginning she found the atmosphere slightly strained, as the women did not trust each other entirely.

The American troops at Camp Phoenix were banned from drinking (although the Europeans were not), and if they wanted to go on a bender, they flew to Qatar. Nevertheless, Debbie had smuggled in miniature bottles of whiskey, hoping to make herself a cocktail. Once she got her permanent housing assignment, however, she realized it would be unsafe to expose herself as a drinker, so she kept the bottles hidden inside a coffee can. At the end of her first day in the new tent, Debbie longed for a drink but did not make one. “Boy a cocktail would be great,” she wrote in her diary. “No ice cubes yet I know there has to be some somewhere.” The following evening, Debbie did manage to fix herself a drink. “Finally found some ice had a cocktail it was great. Hope I get to take that time to Qatar I'll be at the local bar if needed.” While Debbie considered the Afghanistan deployment a privilege, it was hard to sleep in a tent with nine other women, and a drink helped ease anxieties that she kept well hidden. At the same time, she relished her new surroundings. “At night the wind really comes up strong can't hardly sit outside very well too much sand in the air. Go to MWR a lot, great tea. Call when I can. Haven't done the Internet yet. Stars are beautiful because of the altitude.”

Michelle moved into a ten-person tent that she had to share with only nine other women, including Desma and Mary. Michelle and Desma had requested that Debbie Helton become the senior person in their new tent, but instead they wound up with Sergeant Karen Shaw. Karen's moods swung in arcs so epic that Michelle wondered if she was chemically unbalanced. Desma started calling her “Shock and Awe Karen Shaw.” The other women sharing their tent included a churchgoing soldier named Stella Brown; Jaime Toppe, who was even more devoutly religious than Stella; Caroline Hill; Katie Elkins; Elizabeth Ziegler, known as Ziggy; and Betsy Merrick. Mostly they were mechanics or worked in supply, with the exception of Jaime Toppe, who served as the unit's public affairs representative.

Now that Oklahoma was gone they could use the top bunks for
storage. Desma and Mary snagged opposing bunk beds right by the front door, and Michelle got a bed next to Mary. Caroline Hill got the bed next to Desma, across from Michelle. The next two opposing beds were occupied by Karen Shaw and Jaime Toppe, then Stella Brown and Ziggy after that, and finally Betsy and Katie. From the get-go, they had friction. “Catty, catty, catty, catty, catty,” Michelle would say later, describing the atmosphere inside the tent. “I mean, we had probably six feet by four feet of personal space.” The tent was divided politically, too, with Michelle representing its most liberal occupant, and Jaime Toppe its most conservative. And the women did not agree on what was socially acceptable behavior, either, with Michelle, Desma, and Mary condoning activity such as smoking pot, and Jaime and some of the other women disapproving of that kind of behavior. How they were going to get along for twelve months remained an open question.

Yet Michelle felt elated to be sharing a tent with so many fewer people. She could still hear every cough and rustle, but she got an empty top bunk where she could store her gear, and a shelf with a bar to hang up her uniforms. She unpacked at last, and put photographs of Pete and Halloween next to her bed, where she could look at them every evening. A few days later, when the staff at the chow hall baked a large cake for a birthday party for some of her coworkers, Michelle went to the party and had a decent time. “Everyone is in good spirits about being here, finally,” she wrote to Pete. “Of course I still miss you desperately. . . . [I]t's really hard for me when I think of you because I can feel how slow time is. No one else in the world matters.”

It was immediately obvious to Michelle that Camp Phoenix was not the kind of place where it would be safe to wander around late at night in an alcoholic stupor, uncertain of the location of her tent. Entire zones of the post belonged to all-male infantry units, and anybody who showed up there in an incapacitated state would be considered fair game. She saw that the brain-numbing partying she had engaged in back at Camp Atterbury would make her vulnerable, and consequently she stopped drinking. Instead she became more and more reliant on the pills she took once she was safely inside her own sleeping bag. But the same pills that helped her lose consciousness at night also left her groggy in the morning, and upon waking she had to fight off the gloom of
remembering where she was. And so even as she started to feel more at home, she still kept showing up tardy for work, and Miller kept going ballistic until she broke down crying. It became their daily routine.

Michelle started visiting the gym right after work, where she trod up and down on the StairMaster for an hour at a time, then lifted weights. The furious workouts funneled stress out of her body and made it easier to fall asleep. She decided that her weight was one of the few things she could control, and started tracking it compulsively, determined to shed pounds. Then Miller announced they had some guns to repair. “I got my first broken weapon tonight!” she wrote to Pete. “I was pretty excited, I'll actually get to do my job tomorrow.” They were all relieved to have work; even Debbie had begun to worry that the biggest challenge of her deployment might be boredom. She had been distracting herself with a mystery novel by Iris Johansen, but to her astonishment she finished it after only a few days. “Amazing,” she had written. “Usually takes me one year to finish.” After they got busy, Debbie happily changed the butt stock on a damaged M4 assault rifle and organized toolboxes.

The spurt of broken weapons dried up in the middle of August, and then Sergeant Miller announced that they were going to build a secure weapons room. In a corner of the same building that housed the motor pool, he planned to construct a twelve-foot-square space to house weapons in need of repair. George Quintana helped oversee the project. He and Miller got along well because they were both ex-marines and both devout Republicans; the rest of the team loved GQ because he was unflappable. They cleared away debris, then lugged in tools and lumber. “We started the office today!” Debbie wrote in her diary on August 13, 2004. “Miller + Q are the bosses we are the workers.”

For the rest of that month, the armament team sweated through the construction project and grew accustomed to working with each other. Debbie injured her lower back while carrying lumber, and started worrying that she might be too old for the deployment. Three Tylenol and one Aleve did not even touch her pain, and she finally had to get a muscle relaxer called Feldene from a medic. He ordered her not to bend, twist, or lift anything over twenty-five pounds, which made her feel useless. But Miller found other ways for her to help, and she regained her confidence. At one point, GQ praised George Bush. Michelle announced that
she found his stance unfathomable. “How is it that you ended up being Republican, if you're Puerto Rican and from the Bronx?” she asked. GQ told her, “Any man under thirty who is not a liberal has no heart. Any man over thirty who is not a conservative has no brains.” She thought he had made it up, only to learn it was Winston Churchill. But it didn't really matter, about his politics. Once, back at Camp Atterbury, Michelle had walked for miles carrying a heavy rucksack, and her feet had sweated inside her combat boots, giving her hot spots. GQ had helped pull off her boots and picked up her red feet in his hands and covered them in soothing Gold Bond foot powder. Even if they disagreed about Bush, she would always think of GQ as an ally.

She no longer felt the same way about Patrick Miller. Their tendency to get crosswise only increased after they started building the secure weapons room, and now he routinely treated her with contempt. Sergeant Miller wanted the team to go at the project full tilt, but Michelle had never done construction work before and could not even hammer a nail properly. Then, while he was trying to determine whether the walls would meet at a right angle, Michelle suggested they use trigonometry. Didn't he know about Pythagoras's Theorem? Miller appeared to think that she considered him stupid. He ripped into her again, cussing ferociously. During one of these frequent displays of temper, affable George Quintana intervened.